The Mountain Goats Get Famous

In ‘Hospital Reaction Shot,’ a somewhat slept-on track from the Mountain Goats’s 2018 Hex of Infinite Binding EP, John Darnielle voices the final wishes of Judy Garland at the end of a life lived in the brutal gaze of the public eye:

Tell the papers that you’re dead
You’d want them to be the first to know

(Almost all songs mentioned in this article are linked in this playlist)

Garland’s fifth husband Mickey Deans, from whose perspective the song is written, describes himself as ‘the last to try to break’ the actress and singer’s ‘fall.’ Like most attempts to impede reckless momentum in a Mountain Goats song, Deans’s has been unsuccessful — that he is reporting this after the fact rather than, as often, in the heat of the moment, might explain the number’s elegiac tranquillity, its gently looping melody, Matt Douglas’s languid and surprisingly buoyant guitar line. Like her antagonist in Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West, Garland has now ‘gone down where the goblins go,’ and so has perhaps attained a kind of ambiguous peace after finding, at such an early age, both fame and its terrible costs as Dorothy Gale. The magical promises of the entertainment industry appear here in retrospect as volatile mirages:

There’s no kingdom
There’s no road
Just old sets where faulty flashpots explode

Nonetheless, Darnielle-as-Deans recognises that truth to Garland’s character involves going out regardless to face the cameras which had become, in this telling, inseparable from her narrative and her sense of self. ‘Head out to the sidewalk / On with the show’ are the last lyrics we hear before the goblins return, the song calmly polarised between two drives — one towards public performance, and one towards oblivion.

This is not the only song Darnielle has written about Garland, or her family. 2011’s ‘The Autopsy Garland’ enlists the production assistance of metal musician Erik Rutan to add suitably taut and doomy shades to a tale of the exploitative ‘fat rich men’ of early Hollywood to whose desires the young performer was implicitly sacrificed, though here too the fantasy of escape is inseparable from the fictions of that fateful starring role: ‘Look west from London, toward the Emerald City / Remember Minnesota.’ Elsewhere on the same album, All Eternals Deck, Liza Minelli confronts ‘your name on the sidewalk’ over Jon Wurster’s slow jazz brushes in the depths of a Hollywood breakdown:

Never get away, never get away,
I am never ever gonna get away from this place
Lay down on the street, my eyes toward the sun
Your star next to my face

As with her mother, there is still no possibility of Minnelli’s turning her back on the spotlight entirely: ‘Let the camera track me from the footlights to the wings.’ ‘Birth of Serpents,’ the album’s second track, features similar invocations to ‘the camera,’ a device supposedly capable of revealing ‘truth’ in ‘the fullness of the frame,’ and yet equally associated with ‘dirty work down there in the dark’: any kind of recording carries with it the possibility of mediation, distortion, loss, despite its seductive qualities. It’s not that the camera necessarily lies, but that the truths it tells for characters like Minnelli might not be those they wish to present to the world. Though the camera makes stars, it will also resist all efforts for those it documents to wrest back control: ‘Regrind the lens again and again and again and again / But still the picture flips.’

I’m thinking about all of this on the eve of the release of the Mountain Goats’s nineteenth studio album, Getting Into Knives, in the light of ‘Get Famous’: a pre-release single which bouncily exhorts the listener to ‘shine like a cursed star.’ It might be too far of a stretch to suggest Darnielle views stardom as inherently cursed, but the song’s movement from commendation — ‘You were born for these flashing lights’ — to admonition — ‘Be careful not to choke on your tongue’ — reminds us that this is far from his first warning about the pressures of celebrity and the extremes to which it can push human beings, onstage and off.

The Mountain Goats are not famous, in a conventional can’t-walk-down-the-street sense, but recent years have seen them grow from cult status to something on the fringes of a mainstream cultural presence, with songs in the soundtracks to high-profile films and TV shows and late-night appearances with Colbert and Letterman. The surprise March release of a lockdown boombox project, Songs for Pierre Chuvin, landed equally surprising chart positions: it was Darnielle’s first album to crack the US Billboard 200, and briefly topped the UK Indie Breakers album chart. The marketing push around Getting Into Knives is the largest I’ve seen from the band to date — a series of facts collectively indicating that the band’s public profile has never been higher.

In this context, I’m drawn to the many interviews where Darnielle has, with scrupulous politeness, addressed a tension between fan expectations of the strangled, stomp-and-holler intensity of his early material, and his own interest in exploring quieter and more varied soundscapes. This overlaps to an extent with a long-stated desire to separate the Mountain Goats work from biography, a logic underpinning the original choice of band name: without the distancing plural, Darnielle told podcaster Steven Hyden, ‘people would assume that I’m trying to introduce you to John Darnielle. I always wanted people to be sure, I am telling stories.’ Though much of his subsequent work has continued to be self-evidently fictional, that distinction began to feel less solid around the release of 2004’s We Shall All Be Healed and its follow-up The Sunset Tree: two albums in which Darnielle vividly evoked the traumas of surviving a youth and adolescence marked by verbal and physical abuse at his step-father’s hands, and a subsequent period of drug dependency in Portland, Oregon.

Taken together, these factors might underlie an increasing interest in the boundaries between private feeling and public expression which I’d argue starts to emerge in Darnielle’s writing from this period onwards. In 2010, to mark reaching 5,000 followers on Twitter (he now has 187,000), the singer released ‘Tyler Lambert’s Grave’ — a song responding to the suicide of a young performer whose mother, the actress Dana Plato, had experienced struggles similar to Garland’s around substance abuse and public scrutiny. Darnielle had documented some of these dangers almost two decades earlier, in ‘Song for Dana Plato’: ‘What kind of world is it, / That comes headlong at you, then swerves at the last possible second?’

