2013-05-29 The Showbox (Seattle)
Setlist
Banter
This is a song about how, from the moment of your birth, you don't owe anybody a look at your true face. It's called 'Animal Mask'. (Animal Mask)
There's a longish story about this one. Just to explain a thing, in professional wrestling, [cheering] this is going to take a long time. So I mean, I try always to see the good in all people, and to see things from people's point of view, but when someone tells me there's two types of people, I say, oh, I'm not going to trust you ever again. You can say there are at least two types of people, this I can respect. No fewer than two types of people. You're either an A or a B, no, I know that's not true. However, in wrestling there are two types of people. Which I think is why so many people who believe in the real world there are two types of people are continually stymied by believing this, and it turns out that things are more complicated, and this is frustrating, you can't reduce things to simple equations like that. And in fact, the more people, the more complexity, and [inaudible]. But you go to wrestling matches, and there are in fact two types of people. The good guys and the bad guys, and it's so comforting and lovely. You know the bad guy when you see him! He's way [longer?] than the other guy. You know the good guy when you see him, because he's not as interesting as the good guy! And the good guys are called baby faces, or faces for short. If you are a bad guy, and then you see the light someday and you grow to regret your evil deeds, you turn face, and you become a good guy. It's called a face turn. And if you are a good guy, and you hear the call of the wickedness that beckons from beneath the floor, that tells you to go get what's yours, that tells you there's something for you down there, and it belongs to you, and all you gotta do is open yourself up to the darkness and depths of evil, and you can have it. If you're a good guy, and you feel like that, you can turn heel. (Heel Turn 2)
It's ridiculous. This is a cue sheet for a song that I don't know if I know it so well...I just got the idea to play it back there an hour ago, so I said, yeah, I'll do it, it'll work out, I think it sounds pretty good, so I cued up the song and listened to it, write out the first couple words of each line, thinking that's enough, this tends to be an utterly futile exercise and a waste of time. I'll look over at the cue sheet and it'll say "five", and I'll go, what does that even mean? Why have you written "five", is that a time, JD? I'll say to myself, unless I remember the lyrics. We'll see what happens. [cheering] I need to play this song because it was released on a seven inch on the fine Sub Pop label out of Seattle. [more seattle cheering] It's about a guy who has a vision of a friend who's gone to the great beyond in a store. It's called Store. [song] [???] I looked over and it said, five minutes when I was dead, in a place, smile, radiant face. So my eye went directly to, in a font twice as big as the preceding for no reason I can discern, you'd have to ask the guy who wrote it down, and he's not here, I mean, he is, but he can't answer at the moment, and it just says AMIDST AND IN. That's a great feature. (Store)
I know what I'm gonna play, there's nothing wrong with requests, I'm just not taking them at the moment. This is a song about a guy who is on tour with a rock band, but a much bigger band than the Mountain Goats, and it's 1975 and he's playing in giant stadiums in the US, but his band is sort of running into some difficulties as far as changing the face of the musical landscape, and also they are taking a lot of drugs. Things become a little difficult on the bus and/or buses. When a band has to have two buses because people can't share the same bus or they'll fight, this is a bad sign for the band. Very bad sign. That's where this band, Black Sabbath, was at, at the time of this song. I've given it a long intro because I've only just figured out how to play it like, two hours ago. (Passaic, 1975)
There was a guy in the Upper Midwest named Ed Farhat. But nobody who watched him work knew that that was his name, because he never dropped character in public. Not once. He played a guy from Lebanon; his mom was, in fact, from Lebanon. He was from Detroit. His character was called The Sheik. And his gimmick was that he didn't care if his opponents died, disfigured, or burned beyond recognition, so long as he walked out and they got carried out. When I was a child, it was terrifying to read about this guy. He didn’t want to win, he just wanted to murder his opponents. And the wrestling magazines would write these editorials, you know, because they had to keep character, they wrote these editorials editorials saying, someone has to stop The Sheik! Someone’s gotta stop him! 'Cause he’s gonna blind somebody! He will blind them! We gotta pass a law against this guy! In point of fact, he owned the Michigan and Indiana territory. He was the boss, right, so he couldn’t have been banned. It was his game. But when you are twelve, all you know is wow, here’s this guy, who is throwing fire at people. That's how - he goes into the wrestling ring, he knows the rules and he throws fire at them. (Fire Editorial)
Luna Vachon was a wrestler with power and grace, and could, could make you believe that she had been possessed by evil. Which is a great thing to be able to do in front of a camera to make somebody think, 'I just love evil.' That was her deal. (Luna)
This is a song about our - I don't mean these guys. People who are like me, and our conflicting relationships with our own bodies from time to time. (Never Quite Free)
This is a song about how when you find yourself in a position where someone says, are you going to show mercy to those terrible poor Diaz brothers? This song explains our position on the matter. (The Diaz Brothers)
This is a song about a couple of people who don't really know what they're doing. But like a lot of people who don't know what they're doing, they have a deep conviction that they're the only ones who know what they're doing. This is called a defense mechanism. It's really a very simple process, but if you get trapped inside it, it's not simple anymore because it's only simple from the outside shell. The inside shell is very baroque, has all kinds of decorations on it. I'm doing a painting of the inside shell of a defense mechanism and I'm very excited to share it with you someday. It's a really big painting. (No Children)