2017-06-01 - The Fillmore, San Francisco
John Darnielle, Matt Douglas, Peter Hughes, Jon Wurster, John Vanderslice
Setlist
Recording
Banter
- This is a song about living in a cave and saying, 'I think I'll stay in my cave.' (In the Craters on the Moon)
- So, the Mountain Goats are a band, but there's one guy with a 51% vote. It's not Peter. The Mountain Goats are notoriously resistant to unnecessary change. For example, we didn't have a drummer for 12 years. So you'll notice like every other fuckin' band you ever see, behind the drummer, there's a big backdrop that says the band's name. I feel like, personally, y'know, they kinda know who you are. But then people present the case to me, look, it's cool. It adds to the staging. And I go, plegh, staging. The weak need staging. But on the Goths tour I have been trying to be open to the haze machine a little bit. But after hte fourth song, I'm like, that's enough on the fog machine. So Jordan, who just brought me tequila, please give it up for Jordan, he's a good dude [crowd obliges], he comes on, and I say, hey man, can you tell them to back off the fog machine a little bit, then I look at Peter, and say, what song is it? He says, oh, Wear Black, so I say, oh, can you leave the haze machine on for one more track. If there's one thing I love in this world, it's an enabler. (Wear Black)
- In the fifth grade, our teacher Debbie Bessel - we knew her first name, because we were California elementary school students. So we would sometimes refer to our elementary school teachers by their first names. It is a forgotten age, I think, though, if you send your kids to a Quaker school, they might do some of that. [off mic looking for something] If you have listened to the new Mountain Goats album Goths, you may have noticed that the songs have an ungodly amount of chords in them. If you're writing a 1995 Mountain Goats song, it takes you about 5 minutes to learn how to play that one. The new ones are gonna take about two tours. So I was in the fifth grade, right, and our teacher told us that we were to write a report. I love this concept. I'm not sure what that's supposed to prepare you for in life. Writing a report. It's not...it's not...a business report. It's writing about something you feel passionate about that you that want to share with other people. I'm not sure that the rest of the world after elementary school encourages you to actually do that. But...but so I mean...I remember going, 'Aww man, I'm going to write about dragons.' Cause I was a young man who loved dragons. And unicorns. That's right. Magical and mystical things. But I had a lot of experiences as I went along through late childhood and adolescence that sort of...hardened my skin a little...and put a crust around my heart. So when a girlfriend of mine, one of the sweetest people I'd ever known, gave me a coffee cup with a unicorn on it as like the first present that we had exchanged, my eighteen year old self looked at it like, 'I used to like that stuff as a kid.' And immediately, the voice of my younger, truer self convicted me and said, "Have you betrayed the noble unicorn? Who sought only the best for you? Who wronged you in no way? Whose innocence you have turned your back on?' But I had not entirely, and I drank from that coffee cup until it broke. This is called 'Unicorn Tolerance.' (Unicorn Tolerance)
- I don't plan the middle part of the set because there is one band alive that doesn't have any posers in it and it's the Mountain Goats. But I did run this song through one time in the dressing room to make sure I knew the lyrics. I normally don't play it because it's in a different tuning and it's hard to do the little bass run in the E string without the different tuning. But I don't like to re-tune on stage because it's tedious. Even though I'm a Grateful Dead fan. If there was one band that loved to tune, it was the Grateful Dead. (Against Pollution)
- I have to say - and I'm not meaning to call out or shame anybody by this. But like, I don't suppose it's shocking to anybody to know that when I get high, I listen to like, New Age music. But when you play at the Fillmore, you learn what songs make at least one person in the audience go, ah, I gotta get high to that one. And that it's the one where the guy shoots a guy in the face and then suffers from spiritual guilt about it, man, that's some advanced, some PhD level getting high. Oh, I see we have some serious philosophical questions to contemplate. Better spark one up. (Against Pollution)
- JD: [to JV, on the balcony] Can you come down and sing, or are you too injured to sing? [cheering] My man John Vanderslice broke his ankle, I think it's his ankle, so I'm gonna make him take his crutches down the stairs and stand here, owing to my megalomania. Nah, man, somebody yelled for a song from the record JV and me wrote about the organ harvesting colonies on the Moon. This is a conspiracy that is so far beyond the kenning of amateurs like Alex Jones, they can't understand, they're busy wrapped up in these very mundane, Earth-bound conspiracies. But me and JV know the real deal, there's people growing kidneys up there on the Moon. [laughing] They're up to no good, we had to spread the word! So we spread the word. On a limited to a thousand copies edition of a vinyl EP. Recorded with Chris Stamie [sp?] of the DB's in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. John Vanderslice, without whom I probably wouldn't be standing here. This guy's been a champion of my music for years and years and years.
