2022-12-05 Doug Fir Lounge

Setlist

Recording

This was a JD solo show.

• Until I Am Whole
• Going to Bolivia
• We Were Patriots
• Fresh Berries For You
• Dance Music
• Mole
• Your Belgian Things
• Alphabetizing
• Commandante
• Pink and Blue
• Picture of my Dress
• Black Pear Tree
• Lakeside View Apartments Suite
• Incandescent Ruins
• Horseradish Road
• Song for Dennis Brown
• Linda Blair was Born Innocent
• Grendel's Mother
• Cotton
• Up The Wolves
• This Year (encore)
• Source Decay (encore)
• No Children (encore)

Banter

• Uh, one thing, if you like to think about- well... [laughs] If you have something to do, you can tell that at the beginning of a thought like this, you can tell that maybe now would be a good time to go move the car or whatever it is you have to do... [audience laughs] I'll still be doing this when you get back. So, like, when you are a child, right? You ask questions like you know, your parents will tell you, "It's like they say, easy does it," and then you say, "Well, who says that?"
  "Uh, uh, It's a saying,"
  "Well yeah, who said it first?"
  "Well, it's a saying, they don't know who said it, it's like a folk song, so you know, nobody wrote them."
  "What do you mean nobody wrote them?" And, because as a child you're subscribed to auteur theory and then you later have to be persuaded out of it. Rightly, because auteur theory is nonsense but, um, [audience laughter] Nonsense! Trust me on this one. [laughing] But, uh, what was I? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah! Because there's sort of a tradition forming around year-end or year-beginning shows, when I do some solo shows- There was a plan. This is one of those things that like, as many of you know, I like to obsess about evangelical Christianity. I have like, a hunger for what they appear to have, and like, which, they actually don't have, a lot of them? It's like, it's just a, it's a presentation, right? [laughs] But, like, they present as though they were zealous and real believers and of course, those of us who grew up after the authorship of "Dover Beach" go, "I want your belief," right? "I wish I had that," right? And so, um, one of these days, maybe tomorrow, I'm gonna read "Dover Beach" to you. Just so you know what I"m talking about when I ceaselessly reference it, but uh, it's a Matthew Arnold poem, pretty good poem! But traditions form, there probably was somebody who first, you know, put a log in the fireplace and said "That's the Yule log." And everybody around said "What?" and he said, "Oh, wait a couple hundred years, you'll see." So yeah, so at the beginning, before the pandemic, I played I think, two shows in San Francisco.
  Crowd member: Three!
  JD: Could've been three. Weirdly, it just seems like a long time ago now! But like, there were these ideas forming about "Well, we'll do this every year. We'll do some solo shows to kick off the year," and I had ideas about the structure of them and how they would start certain ways. Then the pandemic came and just erased everything, right? But one thing I was doing was sort of trying to make the setlists the way that - In the really - In Mountain-Goats-Land, I do write the setlist about an hour before we go on, usually, right? As you know if you're seeing the band, it's gonna be largely the same songs on a band tour, you can't just say to the band, "We're gonna play this song now," and they go, "Well I haven't really listened to that one, John, I don't listen to the Mountain Goats." And then there's always one guy like, "You should do it anyway!" Like, no, that would be bad. Terrible, really terrible, you can't play songs you don't know, all right? So- But on these ones I can do what I like, right? It's just me, like I could talk for an hour and see how many of you are left, right? [audience cheers raucously] So yeah, so I have a loose... thoughts toward a setlist and I'm just gonna play until I sort of feel like we've gone someplace. So I don't know how many of them I'm actually gonna get to I have the first seven or so in a rough order and we'll see what happens. This was on the Coroner's Gambit. [single chord] You know what? Before I do it, the tuning sounds bad to me. [plays some notes] Augh the B! The Notorious B... Yeah, I said it, if only there was an "I" string. See? You'll all be happier for the tuning, you will. (We Were Patriots)
• I don't know if Barry's still here, I know he had to bail early but um, this is one of the ones that was on - Well, if you have a copy of the second seven-inch, it was dedicated to Berry in Spanish, powerful teacher Barry [?]. And a lot of it was around themes that we had been talking about in Chaucer about the primacy of spring among the seasons in medieval poetry and how Easter replaced a lot of Pagan festivals and stuff like that, and I wrote this. (Fresh Berries For You)
• JD: I'll tell you a story about that one just because there's no other place to tell it, really, but to do so I have to invoke one of the miracles of the - I mean, this will shock you to learn, but there was a point in the development of the internet where it was kind of cool? [audience laughs] It's like a bunch of cool shit out there that you would find and like, you know, and you would e-mail the links to people, right? Texting was still, you know, it wasn't in its infancy but it was less common. The technology wasn't there yet to just copy a link and say to anybody, "You have to listen to this fucking thing." Half the good shit was from WFMU in New Jersey, right? So - [audience cheers] this was the case with this compilation called "People, Let Me Get This Off My Chest."
