2013-04-23 Mr. Smalls (Millvale)
Recording
Setlist
Banter
- Man, I am totally not trying to butter you up, but I love Pittsburgh so fuckin' much. [woo!] It is therefore not without some small sense of regret that I tell you that I am going to stab you in the eye with a foreign object. (Foreign Object)
- This is a song about how for so long you were fleeing from them. You know, and you saw their numbers dwindle, and you say, 'oh, I'm finally wearing 'em out, I've run long enough that there were an original number, there was half that, and a quarter that, and there was only a couple of them left, so I was done. I have evaded the young hundreds.' But no. They were only gathering their reinforcements. It's called The Young Thousands. (The Young Thousands)
- So this is a song about a time that happens in your life. And it happens to you whether you're a wrestler or not. When you say, well, I was just trying to be the good guy here, I'm just trying to be a good guy, y'know? 'Cause it's important to you inside to be true to that better self, that you know is your core self, that you know that's who you really are. The babyface. The good guy. You know that's who you are down there. In the center, you're the good guy. But then sometimes, you feel like, well, I was the good guy and then they slapped me and I turned the other cheek, and they slapped that one too, and then I turned around and they hit me in the back of the head. How long do I gotta be the good guy for? When - when's my chance? When do I get to hit back? When do I get to reach into my belt and find some kind of a flat sap [?] or a razor or something. C'mon man! and you try to be nice, but at some point the concept of a level playing ground becomes important to you. And you say, well, you pick up whatever weapons happen to be at ringside, or whatever, and you look to the people who you thought were on your side, and they say, oh, you're cheating. And you go, well, yeah, the other guy was cheating! And they go, you're cheating. And you go, well, I don't care what you think. You turn heel. (Heel Turn 2)
- So this is a song about, um, the principal of darkness that lives inside you. Me. I assume - you generalize, from the specific to the general - you assume that it's kind of a healthy exercise if you are having one of those seasons where you go, well, this is the worst season I've ever had, this is terrible. But it's really, it's a useful exercise to say, there's no way that I'm so special that I'm the only person who's ever felt this way. 'Cause that's true, right? Absolutely true. If you think you're the only person who's ever felt a certain way, then you're a narcissist and you have to check yourself. You know, at least once in the history of the world, somebody had it worse. It's not usually that much comfort, but nobody promised you total comfort, it's just a tiny little kernel of comfort, right? You lick up the kernels that you can find, waiting for the sun to come out. This is a song about that seaason that you spend saying, I will worship what I have to worship in these hours. (In Memory of Satan)
- Can I tell you a shameful story? I might have told it to you before. I don't have an awesome memory. The night that Full Force Galesburg came out, it was released, I happened to be in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was playing like a fourteen song showcase. Not the breeders, but the Kin Deal 5000 [?] were playing that night. They had their own dressing room and the rest of us had to share one. But that was cool, that was fine, I was alright, I was happy to be in a town that I had never been in before. but I went into the Tower Records next door to the club, and I grabbed the Tower Pulse, the magazine that Tower had, back when there was Tower, and a dude, the record had come out that day, and I've been waiting awhile to have people hear the record, I was very excited. Back in the day, let me tell you young cats and everybody who's in bands, don't do this. Don't, on the day your record comes out, don't go combing through all the press to see what people say about it, 'cause some people aren't gonna like it. That's just reality. If you think everyone's gonna love your record when it comes out, then you're like, the narcissist we were talking about earlier. That's not the case. People have their own opinions. So it's the day it comes out, I'm playing a show, I'm in a town I've never been in before, I pick up the Tower Pulse... Man. Did the dude in the tower pulse hate Full Force Galesburg. He hated the shit outta that record. [crowd boos this guy, correctly] He speent a good long while making sure that I and anybody else reading it understood how much he hated that record. And at that time, I was still fairly young, and I hadn't figured out the whole concept of, well, people have different opinions and that's cool, so I was really mad. I was really mad, and I played like, a 20 minute set, as fast as I possibly could, I think I tried to kill this guy who wasn't even in the room. (Weekend in Western Illinois)
- This is a song about the things that haunt you. And I think that we hear the word "haunt" from such an early age, we really start to discount it. We think, what would it mean that there's some deathless force that perceives us. Cause if something haunts you, I think the idea of actually managing to purge it or make it go away is a little vain. A haunting is a real thing. A haunting is something you really have to debate over the course of centuries. Leave yourself a little haunting. (Never Quite Free)
- This is about wrestling. [woo!] it's about the days of the territories. So in the early 80s, the territories were consolidated under Vince McMahon Jr, and then the territories went away. Before that, the territories were like the scene reports in Maximum Rock n Roll. They were these things where, like, two states, or in the case of California, two parts - southern and northern - would have their own dudes running it, and they had their own plotlines. So it was like, like you were following a comic book, and you had your own regional variation of the comic book, where the character had regional references and knew the places and people that you knew. It was a small little world that you could buy into for five bucks on a Wednesday. (Southwestern Territory)
- I've told this story once or twice before. I wrote this song, I was working through some issues. It felt really, really good to be getting those issues through my songs. 'Cause I didn't normally treat my songs like that before 2004. As a place to sort of get stuff done, and I sent this song to Peter, and then my wife and I went on vacation. We don't really do vacation, but we were on vacation, so it was very exciting. Four days in SC. And I sent Peter the song and said, hey, man, I'm going on vacation, I'll talk to you about this when I get back. But as you do, when you're going on vacation, I won't check my email, you probably will. Because that's how we are these days. So I open up the laptop at some point on the third day of vacation and there's an email from Peter saying, hey man, I know you're trying to chill, but I really like this one. I wanna make sure this one doesn't fall off the song list, so I demoed a bass part for it [inaudible] voluntarily, and I said, oh, good, we're going to do a thing. We're gonna go into Prairie Sun in the spring. (Up the Wolves)
- This is a song about finding the shining thing at your bedrock and embracing it until the light courses through you. It's called Amy, also known as Spent Gladiator 1. (Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1)
- This is a song about the times in your life where you say, this job isn't working for me anymore. I gotta pull out my werewolf gimmick. (Werewolf Gimmick)
- This is our favorite song on the new record that's not on the new record. It's a song about how sometimes you think, man, I used to be a wrestler, but now I'm not hot anymore, I gotta rob a bank. (Blood Capsules)
- JD: This is a song about my personal hero.
Audience: [inaudible] MartÃnez!
JD: No, that's the East coast. I represent the West Coast. I have love for the east coast, but I come from the west. We have our own heroes. We have the Guerrero family. [woo!] I will tell you a secret that the rest of the world will know about shortly. I met Chavo Sr. It was fuckin' awesome. [more cheering] (The Legend of Chavo Guerrero)