2013-06-15 - Buskirk-Chumley Theater, Bloomington
Peter and JD duo show. recording
Setlist
Banter
- This is a song about the ardent wish of all we Catholics, and former Catholics, to be burned alive in front of people, so that others may know that we suffered. (Heretic Pride)
- Because when I'm tuning, you're supposed to just tune to the lights, but I kind of can't do that, I have to be listening, so I'm trying to focus hard on what I'm hearing while I'm tuning. And somebody said something to Peter, and my brain feeds me whatever is left over after my focus has been used up. I thought it was interesting that the gentleman said to you, Peter, you look representative. [Bass noises, laughter] This is a song, one of those songs that I write when I get sad that somebody who has a drug problem doesn't make it through the woods. (Song for Dana Plato)
- Take all the other bassists and throw them in the ocean. This is Peter Hughes. [much cheering and rejoicing with love]. This is a song about waiting for something good to happen. Waiting super, super, super hard, for something real, real good to happen. There's a scripture you could probably attach to it, but if you're singing this song, you're a little ways from the scriptures. (Up the Wolves)
- Audience member: Thank you for coming to Indiana!!
JD: You know I was born here. [cheering, bass noises] It's actually a living fear of...aw man, this is gonna be long, okay. [woo!] So, one thing you notice if you are a music fiend all your life is that the singer-songwriter has a child, and the next thing you know, he must tell you about his experience having a child. And you go, man, look, if I wanted to hear about that, I got other people I could talk to. I come to you for the well of grief! Will you please. I'm glad that you're having a good time and that you escaped from the fire, but I come to you to hear all about the fire, not about your baby. I'm sure your baby is awesome! I've loved the hell outta some babies. But...man, if you put out a children's record, imma seek you out and throttle you personally! [laughter, cheers] If you do that, if you do that, you will go to jail for throttling too many singer-songwriters, because they all put out the fuckin' record for their kid. And nobody - I mean, this is a bold assertion, but no human being ever felt such love for their child as I feel for mine, and yet, people get no record of love songs for the child. [cheering] For one, he wouldn't give a shit about that kind of song. He likes the Grateful Dead, and so I will play him Dead tunes all day. So, man, how did this even get...I don't know what...[audience reminders] Oh yeah, wait. Born in Indiana, born in Indiana. [laughter] But at the same time, all that being true, you don't want - don't want to become the guy who's suddenly going soft, because everyone you idolize will go soft, except us. [crowd goes nuts] That is the cold fact of the matter. All my peers I love and worship and respect them, but we will be the hardest and the furthest going. But anyway, be all that as it may, at the same time, you can't pose, you can't pretend you're not having emotions and experiences and feelings you're having. I've been to Bloomington before, went to the courthouse and looked at my birth record, and had feelings about that. And once you have spent a lot of time in the presence of this creature who is your own progeny, who y'know, during the helpless months, the first six, four to six months where they just can't do anything, and all - they don't know how to roll over, they have to learn that. And you do a thing that is completely amazing, where you put them on their stomachs and they don't know how to roll over, and it's like playing with pillbugs. The most amazing, greatest thing. And some babies hate it. I'm really glad that ours didn't, because, like, you have to do it anyway. But, so then you come back to Bloomington, where you were born, and you have a realization of what it means to have once been a baby, and you probably don't spend a lot of your daily life thinking 'once, I was helpless. Once, if someone set me down out on the porch, I wouldn't be able to go anywhere, just wait until someone got me. Or, y'know, or what if they didn't.' And you think about these things, this is the place where I was a baby, this is where there was no such thing as me. I was out in the world in the rough animal state, waiting to become something. It's a very heavy thing to think about, especially if you're me, to think about. There's heavy darkness in there.
