2022-12-06 Doug Fir Lounge
Setlist
Recording
This was a JD solo show.
Banter
- JD: I just, I want to apologize, I know that people have like, an expectation of my glasses and stuff, you know I *stammers* But when I’m doing it by myself I sort of need focus, right, when I have the band it’s like, then you have other people, you know, you have *stammers* less of a… it’s easier for me to like, be closer to nude, which will be the next solo tour.
*Laughter*
JD: It’s very exciting, we're planning it right now. It, the venues are very, very hesitant but uh, it’s gonna be gruesome really just a horrifying tour.
- JD: (Unintelligible) Bad habit of putting the pick down.
*Laughter*
JD: It’s like, there’s a, there’s actually a… This will be a short and somewhat interesting intro or a long and not even remotely interesting intro. *laughs* The purpose of a pick or plectrum… is to more evenly distribute the tension across the strings as you strum, right? Uh, that’s, that’s what it does, right, and it also causes the strings to sound but you can do that with just your hand if you like to. I never used a pick at all for like the first ten years of the Mountain Goats and there should be but is not a grand theory of division between the eras, like when John finally said, “Look these tours are too long for me to be bleeding from the hand,” right? It used to be, on a six-day tour you could just beat the crap out of it and then be, you know, in more and more pain, most pain on night six and go home, right? But when you’re doing three or four weeks, at some point you’re gonna need the pick, right? And, and it’s a very different thing, well, you know there’s more I could say about this and will, but I don’t want to spoil you by giving you the whole schtick right now.
*Laughter*
JD: But I notice it, because like if I go to play Against Pollution, that’s from before I’m using a pick all the time and it sounds like this: *strumming*. But when you do it with the pick then it makes it even, and the whole thing: *strumming* Right? That’s just not as interesting. That’s interesting to me. Uh, it need not be to you.
*Laughter*
JD: But yeah, this is. *strumming* But actually it informs the way you write. It ends up sort of uh, uh, you wind up subconsciously making different choices than you would make. (Against Pollution)
- Uhm, yeah. I played this last night. I’m really self-conscious about playing songs two nights in a row ‘cos I’m really stupid. It’s like, every other fucking band in the world like, same thing last night eh- tonight as last night. Same thing- -cos it was good last night and they liked it so play it again. I’m like, “Posers, posers, posers.” (Until I Am Whole)
- JD: It’s like uhm, one of my favorite, uh, Mountain Goats records is that one, uhm, because it was, it took, longer to write than the other ones had and not ‘cos I was focu- It’s like when… I can’t speak for other people. I will though. *laughs*
*Laughter*
JD: When, when you’re writing a record, it’s not like- This is one reason why you know, I tease people about their work habits is like, if, you know, you write a record for two years but does that mean you showed up at the office at nine every morning and worked ‘til five working on the record? Probably not, right? It means that it was sort of taking form, you know? It was like, you work- You should work as much as you can, every day if you can but at the same time there were a bunch, a bunch of songs that were just so bad. You know, uh, and I have them in notebooks and, and I look forward to the fire when I burn them. I’m very excited for this. It’s like I keep putting it off because it just gets better every year it’s like “ah, now it’s really old, and now that it actually has monetary value I’m gonna burn it.” *laughs* It’s really, very exciting. And I had like, many different titles you know? And all these- It’s shocking to me, when I go through the notebooks, that the record is any good at all because I wasn’t quite sure what to do, uh, in the wake of moving out to the midwest and like, doing it all by myself without Rachel who was like, sort of a good, a good barometer for whether something popped or not. And uh, and it all came together, you know, and I’m super fond of it. And also the other thing is like I got very sick at the studio session, at Simon Joyner’s coffee shop that sort of- He was running a coffee shop in Omaha. So I took a Greyhound bus from Ames to Omaha. Uh, If you have not ridden a Greyhound bus, and I’ve ridden a lot of them in my life, and this could be an extraordinarily long intro, uh. You have… experiences on Greyhound buses that can shape you as a person.
