2021-08-18 The Black Sheep

Setlist

Recording

• Aulon Raid
• Cry For Judas
• Dark In Here
• Sax Rohmer #1
• Rat Queen
• Tidal Wave
• Rotten Stinking Mouthpiece (JD solo)
• Rescue Breathing (JD solo)
• Solidarity Forever (folk/cover - JD solo)
• Nine Black Poppies (JD solo)
• Lakeside View Apartments Suite
• The Diaz Brothers
• The New Hydra Collection
• You or Your Memory
• As Many Candles as Possible
• Getting into Knives
• Heel Turn 2
• The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums (encore)
• See America Right (encore)
• Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1 (encore)
• Up The Wolves (encore)
• This Year (encore)

Banter

• I have several songs that mention the Chaney family. This is one of them. It was on - All Eternals Deck was the album, what was it? All Eternals Pack was the tape. This takes its plotline from a movie with Lon Chaney Jr in it, and he had to have an operation in the middle of the movie and they had to rewrite the script so he didn't have to speak. If you know this watching the movie it adds a profound amount of pathos to it. (Rotten Stinking Mouthpiece)
• This is a song I found in a notebook. You know, I write a lot of stuff that I don't - this will shock you, I kind of have a busy mind. ANd so I'll run across something and go 'what was wrong with that one?' and it probably means a bird flew past or something. Mouse ran under the table. But I thought of it - it's a longer story but we got here at 8 this morning and there was a fella, about 20-ish years old, leaning up against the window of a vape shop. The vape shop was not open yet, because it was 8 in the morning. You don't need to vape that early. Maybe he was waiting for somebody. But he was - may this be a witness for somebody - he was leaning up against the window, leaning over and rocking, and his fists were clenched. Leaning and rocking, shaking his head, and I recognized him, because I used to look a lot like him, leaning up against the window of something at 8 in the morning, after being up all night. And I would have bet my last nickel that he had been up all night and was waiting to see whatever else there was to do, until whatever was inside him lets him go to sleep. And a couple minutes later, the paramedics came. I thought of this song, it's a true story, it's called Rescue Breathing. (Rescue Breathing)
• This is off the new one, Dark in Here. [Woo!] Thank you. You may know this but we recorded that March....like, 7th through 15th, 2020. I like, I had played what turned out to be the last three Mountain Goats shows that would happen for a long time, in San Francisco in February. And I had played a song whose chorus ran 'All of you must die', and some people asked me if I was singing about this new virus that was around. 'Ah, no, c'mon, that would be rude, y'know'. And that was the first sorta hint of it, people asking in San Francisco about this thing. But we had two albums to record, we did the first one in Memphis, things seemed pretty mellow in Memphis. Then we drove down to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, quite a place to be at the outset of a pandemic. Beautiful place where people don't believe in pandemics a lot of the time. And so, I don't actually mean to dismiss Alabama. The thing is, Alabama fucking kicks ass and there's a lot of great working people in Alabama to whom the state rightly belongs. But for 200 something years, people with a lot of money have managed to suppress their voices and votes. It's actually a great place. But having said that, there's plenty of yahoos who were like, making a run on toilet paper while we were down there, like, you'd go to the CVS and it'd be cleared out on the hand sanitizer and the kleenex, and you'd think, that's not gonna help really, and we were down there, and a lot of the songs had this apocalyptic tone. And I remember recording this, this is a song about some people creating a monster and trying to unleash it upon the land. (The New Hydra Collection)
• Audience member: You rock, Peter! [woos and yelling]
  JD: He can't hear you, he has an in-ear. The fella says that you rocked.
  Peter: I can hear! It's not like, I mean, I can hear you.
  JD (mostly off mic): I have a mic [?].
• JD:There's only one left!
  Audience and Wurster: awwwwwwww
  Erin: Happens sometimes.
  JD: There's only one left on there!
  Audience, louder: noooooo!!
  JD: It is a song about professional wrestling...
  Audience, even louder: WOOOOO!!
  JD: I don't know how many of you are conversant in the general tropes of professional wrestling, this is not the amateur thing, people don't get to punch each other in the face. Which is obviously, it's a science, they have in professional wrestling what are called 'scientific wrestlers', I dunno if they still have these. In my day, the scientific wrestler was there to, [audience member yells] no, I'm gonna sing a song about professional wrestling. In the middle of a spiel about it. So, scientific wrestlers' function was to be the good guy who you pretend to admire, and then he just gets his face beaten to a pulp. Everybody like, applauds politely when the scientific wrestler grapples, and holds his hands on the other guy's shoulders and moves around. It looks like amateur wrestling. Nobody paid to see that, at the mid-south auditorium or whatever. The scientific wrestler wins if it's in the opening match and loses elsewhere. But a great thing happens, because he's been sort of played to be the hero the whole time. He comes in, he's very clean cut, the scientific wrestler, no tattoos, just togs and a good body, and at some point, with every scientific wrestler I think this is true, at some point he, like, gets punched in the face and gets up, punched in the face, gets up, and the bad guy punches him in the face with a closed fist, which is technically not a wrestling maneuver. But you do see a lot of it in wrestling. Curious to me. But at some point, he gets a really big haymaker to the jaw, and as it's falling he sorta reels, he stands there swaying, and he gets a look on his face, and you can see the look on his face in the highest rack, it needs no amplification. Because suddenly there is outrage in his eyes. Suddenly he's thinking, what good have the rules done me? Why am I adhering to a code nobody else even seems to know, or if they do know it, they spit on it before they get out of bed in the morning and then they come to this building to beat me as I, and I alone, adhere to the code of professional and scientific wrestling? And the rest of these people come in and they spit on me and they light me on fire, and they pull little objects out of their togs and hit me over the head with them. Why should I be the only person who follows the rules around here? If nobody else is following the rules, should I not then visit my vengeance upon these bad guys? (Heel Turn 2)

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