Chattanooga, Tennessee, June 2006: Gatsby’s American Dream pull
their van into a gas station off Interstate 75. Their roadie, Kay Kay
Dargerson, gets out to fill up the tank. He picks up the nozzle, and a
mosquito lands on his sweaty outstretched forearm. It’s 103 degrees,
and Kay Kay is about to have heat stroke. He pumps the gas and studies
the mosquito as it sucks his blood. He lets it drink until it’s full.
Dizziness sets in.
Seeing the mosquito with his own blood inside
fly off into the sky mesmerizes him. It’s the last thing he sees before
the heat overtakes him and he falls to the asphalt.
When Kay Kay comes to, Kirk Huffman and Kyle O’Quin from Gatsby’s
have poured water over his head and are slapping him in the face. They
are wearing only their underwear. Groggy, Kay Kay asks, “Why are you in
your underwear?” O’Quin (still slapping him) responds, “Kirk was
showing me a new song in the trailer; it’s too hot in there for
clothes.” They place a bag of ice on the back of Kay Kay’s neck, he’s
revived, and a new band is born. Back in Gatsby’s van, Huffman stares
out the window and snaps out of a daze. They hadn’t stopped for gas,
and they didn’t even have a roadie. There was a mosquito bite on his
arm, though.
“We wanted something different to be the centerpiece of the band, so
we came up with this fictional character, Kay Kay,” says lead vocalist
and guitarist Huffman. “I could sing about falling in love, being on
the road in this band, playing shows, being stuck in a van for five
years on this big label (Fearless), and
how now I’m serving you
hash browns
at Glo’s. But Kyle and I just had this idea for
something bigger.”
For the rest of Gatsby’s tour—in the trailer, in hotel rooms,
and at sound checks—Huffman and O’Quin poured out ideas and came
up with seeds of songs. Back home, those seeds sprouted into Kay Kay
and His Weathered Underground—a big, weird, happy family that has
come together to flesh out a symphony of psychedelic pop and rock
songs.
“We wanted to put on a show that would transport people and be more
of a production,” says Huffman.
A production it is. When Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground take
the stage, they can be up to 17 people strong. Huffman’s royal falsetto
is surrounded by a swerving orchestra of friends, family, lovers, and
neighbors. They all play in each other’s bands and mix each other’s
projects and live in each other’s houses. Tennis Pro and Nada Surf
cellist Phil Peterson conducts the strings. His sister, violinist
Victoria, is married to horn player Robert Parker. “Big” Thomas Hunter
from Forgive Durden, who toured with Gatsby, is on guitar. Huffman’s
wife, Racheal, sings backup, and the Lashes’ Nate Mooter plays bass.
Captaining the dirigible on the drums is the esteemed Garrett
Lunceford, also seen in the Catch and the Divorce (RIP). Pretty
Parlor’s Anna Lange is the den mother, providing the threads, and
running the sound is Nirvana engineer
Tom Pfaeffle. The components
and players tilt, spill, laugh, and create.
“I feel really lucky to be in Seattle,” continues Huffman. “This
record couldn’t have happened anywhere else. I’m thankful for all these
people pulling together and the way things have fallen into place.”
On February 18, the band celebrate their self-titled, self-released,
full-length debut, a four-sided vinyl affair based on the pop cantata
(the album has been previously available as a digital download). The
album encapsulates a swirling mass of this city’s musical lives and
inner lives. Sgt. Pepper’s progressions fade into dub
refrains. Ragtime keys, horns, and strings swell with drums and march
back out with momentum and lyrical revelation.
Side A is uplifting and bolstered, beginning with the bright hooks
of “Hey Momma.” Side B gets experimental—it’s still sunny, but
“Bowie the Desert Pea” finds Kay Kay daydreaming, his imagining eye
turned to the desert. On the instrumental track “Cloud Country,” O’Quin
lays lazy, slurring Marley keys into horn lines and acoustic guitar.
Side C weaves through long, epic transitions. The compositions are
complex and playfully dark.
Familiar harmonies and progressions weave in and out of the entire
record; parts of songs reappear. It’s a unified piece of music,
building and splintering off into separate related sections. Lyrics
flow in and out. It’s all intertwined. The last song, “All Alone,” goes
from Tim Burton sing-along stomp into a Revolver guitar
dervish, ending with a melody from the album’s first song, “Hey Momma,”
and Huffman simply singing the word “love.”
The fourth side, available only on the vinyl version, is a manic
12-minute remix of the entire record. Bits of words and lyrics
distantly float by. Instruments and parts of songs you didn’t hear
before become forefront and magnified. Sounds are played backward. Kay
Kay is having a flashback: He’s at a childhood playground where he fell
off the merry-go-round and cracked his skull. The dizziness overtook
him. Here in the memory, the scene is reversed like the sounds on the
record. Kay Kay falls back onto the merry-go-round, and the accident
never happens. There’s no ambulance to the hospital or trip on the
gurney into the emergency room. No nurse puts him under anesthesia and
tells him it will be like a dream. 