*Cheering*
JD: They’re not generally the sorts of experiences about which you would cheer with enthusiasm *laughs* but, but your mileage may vary. And the thing is like, *stammers* I don’t mean to call anybody out but like if you were a young boy in the early eighties riding a Greyhound you couldn’t fall asleep on that bus, right? Somebody was gonna paw at you then you’d wake up and go “Excuse me?” which is exactly what I did. *Laughs* I remember doing “Excuse me?” to the guy but you couldn’t tell the bus driver it was just like- It was the wild west out there. Uh, and- *Laughs* And so, when I went to make a new album I said “I know I’ll take a Greyhound to Omaha!” right? I’m twenty-seven now or twenty-eight or- Yeah, twenty-eight or twenty-nine and I took the Greyhound. The other thing besides people who are like pretty… who are on the Greyhound for a reason, like, uh, to find you. The other thing that’s there is viruses, right? I used to, in the before times, get called a hypochondriac.
*Laughter*
JD: And I’d like to say to everyone who said that to me, “Fuuuuck-
*Cheering*
JD: ‘Cos I was just trying to not get sick, it's not like I was imagining fake buggies out there or anything. It’s like because I’m a singer, if I get sick I’m useless, right? And that’s true, and so- So that’s exactly what happened on the ride out to do the Coroner's Gambit, which was going to be an entirely studio record, I caught some bug and I was deadly ill by the second day of tracking. First day we got some stuff done. Uhm, Baboon, I think I remember. But uh, by the time when you hear my voice on Elijah the reason it’s so quiet and damaged is ‘cause… I’m damaged. So- And I wound up having to go home and do the other half of the record on the boombox and it came out… the way it came out.
*Laughter*
JD: Which I was pretty pleased with because it was like, I like accidents, I like- I don’t believe in uhm, you know… This is a long one, I told you- *Laughter* Like there’s a story that Captain Beefheart taught every member of the Magic Band how to play their instruments for Trout Mask Replica? These stories are always lies. There is no auteur who’s the powerful wizard man whose creativity is so incredible that good musicians in his band need him- Nah. The band wrote that record. I’m sure that Captain Beefheart helped but I like accidents. I like things like “Oh okay well you got sick and you only recorded five songs and you only liked three of them.” So uh, having said all that, which songs am I gonna play…
*Laughter*
JD: I know! But this is one of the ones that came out in Omaha and it’s got exactly the right balance of *laughs* and I get mad when people like, like it when my voice cracks like, no. A voice crack is not good, good singing is good, right? When people do intentional vocal fry, when they go “AAEEeahh,” I hate that, *laughs* I mean fuck that, sing well, right? (unintelligible) And uh- But this is one where you can hear, “Ohh, he’s getting sick…” *Laughs*
JD, strumming: And it sorta, speaks to the lyrical content of waiting for things to get good. (Onions)
- JD: Hello.
*Laughter*
JD: It’s me, I’m at the piano.
*Laughter*
JD: As I was saying, this is normally if you see the Mountain Goats there’s a paper setlist that I have and everybody else has their own and that was written up right before we go onstage but it has a lot of bleedthrough from night to night, and so forth. But the year-end solo shows have… have this, right? A notebook with a 3D image of a dolphin…
*Cheering*
JD: You know, like last night’s has two pages of song titles with numbers written before the first seven. *Laughs* Yeah, and they were written before I come out. But I was hoping to play-
Audience member: It’s beautiful.
JD: It is beautiful. *Laughs* Uh, I’m always very nervous about the piano stand because people go, “I paid to get in! And I was staring at the back of a fucking music stand all night!”
*Laughter*
JD: But at the same time, I’ll be dead before I have a screen onstage.
*Laughter*
JD: Spend our whole fucking lives looking at screens I’m not having one onstage.