  Crowd member: Hell yeah!
  JD: Anybody know what I'm talking about? It's Paul Stanley banter from KISS, and it's just the banter, right? And it's like from two- It's like from some KISS concerts but also from a solo show and that's the meat of it. And I find it incredibly touching because the Paul Stanley solo show sounds like it took place at a club that holds a few-hundred people, maybe it was- You know, I mean, KISS really figured out their business models at some point in the nineties and then, you know, then they could play giant rooms wherever but before that KISS had had ups and downs. And rightly so 'cause they're not... Well, I'm not gonna say it but... [audience laughs] to everyone's taste! But Paul Stanley is an incredibly charming fellow because he's guileless, like when he speaks, he doesn't sound like a guy with a star over his face who's showing a lot of chest hair who's in this, you know, codpiece and stuff, he sounds like a guy who's very excited to be playing music, and when he introduces a new song to a crowd - Which, like, a crowd that's come to see Paul Stanley is a crowd that wants to see "Cold Gin," "Rock and Roll All Night," "Firehouse," "Strutter," "Deuce," "Black Diamond," all that stuff, right? And so when they say there's gonna be a new song, you know, everybody collectively sighs and "ehhhh," but he explains this thing. This is all coming toward a thing about "Dance Music" - but he says, and I just find it incredibly moving, he says, "This is a song where when you're writing a song... you know, you think this one part is gonna be the cool part... and then the other part... doesn't seem like much but then it turns out that that part is the COOL part!" And I find this incredibly moving because it's really true! Like, this is a thing that happens in the studio where you go, you know you'll have a song that you think, "This is, you know, it's fine but it's not as good as the big ticket items from-" you know, any given album that you write is gonna have the ones that sound to you, when you go in, like "These are the ones that are gonna snap. This is the ones who've liked our stuff for ten years are really gonna love," and then at the end of the session you go, "Whoa! That one showed up, didn't really have any expectations for that one," and that's when you start having to retool the sequence, you go, "That thing can't go any later than two, it's really good," you know? But some of it's accidental, right? and the end of Dance Music - this is a long story, but again, I figured this is the place to - Dance Music was written in a van parked in front of a club in Paris. Well, parked while we were looking for a place to park, while we were on tour and I wasn't sleeping and I was in absolute - I was having a hard time. I was, I wasn't quite in - when I get to my worst it's a state of mind I call 'crying while awake,' right? And it's heavy, if you've been there, it's like, everybody goes there at some point or another, and that's where I was at, it was really fucking hard. I wasn't sleeping and, you know, in my life what happens is then the only good part of the day is when you're onstage and that feels weird. It's like, "Oh good, so that's the only time I get to be real is when I'm performing and then the rest of the time it's just broken mess, but! During that tour I was managing to turn it into lyrics and so it was cool. And we got to Medievale, which is in uh- which is actually a studio that's being turned into condominiums I think now - [audience boos and groans] In BBC, It's where the Beatles did stuff but obviously... you know, people with a lot of money need their condominiums, you can't... Let's be human beings here, people. [JD laughs ruefully] So, but anyway, there was no music to Dance Music when I showed up to do the one day, the four-hour Peel session that ended up producing Dance Music, Tetrapod, uh, Magpie! And then there was a cover but those three- those three were all that day and I had lyrics. I had some lyrics, most of Magpie I finished at Medievale, but there was nothing but the lyrics for Dance Music scrawled in a notebook that was in my backpack. So I sat down on the studio floor, we didn't have a lot of time, and I went like "...Okay, what about-" [plays Dance Music chords] Okay so that's the instrumental break, right? It's supposed to go like that. Peter's just following. Peter would tell you it's like - [imitating Peter] "Playing with John when he's in one of his things is sort of like you're trying to follow a car and you don't know the directions where the car is trying to go, [JD laughs mid-Peter impression] So you just sort of gOOoo with him- oOOH We're going left! Right? But that was supposed to be -" you finish the- *strumming* dance... music... and I was just working that out, I did it in about five minutes I said okay, roll tape lets do this, right? And when it got back to the instrumental break again that was supposed to go back to the G and go: *strumming* ...but I went backwards I went: *strumming* and what I played you just now, you know, it's the part that became the cool part! That is my story. [starts to strum, stops abruptly because the guitar sounds bad] Oh, no no, I- B string again, sorry. Eho could imagine that a man beating on a guitar would cause it to go out of tune? (Dance Music)
