2019-05-07 Mr. Smalls Theatre
Setlist
Recording
Banter
- I used to go to Catholic Mass in Spanish and you learn to say "ten piedad", "have mercy". One of these days I'm going to get this song translated into Spanish. It's gonna be rippin'. (The Diaz Brothers)
- This is about how we all hope that someday, our champion will somehow arrive, in some form or another, and incinerate all those who have stood between us and the simple pleasures we were only asking for in the first place. (In League With Dragons)
- Just as sick as the day is long. On drums, Mr. Jon Wurster. (Sax Rohmer #1)
- Let me tell you something about how much I love you. [reciprocating crowd shouts] This is real, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to convey it to you in a way that is meaningful to you. And if I'm the only person having a meaningful experience here, then that's a very imbalanced equation, so I'm really hoping that I can communicate this. so I started doing this, alone, in front of a crowd by myself, and I didn't use picks, because I found them noxious. I thought they were gross, and I found anything that stands between me and the thing I'm trying to do feels very artificial, like a raincoat inside or something like that. And what I just did was took out the in ear monitors, because I wanna hear you guys better. [crowd woos enthusiastically] In ear monitors give you great clarity of sound in listening to each other, but the Pittsburgh audience has been so kind and amaing to us for a lot of years now, thank you, and then a seocnd thing happened. And that was, I was starting to play, with a pick, and I thought, no, this feels like you do it without the pick, which is a sign of comfort and a feeling of feeling at home, so thank you so much. I would now like to play for you a song about a man who deals in arms and information, whose luck is running out, and he knows his luck is running out, you know, you can only work in that business for so long before somebody's gonna pull your number. and his number is right about to get pulled as soon as he finishes watching Waylon Jennings play in the middle of Iowa sometime in the 80s. (Waylon Jennings Live!)
- JD: I'm pretty sure I've played Cotton fifty times with Jon Wurster but that time was the best one. [kick drum agrees] Fuckin' sick as hell. It's an emotional burden having the best drummer in rock behind you. Somehow, I manage to cope with the stressors. [crowd appreciates wurster unintelligibly but enthusiastically, one person appears to be understood by the band]. C'mon man.
Wurster: [starts playing a Ramones beat]
Peter: [unintelligible] is erotic fiction.
Peter and JD: [join in playing Rockaway Beach, JD singing]
JD: Sorry. Little drummer humor there. (Cotton)
- Can I do my thing? [crowd and band: yeah!] Movin'? Groovin'? [crowd and band, louder this time: YEAH!] Like, like a guy imagining visions of royal palaces in India in the 15th century?? (Jaipur)
- Crowd member: HOLY SHIT. God DAMN.
JD, off mic: God, I love my band!
JD, on mic: Seriously like, you will learn as you grow older that there are versions of yourself in your mind. There's one who moves to Tampa when he's 17 because he's interested in the word Tampa, right. [laughter, snare drum] There's another one who - this is a true story, so it's gonna take a minute, hold on a sec. I wore a crew cut when I was 19 because nobody else was wearing a crew cut. And it was a very severe crew cut. I looked - and I weighed like 115, and I fit into a ladies' size 4 pants, and I was fierce, but, uh. I also looked like sorta maybe I didn't know how to dress myself, because I was still tucking in my t-shirts with no belt or anything. Someday this look is coming back. and I would buy my clothes at an army surplus joint on, I wanna say, White. Same Gary and White [approximately two people in the audience get the reference to Palmcorder Yajna and laugh] but one day, I'm 19, I look like I haven't eaten in about a week, 'cause I may or may not have, and I'm walking up Indian hill, and a Ford. like the cheap kinda Ford you'd get when you refuse all the upgrades at the rental counter and then you get like, what, like, a Fiesta. This is like, '86. Peter, what would be the Ford in '86?
Peter: an Escort.