JV: Testing...I love you, JD.
JD: Love you too, babe. (Surrounded)
- Audience: [unintelligble, inquiring about Peter's clothes presumably based on context clues]
JD: Peter, where do you get your suits?
Peter, deadpan: Ebay.
JD: If you have nothing better to do, like most of us, and you're awake at 2 am, wondering if your children will actually see the total devastation of the planet that seems, y'know, pending...
Peter: awwww.
JD: And you've run out of other stuff to look at, you can look at late Deicide shows, where Glenn Benton, the singer of Deicide, who has an inverted crucifix branded into his forehead, which is a heavy dedication to a style of music that tends not to pay your mortgage bills. but in the middle of his shows, I don't know if he still does this, so I don't wanna make any specious claims, but there was a time where he'd be playing like, 200 capacity rooms, and in the middle of the show, he would just do Q & A. I thought it was the greatest thing ever. This has nothing to do with that.
- When you make a record album. When you make an album. Jordan can I get some more tequila. When you make an album, the idea is that it will then be released. You have this sort of feeling of faith. When you make a record, it's really, you spend, generally speaking, there's a lot of ways to do it, there's as many ways to do it as there are bands, but the pattern tends to be, everybody shows up at a studio, and tells everybody else in their life that we won't be around for 3-10 days, or if you're fleetwood mac, 2 years. And then you become what's known in the business as a studio rat. You don't see daylight. You're inside the ocnfines of a building, and you go micro. You don't - you don't think about other things. And it gets real funny, because in the age of social media, you look at Twitter, and Twitter says, oh, the world's going to melt, and there will be none of us left in 8 hours, and you go, yeah, I know, but I have to double this vocal. It's - you shut everything else out. It's a very intense experience. It's comparable to a relationship. You give everything you have to it, you shut everything else out, you tell all your friends, 'I don't know you anymore, I'm working on this thing, it's important to me, so if you like me, you will stop writing to me for the moment and I will just be here locked in.' And you share this with your friends, your band, and by day 7, nothing exists except the studio environment. If someone leaves the confines of the studio to, go, like meet their friend or something, they are judged, as really kinda having failed the compact. But it's a veyr intense process. When you finish it - the record's not even mixed yet, so it's not even half done, but you feel like you've done the thing and you have the thing in your hand. In the old major label system, you could do all that, and then get it mixed, which is its own very heavy emotional process, where somebody mixes it and you listen to it and go, hey, where did the - I played a little guitar solo, where'd it go? Well, you weren't in key, we can't, and you go, no no, I really felt it! So yeah, well, no, I erased that, it's gone. And you go jsfhkasjhdfk, you go through this, if the record has 12 songs on it, you go through it 12 times. So you go through all this, in the old major label system, the guys upstairs who haven't been involved in the process prior to this point, except to sign your check can say to you, y'know, we're not really feeling this record, we're not gonna put it out.
Audience: FUCK THEM!!