• One thing you can do if you want to write songs about stuff that actually happened to you but you don't feel like writing confessional songs is you can just... fuck with the pronouns. (Mole)
• JD: I am choosing to believe that the stage clock above me is a tribute to the person that I was when I lived here, young and confused, and there's uh- There's a Didion line *stammers* about not wanting to cross certain sorts of signs that you've let yourself go too much and one of the signals in the image for her is like, sardine cans or food cans left in the sink, you know. They're empty but you haven't washed them, right? That's one of your... Some things are bad in the house. For me, a digital alarm clock that hasn't been set, it's not fixed, it's blinking a time that is wrong, right? And you could fix it, it's not hard, right? *laughter* JD: You know, you're not... It's not that you're ninety-five and you were around for the earlier technology, no! You know exactly what you could do, you know that it would take you all of thirty seconds, and you say, "I'm not going to do it." *laughter* JD: "I'm going to let that happen." *laughs* Actually that gives me an idea for what song to play next. (Commandante)
• JD, picking: mmhm... Well, I didn't practice it. *cheering* JD: ...but it's on the list. *laughter* Audience member: Do you need me to [unintelligible] the lyrics? JD: Nah! *laughter* JD: The thing is, I just noticed that the song I wanna play shares chords with- shares a basic structure with another song and so I'm worried that I'll get confused. *laughter* Audience member: [unintelligible] JD: What do I fear? Death. *laughter* JD: *laughs* Didn't used to! It was like one of the things that was special about me. "I don't give a fuck," then you have children. Now you fear death! *laughs* It's really- That's their gift to you, they look up at you and they're cute and adorable, "I gave you the gift of fear." *laughter* JD: Some things they articulate on the second day of their lives, it's wild. JD: uhmm... Oh yeah, I wanna do that. (Pink and Blue)
• Sometimes it's just a quest to get the first line. (Picture of my Dress)
• JD: Seems like a good time to go to the piano. silence. JD: Drink some water... You gotta hydrate, It's very important. It's my main mission, is to educate people on the importance of [unintelligible] hydration. There's water products that claim to hydrate better than other ones, I'm really into it. *laughter* JD: They talk about like, molecular movement and stuff like that, ‘cos the thing is like- The thing is like, uh, if you were like, you know, a young God-believer and then you lost that, right? then that's the stuff that's trying to get ya. It's like, "You want this. You want the water to hydrate you better. You want the water... the water that is special." *laughs* So, this one says- claims to be "zen water." *laughs* Zen buddhism is a practice in which one contemplates the infinite. This is a bottle of water. *laughter* JD: This is a song that uhm... Well, those of you... Some of you already saw earlier, one thing that's special about the Douglas Fir to me- But then, some of you are saying, and left Twitter when the billionaire bought it- Although I've gotta say it's not like the last guy was also like... you know? One guy who was into crypto sold it to another guy who's into crypto, right? That's like- *chuckles* The other guy is worse but... they're both guys who're into crypto. *laughter* JD: I don't know how to break this to any crypto-believers in the house but that's a pyramid scheme. *cheering* JD: You should get into Amway, Amway is like... Merle Norman. *chuckles* At least with Merle Norman you get good foundation. So I was uhm... I was on tour... for Heretic Pride... When, uh, when I woke up in Seattle after the first show- second show, second or third show... and uh, there was a ringing sound in my ear we- Me and Peter always really liked our monitors super loud and now we had a drummer and it was nice and loud onstage. I like loud volume. And uhm, and I had a ringing in my ear, sometimes you have that after a loud show, right? But usually it goes away after breakfast or whatever and it didn't and I called Brandon into the room, I was like "Is there a ringing?" he said, "Yeah, that's the air conditioning," it's like "Okay, cool." Then I got in the van and it was worse. It was very high, a single tone. I'm lucky that I have a single tone. Some people have clusters, right, that aren't harmonic, that are horrible. Some people have a crackling sound. Lot of people have tinnitus, tinnitus comes for a lot of people. It may or may not be the result of listening to too much loud music, there's a lot of research on it. You learn about these things after it comes for you, right? But I was on tour during an album release and that's a very stressful time. It's hard to, you know. In the best of circumstances you still are kind of struggling to keep it together and I went over the cliff. Uhm, went over the cliff because I couldn't sleep ‘cos the ringing would wake me up after about an hour. And I would lie there in the dark, Brandon in the next bed, thinking, "You did this to yourself. This is you. Your family lives a long time, you have to deal with this for fifty more years or so." And that was one of my ‘crying while awake' times and it was on tour so the only good part of my day would be onstage and I got here like a day or two later and I was... gone. It was the least healthy I'd ever been in my life, I think, I mean I was not- and I've taken some hard drugs and stuff but- but this was really bad. I couldn't function and I saw that Kaki King was gonna be playing here and it made me happy to think about, for a second, you know? And then I was reaching for what I could stand to reach for so I left her a note on the dressing room wall, maybe the mirror, it said, "Thank you for your wonderful music," and she took a picture of it like three days later and I forget how she got it to me- I don't think I was on Twitter yet, but- Oh yes I was, but said "I got your note." So... we arranged a tour and I wrote a song about another health scare I had where I was having chest pains. I had to go to the hospital in Sweden where they have, you know, socialized healthcare. Right, It's so terrible that, you know, yeah, they take care of you when you come in, and listen to your complaints no matter what time of day it is, you know, but you don't have your freedom... *laughs* to be billed for it. What kind of healthcare is that? *chuckles* I wrote this song in the uhm, in the waiting room of the Swedish hospital. (Black Pear Tree)
• I found myself, in March or so of 1986, in an apartment way up on the northeast side of town. (Lakeside View Apartments Suite)
• JD: I rehearsed that one backstage and when I got to the second part I was like "Ah fuck, I don't have the line." Looked it up, went, "Okay, right, the Enigma Variations," should be easy, there's like- It's got a sort of a very methodical structure where there's like a composer named, it's very- there's like mnemonics in it but I don't know. *chuckles* Let's see here. (Horseradish Road)
• JD: Oh, I, I've told this story before possibly here. When we were on 4AD I had a pretty heavy hand in writing the album bios and stuff like that. They would ask for information and, you know, but if you've- The bios that go out to the press for most materials are very boring, you know, it's like they're very- and that's by design because they're going to write whatever you write down, right? So you write, you know, "This is the most exciting band to come out of New York since the Strokes!" and then ten reviewers compare the record to the Strokes, right? Whether it sounds like them or not, right? There was a lot of this in the early two-thousands. Every press kit would reference Gang of Four and, and then bands that didn't sound a lick like Gang of Four, "Some of the post-punk stylings of Gang of Four are present in this record-" no they weren't, right, but like, but our press kits would be like tone poems, you know? They'd be like, you know, "There are five of us in a room, three of us have not slept for weeks," right? That's what they looked like. And so- They weren't signed, like nobody saved them they're gone forever which I love, right? So uhm, but so consequently when the Sunset Tree went out, Chris Sharpe, who ran 4AD at the time, just saint of a man, peach of a guy, wrote a thing saying it was a special record but there were no real song notes or anything saying like, "Here, figure out the record," and uh, and one reviewer, only one I think, *chuckles* figured if there was a name of a person on the record it must be my stepfather, and that's how the great reggae singer Dennis Brown... *laughter* JD: ...Bob Marley's favorite singer, a man whose voice I hope to be hearing in my last moments on this Earth, was identified as my stepfather! *laughs* (Song for Dennis Brown)
