Taboo VI: The Homecoming

232. Going to Alaska

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The best song on the first album, “Going to Alaska” calls a harsh environment “perfect” and opens up some grim questions.

Track: “Going to Alaska”
Album: Taboo VI: The Homecoming (1992)

The most enduring song from the first album is “Going to Alaska.” It’s also the first in the collection of 40+ “Going to…” songs that discuss the experience of going to places that include a small city in England, the southernmost city in Texas, and Maine.

The studio recording is rough, but that’s par for the course on the first album. “Going to Alaska” has bookends of samples from an episode of Hawaii Five-O, but it also sounds the most like the things that came after it. John Darnielle’s delivery is intense. That’s an easy word to use for him at any stage of his career, but it’s really the only word for a song that ends with a narrator insisting they are going to Alaska because it is “perfect for my purposes.”

It was a poem first. Bits like “up, yes” to start the second verse and the extended metaphor of heat as paint still carry a poetic quality. What makes it a Mountain Goats song is the delivery, with a building sense of nervousness. “You can go blind just by looking at the ground,” our narrator tells us, and we wonder why this person would say such a thing. These details about Alaska are true, such as I know, but it’s all akin to someone talking about how easy it would be to push someone off a building when they are both on top of it. It may be true, but why are you looking at me like that?

231. One Winter at Point Alpha Privative

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The first Alpha Couple song, “One Winter at Point Alpha Privative,” introduces us to two people experiencing new feelings for each other.

Track: “One Winter at Point Alpha Privative”
Album: Taboo VI: The Homecoming (1992)

John Darnielle has written dozens of songs about “The Alpha Couple,” a married-and-divorced couple that travel to Florida in Tallahassee, ultimately, and experience a particularly destructive relationship. There’s a lot of connective mythology through Mountain Goats songs, but nothing is more critical than these two. Many songs are explicitly Alpha songs given their title, but even songs with standard titles often appear to be about these two.

John Darnielle started writing poems before he wrote songs. “Going to Alaska” from Taboo VI: The Homecoming was one of the first, but the first Alpha song was “One Winter at Point Alpha Privative.” He has said that no one wanted to read his poems, so he put them to music and made them rhyme. Each verse of this one rhymes internally, which makes for a droning effect when sung aloud. The guitar builds on that and it will make you nervous to listen to, like an argument you aren’t involved in and shouldn’t be hearing.

Much of the band’s best work builds on these characters and it’s impossible to not add some mystique to the song as “the first Alpha song.” The lyrics are intense, with the narrator asking “is there something eating you // will it leave a single trace” of their partner. John Darnielle has said that he started the Alpha idea to explore his own feelings about divorce. While the characters have become more solidified and seemingly grown beyond his personal experience, this first look lets us see how John Darnielle began thinking about the end of love between two people and what they felt about each other after that gave way to something new.

230. Don’t Take the Dogs Away

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One character pleads with another, but you’ll never guess about what, in “Don’t Take the Dogs Away.”

Track: “Don’t Take the Dogs Away”
Album: Taboo VI: The Homecoming (1992)

There is a temptation to say something like “Don’t Take the Dogs Away” is about a person not wanting someone to take the dogs away. There really isn’t much to say about a song like this, but I am fascinated by the live performance that I’ve referenced before where John Darnielle played the entire first album live in 2014. Peter Hughes provides backing vocals on what may be the only performance of “Don’t Take the Dogs Away” in the thirty years since it was written. I love the image of Peter Hughes listening to that first tape to learn the lyrics and preparing to play it in front of a crowd.

The lyrics are simple, though not as simple as “Move (Chicago 196X)” before it. A narrator yells “you do this every time” at someone else, presumably in reference to said dogs. “Just look around the house,” they say, “what should I say to you // where do you want me to begin?” It’s an early look into the situations future Goats characters will find themselves in. It’s not really about dogs, probably, but it’s a fight about something that seems to have happened before.

John Darnielle has said that it’s not worth digging up Taboo VI: The Homecoming and he’s mostly right. When you listen to the two minutes of “Don’t Take the Dogs Away” you don’t walk away with much, but you do see the early signs of Darnielle as a songwriter. A narrator screaming “you do this every time” over and over isn’t very interesting in this moment, but it really is part of the start of everything else.

229. Move (Chicago 196X)

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You could get lost in trying to figure out the meaning of “Move (Chicago 196X),” but that won’t do you any good.

Track: “Move (Chicago 196X)”
Album: Taboo VI: The Homecoming (1992)

When John Darnielle played the entirety of his first album at a live show in 2014, he joked about “Move (Chicago 196X).” He said it was one of two songs that he knew had never been played live. He called the instrumental middle a “dream pop interlude” and explained that you can hear his mother talk to him and squeeze a toy pig into the microphone while he was playing piano.

It is difficult to imagine needing more information than that about a song that is, in total, a person saying “if you leave you’re gonna get athlete’s foot” in various formations for a few minutes. John Darnielle said at that same show “if my dream of ever turning us into a jam band is ever realized, you will hear this song again.” It’s all a joke, because it has to be.

