Present Joys

I saw the Mountain Goats in Cincinnati last friday (14 jun 2013). It was as delightful and numinous as you’d expect. Some thoughts:

• I disliked the venue, which was the ballroom beneath the Taft Theatre. It was literally like a big, low-ceilinged basement room with harsh lighting. The sound was excellent, though, so I can’t complain.
• The opening band, the Baptist Generals, were excellent. A great mix of weird/artsy/distorty/polyrhythmy stuff and good, solid tunes.
• On to tMG: this whole tour, the band is just JD and PPH. The setup was very simple: two persian rugs, two guitars and one electronic keyboard for JD, and a bass for PPH. Super good. The stripped-down instrumentation was so much fun throughout the entire night.
• Specifically wonderful: the bass, the bass, the bass. Peter played that white fretless bass the whole time. (Which must be a new thing? The first time I noticed the fretless was last fall, and he only used it on a few of the Transcendental Youth songs.) I don’t know whether it was the more intimate venue or the lack of drums or Brandon Eggleston workin’ extra magic or what, but the sound of the instruments was crisp and articulate and wonderful.
• That isn’t to say that Wurster was not missed, because I missed him a lot! But it was so fun to have the bass as sole rhythm section. Several songs (“Alpha Rats Nest”, “Dance Music”) had fresh-feeling, reworked bass grooves that seemed to be a direct result of the simpler instrumentation.
• It was a cool set. Some old stuff, some new stuff. My two favorite parts: JD and PPH performing “Tallahassee” with JD on electric keyboard. Also: “Commandante”! There’s a song I wasn’t expecting to hear live. JD improvised some of the lyrics, at one point rhyming “the sayings of Chairman Mao” with “full Communism now”. Fantastic.
• Oh, yeah! “Alpha Chum Gatherer” is a real song, and it is very good.
• the bass! the bass! the bass! (Please imagine me shouting that à la John Flansburgh.)

Oh, how time flies! My all-time favorite Mountain Goats concert bootleg is fifteen years old! Have you heard it? Highlights include:

• Pre-Coroner’s Gambit versions of We Were Patriots and Family Happiness.
• A really good performance of Tulsa Imperative, a deep cut which JD wrote and PPH’s old band DiskothiQ recorded.
• My favorite version of Orange Ball of Hate (and I’ve got fourteen versions to compare it with).
• A fantastic cover version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Tell Me On a Sunday.
• Generally great audio quality (it’s a soundboard recording).
• Fun young-JD banter.

Listen to it! you’ll love it!

Cool, talented, fantastic people, photographed by John Vanderslice during the recording of Heretic Pride.

The campy-listening thing, I think, is false. I don’t think that there is any such thing, actually. This happens with age, that at some point you might have told yourself and others that you listened to the Backstreet Boys because it was funny. But in fact, you were enjoying it; it’s just a different kind of enjoyment for you. But I don’t think that ironic-distance appreciation is actually a different or lesser appreciation. I think most of that irony is an attempt to say, ‘These aren’t exactly my kind of people, and I don’t picture myself sounding like that, but I still like it.’ I don’t believe in ironic appreciation. I think if you like something, the core of it is you like it.