1994: Zopilote Machine
In the record stores that stocked the Mountain Goats’ first CD right after its release in the summer of 1994, you might have seen, in the new CD displays, albums like Beck’s Mellow Gold, Green Day’s Dookie, Hole’s Live Through This, Nine Inch Nails’s The Downward Spiral, Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die, Salt-N-Pepa’s Very Necessary, and Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle. It wasn’t exactly the moment for a CD of songs that were mostly recorded in one take on a tinny, noisy Panasonic, featuring a guy without chops on a cheap guitar.1 Which means, of course, that for a few people at least, it was the moment for Zopilote Machine—the moment for an album that was leaner and rawer than anything else on the market.2 Leaner as in: no bass, no drums, no electric guitar, no solos, no picks, no finger-picking, no separation of the vocal track from the guitar track, almost no harmonizing, and an average song length of 2:09. Rawer as in: stark lyrics, vehement vocals, and a blistering strumming of basic chords. It was definitely not the only inventive, strong-voiced album on the market, but it’s hard to think of another album from that year that was more energized by its own anti-commercial qualities.
Not that there’s a Darniellean persona in Zopilote Machine, telling us about his righteous choices. There’s just a propulsive force, momentarily alive in the singer/guitarist, that brings rough little story-songs toward us. One is about a man—or woman, or neither; gender is indeterminate in most Mountain Goats songs—sitting in the middle of the street, getting dusty, and, eventually, seeing the sign of the apocalypse in the western sky. (I’m occasionally going to use he/him pronouns for the gender-indeterminate personae Darnielle sings through, but only because his mostly masculine-sounding voice so powerfully shapes the experience of listening to a Mountain Goats recording, not because a masculine point of view is an intrinsic part of the song.) Another is about someone who tries to leave the house and then, more modestly, to make a phone call, but is stopped each time by the psychological weight of the plum tree in the yard. And yet the songs aren’t exercises in absurdity; there’s real death-longing in the first one, “Azo Tle Nelli in Tlalticpac?” and a real fear—or paralyzing romanticization—of blood-rich action in the second, “Quetzalcoatl Eats Plums.” The pressure toward emotional reality is even stronger in the songs set in ancient/mythic worlds, like “Grendel’s Mother,” in which the level of feeling in the final chorus is almost unbearable: we’re going faster, he’s hitting the gentle chords harder, and there’s a tremor in his voice on the last line. (I’m saving “Going to Georgia,” where that pressure is at its highest, for the “Twenty Songs” part of the newsletter.) Throughout Zopilote Machine, the force at work in the lyrics and the performances keeps maximizing our investment in speakers who might otherwise feel distant, whether in time, space, or species-type.
Or wellness. People whose minds and bodies aren’t allowing them to socialize, fulfill obligations, or feel non-punishing feelings are some of the most distant people in the world, as far as many normatively healthy people are concerned. One of the basic aims of the Mountain Goats project is to begin to close that gap, to “articulat[e] the experience of people too possessed to know what to say,” as a reviewer of Black Pear Tree wrote in 2008. “I’ve got a message for you,” Darnielle and the Bright Mountain Choir sing in “Sinaloan Milk Snake Song,” “if I could only remember.” “I shake my hair and I look about,” Darnielle says in “We Have Met the Enemy,” and then starts singing, near the top of his register, “And the wild dogs are hungry/And the wild dogs howl/And the wild dogs in the mountains to the north of us/Come down.” And then there’s the entirety of “Alpha in Tauris,” but especially the last verse:
My brain gets flooded six hours later
My brain gets flooded over six hours later
And rivers run with pictures of you as I stare up at the blood-red moon
Lying out front on the lawn, hey-ey-ey-ey
Something has set off a chemical and psychic reaction in the speaker that can be hidden in public (I’m the model of composure out there) but not in private (you oughta see me shaking later on). The song never lets us know what that “something” is, though. It just lets us feel, with the speaker, the force of its effect—lets us see, imaginatively, the same impossibly red moon.
The “Alpha” in the song’s title means that it’s about the “Alpha Couple,” two imaginary hard-drinking people whose coupledom is in the process of destroying them (Alpha signifies a-, the prefix of negation, as in asymmetrical, asymptomatic, and asynchronous).3 The first song on Zopilote Machine, “Alpha Incipiens,” is the couple’s origin story, and it’s one of the best examples on the album of Darnielle’s ability to pass along what a character is feeling without resorting to the wildly misleading shorthand of naming and explaining.
