“Jaipur” opens with a sample of Bessie Smith’s “Haunted House Blues” (This house is so haunted with dead men I can’t lose) and then cuts to Darnielle downstroking his acoustic with a pick. The blues-rock progression—an E for two bars, followed by a Dsus2 and an A7sus4 (each played with two fingers, so most of the strings are open and ringing)—builds the tension. Then Darnielle tears into the opening line—“I was having visions of sugared pastry”—rising in pitch and volume for “pastry,” and we’re off. He’s sitting on the floor of the living room in his Colo, Iowa, home, playing and singing into an interview-style tape recorder with all of the input levels maxed out, and everything is saturated with distortion. “Cooked up in clarified butter,” Darnielle adds, and then, after a couple of transitional lines (I tried to turn my visions into prayers/But I built my castle way high up in the air), he’s on to the chorus and a new vision:
Yeah, I came to the gates of the fabled pink city
Hungry and tired and cold
Swing low, sweet chariot
Chrome tailpipes shining, bright as spun gold
The prayer in this high-in-the-air vision, which transports the song’s speaker to Jaipur, India, is for the descent of a modern chariot—a car or a motorcycle—with gleaming tailpipes. Why? He’s suffered Biblically bad treatment, on the level of Moses and Joseph, and he’s going to Georgia to even the score:
My brothers picked me up out of the rushes
Handed me into the company of evil men
But I inched my way down the Eastern seaboard
I am coming to Atlanta again
Once more through the chorus and then he starts raining down terrifying images of who or what he is:
I am the killer, dressed in pilgrim’s clothing
I’m the hard-to-find stations on the AM band
I am the white sky high over Tripoli
I am the land mine hidden in the sand
“Yeah I came,” Darnielle shouts, his voice shaking, “to the gates of the fabled pink city/Hungry and tired and alone”—prolonging the second syllable of “alone”—“Swing low, sweet sweet sweet chariot/Comin’ fer to carry me home.”
What Darnielle is always trying to get in these early recordings is the take with the greatest possible commitment to the song’s point of view, as opposed to the take with the fewest mistakes. His models for that kind of commitment don’t always come from punk/metal/rap scenes; Karen Carpenter’s “commitment to the lines” of “Yesterday Once More” is, to Darnielle, “as fierce in its own way as Johnny Rotten spitting out the opening lines of ‘Holidays in the Sun.’” Anything fierce; anything all in; anything ruthlessly focused. He commits just as irrevocably to “Elijah” and “There Will Be No Divorce” on The Coroner’s Gambit as he does to “Jaipur.” But there is, nevertheless, a special place in a lot of Mountain Goats’ fans’ hearts for the songs that ride anger out to the end of its line. The old-fashioned way that he sings “white” in the last verse of “Jaipur”—it sounds like “hwite”—makes something go off in me; the precision feels lethal. And in the final “Yeah I came,” it’s like he’s just as horror-struck by what’s coming as everyone else. You can go elsewhere in the catalog for this kind of a speaker: “Baboon,” “Cut Off Their Thumbs #2,” etc. But the speaker of “Jaipur” takes it farther than any of them. “[G]ood, hard, sweaty non-comm rock records are doing for me what I hadn’t thought they could do for me anymore,” Darnielle would write on Last Plane to Jakarta in 2003. “They are filling me with the pure cynical all-affirming blood-spitting lust for existence that good rock music fills me with, sometimes.” “Yeah I came to the gates of the fabled pink city,” he sings, viciously, totally open to the moment. “Hungry and tired and mad as all hell/Swing low, sweet chariot/Make me young again/Make me well.”
I love these header illustrations! Keep 'em up, Colin!