- I have to say this is my favorite of all the alpha song titles, and I don't know why. Well, I do know why. I was thinking about this earlier. Not about this song, but I was thinking about why is Guns N Roses scarier than all the other bands of that era. [laughter] Motley Crüe would like to have been so scary. They had Shout at the Devil, with a pentagram on it, but they're not as scary as Guns N Roses. That's because Guns N Roses had the foresight to misspell things. This is not - there's not much scarier than dumb people. [cheering] This is the thing. I don't think Axl Rose is a dumb person. I think Axl Rose knows that there's nothing scarier than dumb people. So his whole business plan setting out like, imma convince people, I'm gonna cut the dumbest figure I can cut. And when people see me, they'll go, man, that guy's dumb, he's liable to hurt somebody! Because it's like, how are you gonna know what he's doing? Smart people, you can reason with them. Dumb people, they're just going to hurt you. They don't know any better. But before you've had a chance to try and get out of their way, they've already destroyed a thing or two, and they'll break a few more on their way out. They can't see in front of their faces, because they're dumb, and when you see a missing punctuation mark or something, you go, ah, I better be careful, I'm in the presence of dumb people. So I was very proud because the thing is, you know, once - this is a fucking long story. So once, and I hope I'm not badmouthing people who still [inaudible], but this is the thing, I suspect they're both dead now. But a couple people come up to us, very early on, like, within a year of Tallahassee or something, in South Carolina, and like, this is a place, it's a club that didn't have a dressing room, so I'm hanging out at the bar playing a video poker game, take two, you know, it really hurts your hands after a couple hours. I kick ass at it. I'll beat you so bad. I will take your money. So. There is no money involved in the game. So I'm sitting there playing take two, there's no dressing room, waiting to play, and these people come up and go, 'Hey!!! Are you John? We're the alpha couple!!!' and I say, whooooa. Like, some people romanticize those people but those people are dumb and angry, that's their whole deal! It's like, sometimes we are all dumb angry people, so we relate to them when we meet them on that little axis of 'I hope to God I never live next door to them', but I'm them at this moment, so I can dig where they're coming from. But then you meet people who, their relationship to the Tallahassee album is, yeah, I relate to them, this is a record about my life. This is those people. I'm gonna play a song for them, it's called - it has no apostrophe - it's called Alpha Rats Nest. (Alpha Rats Nest)
- If I were more cynical than I am, there would be an Indiana special edition of this song, and it would be called Fall of the Star High School [inaudible]. But I'm not that cynical, so this is about football. (Fall of the Star High School Running Back)
- I'm gonna explain the name of the tour to you, but I'm gonna do it over a lilting vamp. [JD starts vamping the No Children chords slowly, Peter eventually joins in] So in 1995, Peter and I are on our second tour of Germany for that year. You say, twice in one year, they must have loved you over there. [laughter] Yes, so we thought. 'Cause our first tour in Germany in '95 was badass. The people, they loved that lo-fi music, they couldn't get enough. All the interviews would say, so you are part of this lo-fi movement, and I would say, no, that's a thing you guys like to talk about. That's really got nothing to do with... 'no, no, no, you and seven and beck, the lo-fi movement!' Alright, well. Play ball I guess, part of this important movement that's taking the world by storm. We did really well, but when we came back, our [inaudible] manager over there was like, you gotta come back in like, three months, you will clean up, you gotta go to all these places you haven't been. So we go, okay, cool, Peter, you quit your job, and I'll quit mine, and we will go tour Germany for two months. It will be amazing because of their great longlasting love of lo-fi. However. In the meanwhile. Drum and bass had taken over. This is how I learned that like, we here can bitch about trendiness, but over there in Europe, trends are a very very real thing, and all the people who liked [inaudible] and Beck, and the Mountain Goats, had moved along to Tricky [?] and the Prodigy, and faux-tech [?]. And a lot of the rooms didn't have any people in them. And we begin to perceive that there was gonna be no big payday at the end of our two months in Germany. That we'd be going home with our hats in our hands and so, after the last of a couple very sad shows in South Germany, we said to our our agent Dirk, can we not play these last couple shows, since there doesn't seem to be any point, there's nobody there. He says oh, no no, I think the Tuttlingen show is gonna be good. And we were like, I dunno, I guess we'd just sit around in Bavaria otherwise. Go to Tuttlingen, to the middle of the woods. So we drove out into the middle of the forest, like Hansel and Gretel. I've long since thought of us as the Hansel and Gretel of indie rock. We left no crumbs, we just went into the maw of the beast, and we arrived in Tuttlingen, by night, and set up in a 400 year old room, we were on this side of the room and the banquet hall was way over there on the other. And that's where the people were, eating Seilerbraten and other kinds of stuff that you eat in Germany, and we were playing to a room about the size of this one but without any people in it. [sad crowd noises] And we looked out at Tuttlingen, and if I'd had the chorus of this song to sing, believe you me, I would have sung it with everything in my heart. (No Children)