The recognition that the pull of the past took a comparable toll on Plato’s son produces a piano-and-strings ballad of almost unbearable sadness, built around what the song itself acknowledges as a doomed fantasy of escape: ‘Let the dead of night hide you / From things you can’t forget.’ Characters in Mountain Goats songs are often reaching for the solace of anonymity — to ‘seek out a cave by the ocean’ to ‘wait out the rain,’ as Darnielle puts it in the first Knives single, ‘As Many Candles As Possible.’ But try as they might to run away and ‘live like an outlaw,’ there is always the threat of pursuit, of falling back into old clutches: between the ‘small dark corners [which] have designs on me’ and the ‘room full of ambitious young policemen,’ a figure like the narrator of ‘Night Light’ has few places left to turn.

Tyler Lambert is one of many who ‘Fall into a pattern / Never get unstuck,’ a trajectory which Darnielle finds all too familiar — ‘Anyone who can’t relate / Should thank God for his luck’ — but his proximity to the public eye only increases the stakes and the difficulty of any attempt at reform or disappearance. In an interview with Seattle Weekly, Darnielle expresses a sense of kinship — ‘you sometimes see your own face in the image of somebody who never quite got free of his demons’ — and though he had no direct experience of fame as a child, it’s easy to see how the lyricist might relate to the concept of a lost childhood. ‘Short Song for Justin Bieber and his Paparazzi’ revisits similar ideas in a more comedic key: ‘Even a rich guy needs some space / And should be able to get to his car / Without people all up in his face.’

The rich and famous, and those caught up in their lives, though it may be ‘hard to feel sorry’ for them, are liable to experience a feeling to which Darnielle repeatedly returns. There is a direct line from imagining how Lambert might ‘dream all night of freedom / Never wake up free’ to ‘Never Quite Free,’ the rousing-if-muted anthem of survival which precedes ‘Liza Forever Minnelli’ as the penultimate track on All Eternals Deck. For all that it gives the singer and listener alike a hard-won permission to ‘find the faith to saunter forward / With no fear of shadows spreading where you stand,’ it shares the closer’s acceptance that full escape from the burdens of the past is impossible: ‘Wish me well where I go / But when you see me, you’ll know.’

Perhaps ‘when you see me’ is the operative phrase here: once somebody has bought into the contract of public performance — has chosen, in the influencer-culture-baiting words of ‘Get Famous,’ to ‘Show everybody exactly who you are’ — it becomes very hard to re-draw the lines around the private self which are necessary for survival. This can go as far as affecting one’s own self-image, unsettling the sense of a meaningful division between person and persona. Witness the snarling wrestler of ‘Werewolf Gimmick,’ who has to be ‘told to maybe dial it back / Backstage later on’ — the implication being that a commitment to onstage ferocity is not so easy to leave at the door once the show is over.

Any number of recent Mountain Goats songs, from ‘Harlem Roulette’ to ‘Amy aka Spent Gladiator’ to ‘Shelved’ to ‘Doc Gooden,’ mine the complex hinterlands between performance and reality, though their perspectives vary. ‘Some no one from the future’ (a modest portrait of Darnielle himself) mourns the premature, drug-related death of Frankie Lymon; an ageing goth with a diminished fanbase refuses to ‘tour with Trent Reznor / Third of three, bottom of the bill,’ despite recognising that ‘the ride’ is long since ‘over.’ Responses to fame, renown and notoriety take as many forms as the personalities caught up in them — but the psychological toll involved in crossing of the threshold between onstage and off has emerged as one of the most powerful preoccupations in Darnielle’s writing.

2015’s Beat the Champ focuses entirely on the more selected fame enjoyed by 1980s minor league wrestlers, and works through some of these issues at a manageable scale (though it did lead to a heavy endorsement for Darnielle’s music from his own childhood idol, Chavo Guerrero Sr.) In ‘Heel Turn 2,’ a well-loved favourite goes through the turbulent process of disappointing the ‘president of the fan club,’ but resolves to ‘Drift down into the new dark light / Without any reservations,’ finally, authentically, remaking himself, whatever the consequences: ‘Let all the trash rain down.’ There is perhaps a kind of graceful resignation to the forces which shape public perception in these repeated vocatives. ‘Let the camera pull back.’ ‘Let the tube lights buzz overhead.’ Let somebody else worry about how the story gets told.

On the other hand, ‘The Ballad of Bull Ramos’ presents the establishment of a public profile as a source of stirring vindication. Set to an emphatic, climbing melody, the singer’s discovery that he is known and remembered for something, however shlocky, however exaggerated, is a force powerful enough to buoy up his spirits in the face of potential death. Bull Ramos doesn’t go down where the goblins go — not quite yet, anyway — he climbs up and over, strengthened by the power of his own cultural legacy:

And the doctor recognizes me
As the operating theater goes dim
Aren’t you that old wrestler with the bullwhip?
Yes sir, that’s me, I’m him

It’s not always such a bad thing to get a gimmick, to ‘listen to the people applaud,’ as the new single has it. But that tentative balance, between blessing and curse, between tailspin and recovery, is where a good deal of Mountain Goats songs live — and it’s likely that Getting Into Knives, released on Merge tomorrow, will see their dramas of public catharsis and private intensity playing out before a larger audience than ever.

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Richard O’Brien (@notrockyhorror) is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Northumbria University. He is a winner of the 2017 Eric Gregory Award for poetry, and is working on a book of essays about the Mountain Goats.