JD: One great thing about having Berry Sanders as a teacher is he was able to point out when an author is actually writing about writing without being irritating and postmodern about it. *Laughs* You know, point out that when Chaucer has a whole bunch of pilgrims going, uhm, to pay respects to the saint, right? They’re telling each other stories, they’re writing a book as they go and you’re reading that book. This is- I don’t think of this stuff when I’m writing but then after I’ll record an album I’ll go “Oh, that song is about the Mountain Goats.” *Laughs*
(Antidote for Strychnine)
- JD: She is, I almost cried the entire time, just hearing her voice. It’s uh- Her music means the world to me uh, anyways- Amazing, and she’s a compassionate and incredible person. I don’t know when the podcast comes out. It’s called “Hope is a Muscle” is the- Amazing, right? *Laughs* And uh, we were talking about the time in my life when I was writing the Life of the World to Come, which was an extraordinarily bad time in my life. Uh, it was really- My physical health had just gone to shit and I couldn’t sleep. And there is no- Oh man, I have so much to say about this- *Stammers*
Crowd member: (Unintelligible)
JD: One reason- Well, no. *stammers* And everybody here agrees with me so there’s no point-
*Laughter*
JD: But like, when people minimize how monstrous our prison system is in this country, right? They, you know, somebody’ll say, well you know, somebody who’s lobbying for prison reform or abolition will say that one thing they do is leave the lights on all night in solitary, right? One, solitary confinement is a monstrosity that no other democracy in the western world would even consider indulging, it’s monstrous. But the other thing is to deprive someone of sleep doesn’t sound like that much, like compared to other things I could do to you, right? Like, I could torture you, I could remove your fingernails, right? I could have all kinds of fun! Right, I can flay you! *Laughs* And I can film it and upload it to the internet! These are all terrible things to do. If I- If I put that long list of things and I say, “Oh, I deprived him of sleep,” you’ll say, “Ah, then you didn’t really treat him that badly.” But, my friend, if you ever have a time in your life when actually you can’t sleep, right, you’ll be begging to be flayed alive, right. There’s nothing like it. It’s so bad your mental health goes to pieces and that was me, on tour, in 2008. Just going progressively crazier every single night and I got home and I was starting to make sense of my life and one thing you can do when you cannot absolutely stand to be in your own head for a minute longer is to play video games, right?
*Cheering*
JD: Which totally sounds like, “Whaaat?” It’s like, “No, yes,” right? Because they will possess your attention and what you’re wanting to do, Berry and I were talking about attention backstage, what you need to do when you’re suffering is put your attention on something that doesn’t emphasize your own suffering if you can. Find some object to focus on, that’s kind of what meditation is about because meditation asserts that we’re suffering whether we feel good or not. And so you find a place for your attention to rest, and for me it was a game called Odin Sphere, right, which is a Japanese role-playing game. I barely even know what the term means, I haven’t played all the classical ones that the people who are big fiends in the crowd are going, “Oh! Well, have you played Persona?” No. I haven’t. I bought it. I made it through the first two scenes and I went, “God these cutscenes are fucking interminable.” I’m not gonna- I’m not sitting here for fifteen minutes to work out some baroque plot with like ninety characters whose backstory I have to know before I can feel anything about any of them- No, Thank you, so much but I won’t be there for that… game because I have tetris to play!
