“And here are the MOUNTAIN GOATS!!”
“Looks like only one goat though…”
That was my introduction to the music of John Darnielle almost ten years ago – on a mix cassette made for me by Will Schaff the first sentance being the MC’s announcement, and the second the offhand comment by Will into the tape recorder he was using to bootleg the concert.
And then follows “Black mollies in the aquarium, swimming back and forth like an earthquake was certain, and I turned up the heater, and I ripped off my shirt”… John Darnielle is one of the most amazing lyricists I’ve ever encountered, drawing from experiences far too wide to ever come from just one Life, or so I’d like to think.
At one point, in college, Will mentioned that the Mountain Goats were playing at the Ottobar, and we all went down to see John in person. At the time, the Ottobar was miniscule, and was focused on indie rock and other eclectic music – a tiny hole-in-the-wall bar with an artsy aura. The Mountain Goats once again consisted of a single performer, and my memory of John Darnielle was of a shaven headed man, a little older than me, screaming his heart out into the microphone, almost silent between songs, and completely unrivalled in his intensity – pulsing skull veins and pumping muscles – a vague memory of volume and emotion.
It’s been a good visit – what with the introduction of homemade Southern fried chicken and… “butterbeans”. I like butterbeans. It’s been funny to watch Rowan show up in the South – returning home after however many years away, he’s very excited to hear that there’s a local sale on bushels of butterbeans. He’s going to bring some home.
So the beginning of last night’s Wilmington Mountain Goats show was spent trying to figure out which person was The Mountain Goat(s). We got there early enough to sit through complex and casual sound checks – the opening act, John Vanderslice, was a four-piece band with singer/songwriter, drummer/xylophonist, electric guitar/keyboardist, and a bass player.
We eventually identified the Mountain Goats as a tall scrawny bass player and the periwinkle shirted narrow-eyed guy playing that dumb bar video game in the corner. Yep, John Darnielle was relaxing, hanging out and apparently flirting with the merch girl. This was an entirely new side to a guy who writes such lines as “And you smile as you ease the gun from my hand” and “the daisies bloom like cancer” and lyrics about subjects as varied as human sacrifice, murder, Love, passion, and estranged children.
I really WANTED to warm to the opening act. John Vanderslice used a lot of reverb and a lot of tremolo effects. He had an insane keyboardist and a vibrophone and a REALLY good drummer full of dangerous tom noises and fierce thunder. He had a good song. Maybe. A good lyric, maybe. But a couple more lyrics that sounded as if they were really TRYING to be deep, but… failing. (“Sometimes a cowboy is just a man in a cowboy hat”). But mostly, he left me kind of cold. Most of his music continued in a solid unbroken not-quite-slow rhythm as if everything had been written to match the same trem effect setting. Really, really good musicians though – they somehow put me in mind of a lounge-ier alternative to Rush. Yeah – TRY imagining that.
And then come the Mountain Goats. Up to this point, John Darnielle’s contribution to the show had been to shake his fist from behind the stacks on the side of the stage in time to some of the more emotive beats in Vanderslice’s music. He takes the stage with a dozen songs I’d never heard before, all of which proved to me that this guy is one of the best writers that’s ever Lived. And one of the best performers, too.
After the opening tune, he stops to explain that once upon a time he was VERY uptight about setlists – that setlists were laid out weeks ahead of time, and the musician that deviated from the setlist earned his wrath. Tonight was the first time he was operating ENTIRELY sans setlist – and pretty much the whole night was made up of audience requested tunes.
Heather even requested one, but she didn’t know the title, so she wrote a bunch of lyrics down and made John a lengthy note – with a smiley face on it – “Oh, she wants ‘Poltergeist’. Do we do ‘Poltergeist’? I think we tried it once in San Francisco. It’s got like, this C# in it.” At this point the keyboardist from Vanderslice had snuck up on stage, and though the bass player caught on quick, he spent a lot of time angling his bass over so the other guy could see the notes he was playing.
A good night. Very freeform. John moved from guitar to drums and back again, insisted that the bass player play a song of his OWN devising (he barely remembered it, but it was awesome nonetheless) and by the end of the night, invited the whole of the Vanderslicers up on stage for a very scary song about a man stabbing his wife who’s using a saw to saw off her jaw while they’re planning to give us cancer in our hands. Creepy song – the Vanderslicers, when finally freed from the musical vision that was John Vanderslice, went crazy in a ferocious, almost punk recreation of Mountain Goat insanity.
Incredible night. Too much to recount. We just got back from playing Port City Java – another great day. Maybe I’ll put Heather in charge of telling you about that.