I don’t know what the title refers to and I don’t know if there’s a deeper meaning to this one. I suspect the answer to both is “it doesn’t matter.” Thirty years ago, John Darnielle was not imagining people trying to figure “Move (Chicago 196X)” out. It probably would have delighted him. If there’s anything to draw out here, it’s the mindset of John Darnielle in the early nineties, not planting mysteries but taking what might be an odd phrase he imagined and exploring the space it creates.

228. Ice Cream, Cobra Man

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The first album is a strange journey, but “Ice Cream, Cobra Man” displays some of the intensity that comes after it.

Track: “Ice Cream, Cobra Man”
Album: Taboo VI: The Homecoming (1992)

I do not own a copy of the first Mountain Goats album, Taboo VI: The Homecoming. John Darnielle is consistent in his description that it isn’t really something you should track down. As far as I can tell, it will cost you a few hundred bucks if you want your own.

It is interesting primarily as a historical document. John Darnielle was very young and wanted to put his poems to music, and thus this collection of covers and original songs was born. There are some real choices here, with one song in Spanish translation tracked almost directly on top of the English, dialogue from television shows, and sound effects from John Darnielle’s mother playing with a toy pig into the microphone. It’s not quite outsider art, but it has a similar effect.

“Ice Cream, Cobra Man,” on the original tape, opens and closes with explicit, first person, discussion of a sex act. The versions online cut most of it out, which is a source of some controversy. John Darnielle played the entire tape live in 2014, but he also played this one song in Urbana, Illinois in April of 2009. At that show, he made no comment about what may be the only other extant performance of a seventeen-year-old song but did say later that he was talking less because his throat hurt.

It is very difficult to talk about the first album. John Darnielle hasn’t fully disowned it, but he does say it isn’t like what comes after it. “Ice Cream, Cobra Man” is an exception, and “I feel no pain as I float across your ceiling // I feel no shame // I am in a thousand rooms all at the same time” is, if nothing else, something another Darnielle narrator would like to shout at someone.

 

133. Running Away with What Freud Said

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“Running Away with What Freud Said” is the first song on the first album and sets up much of what came next.

Track: “Running Away with What Freud Said”
Album: Taboo VI: The Homecoming (1992)

There are four live versions of “Running Away with What Freud Said” online in the Internet Archive. All four are in San Francisco and all four are excellent. If you’ve never spent much time with live Mountain Goats shows, start with shows in California. John Darnielle’s always at his best in California.

I tell you that because you may not want to dive straight into Taboo VI: The Homecoming. “Running Away with What Freud Said” is the first song on the first album and it definitely sounds like it. The recording is rough, with some washed out noises and odd samples mixed in during awkward times. It’s the kind of album you can only love once you love all of the other ones. John Darnielle has consistently said that the first album isn’t great, but it’s a fascinating piece of the band’s history.

You should check out those live versions to get a real appreciation of this song. The album version is pretty catchy, but Darnielle’s voice isn’t yet the force that it became as he developed. Live, he screams something more into the character’s seeming madness and really elevates it.

“Going to Alaska” is the standout, but “Running Away with What Freud Said” works. The narrator wanders around Portland and recovers from a blackout. John Darnielle says the song is about a time he lost several days in his Portland apartment and the time that immediately followed. It’s fitting that his whole career opens with a person, in Portland, who isn’t quite themselves. You’ve got all the pieces there to construct hundreds of songs that followed.

090. Solomon Revisited

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John Darnielle mentions actual mountain goats for the first and last time in “Solomon Revisited.”

Track: “Solomon Revisited”
Album: Taboo VI: The Homecoming (1992)

John Darnielle has been consistent when he’s talked about his first album. He knows that people are fascinated by what they can’t find and the origin point of their favorite artists, but he still hopes you won’t look too hard for Taboo VI: The Homecoming.

Many of the early Mountain Goats albums are grating, but mostly in a way that serves their harsh content. The lo-fi recording reads as on purpose in a DIY sense and it gives the music a certain sound. The first album is too much in a lot of places, but Darnielle would tell you that he warned you. He’s said that he does stand by a few songs (“Going to Alaska” is the standout and he typically says so) and it’s still worth examining the album as a piece of Goats history.

The title of “Solomon Revisited” is a curious biblical reference, but the content is much more interesting. Darnielle’s narrator insists “I’ve got a radio” over and over to the point that Darnielle has said that what the song “lacks in subtlety it makes up for in radio.” This narrator introduces the listener to a type of speaker that shows up over and over again: an insistent person who doesn’t want help from outside sources. What they’re furious about is left up to debate, but they’re really set in their ways.

Nearly 30 years later, “Solomon Revisited” is not strictly required listening. It does serve as a bit of trivia as the only song in the catalog to mention actual mountain goats. The narrator says in response to a discussion of dangerous rocks “how long has it been since you’ve seen my feet?” because mountain goat feet are designed specifically for steep rocks. Educational!