After the poet Dan Gutstein sent me the song “McFlurry” by British punktronika duo Sleaford Mods, I was inspired to write the riff for “Thunderdome”—the second track on our forthcoming LP States of America (June 11)—and I then contacted Dan, who wasn’t yet in Joy on Fire. “Do you want to try some lyrics?” I asked in an email, after praising the Mods’ nutso live performance of their scathing and hilarious satire.
This was in 2018, and Anna and I were in Princeton and Dan was in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, DC. So, I drove down to DC with my amp in the trunk, my bass in the backseat, the riff for “Thunderdome” in my head, and headed to a bar in Petworth where Dan and some of the shady characters he associated with watched soccer—specifically the Welsh football club Swansea—on Saturday mornings.
The place was called DC Reynolds.
What a dive! What a lovely dive!! Dan’s cronies were artists and writers like Dan and myself, and they hung about like they owned the place. In fact, the place opened early on Saturdays just for them to watch the Swans (not the band, the team). It was like church! (Again, not the band, nor the chicken joint.) I got some funny looks upon arrival. I was an intruder on the ritual, not a true aficionado. Nonetheless, it was easy to get into the spirit of it all. It was easy to get into the spirit of having your first pint at 11am.
Swansea may have won that day, but even if they didn’t, let’s go with they did. There was some songwriting to be done.
It didn’t take long, that first song out of six that Dan and I wrote over the course of two weekends. We’d stopped off for beer on the way from Petworth to his apartment in Adams Morgan, and when we got the gear and the beer up from my car, we plopped the gear down near the couch—Dan’s windows in that room looking out on The Washington Monument and toward Washington National Airport—and got to work. As I looped the riff, Dan reworked some verses he had in a folder of poems and, when we came up a verse short for the structure I wanted, the decision to repeat the opening verse—now over a much heavier and harmonized version of the riff at this point in the song, “Mack Truck Jazz,” if you will—came easily and naturally. Breaking the riff down to three notes to open the door for Anna’s wonderful extended solo came next, and there it was, “Thunderdome”! (The title comes from the parodic reference in Dan’s refrain, “What’s love but a second-hand emoticon?”)
Since completing the song, “Thunderdome” has been one of two pieces that JoF has played at every gig. A “staple” as the lingo goes. (Though, for some reason, that word bothers me. I can’t help seeing a single physical Swingline staple, like the one I’m flicking off my desk as I write.)
Our first songwriting session was not without interruption. For one thing, we interrupted it about nine times to get another bottle of stout. For another, there came a knock on the door. Predictable shit, but whatever. “Can you turn it down? It’s Saturday,” said the woman at Dan’s door, a young lady should have been much hipper; didn’t she know Washington DC was built by Minor Threat and the Bad Brains in 1982? But, again, whatever, Dan was polite. Until he noticed her feet. “Nice slippers,” he said. The woman was wearing bunny slippers. Turn it up is more like it!
And in case you missed it, here is the video for “Anger and Decency,” which is a radical remix of both the song and video “Thunderdome”!
