On Juhu Beach

217. Transjordanian Blues

Alex Russell On Juhu Beach , , , , , ,

A song of praise that’s filled with potential disaster, “Transjordanian Blues” fits right in with other Mountain Goats songs.

Track: “Transjordanian Blues”
Album: On Juhu Beach  (2001)

“Transjordanian Blues” has been played live more than a handful of times. In nearly all of the recorded performances, John Darnielle comments on the fact that he’s playing old songs and isn’t confident that he knows them well enough to do them justice. This isn’t uncommon for a Mountain Goats show, but it’s interesting that the sentiment combines so consistently with this specific song.

You get the sense that John Darnielle really enjoys the act of playing “Transjordanian Blues.” The liner notes call it a “sermon” but that’s also obvious just from hearing it. There are dozens of religious songs in the catalog, but few that are this direct. The strumming makes you want to clap along, campfire style, and the lyrics are infectious. By the end, he’s howling praise for the Lord and the audience, in every live version, is howling right along with him.

At a performance in 2017 in Australia, John Darnielle said that every live show in Pomona in the early days was “basically that for 20 minutes” after playing it passionately and loud as anything. It’s true, too. A lot of the early set lists are 10 furious songs played in under half an hour, with themes from the specific preparation of foods to the loneliness of the end of the world as a metaphor for a relationship ending. From the beginning, the man who would eventually write an entire album of songs with Bible versus for titles was interested in the power of things larger than oneself. It’s a song about the strength of salvation, but it’s also just a way to get yourself into the zone. It fits in with everything else not because of the subject, but because you can’t help but belt it out.

216. Bad Waves

Alex Russell On Juhu Beach , , , , , ,

A narrator considers how to get a very serious message across in “Bad Waves.”

Track: “Bad Waves”
Album: On Juhu Beach  (2001)

We have a price and a time. It’s 1972 and our narrator is staying in a twenty-dollar-a-night hotel in “Bad Waves.” The placement on On Juhu Beach tells us we’re in Asia, even if the Bangladeshi children breakdancing doesn’t. It’s a curious scene, especially with the mention of Waterford crystal in a banquet hall. We’re clearly somewhere expensive and we’re preparing for a revelation from our narrator.

The drone of the recorder really makes this one feel miserable. John Darnielle wavers his voice over the chorus of “the waves will tear us all to pieces,” sometimes pitching his voice upwards to show that this is a difficult expression to get across. The liner notes mention that this narrator wants to tell someone something, but is worried about how the message will be met.

“I will try to gather my strength // I will rest up all week,” they tell us. This is clearly complicated and it’s clearly important. In this expensive hotel with a grand setting, our narrator wants to be sure their audience considers the impact of what they are about to hear. After so much build up, the reveal of “the waves will tear us all to pieces” is shocking.

What are we supposed to make of this? The tone is despondent and the message matches. In the first verse, the narrator considers some boys dancing and says that waves will destroy them. In the second, the narrator says the same will happen to all of us. It’s a pessimistic message, to be sure, but is it what people need to hear? Our narrator seems to feel that way, but they also don’t know if this is going to go over well. Dark, brutal realism about death is not uncommon in the Mountain Goats, but it’s rarely this direct.

215. Hotel Road

Alex Russell On Juhu Beach , , , , , ,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBw9c-JtT1A

On a beach in the biggest city in India, a monk looks out over the world and reflects.

Track: “Hotel Road”
Album: On Juhu Beach  (2001)

Imagine that you are John Darnielle and it is the late 1990s. You have just written and released The Coroner’s Gambit and you are about to begin the work of All Hail West Texas. This is a big moment for you, though of course, because you exist in the present, you have no way of knowing that. In this head space, you write several songs that form small EPs. Many of them are about death, even more than usual for you.

“Hotel Road” opens the beautiful, but very different, On Juhu Beach. The album is out of print because it included intricate, handmade packaging. John Darnielle still loves complex packaging, but nothing is really close to On Juhu Beach. The songs reflect this level of craft, with an eerie specificity to them that makes you picture not just the idea of India, but a very grounded, very real part of India.

The liner notes tell us this is an old monk in a hotel room at the top of a building. The monk watches the world around them and contemplates their surroundings. The waves are clear and the children are joyful. In my reading, the ending finds the monk not embracing death, but wondering why death should be something we think about at all. “It’s hard to say why // I should come here to die” could mean any number of things, but I choose to read it as an acceptance of the passing of time, but not quite yet. Not on a day like this in a place like this.

120. World Cylinder

Alex Russell On Juhu Beach , , , , , ,

“World Cylinder” closes the delightfully strange On Juhu Beach with a message about ignoring your problems.

Track: “World Cylinder”
Album: On Juhu Beach  (2001)

Juhu is a neighborhood of Mumbai on the western coast of India. The beach is well-known and that’s definitely the Juhu referenced in On Juhu Beach, but the liner notes for the album are in Japanese. John Darnielle lived in Iowa in 2001 and released an album with Japanese liner notes and a title named after a beach in India. The packaging is hand sewn and the album itself is rare, which means you’ll pay several hundred dollars if you want a real one.

All of this is to say that the five songs that make up On Juhu Beach are strange. It’s the perfect combination of things that contributes to the mythos of the Mountain Goats. The Japanese liner notes include “explanations” of each song, and they’re fascinating translated. “World Cylinder” boils down to “dance music for uncool people,” which seems like a good summation of what Mountain Goats fans are looking for some nights.

The song is fun and bouncy. The repeated “do I have to hit you over the head with it” sounds exasperated, but you can almost hear a smile and a laugh in John Darnielle’s voice. This is just after the bleak The Coroner’s Gambit and just before the complex All Hail West Texas. John Darnielle describes On Juhu Beach as “really different and out there” and it’s easy to see why. It doesn’t serve as connective tissue between anything and it’s tough to assign an overall feeling to the five songs. The album title does create a setting: a person not interested in the specifics of the world, but someone who really just wants to hang out by the beach and ignore the things that can’t be changed. Just what they’re ignoring is a canvas you can fill in yourself.

013. Burned My Tongue

Alex Russell On Juhu Beach , , , , , , ,

The narrator of “Burned My Tongue” offers up a one-sided view of someone who left them alone on a beach in India.

Track: “Burned My Tongue”
Album: On Juhu Beach (2001)

The beach at Juhu is said to be beautiful, and it’s apparently the defining feature of the suburb of the most populous city in India. On Juhu Beach is also a suburb in a way, since it’s an out-of-print collection of five songs that originally came in a hand-sewn cover in 2001. The five songs of On Juhu Beach are all oddities, and at first glance the only tie that binds is the common element of repetition. Most of the songs feature extended use of the same line over and over, but none more than “Burned My Tongue.”

John Darnielle says “it burned my tongue” or “it burns my tongue” 12 times in the 22 lines of the song. It becomes haunting long after it’s already insistent. The narrator wants the audience to be totally aware of their pain, which is both physical and otherwise. They burn their tongue on a life-giving prayer, the name of a lover, a song they doesn’t want to sing alone, and the pain of being alone in Juhu, but also on grains cooked in butter. It might be too much to assume that it’s supposed to be funny that a person so tortured would accidentally mention one actual use of burning one’s tongue in the middle of so much dramatic language, but it certainly puts the character in perspective.

Not every narrator in a Mountain Goats song is in the right. Our hero here might be in Juhu alone, 30, and angry because of something they’ve done. They tell us “I gave you all I got // what more’ve I got to give” but that’s their opinion. We never hear anything distinct about the lost love beyond their impact on the narrator, and it’s worth considering how reliable they really are.