“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?”
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.
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.