Unreleased

562. Skeleton’s Tooth

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle performed “Skeleton’s Tooth” just once, it seems, for a spooky event.

Track: “Skeleton’s Tooth”
Album: Unreleased

In October of 2018, John Darnielle curated a series of spooky stories read by some famous actors at this event in New York. At that event he played “Skeleton’s Tooth,” which was listed on the event’s description as brand-new and a special performance for the “eclectic evening.” It fits with the vibe, absolutely.

The imagery of “Skeleton’s Tooth” is what will stick with you, from dried blood on iron gates as a warning to a mouth full of bloody gums as the positive outcome if the alternative is death. It’s a song about taking the least-bad outcomes, seemingly, and about trying to make it through a world that seems to be full of foreboding and grim spectacle. I’m willing to be wrong on all of these, but especially I’m willing to be wrong on a song that was performed one time for a special event. If you hear something else, you’re probably right. For my money, though, it’s all in this part: “threats of my enemies run loose in my head // the way that lullabies do.”

561. In The Cane Fields

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

The nervous moments compound by the end of “In the Cane Fields.”

Track: “In the Cane Fields”
Album: Unreleased

You have two options if you want to hear “In the Cane Fields” today. You can listen to this one, from 1992, which may very well be the oldest Mountain Goats recording available, or you can listen to the one from 2019 which includes video and the story behind the song. The older version ends with a few jokes about the song and the newer version includes a lot more detail about the original construction. I encourage you to do both because the song is very short.

Part of the fun of the unreleased stuff is it all just exists out there, usually without any context. What little we get here doesn’t really dampen that fun. The early Mountain Goats songs were poems that John Darnielle put to music and this is one of those. The first verse ends with some interesting repetition, but the real meat of this one is the tense moment this couple finds themselves in by the end. It opens with a sugary kiss and closes with a bombshell. It’s not going to be anyone’s favorite Mountain Goats song, but you can hear a lot of what came later being unpacked in this one.

560. The New Potatoes

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

Decades after what might be the only surviving version was recorded, you can still contemplate “The New Potatoes.”

Track: “The New Potatoes”
Album: Unreleased

At the risk of writing more about it than the full text of it, “The New Potatoes” is one of those live songs you can only find one version of. In this instance it’s one John Darnielle played by himself at Duke Coffeehouse at Duke University in 1997. Remarkably, 26 years later as of this writing, there’s even a scan of the poster from the show you can see here. The fact that both of these exist is a testament to the permanence of media even in an increasingly impermanent world. I truly cannot believe these are here for us all these years later.

The song itself is short, as I said before. It’s 54 words long and those words describe some potatoes being washed away by rain. Darnielle belts out his goodbyes to these potatoes in increasing severity. It’s a song about things being temporal and the change of things that accompanies that reality. The final lines are really intense, even for him, even for the time, but the real remarkable element of this is that it’s still here for you to hear long after anyone in that room might have guessed that it would be.

559. Malted Milk

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

If you were in one specific room in 1992 you’d have heard the only performance of “Malted Milk.”

Track: “Malted Milk”
Album: Unreleased

You would be forgiven for not knowing “Malted Milk.” As near as anyone outside of John Darnielle and company would have any way of knowing, it exists solely on this recording from 1992 at Munchie’s in Pomona, California. Darnielle responded to a tweet in 2013 to clarify that the backing singers are “the Dark Mountain Boys” and as far as I can find, history does not recall them. For a song like this it’s still a remarkable amount of info to have and my hat is off to the intrepid fan who asked the question.

The song itself can best be called “of the time” for 1992. Honestly, it’s a little more complete than a lot of the unreleased stuff from the era. It is, however, right on the money for the subject matter of the time. Our narrator drinks malted milk. They love malted milk. They are sick enough looking to potentially require medical attention and their love life is maybe falling apart, but, hey, malted milk. I’ve always loved the line “I guess you know what happens next.” No one could know what happens next.

534. Shower

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , ,

“Shower” is a fierce, angry song from the perspective of someone who probably caused their own problems.