*Laughter*
JD: But in the case of Odin Sphere it’s different because it takes place in Hell. Right, so it speaks to me. And it does, like the story begins with somebody who goes down to the underworld, *stammers* and I can’t remember the particulars of the rest of it because again it’s just impossible it’s like a lot of Japanese and Thai and Chinese mythology- There’s like this dense six-thousand year old body of stuff so it’s not just like five people doing the same things it’s all these people you have to know about. But there’s this amazing emotional moment where one person is confronting somebody else in Hell, right, and is demanding something but the other one… And again, I’m in a bad place playing this game, right? I’m playing it to distract myself from how I can’t function in 2008, and this person- If I remember correctly it’s a person who has been uh, forced to assume ‘bunny form…’
*Laughter*
JD: They were a person when they went to Hell and well, now they’re a rabbit. *laughs* It happens. Like, points a finger and says, “You and your brother, you both escaped the curse. You can’t comprehend what it’s like!” And that just absolutely lit a fire inside my brain, this record did not make the Life of the World to Come, It’s called Enoch 18:14. (Enoch 18:14)
- JD: This is- I know I don’t actually have to sell the Mountain Goats to anybody here, but this is what is good about Mountain Goats shows is I didn’t have any plans to play that song. My hands landed on b minor and I said “No, you played Lakeside View last night,” so then I went to D and then that happened and it’s like, if you’re starting a band, leave space for something to happen that you didn’t plan on, it’s nice.
*Cheering*
JD: I will say, it’s also easier to do that, one: in a room where everybody already likes your stuff, and two: in a room of three or four-hundred people instead of like three-thousand. *laughs* Three-thousand it’s like, “Hey this is spontaneous, maybe it’s not gonna work, but they really charged the hell out of you to get in so let’s see what-” *laughs*
*Laughter*
JD: What is next… What is next? I don’t know, the second half is really chaotic, uhm-
*Cheering*
Audience member: Broom People!
Audience member: St Stephen!
Audience member: I’ve Got the Sex!
JD: You know, the thing is I would do St Stephen but I really don’t like how I cheat the middle section out of the proper timing, ‘cos Jerry Garcia was a considerably better musician than I, right? And I don’t- You know, dead heads notice they go, “Well you did the song but-” *laughs*
*Audience requests and chatter*
JD: Hold on one second- (1 John 4:16)
- There’s gotta be some people in here who are like, “I don’t know any of these songs! I was waiting for the stuff from Tallahassee and the Sunset Tree.” I can’t- I can’t promise that I’m gonna get to you- *laughs* These are earlier stuff! That I have in my mind- I find that, for me, with earlier Mountain Goats stuff, the ones that seemed very emotional to me at the time now seem kind of embarrassing. And the ones- No, but the ones that seemed funny to me seem now to have like, soundable emotional depths I didn’t realize were there. *laughs*
JD: This is one of those, for me. It’s about a guy who died when he was twenty-two. He wasn’t a particularly good guy… He died in a hail of bullets, probably killed a number of people in his lifetime… The world was probably better without him but… But I had a vision of him dreaming of his escape from the law. If you don’t know this song, then I have to tell you the title but I- I have a fondness for not saying what the title is before I play it so that the people who like the song will then be surprised… I’m gonna err on the side of the other people. This is called: “Billy the Kid’s Dream of the Magic Shoes.”
*Cheering* ( Billy the Kid's Dream of the Magic Shoes)
- JD: Thank you. What if I was back there for like, ninety seconds and when I came out it was clear somebody had been doing my hair?
*Laughter*
JD: *laughs* That I had to go back and immediately get it fixed, but nobody does my hair because it’s perfect all by itself…
*Cheering*
JD: I thank Portland audience that, if you enjoy the hair, you should drink it in while you can because it’s reaching a point where something must be done.
*Distressed cheering*
JD: *laughs* Hair like this is like really like, well it’s very uncomfortable 24 hours a day, but at least when I see a picture of it it looks cool.
*Laughter*
JD: Here’s the thing, I want those of you who I already know this is true of to not answer this question, okay? People who came to hear No Children and This Year and stuff like that, are you still cool with the deeper back catalog in the encore?
*Cheering*
JD: Okay, some of you I know the answer is yes I’m not asking you. *laughs* (Orange Ball of Love)
- JD: Here’s the thing. Like, there’s two songs I kind of gotta play.
