Pittsburgh Dreamin': The Greatest Hits of The Gotobeds

"I wanted to tell you about beauty, but I have no voice left"

Mar 14, 2025

The Greatest Hits compilation seems to be a maligned concept but I have about 15 greatest hits CDs in my car at this very moment. Sometimes all you need from a band is their hits (see: Creedence Clearwater Revival) and sometimes a band’s hits are the best jumping off point to dive into their deep catalog (see: David Bowie). If you're not a "Big, Rich Rock Band" you don’t usually get to release a greatest hits compilation. In this ongoing series, I'll be making them on behalf of the overlooked, underappreciated or otherwise passed over.

Previously on Bootleg Greatest Hits:

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Today: The Gotobeds, The People’s Band of Pittsburgh, who have released 3 albums and multiple singles and EPs since 2012

Fun1 Fact: I have no idea how I discovered The Gotobeds. All I can remember is that I bought their debut LP Poor People Are Revolting at one of the record stores in downtown Long Beach (not Fingerprints, one of the other ones.)

This was a weekend in January 2015 when Rocket From The Crypt played a double-header at Alex’s Bar and we were killing time (by killing time) on the Saturday before the second show. That much I know for sure. What led me to purchase the record is unknown. Was it faith in the label, 12XU records? Was it an appreciation of the clever wordplay of the album’s title? Was it a vibes based purchase based on one or more of those factors and/or the album cover? It is lost to the haze of high fives, beer, friendship and joy that a weekend with Rocket From The Crypt will deliver. What matters is that I went home with the album in hand2.

As might be expected from a band based out of Pittsburgh, a working class bent pervades the Gotobeds discography. A penchant for wordplay is also pervasive, as evidenced by the aforementioned Poor People Are Revolting3 That record arrived on the heels of a self-released EP and a 7” released by Pittsburgh’s Mindcure Records. Poor People in turn got them signed to SubPop, who then released 2016’s Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic and 2019’s Debt Begins at 30. As might be expected by some of these titles, each of these records features commentaries on late-stage American capitalism4 but also finds room to have a good time, which fits with this authors personal experiences of working class life.

I can claim no expertise on the state of mind that is Pittsburgh, having never set foot on Pennsylvania soil. There is an itching suspicion in my brain that Pittsburgh is likely my kind of town. A proudly blue collar haven, which despite what the lines on the maps may suggest to you, is neither the Midwest nor the East Coast5 (nor is it Appalachian) and is very much its own thing.

Shunning pre-defined labels to take on the mantle as very much your own thing - something we should all strive for - is also how you can describe The Gotobeds. Yes, there is a clear post-punk sonic apparatus in play. Any of us could list 3-5 wonderful bands on this particular branch of the musical family tree but you can’t keep The Gotobeds on that branch. They’d probably break the branch anyway, as part of an incendiary and/or drunken live show.

There is joy to be found in the Gotobeds music, which is not the case for every post-punk band. There is a warming quality of authenticity and a real heart to the lyrics which is not always the case for a band this loud, with guitars this sprawling. There are sections of songs filled with tension and dynamics, more fitting of Greg Sage’s playing than Roger Miller’s. There is a living and breathing human quality to the music of The Gotobeds, summed up superbly by Bob Nastanovich in the press release for Debt Begins at 30 as the Folk Music of the Steel City:

Their esprit de corps and anxiety free joy that permeates their other LPs and EPs remains intact. The octane is high test, the engine still has knocks and pings and the battery is overcharged. The Gotobeds, as Pittsburgh as it gets, the folk music of the Steel City, have more tar for us to swallow. 'Debt Begins at 30' is an old-fashioned blast furnace and the liquid iron flows.

I’m glad Bob used the heavy industry/steel city metaphors here because it means that I can be the first person ever to not talk about Pittsburgh Steel while writing about The Gotobeds.

Perhaps the best way to familiarize yourself with The Gotobeds and their beloved hometown is to read this feature about both of them that was published by Bandcamp Daily back in 2019: Post-Punks Like Us: 12 Hours in Pittsburgh with the Gotobeds

A theme I return to often in these pages is the dying art of album tracking. Without rehashing past content too much, as the focus of an album has shifted from a physical thing with two sides - or even a spinny disc with one side - to lines of code on a website and at the same time as attention spans have drifted, the need to front load albums has increased and the need to take a listener on a journey with a beginning and an end and points in-between has faded.

