“Pinklon” tells a not-real story about a real larger-than-life figure and finds a celebration in redemption.

Track: “Pinklon”
Album: Unreleased

I used to deliver pizza and, as you might expect, it meant many hours of the day I was stuck in a car going back and forth over the same few miles of road. I filled those hours with books on tape, mostly, but I also started listening to one full Mountain Goats live show every day. I burned them on CD-R and scrawled things like “TMG 11-7-99” on them. That was 100% of the context I gave myself and I guess I figured at some point I’d finish all of them. If you start today it’ll take you years to do that. There’s no such thing as “all of them,” either, but I made it through hundreds.

That process means I have a lot of half-remembered stage banter in my head. Some of it I’ve been able to find elsewhere but some of it was not notable enough to make it to a wiki or other aggregated site. This includes an explanation somewhere of “Pinklon,” a story about real-life boxer Pinklon Thomas returning from jail. The song imagines this as an overblown, triumphant moment. The real Pinklon maybe went to jail as a youth and maybe didn’t. The song is fantastic, certainly one of the best non-released tracks, and the story’s truth isn’t really all that important in the wake of the feeling you get as John Darnielle bellows out the legend.