2015: Beat the Champ

Darnielle at a wrestling match in the Mid-Atlantic Sportatorium in 2015

In April 2015, my son Colin, who was eighteen years old, asked if I would go with him to a Mountain Goats show in Boston’s House of Blues. I said sure. We got there early enough to get close to the front row (there ended up being about 1,000 people in the room). When Darnielle came out, he was low-key, suit-coated and barefoot. I had no idea what to expect.

Over a low-string Em-Am-C acoustic guitar progression, he sang

The winter’s wet, the summer’s hot 
Take a match in Puerto Rico, why not
Power and adrenaline flowing like amber 
From the recesses of the earth—

and then, after a quick transitional phrase (put on your waders and),

Twitch (Bm)—when the water runs high (C) sometimes 
Twitch (Am)—when the tide ebbs low (Em)

He started the next verse but fell silent after two lines and played eight bars of a descending, pull-off riff, accompanied by Matt Douglas on sax. When he started singing again, it was an octave up and things were beginning to get bloody: “When the blade hits the bone, everybody hears it sing/Shower room full of people, no one hears a goddamned thing/Twitch when the current runs wild sometimes/Twitch when the contact howls.” He, Wurster, and Hughes banged out eight identical notes, two at a time, and waited. They repeated that twice more, banged out a descending riff, and then did the whole thing over again. Something was building, and Darnielle’s persona, a professional wrestler, was dying. “The sky goes dark and there I am,” Darnielle sang, his voice shaking, in the final verse, “Climbing down the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram”—and I didn’t need to know what that was, I just knew that I was somewhere I had never been before. “I drop,” Darnielle sang, “from the top of my tall steel cage/Drop to the concrete floor.” That was it, the moment of impact. And that was how this whole part of my life began.

Colin burned me a CD of miscellaneous Mountain Goats songs, then a bunch of albums. I listened and kept listening. I probably spent a solid four years listening to almost nobody else’s music, after a lifetime of listening to whatever was out there. Colin and I saw them in Huber Heights, OH, then in Northampton, MA, Saxapahaw, NC, and Philadelphia. Each new show was better than the last one. We talked about them endlessly, played stacks of their CDs on car trips, and sang their songs together when we could. When I started working on All Hail the Mountain Goats, I talked with him about them every chance I got (he had moved to Boston) and we went to more shows together: Royal Oak, MI, Holyoke, MA, and Boston. There’s more I could say, but I won’t, other than that all of this been partly from him and wholly for him.

Me and Colin before the Royal Oak, MI show in August 2021

Beat the Champ was the album that I listened to most at first. I loved the energy of “The Legend of Chavo Guerrero” (“Born DOWN in El Paso,” with the whole band coming in on DOWN), but pretty quickly what I was waiting for when I listened to it was the next-to-last verse:

He was my hero back when I was a kid 
You let me down but Chavo never once did 
You called him names to try to get beneath my skin 
Now your ashes are scattered on the wind

The “you” is Mike Noonan, who brought his young stepson to Los Angeles’s Grand Olympic Auditorium to see professional wrestling matches in the late 1970s, before the Worldwide Wrestling Foundation consolidated all of the local wrestling scenes.

All I knew then, though, was what happened in me when Darnielle sang, “Now your ashes are scattered to the wind.” After three lines set in the past, the shift to “now” was startling, and the coolness in Darnielle’s voice when he sang, “your ashes are scattered on the wind” almost disorganized me. It was a feeling that I needed to feel more, for reasons that I didn’t totally understand. An earlier verse in the song started igniting the feeling too:

Before a black-and-white TV in the middle of the night 
I’m lying on the floor, I’m bathed in blue light 
The telecast’s in Spanish, I can understand some 
And I need justice in my life, here it comes

What I was reacting to, I think, was the verse’s basic psychological scenario, a scenario that probably lives inside anyone who is or was a child in danger of being snuffed out: you erase me/I will erase you. It’s the kind of thing that can make you watch black-and-white wrestling late at night with a near-telekinetic intensity. “This album is for Chavo Guerrero, Sr.,” Darnielle wrote in the liner notes for Beat the Champ, “on whom I pinned my hopes when I was very young.”

