1996: Nothing for Juice
Between 1994 and 1996, the Mountain Goats released three CDs with a total of 50 original songs on them: Zopilote Machine, Sweden, and Nothing for Juice. They also released two cassettes, seven EPs, and 20 songs on compilations, which raises the total to 116. And then there was what they didn’t release: nine outtakes, 17 live-only songs, and 13 songs on two not-quite records: Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg (a projected sequel to Sweden) and Jack and Faye. It sort of gives you pause. Once you’ve heard the top 50 songs from this three-year period, the ones that made the cut on Zopilote Machine, Sweden, and Nothing for Juice, should you really keep listening? How good could the next 105 possibly be?
Stunningly good. Not all of them, obviously, and tastes are going to vary, but the quality of the best of them is incredibly high. (You can begin to demonstrate this to yourself by listening to these seven songs, all of which were recorded or first performed in 1994-96: “Cubs in Five,” “Song for Dana Plato,” “Papagallo,” “Raja Vocative,” “Going to Port Washington,” “Alpha Omega,” and “Tulsa Imperative”)1 The experience of listening to these songs—and subsequent songs that didn’t make it onto the major releases, like (for starters) “Poltergeist,” “You’re in Maya,” “The Day the Aliens Came,” “Enoch 18:14,” and “Bride”—should tell you something important about the Mountain Goats. Because Darnielle cares so much about sequencing his songs to create a whole-album effect, he often leaves his most independently memorable songs off the CDs. (“When you're putting an album together,” he says in a 2008 interview, “some songs sort of raise their hands and quietly say ‘I don’t really play well with the others here.’”) And that means that when you venture beyond the Mountain Goats’ CDs, you don’t enter the zone of 75% quality or less, the way you usually do with the bands you like; you’re in a space where you can expect to find songs that equal or surpass the songs on the major releases.2
It also means that when you listen to the full-length CDs, you can expect to experience, among other things, a sense of coherence. “I’ve always been drawn to writing around a theme, because you’re probably writing around a theme anyway,” Darnielle says. “There’s that thing where all albums are concept albums. Whatever you’re writing is somewhat about yourself, about the world you live in, and the ways you sit in that.” It can be hard, at first, to sense how Nothing for Juice coheres, mainly because there isn’t a dominant musical style, as there had been in the first two albums. There’s nine boombox songs, five songs with Ware (“Then the Letting Go,” “Alpha Double Negative: Going to Catalina,” “Alabama Nova,” “Going to Bogotá,” and “Going to Scotland”), and four songs with Graeme Jeffries’ high-volume electric guitar (“Moon and Sand,” “Full Flower,” “Going to Kansas,” and “Going to Reykjavik”). But maybe you look at the CD’s liner notes while you’re listening and read, “You keep pressing me on this Emerson issue and I’ll show you what an all-consuming I is really all about,” and a passage from Suetonius which translates as follows: “No less arrogant were [Julius Caesar’s] public utterances, which Titus Ampius records: that the state was nothing . . . [and] that men ought now to be more circumspect in addressing him, and to regard his word as law.”3 And maybe you notice, in this context, the fire alarm on the cover, and start to hear in a fuller way lines like “I know what I want” (“Going to Bogotá”), “I will not stop,” (“Full Flower”), “I’m not listening” (“Alpha Double Negative: Going to Catalina”), “What the hell are you looking at?” (“Alabama Nova”), and, remarkably, “I will grab you by the ears” (“I Will Grab You by the Ears”). The “I” of the songs on Sweden mainly just looked at things and experienced the other person’s initiation of contact. The “I” of Nothing for Juice is more assertive than that, and the assertiveness tends to tip over into aggressiveness or imperial disregard.
But there’s a cost. In “Orange Ball of Pain,” Darnielle sings, down at the bottom of his register, about what happens after you’ve gotten what you want.
When I saw it on the bakery carousel
I knew I had to have it for my own
I eased it out
And I brought it home
Why don’t you try some
I already had some myselfIs that the most delicious thing
You ever tasted in your life
Is that the most delicious thing
You ever tasted in your life
There’s just one basic chord, a G, and the tiny riff that repeats for the entire song just adds on a flat 7th, a 6th, and then falls back into the triad. The spotlight is unwaveringly on what happens to the “I” who has had for himself, and then brought home, something that is and isn’t a pastry. This is the second verse:
Then the cold sorrow gripped me by the throat
And then I felt the colder sadness taking hold
I knew I had to have it for my own
Why don’t you try some
Why don’t you try some
Cold, colder, and then, in the third verse, coldest.
