“When I was a heroin addict,” Darnielle said in an interview with the writer Tobias Woolf in 2009,
my dealer told me one time while he was selling us stuff, “If you ever get arrested, they’re gonna ask you where you got it. . . . Just tell ’em Holt Boulevard. They can’t do anything to you if you just tell ’em you bought it on Holt ’cause there’s a lot of dealers on Holt.” . . . So within six months, I’m handcuffed to a hospital bed in the ICU, and the detectives from the Pomona police department come to ask me, “Who sold you the stuff?” And I mean, I had been comatose for two days. . . . And I was lying there, you know, with the black activated charcoal that they put in you to get the drugs out caked on my nose. “So where’d you get it?” “Holt Boulevard! Ha ha!” Okay. So, fast-forward fifteen years, or twenty, I’m no longer a heroin addict, I have a real life now, and I’ve been half-assing my way around this autobiographical stuff, and I’m doing A, D, and A, D, and I’m thinking, “This is going to be one of those songs where you’re hiding what you’re actually writing about.” And so I went, I mean I was just joking with myself, I went, “Holt Boulevard! Ha ha! That’s pretty funny, right?”
It’s a way in. The sudden jerk forward of the humor bears a different-feeling part of your life into the present. You don’t know what to do with it, but you like the sound of two of the cross streets that you remember and “boulevard” almost rhymes with “Travelodge,” a motel near the intersection of Holt and Garey, and now you have a place and some specific memories to work with and the A-D riff is starting to expand. Drift becomes flow, flow becomes drive, and pretty soon there’s a song, “Palmcorder Yajna,” that’s about injecting a lot of bathtub meth with friends in a horrible motel room. It’s pointed straight toward death—the refrain goes, “And the headstones climbed up the hills”—and when Darnielle plays it solo and a little slowly, as he does in the first surviving recordings of it, from late 2002, it’s really sad. On the record, though, it’s got a grimy guitar, a back-beat drum part, and a thumping, melodic bass, and the refrain sounds like this: “And the head”—dah-dah-dah—“stones”—dah-dah-dah—“climbed”—dah-dah-dah—“up the hill.” It doesn’t matter how awful the material is, the creative energies that call up and work up that material are a joy to experience, and Darnielle is always willing to express both of those things at the same time.
Palmcorder: a compact Panasonic camcorder that recorded onto VHS-C tapes. Yajna: in Hinduism, a sacrifice, traditionally by means of fire. Home-movie memories, ritually presented and relinquished. Like these:
Carpenter ants in the dresser
Flies in the screen
“Get us some soda”
Somebody crawling on the floor, inspecting the carpet
Sweatpants with reflective tape on them
Shoes with big holes in them
“I can’t stand it anymore”
“I can’t stand it anymore”
A face with deep laugh lines
The same face in close-up: a map of the crevices in the ocean floor
There’s a thrill to what all of these details add up to, perceptually and emotionally—the thrill of a vividly here-and-anywhere place. “This is a song about the inside of a motel,” Darnielle said before playing it in April 2015. “I went to this motel in Los Angeles and I went to it in Pomona and I went to it in Portland and it wasn’t a chain. They were all independently owned. And yet, miraculously, they were all the same motel.” The room feels like a real place and also like it starts to float a little as it coheres, to become more than itself, to reveal its inseparability from other memories and dreams.
But none of this would matter at all if the pain and fear and self-hatred weren’t real. “If anybody comes to see me,” Darnielle sings in the bridge, sliding up the neck to a C#m, up a bit more to a D, and dropping back to an A. “Tell ’em they just missed me by a minute/If anybody comes into our room while we’re asleep/I hope they incinerate everybody in it.” A single piano note, struck monotonously throughout the bridge, rings so much with reverb that it sounds like a smoke alarm. There’s an ecstasy of self-hatred in the air. Why do I love it? Maybe because there’s a “love we have in our hearts for our own eventual destruction,” as Darnielle said at a show in December 2011. “You look yourself in the mirror sometimes and you feel the tenderness that a person can only feel for him or herself when he knows that doom is imminent.” Or maybe because the feeling of being sick of yourself, so sick of yourself that you’re losing it, is almost never as crystal clear as it is here. Sometimes you would do anything to hear something that sounds true to you, no matter how awful that something might be.
This was the song that drew me in 18 years ago. I thought tMG was probably a one-hit wonder, like so many bands of that era. It would be another 10 years before I became drawn deeper and deeper into JD's world, and now I'm a proper addict working his way through the 600-plus songs there are to work through. A labor of love. Great piece. Thank you for writing this series.