The bands who still ‘get it’ don’t let that get in their way, and track their album accordingly. The Gotobeds get it. They start hot, they end hotter and they hit various beats along the way. The final song is always the longest song, which I like a lot. Each album is clearly and purposefully tracked for the maximum effectiveness of the whole, not the parts (also a very blue collar and egalitarian approach, but I digress.) More people should do this, fuck the Algorithms.

Which leads me to something that emerged during the writing of this piece. The Gotobeds are back, baby. A new LP called Masterclass is coming in May 2025 and the video for the first song Goes Away from it dropped a week before this did. Full disclosure, when I started this piece, I assumed they were no longer an active band, and hence it was a good time to do the bootleg Greatest Hits gimmick. I’m happy to be wrong about that, and if nothing else, if you’re new to Gotobeds or you’re ready to catch back up, you have a jumping in point. Pre-order the new record first though.

I now present to you, unofficially released via Spotify on my imprint label Chapterhouse: Whitehead Records…THE GREATEST HITS OF THE GOTOBEDS.

In a departure from previous editions, rather than tracking this by mixing songs from across albums around, I kept this one chronological, to try and let each album take its own space. You can think of this as if it were released on two 10” vinyl records6, with no fourth side. Imagine the fourth side is an etching of one of Pittsburgh’s many bridges, if you wish.

As always with these fake compilations, its impossible to do justice to a bands catalog, and you are always and forever best served by listening many times to each album, to best take in the aural onslaught that is The Gotobeds. You can find the entire catalog on their Bandcamp page.

Now go ahead and hit play on this playlist, grab a pierogi and think of a bridge, we’re Pittsburgh Dreamin’.

Poor People Are Revolting (2014, 12XU Records)

Fast Trash
This is basically the perfect song to open any album, let alone your first album. The traditional “it makes me want to run through a wall” kind of song, featuring a note perfect “whoo”, seemingly ever-escalating drum parts and guitars all over each side of mix with some gnarly downstrokes. which cut right through the middle of both the mix around the middle of this song’s run time. It accomplishes what any opening song should: you want to listen to more of this band. Immediately.
New York’s Alright (If You Like Sex And Phones)
The first two songs here really tell you if The Gotobeds are going to be for you or not, as we continue to ramp up the pace. The killer rhythm section holds down the groove, allowing the guitars to fill in the rest of the space in the mix outside of the urgency of the singing. And, of course, the wordplay continues (it never ends) with the song title, an homage to Fear.
Fucking Machine
Fucking Machine is where we first encounter an important cornerstone of The Gotobeds, an outspoken commentary of music scenes and/or the music industry. In this case, I assume we are making fun of one or many of the presumably dull indie bands kicking around Pittsburgh, including this all time tear down:
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```
     where's the rage these days?
     i see nothing but tame
     fashionable treble guitar
     your earnestness has not got you that far

