Alpha Chum Gatherer
Lyrics
Rise up real early shaking
Try and steady my hand
Make my way down to the water
Sail a half a mile from land
See where the sharks have been feeding
Out on the ocean alone
And I scrutinize the carnage
Like it was the goddamn Rosetta Stone
When I crack
That secret code
It's sure to lighten my load
Won’t you come out sailing with me
Into the warmth of the afternoon
Scoop up the guts and brains
Drizzle them into a plastic bag
Watch them drop onto the deck
Feel the day drag
And when I get back to the car
It's like a furnace inside
I head on down the highway
Throttle open wide
Back home in the high heat
I spill out all my presents for you
There's blood all over the floor now
What are we going to do
Won't you come out sailing with me
Into the warmth
Warmth of the afternoon
Banter
- If I could just hold forth in the service of praising my bassist for a minute. [woo!] So there's a thing that started happening to the Mountain Goats when the Mountain Goats was just me or just me and Rachel [Ware] way way way back when, that people who were running small labels which - if you were running a small label and you got a little road under you, it could be a good line of work, and so people would look for bands who seemed to be developing a following and start to preach a business model to them. And I was really - I come from southern, I come from the Inland Empire, we don't - we hate all business models. If you have a business model, then we don't like you. That's our position. Do your work and shut the fuck up is our position. So weasels were everywhere, weasels right and left. And they would come up and say [business guy voice] wow, hey, I really liked your show! I really enjoyed that, you got any records out? [normal voice] oh, yeah, I got 20 tapes, here have one. And they'd call you up when you got home and say hey, man, I listened to your tape, are these demos? And I'd go, I hate you, I fucking hate you. [laughter] But you wanna be nice to people and also get good stories to tell later. No, no, that's what they sound like. [business guy voice] If you were to make a record.... [normal voice] I gave you the record and you listened to it. That was it. [business guy] If you were to make a record, do you think you'd wanna re-record these? And as soon as somebody said that, it was then that I knew that I wished death upon them and all that they held dear. And it was like, I was very cantankerous about it. If anybody at all re-recorded one of their older songs for whatever reason it was, well, that guy's bullshit now. Seems like that guy doesn't toe as strong a line as yours truly, the bastion of ideological purity. [woo!] And I have clung very fiercely to this over the years. And suspect that I will never be able to beat back the bastion of ideological purity. But then you play a song like Cobscook Bay - I really like the studio version that I did all the parts by myself on the Yo-Yo EP, but then you play with Peter and you go aw, man. I feel like one of those weasel label guys, like, what if we could record that with a bass. Fortunately for me, I have the big [inaudible] how awesome it is to play that song with Peter. However, Peter will never record it. Because Peter, like myself, is a bastion of ideological purity. [cheering] Speaking of which, this song is unreleased. The greater number of people who like it, the more certain it is to remain unreleased. [more cheering, then tuning] This song got, aw man, if I'd had a time thing, that would be like, long story bumping into long story. That's bad luck for you guys, I'm sorry. So we - can you handle one? [resounding yes from Peter and the audience] So we go to record Tallahassee, I'm still pretty much in my ideological purity phase, but I'm willing to go into a studio. Because recording bass into a boombox is kinda bullshit. [laughter] So we go up to Tarbox Road studio, where the Flaming Lips had just cut - they'd just recorded Yoshimi, I think, but they'd also recorded Soft Bullet in there, and many bands - Mercury Rev had recorded all their stuff there, it's a great studio, so it was a great joy to hear people call the record lo-fi when it came out. You didn't actually listen to the record, did you, you just read the previous, ok, cool, appreciate that. Flew that dude in from Scotland for nothing. But I come in, I have 19 songs which I would like to track and mix in six days. If you haven't been to a recording studio, that's completely unrealistic. You should record about two songs a day. But you can do three if you don't have a drummer. Going over three is completely ridiculous if you're actually trying to make the songs good and get a good take. I mean, you can do 19 songs in two days if you want to, if you don't care which take you get, if you just sort of wanna get the songs, but I was, again, I was pretty - we'll start working at ten AM and we'll clock out whenever, about two in the morning, and... that's exactly what we did. And Tony [Doogan, Tallahassee producer] was a good sport about it, and a couple songs got left off, this was one of my very favorites, and I had envisioned it as being, like, the one that led off the album, so you'd sort of picture somebody going out onto the water and discovering the water is threatening, and coming back home and finding it's even worse at home than it was on the boat with the blood all over the boards. (2013-06-05 - Maxwell's, Hoboken)
- ...I won't get it back, trust me, if you were married to me, which someday you all will be, [laughter] if you were married to me, you'd go, ah, I'm not gonna remember this one. Although, I could fish for it another hour, before eventually the rest of the house says 'I don't care, I'm going upstairs'. (2013-06-07 - Center Church on the Green, New Haven)
- This was one of the songs I thought was gonna be one of the big primary texts in Tallahassee but when we went to put it together, it just didn't seem to fit anywhere. You couldn't put it after or before anything and have it sound right, it just didn't play well with the others. It was a little bloodier than most of them, and also it had some unresolved plot points, like "Where did they get the boat?". The whole alpha stories are full of questions like "How did they afford a car?" - "Did they own or rent?" This song features a boat, and a car. I don't know where they got them, I don't want to know where they got them. It's called Alpha Chum Gatherer. (2013-06-17)
- I wonder if you guys saw this commercial that they used to play when I lived up in Iowa. I didn’t see it anywhere else, I don’t know if it was nation wide, or what, but, um, they use to have this commercial they would show that was like, you know… *laughs* it was the best thing. I hope you saw it! But I don’t know if it was maybe a Iowa and Minnesota get-people-to-go-to-the-lakes thing– though I assume you have lakes down here also. But it was a kid’s voice– oh, this is going to be a long story, hold on– It was a kid’s voice and reminded me of one of the best songs of the 80s, that great decade the 80s that brought us such great music as “Dear Mister Jesus.” Did you ever hear “Dear Mister Jesus?” It was a song sung by a five-year-old, and it was that sort-of Christian pornography, that like, you go, “Oh, the kid said Jesus. What could be better?” And if you are like a guy who is going to Mega Death shows in Long Beach in his spare time, you look at “Dear Mister Jesus” with wonder and reverence and go “Aw, this is the best time to be alive!” because “Dear Mister Jesus,” right? But it was clear that they had asked the kid to talk dumber then she actually was and she sings like: “Dear Mister Jesus, I don’t know what to do” and it was like that, right? So this commercial I’m thinking of that ran in Iowa, was the “Dear Mister Jesus” voice, but the kid was asking his father to take him fishing. This is the sort-of thing that weighs very heavily on Midwestern Dads, I think. If you are a kid listening to this, and you want to just rip out your Midwestern father’s heart, then I suspect asking him to take you fishing on a day he can’t do it is a good way to do that. But the commercial went: “Take me fishing, because I won’t be nine forever!” “Take me fishing, because there’s only one sunset a day!” And I would watch this video and go “Oh man, Dear Mister Jesus has gone fishing, this is cool!” Right? I want you to bear those noble sentiments in mind as I play an unreleased song from Tallahassee about the day the guy gets drunk and goes fishing. (2013-06-20)
Live Performances