At first, the Mountain Goats were an idea of a band, something that Darnielle came up with as a way to account for the new kind of recordings that he was making in 1991. The name came from a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins song, “Yellow Coat,” which ends with a verse in which Hawkins sings, “Fifty million bulldogs/Twenty mountain goats/All gathered round at sundown/To see my yellow coat.” The song’s excess, craziness, and glee are foundational elements of the Mountain Goats, as Darnielle imagined them. The lyrics to “Going to Alaska” are full of those qualities: we’re introduced to an insanely lush world—color-soaked petals, shifting sap, branches charged with electricity, and a blood-soaked, history-transmitting soil—and then it’s one-upped by an insanely monochromatic world, where there’s nothing to eat (besides fat) and where the animals can kill you (but only in silence, in an unreal way). The same cranked-up feeling is alive in the slapdash music and the weird stresses that the measures sometimes induce in the lines: “there’s SNOW to SUCK the SOUND out—<beat>—from the AIR”; “UP, yes—<beat, beat>—in the BRANches.” It’s like Debbie Reynolds saying, “And what a LOVEly mornin’” in Singin’ in the Rain; the campily overstressed syllable gives the sentence an off-balance energy, which gives rise to a held-note word—“GOOOOD”—and then to “Good Morning,” a song that means nothing but is something.
A lot of very early Mountain Goats songs are like that; they say, “I exist, end of story,” and the sandbags drop from their balloons. Take, for instance, the first verses of “The Cow Song”—“Bang, pow, look at me now/Don’t let the cows stray off too far/Come down, take a good look around/See how the cows start to shine like light bulbs”—and “The Water Song”: “Water came springing out of the side of the wall/And I guess the same thing will happen to us all/I don’t know how to explain what I mean/I mean to say it’s kind of hard to explain.” And the entirety of “The Car Song”:
The highway’s open and the sun is full
And the vinyl upholstery heats up like worsted wool
The hills roll past us, then they rear up again
Take a deep breath now and count to ten
I reach across the stick shift and I pull you near
The highway’s open and it’s hot in here, it’s hot in here
Your skin sends all the sunlight back to hell
And you shine in the coming darkness and I guess it’s just as well
That there’s no one left, there’s no one left at all
And then the hills behind your eyes start burning like a solid wall
Of licking flames. They burn red and clear
The highway’s open and it’s hot in here, it’s hot in here
The songs are “temporary things in a world made up of temporary things,” as Darnielle puts it in “Thirty Short Poems About My Favorite Black Metal Band.” They’re happenings, little events, as uncertain about their origins and consequences as any other little events in the world. The puddles that they are can be larger than you might expect: when Darnielle draws out that unexpectedly enjambed line in “The Car Song”—“of LICKing FLAY-ay-ay-ames”—something attractive, sick, and wicked spreads throughout the song. But they’re puddles all the same and he likes it that way. “Mud puddle, it’s a fine place to cuddle,” he sings in “The Cow Song,” “if you’re a mosquito or a mosquito’s baby.”
It was 1991-92, after all, and Nirvana was monstrously big. Staying small, staying close to the DIY scene in Claremont and Upland, seemed good to Darnielle. Plus, there were other kinds of bigness. In the fall of 1991, at the age of 24, Darnielle enrolled in Pitzer College, where he became an English and classics major. This is “Song for Cleomenes,” which he recorded in the spring of 1993, toward the end of his sophomore year:
Seventy-three years before the advent of the Christian era
As Rome was taking over any land within reach
Setting up proxy governments in the conquered lands
There lived one such man given just such a job
Gaius Verres—go!A praetor held a position which operated on trust
He was to govern instead of the emperor himself
It was an easy, easy privilege to abuse
And Verres did soHe was the governor of Agrigentum which we now know as Sicily
And he stole everything that wasn’t nailed down
Took improper advantage of other men’s wives
The list goes on, trust me, Cicero wrote it all downAt Syracuse, Verres welcomed a band of pirates
They all drank and danced and sang on the shore
And when the husband of one of Verres’ paramours
Came bringing a fleet of boats with him,
Verres, clever, if diabolical, gave him a job
And enlisted the pirates to burn the whole fleet downThe boats burned in the Sicilian harbor
The flames rose hundreds of feet into the air
We stood on the shore watching them burn
We stood on the shore, we heard the old songsHey!
It’s a funny concept, but it’s not a joke. There’s no irony in Darnielle’s mostly talking-blues delivery (except for when he says, “The list goes on, trust me, Cicero wrote it all down”—the source-text, Cicero’s In Verram, is mind-numbingly long). The song really is for Cleomenes, the cuckolded fleet commander, a clueless-seeming part of a much larger scheme. When Darnielle gets to the moment of Cleomenes’ greatest humiliation, the burning of the fleet on the beach, he begins to sing. The chords—which start cycling in a resonant IV-V-VI-I progression (Bb-C-Dm-F)—nudge the D-minor song into the feel of F major. The song’s intuition, if I can put it that way, is that the narrative has arrived at a moment that demands something more than narrative; it demands a rising, a half-entranced assimilation to the impossibly high flames over the Sicilian harbor. And then there is, suddenly, an inside-the-song perspective, a “we” of some kind, and the experiences of the people in that group—they watch the ships burn, they hear “the old songs”—take us even further back in time. The world feels larger, more ancient, and more real. “Hey!” Darnielle shouts. He plays the talking-blues riff in silence, damaging the chords with tritones, and then the Panasonic’s wheel-grind is all we’ve got left.
