2013-04-16 Bogart's (Cincinnati)
Recording
Setlist
Banter
- This song is about the [inevitable?] kind of sadness you feel when you consider the character of Judas. (Cry for Judas)
- [Peter appreciation from both audience and JD, which is well deserved after a ripping performance of Cry for Judas] This is about, if you ever wrestled, and been in a battle royale, then you'll already know what it's like, right? You're in there, and there's like 17 other people trying to kick your ass out of the ring, but you did not come to lose. You did not come to go home empty handed. You need to go home with the cash prize. Five hundred dollars for the winner of the battle royale. So you come against the forces that confront you, against, y'know, some local brothers' team who is always kicking everybody's asses, but you clothesline one of them and flip the other one over your shoulders, and then you go on, there's only 15 left. And in quick order you dispatch as many as you can, but you realize you can't do it on your own. You can't do it on your own. You gotta have a partner. You gotta find somewhere in this battle royale, someone who [unintelligible]. And in the heat of the battle, you find this partner. And you lock eyes with them, they're in pain just like you are. Because they've been punched one too many times, they've been thrown to the canvas one too many times. People try to throw you under the ring, but you gotta stay in the ring. This is about that kind of scene. It's also about the labor and delivery room. (Animal Mask)
- This, on the other hand, is a song about how I, John Darnielle, am going to stab you, no matter who you are, in the eye, with a foreign object. (Foreign Object)
- JD: With respect to all the other audiences we've played that song for, this was the best Foreign Object audience.
Peter: How many of you are holding foreign objects? Did they let you in the room with a foreign object?
JD: Tonight, a schtick is born. How many of you here have a foreign... [breaks down laughing]
Peter: Do they have a foreign object screening process?
JD: I was thinking more like, tickets half price with a foreign object.
- This was on All Eternals Deck. It is a song about a sort of cautious optimism. (Never Quite Free)
- If I can get a little maudlin with you guys for a second here. The summer that that record [Full Force Galesburg] came out, I was so proud of that record, I thought I had done something new. [cheering] Thank you. But, you may not have noticed, it took the world a long time to catch up with the Mountain Goats. [laughing] We did a lot of tours, in, you know, we didn't always make it into towns like Cincinnati, we'd be playing in Covington [?], across the river. Maybe people would say, I wanna see the Mountain Goats, but I'm not going there. Or we wouldn't get there at all, because we'd be - [audience: Covington is awesome!] It is awesome, but there is a club there that is not. I gotta be quite honest with you. But, on that tour, so, that was like, 97, and I'd be playing in Pittsburgh to like, 30 people, and I was proud, and glad to see those 30, better than 29, but. At the same time, I really felt like, this stuff is not coming across, people are not feeling it at all. And so, to play that song, 15 years later, [unintelligible]. Thank you. [audience cheers raucously] (Minnesota)
- I feel like a hard one which is why I wanna share this song with you. This song is about drug addicts. [woo!] I know there'll come a day in the future and they'll be like, Imma go listen to that show by that guy I saw that one time, when I was the kinda person cheering when I heard the words "drug addict". I heard that and went, 'I know this song is for me.' This song is for you. (Steal Smoked Fish)
- This is about wrestling. [woo!] Professional wrestling. [bigger woo!] After the amateur level, you become professional wrestling. It's why you practice your trade. In the days before the whole thing was consolidated under Vince McMahon [boos] I know right, there was a system called the territories, which meant that, they were like scenes. If you think about it, if you read Maximum Rock 'N' Roll, I know you all do, they used to have scene reports, like, here's what's going on in Columbus. And you'd read about it on the west coast and go, awh, it sounds like they have some good bands in Columbus. And that was the only way of finding out about it. The territories were, the country was carved up into these little regions, and it'd be like, you know, Michigan and parts of Indiana would belong to Ed Farhad, who promoted there, that was the Michigan territory. And Vince McMahon's father was from the Eastern territory, they were small little areas, you didn't work outside them all that often, it was a tiny, it was an independent scene. This is about that time. (Southwestern Territory)
- Friends, I mean to tell you, we may come from different places, we may have walked different walks, seen different things, had experiences we can't always relate to one another in a way that's communicable, that may be a broad gulf between us, palpable at time, an enormous shape between the two of us. But there's one thing that's true of all of us: game shows touch our lives. (Game Shows Touch Our Lives)
- I don't need to play nothin' on this song, I just need to dance and wave my arms around. I play this here apple. It's from niño percussion and it has an elephant on it. The elephant is a mark of quality of percussion apples worldwide. This song is about my childhood hero, it's called The Legend of Chavo Guerrero. (The Legend of Chavo Guerrero)
- I love this town. There's a possibility I was conceived here. [woos and instrument noises] I was very small at the time. I would like to dedicate this one to the down front mosh pit who just made my whole night. (Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1)
- Like approximately 50% of the songs that are worth hearing, this one is in drop D. (The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton)
- I've been wanting to play in this club since in the fall of 1995, I was working at the Touch N Go in Chicago, and I was like, so the Mountain Goats were a very very small proposition at that time. I was mad jealous of all of these touring bands, I was calling people, calling record stores, remember record stores, trying to get them to hang up posters for touring bands like the Laughing Hyenas and Cubone (?) and I would call them up and say, y'know, Cubone is coming to Indy, and I know you only work at a Best Buy, and you guys don't really hang tour posters, but could you put one on the door, and the guy would say, okay, can you send me the new Pigface record? OK, deal. But, at any rate, I'd be calling people in Cincinnati, and I'd say, oh, hey, man, this band is playing at Bogart's. I was jealous of people that got to play Bogart's. (This Year)