The first album is a strange journey, but “Ice Cream, Cobra Man” displays some of the intensity that comes after it.

Track: “Ice Cream, Cobra Man”
Album: Taboo VI: The Homecoming (1992)

I do not own a copy of the first Mountain Goats album, Taboo VI: The Homecoming. John Darnielle is consistent in his description that it isn’t really something you should track down. As far as I can tell, it will cost you a few hundred bucks if you want your own.

It is interesting primarily as a historical document. John Darnielle was very young and wanted to put his poems to music, and thus this collection of covers and original songs was born. There are some real choices here, with one song in Spanish translation tracked almost directly on top of the English, dialogue from television shows, and sound effects from John Darnielle’s mother playing with a toy pig into the microphone. It’s not quite outsider art, but it has a similar effect.

“Ice Cream, Cobra Man,” on the original tape, opens and closes with explicit, first person, discussion of a sex act. The versions online cut most of it out, which is a source of some controversy. John Darnielle played the entire tape live in 2014, but he also played this one song in Urbana, Illinois in April of 2009. At that show, he made no comment about what may be the only other extant performance of a seventeen-year-old song but did say later that he was talking less because his throat hurt.

It is very difficult to talk about the first album. John Darnielle hasn’t fully disowned it, but he does say it isn’t like what comes after it. “Ice Cream, Cobra Man” is an exception, and “I feel no pain as I float across your ceiling // I feel no shame // I am in a thousand rooms all at the same time” is, if nothing else, something another Darnielle narrator would like to shout at someone.