Mountain Goats

Am I actually being charged $10 for a shitty beer at a venue where the Mountain Goats are about to play? I was more curious than angry. How exactly did this happen, me at the Live-Nation-owned-and-operated Fillmore at the TLA, sipping a $10 Yuengling from a stadium cup while dude played “Going to Bristol”? If you’d have told me six or seven years ago this is what the future would look like, I would have been all “Yeah, and I bet Johnny Marr’s going to join Modest Mouse, too.”

Because when you look around a spacious, corporate-owned venue and see it packed with people there to see a songwriter whose ostensible charm was once the humble intimacy of his bedroom recordings, one’s knee-jerk reaction veers toward cynicism. But in this case, one’s knee-jerk reaction is wrong; this venue actually suited the Mountain Goats brilliantly. The last few times I’ve seen them, their live show’s been obviously growing, along with their audience, ambitions taking heed. Last week in Philadelphia, I finally felt like the size of the stage John Darnielle was playing was equivalent to the sort of stage he’s always been playing in his mind, writing anthems for years even when they were solo recordings played on a busted guitar and buried in boombox hiss.

In fact, the entire show was full of ecstatic energy from both sides of the stage. During a rousing “Palmcorder Yajna” early in the set, Darnielle—whose performance trademark is a mouth that routinely explodes into spasms of unadulterated glee—seemed even more euphoric than usual, frequently turning to give his bandmates mid-song facial high-fives. He almost looked like he couldn’t believe this was finally happening either.

People who go to Mountain Goats shows, diverse as they are, fall rather neatly into two basic categories. First there are the people who come in hopes of hearing the classics, the big sing-a-longs like “No Children,” “This Year,” “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,” “Cubs In Five,” etc. Then there are the sort of people who pride themselves on a meticulous knowledge of every nook and cranny of the Mountain Goats’ extensive discography, people who had to suppress squeals of delight as Darnielle played an Extra Glens song, people who once approached bassist Peter Hughes at a local restaurant, acting as inarticulate and starstruck as if they were 14-year-old girls and he was Justin Timberlake (and Peter Hughes was really, really polite to said people, even as his kind eyes flickered with an unmistakable desire to be left alone so he could just eat his hot dog in peace…em>cough). On recent tours, Darnielle has perfected a set list that reveals an intimate understanding of both of these types of fans. He plays some big loud songs with the full band early in the set followed by a solo mini-set during which he appeases the people who are there to hear the obscure stuff (such highlights in Philly included “Song for Dana Plato,” a Chiffons cover and former live staple “One Fine Day,” and one of my favorite Mountain Goats songs of all time, the unreleased gem “From TG&Y”). Then at the end, he plays the aforementioned sing-a-long songs. Well, most of them. He’s careful to give you just slightly less than everything you came for, always ready to dangle something unanimously requested just out of reach, knowing when you finally do hear him play “Going to Georgia” again, at some point on some fine day, you’re going to lose your shit.

There is one thing that unites these two disparate groups of fans: almost everybody loves to yell out song titles at Mountain Goats shows. Some guy always starts around the third song and then the floodgates open. And it’s easy to get cynical about this part, especially about that first “No Children” guy around the third song—does he really think they’re not going to play that one? I started with this kind of thinking at the Philly show, but I soon became humbled by the sheer heterogeneity of titles that people were yelling out. Picking from a catalogue that exceeds 500 songs, what sort of personal minutiae drives somebody to yell “Standard Bitter Love Song #7”? And then I remembered why I was once driven to yell “Old College Try”: the awful, glorious mistake of listening to Tallahassee (2002) incessantly during a break-up; the constant, quiet pain of that song’s deceptively cheery melody rolling around my brain like a marble; the world’s saddest organ solo, kicking me (still, pretty much every time I hear it) ever so gently somewhere between my eyeballs. “Standard Bitter Love Song #7” guy probably has a similar story that I’ll never know, as does the girl who wanted to hear “Weekend In Western Illinois.” I thought Darnielle was full of shit when he said he only just began writing autobiographical songs about a year ago, but I get it now: he has written hundreds and hundreds of songs that have scattered and burrowed, singularly, into all sorts of different lives. When he finally sang “No Children” at the end of the night and asked everyone to join, he said, so rightly, “This song is more yours than mine anyway.”

So, yes, even in a building bought out by Live Nation there are still things like this happening. Some talented artists still gain dedicated followings not because they embody some ephemeral trend but because their music makes sincere, intimate connections with people; there are still places where a guy nearly twenty years into a career that began with the sparest of means can lead hundreds of people screaming, in unison but for entirely individualized reasons, “I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.” If $10 beers and service charges on top of processing fees and the incessant grind of the indie rock hype machine have made you too cynical to recognize the beauty in that, then really, that’s your loss.