There’s an impressively broad range of styles and tones on Beat the Champ, and eventually that would become what I liked most about it, but I had a strictly heat-seeking approach to it back then; I wanted more of what “Stabbed to Death Outside San Juan” and “The Legend of Chavo Guerrero” were giving me. “Heat,” in professional wrestling lingo, is the flooding-up of rage that the “heel,” or bad guy, calls forth (“pop” is the cathartic reaction that the “face,” or good guy, provokes). Wherever I felt heat, I invested the moment with a kind of super-reality.¹ Heat is what makes the “Choked Out” speaker, who is in a two-hundred-dollar-purse competition to see who can survive a chokehold longest, keep going (I stretch and strain with all my might/Drift off into the velvety arms of the night/Kick and claw and scratch and bite/Fire up the grill, everybody eats tonight). It’s what makes the face in “Heel Turn 2” turn heel (Come unhinged/Get revenge . . . Drive the wedge/Torch the bridge). It’s what I feel when Darnielle sings, “I personally will stab you in the eye with a foreign object” (“Foreign Object”) or “Get told to maybe dial it back backstage later on/Everyone still in this building right now, dead before the dawn” (“Werewolf Gimmick”). At times, in response to the “world that seems to press down,” I side with goodness and heroize the faces; at some point, though, I side so hard that a destructive power starts flowing through and out of me. And if that’s bad, well okay then I’m bad. The difference between good and bad might matter less at that moment than the difference between dialed up and dialed back.

But the speaker of “Southwestern Territory,” who sings, in the sweet, clarinet-y bridge, “Nearly drive Danny’s nose back into his brain/All the cheap seats go insane,” makes me feel something else. The same kind of violence that I’m animated by elsewhere on Beat the Champ is something that I’m intensely sorry about in this melancholy piano song about a wrestler who’s driving, late at night, from the Grand Olympic Auditorium to La Puente. “I try to remember what life was like long ago/But it’s gone you know,” he sings in the first pre-chorus, and then, in the second, “I try to remember to write in the diary/That my son gave me.” He can’t gain access to what life felt like then or what it will feel like later on, when his son opens the diary; trauma and working-class routinization seem to have done a number on his brain.² But he doesn’t stop trying. There’s a similar kind of pain in “Luna,” in which the retired wrestler Luna Vachon watches her house burn down from her front lawn and with great effort keeps her head high and stays on her feet. “Burn hard, burn hard,” Darnielle sings in her persona, “Smoldering pieces landing in the yard.” He sings it quietly, as if to intensify our sense of the difficulty of what she’s doing (Stay on my guard/Burn hard/Rage on/All gone). She dies of an overdose a year later. The retired wrestler Bull Ramos steps on a piece of glass, the wound gets infected, and they amputate his leg—but before he goes under in the operating room, the surgeon says, “Aren’t you that old wrestler with the bullwhip?” and he says, happily, “Yes, sir, that’s me, I’m him” (“The Ballad of Bull Ramos”). After which he loses a kidney and goes blind. Still: “Never die, never die,” he sings, “Stand with a bullwhip in my hand/And rise, rise/Surrounded by friends.” “Wrestling’s a form of expression, and it expresses vastness,” Darnielle said in an April 2015 interview.³ “You sort of do . . . assign specific situations to certain emotions, and wrestling kind of confounds that by saying, ‘No, we can express all the things in here.’” “I wanted to give a sense of the breadth of mood within the whole world of wrestling,” he said in a later interview. “Like any art, it’s not just one thing; it’s a lot of things.”

Things like sweetness. “Animal Mask” is a song about the inception of a two-person team in the midst of a free-for-all match in which everyone’s trying not to get thrown over the ropes. “Some things you will remember/Some things stay sweet forever,” Darnielle’s wrestler-persona sings, thinking about that moment, the moment when the other wrestler cried for help and he cried, in response, “Hold on, I’ll be right there.” When Darnielle wrote that song, in 2013, what he most wanted to express was the mood of the moment when he first saw his son Roman (That was when we were green and young/Battle-cry rising from your tongue), and wrestling made it possible for him to give that mood a fresh, expansive form.⁴ It also made it possible for him to do something intensely personal in “Unmasked!”

Rain beats down, down on the outer walls 
Down on the skylight, where the streetlights 
Shine like unquenchable coals 

And I’m up high, trying to say goodbye 
The only way I know how, crude and graceless 
Peeking through the eyeholes 
Seeing the real me/you

And just after midnight 
When it feels like it’s getting late 
I will reveal you 
I will reveal you

Crowd’s half-gone, just a few hangers-on 
Come to see me
Finally tear through the stitching at last 

You don’t care, you look almost relieved down there 
Like you’re free, like you can breathe now 
Like they’ve sawn off your cast 
One more sleeper to see through

And by way of honoring 
The things we once both held dear 
I will reveal you 
I will reveal you

Cast of thousands 
But we were the real two 
When I’m alone 
Before a mirror late at night 
I will reveal you 
I will reveal you