JD: An Escort. So an Escort pulls up and a guy with a haircut exactly like mine gets out. Now, I know this scene, but this scene for me usually takes place in a bad neighborhood in Portland at night. Not in broad daylight. So the guy gets out and says "hey, what are you up to?" "going to rhino records, what's up with you." "what do you do?" I can see this is a really weird question but I can see he's in uniform, he's an army dude, so I say, I dunno, hanging out. "Got a job?" "Nah, I don't have a job." "Why don't you come down and talk to me?" A recruiter - an army recruiter - had spotted me as possibly like, some guy who was trying to dress army for attention or something. So I went down there, and I took the 40 question thing that you take where I think there's literally no way of failing the exam, and they tell you that you're absolutely a good candidate for the army. And I was like, for a good 48 hours, I was like, what if I joined the fuckin' army. The thing is like, my stepfather was really anti-military, and at this point we weren't close at all. but I thought, man, it would absolutely cause him some trouble sleeping at night if he knew I was in the fucking army. So I called my father who had been in the navy and said, hey, I'm thinking about enlisting in the army, and he was ecstatic because I was pretty directionless at the time. But I thought, what if, what about basic training. That's going to be very hard for me. 'Cause I smoke two packs of Winstons a day. And I literally have never benched 30 pounds. I weigh nothing. [band laughter caught on mic] They'll murder me. And the guy like, hassled me for a month and a half. It was clear he thought he had a live lead. And I was like, well you know, I'm into crystal meth. Do you have that in the army. [note: unfortunately that would be the german army. specifically, the nazis. their army was powered by meth.] But the thing - prior to deciding, no I'm not gonna do that, I had already picked my bases, because I had been reading Faulkner for years, so I was gonna go to Shreveport or I was gonna go to Oxford, I was gonna to go any southern spots where they had military bases, because I was naïve. I was like, oh, you'll go to the south, you'll be fine. But there's a version of me that did that, and isn't here tonight, and did something entirely different. And this song has nothing to do with that, it was just something I thought of. (Possum by Night, sort of.)
- I remember now what the point of the long army recruitment story was. It was that there's an alternate reality in which I join the army, right, there's all these courses you might have taken. And I don't know what the future holds, but one of my alternate futures is that I become old and somehow I'm alone, but hopefully my children are fine, and I myself am personally in Millvale [PA, site of this show] living in a very small place, maybe a house, maybe an apartment, with a Steelers sign in the window. [woooo] and I'm living on pierogi all day, and I go to Sunday Mass faithfully and there are people who remember who the Mountain Goats were, who go, you can see that dude on Sunday at St. Catherine's, he's there every fuckin' Sunday. And he prays the rosary way longer than even the old ladies do. That is one of the realities that exists for me. I feel it at this place. Thank you. (pre-encore)
- With one of the best bass lines our genre has to boast, Mr. Peter Hughes. (Up the Wolves)
- This is a song about a couple who should have gotten a divorce a while back. But at some point it becomes a question of spite. Not only toward each other, but to you. Their friends, it's like, all of their friends know it's time for both people to move on into whatever sordid corner of their lives they go to next, but this chapter has seemed fetid for a long time. Seemed over and rotten already. And it's not entertaining, that's the idea. Which, when I think of it as a hilarious thing to pitch to 4AD, the storied English record label, and you go, what if it's about the decadent phase of a relationship. But that's what it's about. So. So they, they know their marriage is over, they take what's called in recovery a 'geographical'. [audience member: woo!] Woo! is exactly right. I one hundred percent whole heartedly support the Woo! for the geographical. Because, like, that seems reasonable to me - hey, if our addiction is causing us problems in southern California, who's to say it'll have the same hold in Tallahassee, Florida? (Game Shows Touch Our Lives)
- Peter and I did some math. We think we can squeeze two more in before the hard curfew. Between Peter and me, there's conflicting, not conflicting, but sympathetic energies where Peter'd be the guy who'd lean towards the hits and I'd be the guy who'd lean towards "what if it's one that, like, nobody's ever heard before." [singular woo] Woo, but most of the other people don't. So Peter Hughes energy on this question, because I believe in the voice of the people. I mean, Peter's right, if you stuck around for two hours, you have a right to hear the songs you came to hear. There's - it's not a super long list for the Mountain Goats, it's a good, like, nine song list. But that's not like, if you go to see Def Leppard, there's like 20 songs you insist upon hearing, and Def Leppard is tethered to those songs. They have to play every last one of them. Same as for ZZ Top, for a fact, they resent it. But that's not my burden to bear. I only have a few. This is one of them. I wrote it on a napkin on a flight going from Des Moines to Athens, Georgia. Because I had heard a song on the radio on the way to the airport by, I could never remember, I always think it's Trisha Yearwood, but it's not. [audience: Leeann Rimes] No, it's not actually Leeann Rimes either, it goes like, [starts singing the Leeann Rimes song with a violent amount of schmaltz] And this is my least favorite line... promise me that you'll give faith a fighting chance, and when you get the choice to sit it out or danceeeeee... 1-2-3-1-2-3 (No Children)
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