John Darnielle was happy to leave “Rockin’ Rockin’ Pet Store” as a joke on the sidelines, but it’s worth your time.

Track: “Rockin’ Rockin’ Pet Store”
Album: Unreleased

Nineteen years ago this week, John Darnielle last played (as far as we know) “Rockin’ Rockin’ Pet Store” in Michigan. He opened an ask to the crowd about what he should play and the answers were, honestly, as someone who has heard hundreds of live recordings, surprising. One person asks for “Death Metal Band” and Darnielle says “we’ll get to that” (which he wouldn’t, interestingly, especially for the time) and another guy asks for “Store” many times in a row and is denied and unacknowledged. Let me just say again that “Store” is one of the best few dozen Mountain Goats songs but Darnielle has said he hates the yelling it requires, thus, again, we are denied.

But we do get this outta nowhere song that was old then and it’s two decades later now. You can read the whole story on the wiki about why it’s called that and how a moment with Franklin Bruno led to it. That may close the book on this one for you. For me, it’s always that early version with some form of the Bright Mountain Choir. They barely sing, compared to some of the other ones, but that younger version of Darnielle really hammered this one that one time.