The Reason The Dreadnoughts Exist: Jeff

I'm gonna fight for what I wanna be

It was 1997. I was an 18 year-old long-haired hippy-folk kid showing up to start a journalism degree at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. I hauled my two suitcases into my room and found that my Mystery Roommate had already moved in to our tiny shared room. I put sheets on my bed. I set up my computer. I ate a lonely meal at the caf. I went back to my room. The sun went down. The night became still and quiet. I lay back to bed and tossed and turned for two hours before finally drifting into a low, restless slumber.

Then it was 2 AM: The front door, mere inches from my head, flew open and slammed into the opposite concrete wall. A large, booted foot crashed into the wastebasket by my bed, sending it flying across the room. The owner of the boot let out a primal cry: “FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!”, stalked across the room, turned on a speaker system which started blasting ungodly loud music, turned on his lamp, took a swig from a flask, pulled out a cigarette and lit it, ran his hand, still quivering with rage, through his deeply disheveled yet still unbelievably intimidating mohawk… and then he saw me.

“Oh.” He said. “Hi.” He’d been bounced out of a local bar for being underaged and came home in a rage. “Um,” I said. “Hi? How are you?”

This was Jeff, and without him there is absolutely no chance that the Dreadnoughts exist. None at all. Jeff was a kid from Sarnia who’d been kicked out of bars long before arriving at Carleton, who had played in his own bands many times and who was actually part of Antifa back when it was a reasonably effective antiracist organization counter-protesting holocaust deniers and not… whatever it is now (I honestly have no idea, nothing in the modern culture war is what it seems).

Jeff smoked regularly throughout our 8 months together. I had signed up for a no-smoking room. But it felt wrong to ask him to stop. At night he would sometimes open his window, light one up, and ask if we could go to sleep to Fugazi or Bad Religion. What do you say to that? “No Jeff, my poor nostrils don’t like the smell and your music is very noisy”? The fuck you do. You let him do it, and you lie back and let the pure sounds of rebellion wash over you. Change you. The smoking became a part of that ritual and I started to weirdly enjoy it. Yeah buddy, I’d think. Do the thing you’re not supposed to do. Fuck it all.

Before long I was buying everything from Fat Wreck I could get my hands on (this was before the Warped Tour came along and started to ruin literally everything), buying the Give ‘Em The Boot compilations, the early Bad Religion and Pennywise and Descendants and NOFX and a bazillion underground bands I can’t remember, and then of course it was back to the classics of the first-wave. I listened to it all religiously and started to foist it on my friends. Jeff cut his mohawk off halfway through the semester and started to deride the people he called “fashion punks”. “Yeah,” I’d reply. “Yeah, man. Fuck those fashion punks.” I had no idea what I was saying.

My buddy Slippy and I would zone out to some of this music, and on one such day Jeff walked by us in his giant mohawk and said: “I like that this is happening”. It was like leveling up. I could almost hear the green-mushroom Super Mario sound. I was no longer just the weird hippy he had to room with. I was getting punk music, and Jeff thought I was cool because I was becoming cool. No chance this would have happened without those long, hazy nights. It wasn’t long before I was putting the music on in our room.

It was a few years later before I’d finally pick up an electric guitar and actually do the punkity rock. This was just after the evening, now infamous (to maybe 37 people), when I’d heard a bunch of fucking hippies singing “Old Maui” with the lyrics changed to be environmentally conscious and from the whale’s point of view. It was like he was spiritually beside me: “Yeah buddy. Fuck this shit. Make this music loud and dangerous like it’s kind of supposed to be.” I got an electric guitar immediately and “Antarctica” was written less than three days later. This band spent a decade relentlessly injecting that 90s punk sound into almost every song and we haven’t really stopped. No way there’s a “Cider Road” or a “West Country” or “Foreign Skies” or any of that stuff without Jeff. And now we have almost 1000 fans in Poland. It’s a real rags-to-nicer-looking-rags story.

Anyway, I never knew what happened to Jeff, we went our separate ways and I forget his last name so I can’t even find out if he has a Linkedin (though I would absolutely bet $50,000 that he is a lawyer right now). I really regret this, as I would love for him to know that he changed my life. I think he thought that I hated him, but I really did not, because weirdly enough I really needed this fucking jerk to walk into my life and give it a little edge. For having now sent a few trashcans flying across a few rooms myself, I can confidently say that it is really quite satisfying.