There’s his I’m-glad-you’re-ashes-now fury toward Noonan, and then there’s his sense of human dignity and possibility as “unquenchable coals.” But the only way he knows how to do this (in the song) is crudely and gracelessly, simplifyingly, so he goes in for the ruination, the stripping off of the mask, the identity-destroying revelation of Noonan as the heel. That means that he has to look at the masked face, which means that he ends up peeking through the eyeholes into his opponent’s eyes and seeing “the real me-you” (Darnielle’s vocals are double tracked, and on one of the tracks he sings “you” and on the other track he sings “me,” as far as I can tell). The wrestler-persona tears through the mask’s stitching anyway and there he is, the Opponent, freed from his encasement, looking almost relieved. Then the wrestler-persona puts him in a sleeper hold, choking off the blood going to his brain, and he’s unconscious, or maybe dead, who knows. “Cast of thousands,” Darnielle sings at the end of the song, “But we were the real two”—each the other’s person, so intimate with one another, in the end, that they become, at times, hard to tell apart. “When I’m alone/Before a mirror late at night,” he sings, “I will reveal you/I will reveal you.” The moment’s sweet, musically, drifting down from a V to a II and then the tonic, rich with extensions. But it’s also a moment of recognition, and the recognition—I look at my mirrored image and see his face—is hard to take.

On the album’s last song, “Hair Match,” Darnielle drives the tensions in a different parent-child pairing toward an even more powerful resolution. In the opening bars, Darnielle plays a C#-5—a C major with the fingers moved up one fret—in three-note arpeggios (C#/F#/G) until the chord finally sinks down into an A#m.

Then he sings,

You’ll be maybe lunging for the bad guy’s hip 
No one anticipates the sunset flip 
The referee and your opponent will hold you there 
And we’re gonna bring in a folding chair

It’s one of Darnielle’s most beautiful vocal melodies, and the way the song starts rocking back and forth between F# and C# sort of cradles the unrest in the lyrics. The next verse trains its attention away from the ring, toward the unauthorized filming of the moment to come, when the losing wrestler will have his hair shaved off. Then, after an interlude with Matt Douglas on flute (Hughes and Wurster are in atmospheric supporting roles), the moment arrives:

Cheap electric razor from the Thrifty down the street 
Two guys down around your ankles so you’ll stay put in your seat 
Buzzing razor held aloft and just about to strike 
I loved you before I even ever knew what love was like

I step, almost every time I listen to the song, straight into what it feels like to be the song’s “I”—who is, I’m pretty sure, the now-grown-up son from “Southwestern Territory,” watching a bootleg video of his father’s humiliation in the Grand Olympic Auditorium.⁵ The energies of the “I” are totally, painfully devoted to the upholding of the wrestler’s spirit, something that it’s almost too late to uphold. But then things start to shift for me, the faces start to blur. “Out in the parking lot,” Darnielle sings in the song’s last verse, “you look up at the stars/And all the cheap cars.” The dissonant chord at the heart of the song is in me; this was never going to be a story with a happy ending. Something in me feels good, though, or at least right. I loved you before I even ever knew what love was like. The son loves the father (Hold on, I cried, I’ll be right there); love extends the son toward the father and suspends them together.⁶ And the father, in the darkness of the long-ago parking lot, really loves his son.

1. Hyper-investment of this kind might seem regressive and pointless. As Darnielle points out, though, “the fact that somebody’s telling you a story about people who didn’t exist doesn’t make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind. You go through heavy emotional responses to these stories, and wrestling is a similar thing—but it’s happening in real space. You’re agreeing to this fiction for the purpose of living some very high emotions. It’s a lot like old drama—the way drama was in Rome.”

2. “There was no way that you could miss that these were just working stiffs,” Darnielle said when introducing “Southwestern Territory” at a San Francisco show in April 2015. “They were just dudes. I find a job washing dishes, they find a job throwing each other onto the mat, it’s the same basic deal. It was incredibly compelling to me.”

3. And it has a vaster appeal than many other forms of expression. “In America especially, generally speaking, theater doesn’t present itself as something you might go to for working-class entertainment,” he said in 2015. “It presents itself as something that’s for schooled people.” Everywhere that theater has become the province of the elite, it has lost “what makes art vital, which is that it can reach anybody. Art that can only reach some people is diminished.”

4. “If you think that a songwriter sitting around with a baby around the house, not sleeping at all, and the baby’s very cute, doesn’t eventually toss off one or two about the baby, then you have another think coming,” Darnielle said in his introduction to the song at a 2015 show in Ames, Iowa. “However, me being me, I framed the whole thing in the context of a wrestling match. . . . So this is about a battle royale, and it’s also about the labor and delivery room.”

5. “[T]he question of the identity of the narrator in ‘Hair Match’ is maybe my single favorite thing about the whole album, and kept me inspired throughout the writing of it,” Darnielle wrote on Tumblr in 2015. I may be wrong, but the narrator’s strange pronouns and tenses (You’ll be maybe lunging . . . we’re gonna bring . . . we’ll stipulate) seem to be a function of having watched the tape so many times that he knows what the people in the video are going to do, so many times that he has come to identify with whoever is up there putting this on.

6. The love that extends the son toward the father is love in the “Love, Love, Love” sense, a raw, blind love whose “objective” is “just its expression of itself, you know.”