Track: “Shower”
Album: Unreleased (written for The Coroner’s Gambit, but not included)

The final lines of “Shower” recall wedding vows, though it’s clear we’ve gone beyond the realm of “for worse.” There are a lot of Mountain Goats narrators who only tell us their side of the story, but this one really wants us to know they don’t feel to blame. “You swore that you would stick around // when days like this started coming down” tells us definitively that the other person left, but the insistence and the delivery suggest to us that they might have been right to do so.

Getting into a shower with all of your clothes still on is a grand gesture. Just as there are a lot of songs about heartbroken people across the Goats’ catalog, there are a lot that show us that these grand gestures come from people who cannot do the emotional heavy lifting to do the little things that actually matter. I am reminded of “Korean Bird Paintings,” another song where someone tries to fill life with happy things to pave over some darkness we don’t get to see. Here is the reverse, where someone tries to enact the chaos they feel inside, outside.

This one never made The Coroner’s Gambit, but you can see from the scans of the notebooks that if it had it was more or less the same then as it is now. “Shower” seems to have never made the albums because it didn’t turn out exactly right, but you can hear in the fury behind it that there’s something there if you need it, should you ever find that you need it.

533. Nikki Oh Nikki

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

The ultimate memento mori, “Nikki Oh Nikki” helps you find perspective in a terrible way.

Track: “Nikki Oh Nikki”
Album: Unreleased (though recorded and released by John Vanderslice on Life and Death of an American Fourtracker)

Pitchfork called John Darnielle’s lyrics on “Nikki Oh Nikki” “surprisingly unremarkable” and slammed that song and “Amitriptyline” from John Vanderslice’s album Life and Death of an American Fourtracker as the low points of the album. They’re my two favorite songs on the record. Pitchfork also says that Vanderslice’s version of “Nikki Oh Nikki” is too reminiscent of a Pink Floyd song so your mileage, as ever with Pitchfork, may vary. That seems a simplistic comparison, to me.

Darnielle wrote the lyrics for “Nikki Oh Nikki” though the final Vanderslice version is undeniably his own. Percussive comparisons to “Money” aside, it sounds like a Vanderslice song. His vocals on “like a tumor” and similar wails are what you come to Vanderslice for, with the sole performance linked above by Darnielle as the only point of comparison we have. As near as I can tell, that’s the only recording you can find. The production is different, but the final version is also pared way down lyrically. Vanderslice’s version in 2002 is just the thrust of the message. Darnielle’s in 1997 includes an additional verse about a paranoia that everyone is sharing your secrets. The differences aren’t crucial because the result is the same: worry or not, it’s no big deal. That might be comforting, in a certain light, but it may be less so as you realize and insistently confront the fact that you are going to die.

532. I’ve Got the Sex

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , ,

The not-all-that-lost “I’ve Got the Sex” is absolutely sexual, but it’s brutal at the same time.

Track: “I’ve Got the Sex”
Album: Unreleased (but written for Sweden and not released)

There’s a lot to talk about with “I’ve Got the Sex,” and I’m going to start with the obsessive part. You can still use the Wayback Machine to read an old forum post where someone found a set of nine songs labeled as outtakes. Eight of them don’t fit my ruleset for this series as John Darnielle expressly asked people not to post them or request them at shows, but “I’ve Got the Sex” has been played dozens of times and seems to be the outlier. It was supposed to be on Sweden but John Darnielle says he left the tape at home and thus it didn’t make it. The other collection suggests it also almost made Nothing for Juice, but who can say?

I love the version I’ve posted above, from one of the best live shows the band ever played. Darnielle says he doesn’t usual play four songs in the solo section but he’ll entertain a “phantom fourth” and is cut off before he can say what it shouldn’t be (“Going to Georgia” is a safe bet) and the lone cry is for “I’ve Got the Sex.” Every version is great, but the sweaty, horror-infused version here helps walk the line between the inherent sexual nature of the song and the circumstances that surround it. This is a song about sex, sure, but it’s about animal instincts more than romance. You can imagine smearing strawberries over someone being something done out of passion, but there’s something else beneath all this that neither of you want to contend with directly.

525. Song for Roger Maris

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

The real Roger Maris struggled with greatness, but the Mountain Goats version of his life really asks some deeper questions.