*Laughter*
JD: It’s an obligation in my job to play those ones and I understand and respect that obligation. Like I think, I think if you are like “The Mountain Goats aren’t exactly a one-hit wonder but we have three or four songs in the catalog that you should have a reasonable expectation of hearing two of them if you come to the Mountain Goats show, right? If uh- And the thing is I love Bob Dylan like everybody else, but it is fucking hilari- Actually I love him more for this because if you go to the Bob Dylan show and you’re my age, right, most of your fellow dudes in the audience are four or five years older and they all, unreasonably because you can find out about this by reading about it, they think they’re gonna show up and hear Subterranean Homesick Blues and Like a Rolling Stone and all the, you know, Idiot Wind stuff- He’s never got anything from fuckin’ Blood on the Tracks. But they show up and wanna hear this stuff and it’s very amusing because you can see he doesn’t care at all and then, and I saw him once, right, and finally he does one. Like, one of the biggest early ones and it’s blowing in the wind… and you cannot figure out what song it is for the entire first verse. Like, everybody’s- All the dudes my age in their tie-dye shirts are looking at each other like “What it’s- It’s the encore what’s he- I don’t even know this one- Oh! Oh, it’s a totally different version of one of the biggest songs he ever-” It’s like- And I have maximum respect for that but at the same time, I’m not that dude.
*Laughter*
JD: Like, Bob Dylan is going to bed at night and going “I did a fine job, whatever,” and me “God, that fucking guy wanted to hear No Children so bad-
*Laughter*
JD: And you didn’t play it because you were tired of it or whatever.” So I’m not that dude. So No Children and This Year? they’re coming after this one. I got one more song to play with, right, before I get into the zone, right? So-
*Cheering*
Audience member: Carmen Cicero!
JD: I’m thinking about it but I always-
*Cheering*
JD: But I- Here’s the thing, I tend to blank on a lyric in that one-
Audience member: I got you,
JD: No you- You always say that and then you’re lying, right? You mean well but when the moment comes you freeze up, right? It’s like- I’ve been here for a while and I know that’s the case, right? So, So-
Audience member: (unintelligible)
JD: Yeah it does, but it doesn’t have the big ol’ payoff. *laughs* (Carmen Cicero)
- JD, strumming: If you’ve already seen me play twenty times and you’ve gotta head home because you’ve gotta wake up early… I get it, my feelings are not hurt, *laughs* ‘cos if you have seen me play five or ten times, you have seen me play these songs.
*Laughter*
JD: But I saw- I saw Lou Reed in nineteen-eighty uhm, I wanna say six, when I Love You Suzanne was in the charts, which was quite remarkable… And when he got to Walk on the Wild Side which had been his only radio hit, he gave a spiel that I’ll always remember ‘cos it was like the new, gentle Lou, right?
*Laughter*
JD: If you know much about Lou Reed, the seventies Lou Reed was the terror of interviewers. He would just- His whole thing was making you feel bad for wanting to ask him a question. *laughs* But by eighty-six he was newly married and sober and he said, “An interviewer asked me, ‘Lou do you ever get tired of playing Walk on the Wild Side?’ and I said, ‘No, I can’t wait to play it tomorrow for the people at the Pacific Amphitheatre” and I thought, “Wow, Lou, you memorized that line.” *laughs* “You just barely know this is the Pacific Amphitheatre, Lou.” But the thing is, over the years, right, when you get a song everyone wants to hear, I discovered that that’s actually true, right, that maybe, maybe Smashmouth is sick of the one song, you know, maybe Third Eye Blind no longer wants something else to get them through this life but, but I bet they do I bet when they play the song they think, “This is the song that connects us to everybody in this room it’s the one that everybody wants to hear,” and that’s really a blessed feeling for which I am incredibly grateful and it’s why I find whatever reservoir of hatred and anger I can locate to give my best to the song that I beg you not to play at your wedding-
*Laughter*
JD: and to discourage other people from doing the same. One-Two-Three One-Two-Three- (No Children)
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