• JD: Oh yeah, I should do this *picking* JD: I find it, uh, one of the ways in which I'm very out of step with the age is I don't like to think about my own stuff, right? I don't like to like, there's people who, like, live-blog their creative process. I don't even like the term ‘creative process,' *chuckles* my stuff that I do. *laughs* You know? And I don't- It's not like I wanna be completely weird and, you know, primitivist about it and be like, "Oh I don't even know what's going on-" no, I have a craft and everything but I consider it kind of crass to *chuckles* to like, you know, share the bad ideas on the way to the good one. And so, but, but uh, but this is one that uhm... myeah... that Berry Sanders was the guy who taught me the text that it came from when I was in college, uh, I mean my story in brief is I was a nurse, I was a psychiatric technician working in a locked ward, forty-six male patients, and uh- forty hours a week plus overtime. Everybody wanted overtime. It's a really wild scene when you're a state hospital nurse it's a whole- like, you gun for the overtime, it's a whole thing and uh, worked double shifts, go complete- I lived on the grounds of the hospital, right? So I could do a split. I could do seven to three–or no, I could do eleven to seven, night shift– go back to my room, sleep four hours, wake up, get lunch, and go back to my shift for the three to eleven, right? And that seems like a good idea if you are a state hospital nurse it's a whole- it's a culture, right? And uhm... and I was making money, I was paying off a court fine and uh, but I was keeping a little way and I was reading books in my spare time and uh, and I signed up for community college class, uhm, just to keep registered at the community college in case I wanted to get more stuff like my associates degree in nursing or something and I took an English class from Lois Cole and she said, "What are you- So what are you doing with your life?" I said, "Oh, well you know, I'm a psych tech I'm gonna be an RA and I'm gonna go to RN school at some point." She, "Don't you wanna get a- like a BA in English or something?" right? Because I was a good student and then I was like, "Well, yeah, I've thought about it," she said, "Well, you should," right? So I did. So I applied to this program for people who are over twenty-four at Pitzer, uhm, and I signed up for- you know, you have to take the survey of English literature, which I was way too cool to take the survey it was like, "No, I want to take only advanced topics, please. What do I look like?" But the survey had Barry Sanders and uh, and he, and Barry has a special feeling for the early stuff, right? Which was really resonant for me because I'd always been really curious about that. Many English literature students, very very very eager to get to the twentieth century. But seriously, fuck the twentieth century *cheering* JD: It's like, and I say that with full awareness that the 21st century is when a lot of people got rights they had been really waiting a very long time to get. So like, the twentieth century is kind of amazing in a lot of ways, but it's also, from an artistic standpoint, incredibly full of itself, right? It's like, everything that twentieth century artists do they think they're the first people to ever have the idea, right? And that became my total battlecry in college was like, "The Romans had these ideas two-thousand years before you postmodernists, what is wrong with you?" Audience member: Anglo-saxons! JD: It's totally fucking true, right? That all these, Gaddis, you name it, any of these postmodern guys, I can point to a spot in Roman or Greek literature where dudes were doing that centuries ago. And uh, and Berry was hip to this, right, and he taught Beowulf, right, which most people fear Beowulf, they don't wanna read about, about, "Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum," right? But Berry was like, "No, this is an amazing story," right? And I got a fire under me about it and probably wrote this in uhm, the margins of the notes I was taking during the lectur. (Grendel's Mother)
• JD: All right, let's do two more and then we will do the thing that like, when you have a band with you it doesn't feel as artificial as it does when you're by yourself. *laughter* JD: By yourself it feels [unintelligible] but at the same time like, there's people who say they don't believe in it, no fuck that! I think- It's great, it's fantastic. I wanna give you guys absolutely permission. Give yourselves permission, if you had enough at the end of the next two songs, you don't gotta clap, you can go home and get some rest, it's all good. I will not feel hurt, I had a good time. *chuckles* If you wanna hear more, do the thing, I stand at the ready. *laughs* But at the same time, at the same time, we could make the papers if everybody absolutely silently filed out after that- *laughter* JD: "Nope! I heard about eighteen songs and I was good!" *laughs* Let's see here, uh- (Cotton)
