The Mountain Goats “The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton” (Live)

OK, sorry that this week, maybe this month, has turned into PCR Featuring The Usual Suspects of Indie Rock. Maybe I lack imagination or maybe the holidays are making me return to my musical equivalent of comfort food. (A Sebadoh post can only be fast upon the heels…)

Anyway, archive.org says that back in 2002 my About page read, in part:

Please don’t blame the man, but PCR is more than partially inspired by John Darnielle’s zine, Last Plane to Jakarta, which really every one should read. I’m sure I’ll be talking soon about his most recent album under the Mountain Goats moniker, All Hail West Texas, probably the album that’s meant the most to me this year.

It occurred to me to follow up on this, since we’re almost at 2007. That’s about my typical turaround time on plans. So over the course of the next _____, from time to time I’ll come back to All Hail, a concept album made by one man, his acoustic guitar and an obsolete boombox, which nonetheless got me through and over my first real, major break-up. I’ll try to minimize the use of the phrases “tape hiss,” “yelp,” “frenetic strumming,” “genius,” but please don’t hold me to that.

The lead-off track, “The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton,” is a heartbreaking wolf disguised in novelty-song sheepskin. I mean, death metal is no laughing matter for Darnielle, right, but there’s a jokiness here… if I have to explain it, it’s not funny, right?

The story of Jeff and Cyrus, the duo who make up the eponymous and ultimately untitled band, is about how the world can beat you down. Or at least about how the powers that be in West Texas doesn’t see the greater good of teens indulging naive ambition–really, are there any death metal bands who can afford to travel via Lear jet?–and a little good old fashioned Devil’s Music–ah, those damning pentagram stencils.

But it’s mostly setup for the bitter prospect of revenge, the Moment that so often gives me goosebumps, Darnielle crying, “When you punish a person for dreaming his dream/don’t expect him to thank or forgive you.” What’s better is that it’s followed by instant catharsis, albeit a promise that I often doubt: “The best ever death metal band out of Denton/will in time both outpace and outlive you.” I can’t be so sure that Jeff and Cyrus will triumph. But I’m a cynic.

The closing refrain is, then, no joke, but as anthemic as the Goats get, an invitation to pump fists along with these young men cast aside by society. “Hail Satan, tonight,” indeed.

And you have the birth of a little masterpiece and fan fave. A note on the attached mp3, a recording made by someone else of the recent secret Mountain Goats show in Claremont, Cali: I’m generally very anti singing along with performers at acoustic shows, at least until they invite that audience participation (which, OK, Darnielle does around 1:40), but for the reasons enumerated above, the singalong–and the devil’s horn salute–are very very necessary.

Can I get a “fuck yeah”? I think I can.

All Hail West Texas at Target.

Daniel Johnston “I Had Lost My Mind” “Living Life” “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievience”

Last weekend the little lady and I netflix’d The Devil and Daniel Johnston, a marvelous and heartbreaking biography of the troubled Austin artist, singer-songwriter and pioneering home recordist who’s been a touchstone for a couple generations of indie rockers. The filmmakers truly do justice to a life that is the stuff of tall tales.

Picking up the strand from Lindayism like a month ago, I’d highly recommended this DVD to pretty much everybody. It has moments of hope and is full of beauty, although it’s ultimately harrowing in its depiction of Johnston’s psychosis. It’s amazing how much archival stuff they were able to use–audio tapes of family arguments, Super 8 films of the crush that became a lifelong muse, video of some of his most disastrous performances.

The film demonstrates how the urge to document, to tell stories, has been intimately intertwined with Johnston’s creative play since his teens. It also shows those who fetishize, and even seem to goad along, his illness to be as ill-equipped as his family and friends when it’s time to actually face the ugly results.

It was amazing to see how shrewd and self-conscious Johnston could be even in his disconnected moments–a stark contrast to his image as an inspired naif. And his illness aside, the man’s music has never shone as incandescently as when paired with the imagery in The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Here’s one case in point:

Oh, so I’m not going to front like I’m a D. Johnston expert. I’m not.

I just want to share a couple tracks originally from 1980’s Songs of Pain, but taken from last year’s The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered. This double-disc comp presents Johnston originals and covers of the same songs by various alt-rock luminaries.

And I want to tell you what I love about his music.

“Living Life” is rough-hewn but plaintive. Johnston’s childlike voice shuffles through yearning, hope, joy and sadness beyond his years at the time. The tape warble on his vocals and the basement acoustics reverb around the piano lend the proceedings a timeless but distant warmth, like a yellowing photograph whose exact age or era you can’t quite place.