The song has roughly the same chords as “Billy the Kid’s Dream of the Magic Shoes—E, A, B, A7sus4—but it’s played with the strings tuned down four steps (they kind of shudder when he hits them). The strumming pattern (DAH-d’-duh, DAH-d’-duh, DAH-d’-duh, DAH-d’-duh, DUH-DAH) overlays the 4/4 measures with something that feels like 3/4 time, and the vocals keep lane-drifting between melody and speech, so you’re basically hearing three or four rhythms at once.4 Here are the lyrics:
The morning comes to a stuttering halt
The cool breeze that blows is somebody’s fault
The summer heat tries to burn through
And I look over toward you
But something’s happeningThe morning glories climb the wall
And you speak in a slow drawl
I’m trying to piece together what you’re saying
But the birds are screeching and the hounds are baying
I don’t remember there being any hounds around hereWe lean back and we clink our glasses
Raise the drinks to our thirsty mouths, thick as molasses
Ice cold vodka eases in
As the low-pressure system brings the breezes in
And they sashay and pirouette above you
The only thing I know is that I love you, and I’m holding on, yeah
If you’re playing an oldest-to-newest stack of the Mountain Goats’ twenty CDs, hearing Darnielle sing, “The morning comes to a stuttering halt” is an almost perfect starting point: he slightly prolongs the length of the vowels in the first half of the line, switches to a staccato upward run on “stuttering,” and then hits “halt” in an off-melody way. “Something’s happening,” as he sings at the end of the verse, before the thrashing of the guitar takes the place of an explanation of what it is. He tries again: “The morning glories climb the wall/And you speak in a slow drawl”—hoping, maybe, that the meter will establish a mood that will enable him to speak from his understanding of the situation. But it’s too late for anything like that; the other person’s sentences are flying apart on their way to him and he’s having auditory hallucinations. He can only speak from his too-possessed experience of the situation. Freezer vodka in the morning and cold, dancing breezes. I love you. I’m holding on. That’s what’s happening.
Something is clearly wrong. I don’t know what it is—Darnielle will later suggest that it’s “poor communication skills”—but everywhere I turn in the song, emotionally, it’s there, glowing in a perversely attractive way.5 I can’t do anything about it, no one can. But we can dream. In Aztec mythology, four suns are created and destroyed before an assembly of gods builds a sacrificial fire out of which the fifth sun will emerge. Tecciztecatl, the beautiful Lord of the Snails, hesitates, and so the ugly god Nanahuatzin—linked with Quetzalcoatl, who brought the corn—jumps in and is born as the fifth sun, the one that shines now. (Tecciztecatl jumps in next and becomes the moon.) In the last song on Zopilote Machine, “Quetzalcoatl is Born,” the speaker seems to dream his own version of the myth.
The guitar is tuned down four steps again, the low E string is tuned down further to a D, and with the capo on the sixth fret, Darnielle bangs out a two-chord song (the chords are D and D/B).
It’s a cold night in Sonora
And the stars are out in full force
It’s a moment the world has been waiting for
When you set the world back on course
Into the fire you go, into the fire you goIt’s a strange gathering around you
And the Lord of the Snails is born
Five minutes before you take on divinity
You hear the crackling, well, you hear the snapping corn
Into the fire you go, into the fire you go
Darnielle sings it forcefully, echoing Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” at some of the line-ends. The speaker is, once again, speaking not from an understanding of the situation but from an experience of the situation, whose fragmented elements are more powerful than any explanatory description could be. If you’re really messed up, if it feels like the whole world is really messed up, then a hinted-at situation with the feel of the apocalypse might bring you, privately, a sense of relief and ferocity and joy. Into the fire you go. Into the fire you go-oh-oh-oh-oh.
In response to a question about why he records into a boombox, Darnielle says, in a mid-1994 interview, “I don’t like production that makes the fact that it’s a made thing disappear. I don't like the fact that nobody is playing stuff live onto a record [the way the old] Sun sessions did. You put almost anybody in front of a four-track and they're going to put in two tracks too many, stuff that does not add, it just thickens. Also, I like to record right after I write. I don't want four tracks getting in my way.”
In a 2004 radio interview, Darnielle says that he started using “Alpha” in his titles out of “a misunderstanding of the term ‘alpha privative’ which is the ‘a’ in front of a word that negates: moral, amoral, right. In Latin that's called alpha privative. When I first learned that I was like twenty and I was like, ‘Awesome, the letter that negates!’, you know. A couple years later I was talking to my Latin teacher about it and he was like, ‘Yeah, it just doesn’t carry that kind of force, nobody thinks of the term alpha privative as something you know, annihilating stuff.’ But I did.”
“Polyrhythms are created by patterns which pit a feeling of four against a feeling of three. . . . In addition to that, the onset of one pattern is often staggered in a way which results in something less than perfect superimposition atop another pattern" (Mark Gridley, Jazz Styles: History and Analysis, 364).
“This is another one of those songs where you got two people, they were once deeply in love, and then it’s like a monster came, a terrible monster. But it wasn’t really a monster, it was poor communication skills. But because in all likelihood they have or have had in the past difficulties with alcohol, it seems more like it must have been a monster, because how could poor communication skills make such an awful mess?” (Darnielle, introduction to “Going to Jamaica,” October 15, 2000).