• JD: It does make me wish- there was, on the ninety-five tour with Peter in Berlin, in Berlin I was really into... wait, can I remember that song? I doubt it... There was a boy band I was super into... *strumming* JD: No, that's not it. *strumming* JD: You're all too young to know this song. I'm sure I won't get it all. JD, singing "Back for Good" by Take That: I guess now it's time for me to give up, I feel it's time Got a picture of you beside me Got your lipstick mark still on your coffee cup, (that's the best part.) ooh yeahh Got a fist of pure emotion Got a head of shattered dreams Gotta leave it, gotta leave it all behind Whatever I said, whatever I did I didn't mean it I just want you back for good Want you back, want you back I want you back for good- JD: Well, I was very obsessed with this tune, right? *laughter* JD: Because I had bought, like, I had bought the CD of it at a Coconuts in Chicago and I had a discman that I, that I took on the plane for the European tour. And so I had the discman and a couple of discs and I listened to the Take That– Take That was the name of the band, Robbie Williams got his start in take that. They were so huge in the UK and probably the rest of the world, they did okay here but, but I listened to the opening track on it, right, which was called Sure it was basically the same thing but more uptempo but I got really obsessed with it like I did with a lot of pop music back then and uh, and I had this idea like "What if-" because the club in Berlin was like, it was packed it was full of people and Take That was huge but nobody in that room would've thought the Mountain Goats were listening to Take That. And I wanted, I pitched this idea to Peter for like a solid hour like, "What if, instead of an opening number, we just come out and lip sync the Take That tune?" *laughter* JD: But now I'm older and wiser I know the move would actually be to do the encore as the lip sync. *laughs* Just come out, "Oh thank you so much, I'm gonna lip sync a Take That song now." Please watch this space tomorrow night to see if I follow through. (This Year)
• JD: So I'm gonna do one more because I feel like twenty songs is for like, about the point for which I have to save something for, you know, the ninety-percent of you who are also going to be here tomorrow night. *cheering* JD: I'm a strong, I'm a strong believer in not doing wildcards for encores, right? It's like there are some songs that people paid to get in to hear. Uh, Source Decay is kind of bonus because it's like if you don't actually- Audience member: Minnesota! JD: No, see that's not a final encore song. JD: I happen to love that song! Very fond of it, very proud of it, not a final encore song. That's the one where people went, "You played Minnesota instead of No Children, I hate you now." *chuckles* I could play Death Metal Band instead of No Children and that's a fair, that's a fair trade. I could even theoretically do Palmcorder Yajna and it'd be like, you know, and then there's like ten percent of the audience who go "Oh that was like absolutely the cult move there," but I'm not gonna do either of those things because there are people, for whom if they don't hear No Children then they want to hear Death Metal Band, and if they don't hear Death Metal band they will settle for No Children. *laughter* Audience member: Which is it gonna be? JD: The problem with No Children is that people come up and they say... *strumming* JD: "John, this is our song!" *laughter* JD: I mean the thing is like, it is crass to complain or whine about apparels of celebrity, not that the big celebrities don't seem entirely empowered to do so but I've always considered it rude, you know, but at the same time if you write an album that is clearly *chuckles* a warning not to, not to devalue your marriage when you find a person that you know you can get along with, don't engage in a pattern of mutual destruction. It's not fun for either of you and it leaves marks. And you get people who say, "Hey John, we've got big ol' marks on us now! We walked down the aisle to No Children-" and I say, "NO!!! What are you doing? Why- Do you know how sad your family was when you walked down the aisle to No Children? Do you know how much you hurt their feelings?" And then I think to myself yeah, they do know... It's a litmus test. There are some ways in which, like, not the entire Mountain Goats project but there's a number of Mountain Goats songs where I look forward to people saying, "You know I don't like the song the way I used to. There was a ten-year period of my life where I thought it was the best one and now I'm kind of over it and I think "Fuck yes..." but at the same time... Sometimes you've just gotta pull the cord. (No Children)

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