He’s singing about the span and scope of life here, but highlights a basic conflict that anticipated his later struggles, like the little rumbles before the Big One: What do you do with the artist? Not to be too precious about it, but how does someone who feels so deeply, devotes his waking hours and his dreams to a basically impractical pursuit, deal with the dulling concerns of the workaday world? Johnston evades pretension in tackling this pretty Big Issue (I fear I haven’t) by being plainspoken, bleeding honesty onto a magnetic reel.

If I have the story straight after watching the film, “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievience” comes from a time when the only instrument Johnston had access to was a chord organ, a fan-powered keyboard that’s a cousin to the accordion. So he pumps away, channeling his loneliness and his anger at limitation into a letter to himself, a mini-sermon against loneliness, limitation and anger.

For better or worse, he’s never alone when he has his quixotic ambition, his outsized imagination. During a closing breakdown/vamp of the chorus starting about 2:28, he leads the audience in a singalong. Thus the exile, jury-rigging a studio from scraps in his brother’s garage, conjures a stadium of fans to keep him company.

The Late Great Daniel Johnston at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)
The Devil and Daniel Johnston at Target.

The Secret Stars “Your Life To Live”

In the hope of sending you off to yr weekend in a mood full of both hope and wist(?), here’s some bedroom-recording whispers from the Secret Stars, the now-defunct Boston boy-girl duo interlinked with more rocking concerns like Karate and Ted Leo/Pharmacists.

“Your Life To Live,” off their 1996 self-titled tape, floats along on a sweet love vibe, intimating the dazed infatuation of what sounds to me like the early days of a relationship. Geoff Farina breathes out velvety but emotive lead vocals over smudged acoustic strums and subtle bass accompaniment from Jodi Buonanno.

Even for all the wonder, there’s an edge of anxiety, a sense of capturing a feeling that could fade or a good thing that could slip from yr grasp. The chorus projects the object of affection later possibly on the movie screen rather than in the next seat in the theater, mediated in the future where she’s immediate now. I’m also not sure what to make of a song title that’s more at home as part of a kiss-off rather than a lovestruck paean.

But of course everywhere else, the song overflows with her presence.

This might fall somewhere into the region that’s oft-derided as “twee”–and OK, this tune is totally cute. I was gonna argue that there’s something ballsy in the heart-on-sleeve quality, the torn-valentine earnestness, the subcult hat-tips. But when I think it over the claim feels kinda anachronistic.

I’m fumbling around here, but the sunny yet autumnal feel, and all of the above signifiers, sort of mark this as a document of something we’ve lost in the Interweb age, just dawning at that time. I’m in love with the modern world, but, hey, y’all know I’m also prone to nostalgia.

I could never figure out the handshake–I was more of a spectator and solitary fan–but there was still a sense of inclusiveness for the excluded. Enlisting, through dedication to one or another aesthetic, in a community of outsiders. Shrimper cassettes as membership badge to a secret club. Believe it or not, there was a time when some folks could still say “alternative” without snickering or “indie” without pausing to pick apart that shorthand for all its emptiness and inconsistencies. (The death of that naivete isn’t all bad.)

(There’s a whole other critique we could dive into–way off-track–about buying into an identity, etc., but it’s totally unfair to throw the weight of an entire era, or really of an evergreen pop culture conundrum, on the unassuming heads of TSS and their small-scope song of crushed-out joy.)

Maybe what I’m saying is that the Secret Stars were letting you into their world with these songs about their lives and their friends. There’s some presumption that it would resonate, that yr concerns were in some ways like theirs, yr group of friends like theirs. On second thought that sounds like, I dunno, blogging or vlogging or YouTubing or…

So maybe let’s just talk about a young man, singing in amazement at the gift he’s been given, the perfect girl.

TSS at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)

Chris Dye “End Of My Rainbow”

What strikes me here is the palpable sense of disappointment, from someone who’d caught a heavy dose of it. Angeleno Chris Dye’s¹ alt-rock band, Dashboard Prophets², recorded one album in the mid 90s, only to have their label fall apart shortly after its release. Seems that no one involved fully recovered, and this cut from his 1997 home-recorded solo album, 11 Strings 4 Tracks and the Truth, lays out the bile and the resignation in jangly acoustics and cigarrette-stained throat, in jaded puns, exploded clichés and dessicated aphorisms. It’s sort of “Welcome To The Jungle” via Sebadoh.

I’m not going to fuck around. I relate pretty heavily to this song. You don’t need to know about the ideas never brought to fruition, the people I’ve let down–you can just look at the gaps between posts on this site. I worry sometimes I’ve gone around the bend, age-wise, even creatively, and pissed away one too many years. Sometimes you blame it on the L.A. air, the lotus-eating atmosphere. It might not be exactly what Dye put into the song, but it’s what I get out of it.

And to hear someone take his bad fortune and make something beautiful out of it, well, it’s pretty comforting. Inspiring even.

11 Strings 4 Tracks and the Truth at Big Rig Records.