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.

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.

519. Cutter

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“Cutter” hearkens back to youth, but it’s really a story about where you end up when you can’t help yourself.

Track: “Cutter”
Album: Unreleased

If you go to a Mountain Goats show in Bloomington, Indiana, smart money says you are likely to hear “Cutter.” John Darnielle was born in Bloomington, though he hails from California, and when he goes back he very often plays the only song that I know of that references his birth state. It’s a direct reference, too, and “I was born in Indiana thirty years ago” is about as direct as it comes. That line gets a “woo” invariably from the hometown crowd, but it’s an interesting song beyond that oddity.

It is easy, with a band like this, to speak in hyperbole. The band’s early official merch leaned into obsession with a slogan that became the name of a podcast with “I only listen to the Mountain Goats.” That said, even in that space, “I’m gonna wrap up my troubles in you” is extreme. So many Goats narrators are in dark situations, but this one defines themselves by it. You don’t say something like that unless you’ve, to some degree, come to terms with how things are going and you are dedicated to digging down, not out, of your hole.

The title references self-harm, so we’re obviously in a dark place, but this deserves to be grouped with songs like “Poltergeist” rather than songs from The Sunset Tree. There are brief moments that tell us this was once some other way, but this is beyond saving. There are a lot of Mountain Goats songs like this one, but I don’t know that the band has ever expressed that kind of frustrating inability to help yourself as succinctly as they do here. You cannot help but see this story for what it is.

518. You’re in Maya

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“You’re in Maya” was the first ever song John Darnielle wrote about himself, but it’s about you, too.

Track: “You’re in Maya”
Album: Unreleased

“You’re in Maya” is, if you’re of a certain mind, “the” Mountain Goats song. It’s unreleased and extremely rare, even among rare songs. It’s autobiographical, from an era where John Darnielle wasn’t writing about himself often. You may still hear someone yell for this at a live show, which I’ll admit I assuredly must have done at some point without knowing any better. But that’s the thing, you can’t yell for “You’re in Maya.” At one live show decades ago, Darnielle’s act of playing it was tied to an ask of if someone would “warm him up” a shot of Old Grand-Dad. It’s a specific thing, not to be taken lightly.

The song speaks for itself, in a way. The chorus is Gaelic, so maybe that sounds crazy, but you will immediately either remember this time in your life or you will recognize it as the right now of your life when you hear it. Every performance is a little bit different, to the point where the last four lines of the second verse get transposed in order half the time, but it always feels the same. This is an era where you play pinball until you don’t want to kill people. This is an era where you wear a coat that was important to your father even if you have complicated feelings about your father. This is where you drink and you hide out in Portland.

At some performances he says the address of the house he was in for the second verse. I went to see it in Portland, many years ago. Being in that physical location could be transformative, but it’s more about the time in your life. You’ll be this person, hopefully briefly, and you don’t need Portland to commune with them again.

517. My Favorite Things

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

The Mountain Goats owe as much to what’s in “My Favorite Things” as they do to a tossed off response to it.

Track: “My Favorite Things”
Album: Unreleased

If you want to hear something unexpected at a Mountain Goats show, your best chance seems to be in California or North Carolina, the two primary “homes” of the band over the years. Sure, John Darnielle lived in Portland and Chicago, and sure, he and his wife lived in Colo, Iowa during some of the most critical years for the band, but it’s undeniable they have their roots in California and they live these days on the other coast. San Francisco shows especially have a tendency to bring out the early, early stuff and the stories on stage that make up the mythology we all love to turn over.

“My Favorite Things” is one of the “early, funny” ones and often if Darnielle chooses to play it, it’s because he suspects someone in the crowd might have heard it when it was a staple of his performance back at Pitzer. At a show in San Francisco in 2002 he told a story I think of every time I hear something like “Beach House” where he says it took people identifying him as a person who writes funny songs to force him into the grim, divorce territory that, honestly, made him famous.

“My Favorite Things” is a silly little song about passion and, tangentially, listening to My Favorite Things by John Coltrane. It’s a fun one, but it’s extra fun when contrasting it with the trajectory of the eventual Mountain Goats catalog. You can hear “No Children” in here, sure, but there’s so much more that came out of a rebellion against it.

516. Carmen Cicero

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“Carmen Cicero” asks you in the lyrics to sing along, but I doubt that’s going to be a problem by the time you get to the end.

Track: “Carmen Cicero”
Album: Unreleased

There are some more “modern” ones that usurp this throne, but other than “You’re in Maya,” I think “Carmen Cicero” was the unreleased song I wanted to hear the most at shows when I started going to Mountain Goats concerts. At some point that feeling gave way to my favorite thing to hear a crowd yell: “just play what you wanna play!” I certainly, in my time, have yelled for some songs, but generally you get what you get, and that’s great, and it especially is true of the live-only stuff that only comes out when the band feels they can do it justice and the mood is right.

There are many versions of “Carmen Cicero” online, but the definitive one for me is this one, from October of 2000. The YouTube video cuts off the opening where John Darnielle demands the crowd sing when the time comes. The lyrics further demand your participation, directly, over and over. “And this is a song for your young men to sing when they run out of options” is the kind of thing that you hear in a certain mood, at a certain age, and you feel like you’ve never heard anything else.

Darnielle introduces the song sometimes with jokes about how much people want to hear this on a real release, but that you’d lose something. The final verse comments directly again that the song doesn’t have a chorus, but then ends in a devolution of “yeah” from the crowd. As he says at that performance, “every last one of you right now.” You need that room and those people who will do it with you. It’s something, still, without it, but it’s everything, there, with it.