JD: Well, it sucked, I assume. I haven't ever worked for a label like that. But a lot of people have, and when it happened, the record is said to have been shelved. (Shelved)
- This is a song about a band I was really into when I was about 17 or 18. I saw them twice, at the Palace in Long Beach, no, the Palace was Hollywood, Fender's was in Long Beach. And you know what? You can turn the fog machine back on. [Wurster enthusiastically bass drums] In tribute to the boys who love them some fog machine. (Andrew Eldritch is Moving Back to Leeds)
- This is a song about some alcoholic people. I always feel a little weird when people applaud that. Because I think, well, there's not much harder to deal with than alcoholism. There's a few things. For our heroes there isn't much. Well, that's who really would love to make their marriage work. It's important to them. It's important to them to make it happen. I am unclear as to why it's important to them. I suspect it has something to do with my own childhood issues. I don't know that persuasively, but at any rate. They have this idea that they must not get divorced, no matter how bad it gets. This is a song off Tallahassee about how bad it gets. (Game Shows Touch Our Lives)
- The first time I played this song live it was a year ago, maybe two, at Swedish American Music Hall across town. And I remember thinking, you're gonna play one of the new songs, a long while before you actually release it or even record it. And it was exciting. (We Do It Different on the West Coast)
- People say a lot about just intonation versus right intonation but none of you recognized that song until I had the capo in the right place. Which is interesting as we regard our heroes, because in one system of intonation there is an exact vibration to which you must tune yourself or be wrong. And the other one, all your tuning points are relative to other points within the scale. Such is the case with our heroes. For example, for you, it might seem dysfunctional and unhealthy to wwake up and make yourself a screwdriver before you make a pot of coffee, but for our heroes that's healthy and normal. You stand in judgment of them but you are not them. Unless, possibly, you are, in which case this song is for you. (No Children)
- I don't keep notes on recording sessions, but I'm pretty sure John Vanderslice was the guy wiht the idea behind the hand claps on this next tune. Please, welcome back to the stage, from Tiny Telephone San Francisco, John Vanderslice. [JV returns to raucous applause] If you feel like rocking the Rhodes, JV, it's A, to C#m, to D. Other bands would play and practice this, but as I observed earlier, those bands are posers, and we are not. (This Year)
- JD: I always have a hard time keeping track of who I have introduced and who I have not, but my band is more important than I am. On the bass, Peter Gregory Hughes [note: unfortunately not legally Peter Peter Hughes, which is a shame] [raucous cheering]. On the saxophone, Mr. Matt - he hasn't been in the band long enough for me to have learned his middle name - Douglas. [cheering]
Peter: It's a saxophone, right?
Matt (off mic): Gordon!
JD: Matthew Saxophone Douglas. [laughs, cheering] Matthew Gordon Douglas. And what I consider the most Catholic name of the bunch, mine included, Mr. Jonathan Patrick Wurster. [Peter plays a cool bass thing and Wurster does drums.] We'd like to play a song that is a very Catholic song, insofar as everybody who means to turn their shit around still winds up getting what they have coming to them. It's about a couple of guys in a movie by Brian de Palma [sp?] called Scarface, who are known as the Diaz Brothers, and the song is called The Diaz Brothers. (The Diaz Brothers)
- The thing is, as a guy who listens to a lot of Grateful Dead bootlegs, when the crowd starts getting kinda rowdy that's when you feel like you've ventured into the experimental territory. It's all very easy to sit there playing songs they know. And then they say woo, [woo!] and it's very nice, but when they start to sound like it's late enough that they're getting less stable, they really wanna hear what they wanna hear, something risky about that. I'm waiting for my man Jordan, who deserves all of the credit and all of the praise, Jordan is the fuckin' man. [plays intro] This is a true story. ( Abandoned Flesh (encore))
- It's like, at the end of every episode of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, he says, and this is the thing that makes Mr. Rogers special - he says, Neighbor, you make every day a special day. And you believe him, that's what makes him special, is that he means that from down in the bottom of his being, when he says that to you and you're four, you feel him and you go, well, thank you, I'm so glad that you felt that because I felt that too. That's how I feel playing the Fillmore. [cheering, yelling] There are no shows in the United States of America that make us feel as special as these do. Thank you so much for being the audience that you are. I know, like, we all have facebook so we get very tired of our friends saying 'no words' about everything. But I don't have any words for how special you make me feel. Thank you so much.
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