The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower
Lyrics
Stick bright reflective tape to the collar of your shirt
Mind your business and you won't get hurt
Be true to the things you said you'd be true to
Always keep your objective in view
Keep two working contacts among your effects
See the tall poppies with their tender fragile necks
Solomon in all his glory not arrayed like these
Bending in the wind like pilgrims on their knees
Those who came to learn these lessons
Left no trace of their presence
Always have a flashlight, just in case
Show the world your true face
Burn such fuel as you need to burn
Learn to wait your turn
Count the heads in the bunks before you turn in for the night
Lace your boots up tight
Secure the rope to the pole
Keep a sense of wonder when you finally reach your goal
Those who came to learn these lessons
Left no trace of their presence
Leave nothing behind
Keep a positive thought in your mind
If you can't find anything nice to say
Drift away
Retain a sense of grace when it's time to cut the cord
Crack through the crust, fall to your knees, and praise the Lord
Listen for the voices calling out from down below
Steady as you go
What will they say back home about you
Who always kept your objective in view
Whose effects included contacts that finally got found
Inside the Arctic Circle, scattered on the ground
Those who came to learn these lessons
Left no trace of their presence
Banter
- JD: There was a newspaper of record that was popular in the 1980s among people who wear crosses for earrings. It was, the news in it was so heavy that you could only digest it once a week. If you put it out daily it would be too much to bear. It was called the weekly world news. And it broke many important stories, like the alien who was actually in control of the government and was eating the heads of state. Bat boy was a big one.
Peter: The guy who had a 9 and a half inch long tongue.
JD: Yeah! Oh yeah, on the cover, and he's stoked, because normally he's relegated to page 9 or whatever, but on the weekly world news the man with a nine and a half inch long tongue gets a headline. But the thing that inspired me was the story of how some Russian engineers had pierced the vault of Hell that was underneath the earth. And this like... there's something, I can't call it primal, but it's very basic in me, that like, when I hear something like - well, the thing is, the piercing of the vault of Hell which lay undernearth the earth: that was exciting to me. But then, when the story reported that there was an audio recording of it. Well, that's me all over. Like these days it would be like a shaky video, and that's fine and Blair Witch-y, you know, but nah, nah. An audio recording of Hell. I just loved the idea that these engineers who were working on an oil rig in Siberia, they pierce the vault of Hell, they hear the screams of the damned, they say 'Does anybody have a tape recorder? This is pretty wild down here.' You know? So I read that story, and of course there's a longer story explaining what it actually was, but I'm not interested in a longer story. I'm interested in what happened when the Russian engineers pierced the vault of Hell. As a sidenote, it was in a place in Siberia called Kola, and there used to be a tower there, because in fact the hole they were digging was for a long time the deepest hole on the earth, right? For a long time, you couldn't dig any deeper than that one. It's only about this big around but it went down further than anything had ever gone. At some point after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the tower was destroyed and nobody knows who did it. This is called The Destruction of the Superdeep Kola Borehole Tower. (2021-08-19 Gothic Theatre)
Live Performances
Footnotes