And then I saw the snow against the window
And then I saw the snow hit the window
And then I saw the snow brush against the window
And then I saw the snow again
I had to have it, I did have it, I brought home something resembling it, something delicious, and told you to eat it and say you liked it. And now I am the “I” who did all those things. “This is the Hour of Lead—,” Emily Dickinson writes, “Remembered, if outlived,/As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—/First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—.”4
In “Then the Letting Go,” the first song on Nothing for Juice, “letting go” seems to mean nothing more than getting over a relationship. But if you carry the phrase over into the second song, “Heights,” it starts to mean, in addition, surrendering to entropy and slipping out of life (When the sand crabs ran across your face/You didn’t even twitch. . . . And then you touched me, you were golden/You were giving the game away). Letting go of your ties to other people is, in a sense, letting go of the whole project of holding things together; you can keep imposing your will in majestic, issueless solitude, sure, but you’ll be joining forces with the universal pressure toward shattering, dispersal, and homeostasis. “The wood underneath would win and win till the end of time,” Ayi Kwei Armah writes in a passage from his novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) that Darnielle reproduces in the liner notes for Zopilote Machine.
It was so clear. Of course it was in the nature of the wood to rot with age. The polish, it was supposed, would catch the rot. But of course in the end it was the rot which imprisoned everything in its effortless embrace. It did not really have to fight. Being was enough. In the natural course of things it would always take the newness of the different kinds of polish and the vaunted cleansing power of the chemicals in them, and it would convert all to glorious filth, awaiting yet more polish again and again and again. And the wood was not alone.5
Of course . . . but of course . . . in the natural course of things. “Apart from the wood itself,” Armah writes, “there were, of course, people . . . bringing help to the wood in its course toward putrefaction.”6 Nothing for Juice is, I think, about becoming conscious of the fact that you are one of those people. “It was a terrible thing you did,” the back of the CD booklet reads. “I don’t care how long ago it was. It was a terrible, terrible thing.”
And it’s also about the revivable effort to hold onto something more than one’s self. The “all-powerful individual must eventually be crushed so that Love may exist,” Darnielle writes in a 1995 essay on Emerson, Whitman, and bedroom recordings. First, we have to “see who exactly this individual is”; then, in a few songs toward the end of the album—“Waving at You,” “1 Corinthians 13: 8-10,” and “Going to Scotland”—we will be able to sense the strength of that countervailing force.7
In “1 Corinthians 13: 8-10,” as the song’s chords cycle through a bright, dissonant pattern (D, then F/C and G/D with the low E string muted and the B and E strings open), Darnielle establishes the setting: Warsaw, 1939, a building into which German soldiers are swarming. On an upper story of the building, two young people are hiding behind a wall, hearing the rats in the rafters and wondering about the color of the sky. “It was all right just to be alive,” one of them sings, “it was good that you were mine/And you held your hands up to form a heart in the air/You held your hands up with your thumbs touching, they formed a heart in the air.” Through a hole in the brick wall, they see the soldiers coming toward their hiding place,
And you held your hands up where I could see them in the dark
They formed a heart in the air
You held your hands up
And they formed a heart in the airI heard the old songs radiating from you
I heard the old songs radiating from you
And that’s that. On the one hand, there’s the force of the all-powerful individual; on the other, there’s this force, the force of the old songs, a force that can fill up one’s partial, precarious body with an almost unbearable sense of the whole. The last song, “Going to Scotland,” says pretty much the same thing; Darnielle and Ware sing as an “I” and “you” who actively declare, one cold Scottish night, their indifference to whatever fate has been indicated to them by a silently passing pack of dogs. On “the newfound rich brown deep wet ground,” they warm each other’s bodies, feel love, have sex, and watch the dogs go by. “We knew we’d been given fair warning,” Darnielle and Ware sing, in the song’s last lines. “But that was the only thing we knew.”
I’m not including here the songs I really like from Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg and Jack and Faye. Darnielle has said he would prefer that people not listen to them, since he actively chose not to release them (he’s played a few of them live in subsequent years, but that’s not the same as releasing them). My choice was to listen to them, but everyone has to make up their own minds about it.
In case you’re wondering why I didn’t mention songs like “You Were Cool” and “Tyler Lambert’s Grave,” it’s because I’m devoting mini-essays to each of them in the next part of this project.
You used to be able to read the liner notes to records and tons of other things about the first two-thirds of the Mountain Goats’ career on Kyle Barbour’s amazing The Annotated Mountain Goats, but the site is no longer up (it may return). I copied the translation of Suetonius from it.
Emily Dickinson, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—.”
Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 12. “A pitiful shrinking of the world,” Armah subsequently writes, in a passage on the abuses of power in Ghana’s new government, “from those days . . . when the single mind was filled with the hopes of a whole people. A pitiful shrinking, to days when all the powerful could think of was to use the power of a whole people to fill their own paunches. Endless days, same days, stretching into the future with no end anywhere in sight” (162).
Armah, Beautyful Ones, 12.
Darnielle, “On Emerson, Whitman, and the Bi-Fi Revolution” (not his best essay title; the award in that category goes to “Killdozer: The Case Against Self-Actualization,” a paper for a psychology class at Pitzer). The Emerson/Whitman essay is in a pdf of Darnielle materials on Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/document/52894439/tMG-Interviews