Revenge is realized in the scream-along “Sure Do Love You Baby, But I Can’t Do 60 No More.”

Track: “Sure Do Love You Baby, But I Can’t Do 60 No More”
Album: Unreleased

There are two recordings of “Sure Do Love You Baby, But I Can’t Do 60 No More” and they are almost two decades apart. The first is embedded above and is from The Press in Claremont, which did not survive the pandemic but seems to have been a lovely place to see live music once upon a time. The second is here, in Baltimore in 2019. The two performances are both manic and explosive in that way that only the angry ones from an angry young narrator could be and they’re remarkably similar, with one important difference. The crowd obviously is much more tolerant and excited at the second one, but the bigger difference is swapping out the first word.

In what we must consider the “original” version, our narrator tells us someone moved down to Florida. In the more recent one, as a YouTube commenter suggests and I have to agree with, they tell us Dave moved down there. It’s a story of jealousy and a story that ends with a light “flickering out for the last time.” There are a lot of revenge fantasies and stories of jealously across the early years of Mountain Goats songs, but it’s rare we see someone with the follow-through to actually go down to the beach and do the thing.