     everyone in this bar is a clown
     what does that say about this town?
```
Extremely relatable content there, honestly.
Secs Tape
Poor People Are Revolting wraps with this dizzying 10+min closer that has clear nods to The Wipers and Mission of Burma, but has becomes a song forever intertwined in my brain with the intersection of I-5 South and SR-134 East in beuatiful Burbank, CA. Why? When I would hit play on this record on my way out of the parking lot at the deeply frustrating job I had in early 2015, Secs Tape would kick in right around that section of freeway and then take me the relatively short way home from there, forever urging me to drive a little faster and be home before it finishes because there is no purer, but more pointless, joy in the world than pulling into a parking space right as a song ends. Let alone when one of the great debut LPs of the 2010s ends.

Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic (2016, Sub Pop Records)

Real Maths / Too Much
B//S//S//T kicks off with a song about being poor and bored and horny, that has both a Billy Idol reference and a Hot Snakes reference. Was this song written by me in, like, 2006? We also get a take down of some more weak bands here:
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```
      From the front, the side, the back the phony fuckers and their fucking bands
      BBQ sauce garage rock, or even worse: gluten free jam rock
      I think about carbs
```
I don’t quite want to run through that metaphorical wall as much as I did last record, but I am certainly extremely keen to hear what is next, as the lads show us once again they know how to track a record by kicking us right into…
“Bodies”
It took me a few listens, and a study of the (lovely, poster sized) lyric sheet that comes with the LP to realize that B//S//S//T is kind of a horny breakup record. Which, no judgement here, just wasn’t necessarily what I expected from them, but as we know, many great records are either horny and/or about breakups so why not join the long tradition.
Rope
Rope reflects the confusion and sadness of the lyrics heard in its first third with both the playing of, and the tone of, the guitars heard its final two thirds. Does the guitar gently weep for the narrator? No, but it does convey a message of confusion and ennui. Sometimes noise is not just noise. Or maybe it is and I’ve over analyzed it, but either way (this song is called) Rope is a standout in the Gotobeds catalog.
Crisis Time
The established Gotobeds tradition of taking down scenes and the biz continues, with a magnum opus indicting the sexism inherent in every level of the music industry, from gutter scenes to penthouse towers. Crisis Time is, in my estimation, a punk-rock heat check. Which to say, I personally greatly appreciated Gotobeds using their first SubPop record to take the dying husk of ‘the music industry’ to task. The correct time to shoot from half court is when you’re hot. The correct time to send a message is when you have people’s attention.

Debt Begins At 30 (2019, Sub Pop Records)

Calquer The Hound
Debt Begins (the album), picks up a mere three years after B//S//S//T and was recorded two years earlier in 2017, but during that interval, things have gotten more bleak, more acerbic, more urgent. The album kicks off with Calquer The Hound, which would like you to know that Debt Begins At 30 is not fucking around, that none of us should be fucking around and that the time to run through an actual, non-metaphorical wall is now or fucking never. Let’s fucking go.
Debt Begins At 30
Wait, how did we get this far without taking some time to praise the always-melodic Gotobeds bass parts7, without which there is no room for the signature sprawling guitar noise and riffing that encompasses the Gotobeds sound? Let the record reflect how important that is and perhaps there is no better showcase for those bass melodies that the title track of this, their best record to date? The back end of this song features some guitars that are so thick and so cutting that you could slice open a girder of Pittsburgh Steel. Ah fuck, I did the steel thing, goddammit.
On Loan
Debt Begins (the song) cannot be here without On Loan also being here, tied together as they are, two sides of the same coin. Debt begins with a Loan, after all. One song bleeds into the next, but the wilder tempo and claustrophobia of Debt Begins loosens into the wider spaces and vibe of On Loan. We are also returned all the back way to Fast Trash where our narrator originally told us he was “out on loan” - either intentionally or unintentionally reminding us that debt is often a never ending cycle, as referred to in this song via “the poverty of my youth” and “a nostalgia that’s never mine.” If you do nothing else after reading this, at least play these two songs back to back, really fuckin’ loud.
Bleached Midnight
Another pitch perfect album closer, Bleached Midnight curls itself into an extremely tight ball of fury and beautiful discordance over its first 5 and half minutes, threatening to burst into one thousand pieces, only to ultimately collapse under its own weight and fade out into a drone of feedback. Art imitates life (my life at least) as the song mirrors the hedonistic joy of an evenings entertainment, which is almost guaranteed to end in the futility and ultimate collapse of almost any post-midnight activity.
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Bonus Track: Blazing Sun of Youth
It’s not on Spotify, so its not on the playlist, but in the tradition of a hidden track on a CD, imagine 5 minutes of silence and then hit play on this outtake from the Debt sessions that was released digitally a year later than the record, during the heart of the pandemic, which I bootleged onto YouTube just for this. I love this song. This is a song you can build a record around, so I couldn’t believe this landed on the cutting room floor, with no better home than the B-Side of a digital only single. As a perpetually inquiring mind, I took this inquiry direct to source at the time, and the answer was that it was considered too proximal to a Wipers song, which explains why I love it so much, at least.

Negative Progression

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