Track: “Song for Roger Maris”
Album: Unreleased

John Darnielle told a crowd in New York in 1999 a story about how “Song for Roger Maris” came to be. The real Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in 1961 for the Yankees, but people were conflicted on if this should be a record or not as the previous home run king, the immortal Babe Ruth, did it in fewer games because seasons were shorter in his day. Roger Maris, then and in his later years, seemed to consistently say that he wasn’t trying to make some kind of statement of greatness or anything, he was just hitting dingers because that was his job. Darnielle was fascinated by the fact that even being, for a brief time, the best in the world at what you do can still leave you in that state. It’s a very Mountain Goats problem to have.

He joked that he cared so much he wrote a two-minute song and then never released it, which is tongue-in-cheek but also just how he works. The only other recording I can find is this one in 2001 at The Olde Club, where a fan asked for it and told Darnielle he knew the first line. Both recordings include Darnielle laughing about the song and stumbling over a line, but that’s fitting for something like this. As always, I am most interested in that fan who came to a show in 2001, where it would have been so hard to have heard this in any way, and asked for it by quoting a line from it to the man who wrote it. The story of the song is great, but that fan’s story has to be worth hearing, as well.

521. Alpha Chum Gatherer

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , , , , ,

“Alpha Chum Gatherer” didn’t need to make the album, but it’s still such a wonderfully gross set of images to behold.

Track: “Alpha Chum Gatherer”
Album: Unreleased (recorded for Tallahassee, but not included on the album)

Just about exactly ten years ago as I write this, I heard “Alpha Chum Gatherer” in a sweaty room in Chicago. It’s the same performance you see in the video up top. I’ll never forget that show because it was the best version of “Wild Sage” I’d ever seen, but it’s also notable as one of a very few times you could see the outtake “Alpha Chum Gatherer” from the Tallahassee sessions. The song ultimately didn’t make the album because the band didn’t feel like it fit anywhere along the narrative.

Tallahassee is the story of the Alpha Couple, a story you can hear elsewhere in this collection. John Darnielle introduced this song with a joke asking where these two would come across a boat. That’s certainly a good question, but we can’t let that get in the way of the image of one of the Alphas waking up hungover and going fishing just to borderline (or not-borderline) punish their partner with their day’s catch.

I have said this a dozen times in this series, but Darnielle is heavily on the record that the ones that aren’t on the albums aren’t on there for a reason. “Alpha Chum Gatherer” fits the theme of Tallahassee, obviously, but maybe the best reason it’s an outtake is that it isn’t necessary. You know this already about these two. When one of them asks the other “what are we going to do,” it’s both a big question about everything and a simple one about fish guts. This has to come after the two have confronted the problem but before they’ve resolved not to solve it. In that space, a literal bloody mess may be gilding the lily.

520. Beat the Devil

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , ,

Someone gets arrested in “Beat the Devil,” but their mind is back in Memphis with someone we’ll never see.

Track: “Beat the Devil”
Album: Hope Isn’t a Word, a compilation from Comes With A Smile released in 2004

John Darnielle played “Beat the Devil” as part of the solo set in a show in Chicago in 2022. I went to one of the other nights, so I didn’t see it. That’s a shame, but the studio performance of this one really is good enough that I don’t feel too bad about it. Darnielle has said several times that one of his pet peeves is people insisting the outtakes are better than the songs that make the album, so I won’t say I think “Beat the Devil” is better than anything on We Shall All Be Healed, but I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking it.

Picture yourself as this narrator. You engage, to some small degree, with the results of running meth in your lumber truck in Arizona when you make a joke about keeping “glowstick babies fat and happy.” You’re tired, as we see from the effort you expend as you try to keep the truck straight so as to not attract attention. You’re doing the menial work of something most people never even think about. What do the logistics of peanut-butter flavored meth look like?

But that’s the surface. What makes this one so great is the person back in Memphis. What happened here, we wonder? So often in stories like this the focus is on the events that led someone to deal drugs, especially now in our post-Breaking Bad world. But it’s just as fascinating to wonder what happened between these two people. Maybe it was the drugs, but just as likely it was the standard-fare personal challenges of knowing someone and being known. The surface is a felony, but the sub-surface is the stuff that really, truly keeps you up at night.