Comic energy—here’s a song I wrote for an almost completely unknown Roman fleet commander!—can be converted into other kinds of energy; it is, or can be, a way of setting things in motion and giving them a fresh course. “With most of my ideas,” Darnielle says in a 2018 interview, “my first thought is ‘oh, that would be hilarious.’ I like that, it’s inspiring to me if it’s funny. . . . If you start without anything funny, it’s hard to move . . . if you start in a humorous place, you can go almost anywhere.” In the song “Beach House,” for example, a man implores a woman to stop hanging out on a rock about a mile from shore, because the rock is populated by seals, and “the seal is a wily and a vicious creature/And the seal will bite you if you give him half a chance/Yeah the seal has a mind set on violence/And the seal is the sworn enemy of man.” But the song isn’t just a skit about someone who hates seals. In a 1994 interview, Darnielle says, “Part of the process of listening [to ‘Beach House”] is feeling like at some point you’re breaking through to the actual person, I mean, even if you know it’s not so. . . . You’re not supposed to have a total detachment from it, you shouldn’t come away thinking, ‘this guy’s really fucked up.’ . . . This guy is begging someone to move back to where she used to live.” The comic start-up energy develops into a milieu—a setting, an atmosphere, an ambience, a mood—and through that milieu something breaks. Burst one—he hates seals!—is followed, potentially, by burst two: he’s a real person who is finding it hard to live without another real person.
One more example. “Billy the Kid’s Dream of the Magic Shoes,” which appeared on the 7” single Chile de Árbol (1993), uses its high-concept premise to get things going, and once things are going, it doesn’t extend itself into the here-and-now of the scene, doesn’t introduce other characters, and doesn’t suggest anything about the past or the future, other than that he’s about to be betrayed and shot dead.
It just tells us what he’s got coming, tells us how he feels about it (I don’t really care/I don’t really care. . . I don’t give a rat’s ass /I don’t give a rat’s ass, you rat bastards), and focuses on what really matters, which is the singing of the word “shoes.” “I got SPEcial SHOOES on,” Darnielle sings, “I got SPEcial SHOOOOES on, yah.” Only two of the non-outro chords depart from the song’s basic E-A-B pattern: the A7sus4 that Darnielle plays just before he sings “I don’t care” and “I don’t give a rat’s ass”—the notes in it are A-E-A-D-G, so it screams a little on the upper end—and the song-softening Am that he plays when he sings the word “shoes.” That sustained minor-chord word is the song’s great discovery. You’re free to stick with the contempt for fate that rises from the screaming chord and the screw-you lyrics, but you’ll be missing something if you do. It’s sad and beautiful that the Kid’s clipped-voice defiance rests on a Dorothy-like fantasy of a way out. It’s sad that humans, especially cornered outlaw humans, have so little to draw on. It’s beautiful that they still draw on something, even if—especially if—it’s just a dream.
By 1994, the Mountain Goats were a real presence in the Inland Empire, real enough to put out a standard-length CD, which I’ll use as the starting point for this album-by-album narrative of their career. It wasn’t that they were “discovered” by somebody or that they cut an album in a studio; their first CD, Zopilote Machine, is really just a sequencing of nineteen recent recordings, fourteen from the boombox and five from radio shows (“The Black Ice Cream Song,” “Sinoloan Milk Snake Song,” “Grendel’s Mother,” “Going to Lebanon,” and “Going to Georgia”). The release of Zopilote Machine was, however, a sign of where Darnielle thought the band might go, based both on his own intuition and on the kind of responses that he was beginning to receive. A violinist who would later play on Mountain Goats albums, Alaistar Galbraith, told an interviewer that when he first saw them, in 1993, Darnielle
played acoustic guitar and sang . . . [with] the “Bright Mountain Choir” backing him up, two women that sat on either side of him in chairs and swayed from side-to-side and sang a bit of back-up harmony. His intensity was awe-inspiring, and he lived the songs as he sang them. His lyrics were so beautiful, and the fact that he was really feeling what he was communicating struck me very powerfully, and by the time he had finished I’d written him a kind of fan letter at the table I was sitting at, saying that I had never seen anything like this and that he was a great songwriter and a brilliant performer.
When you’re getting feedback like that, it’s hard not to think about the possibility of bigger things.
This is an unbelievable project. Thank you for posting it for free. If you were to self-publish this as a book I would read that too.