The Mountain Goats, Beer, Satan, and Chafed Tender Vittles

In the past I have been documented as having said that I possess an inherent distrust of people that don’t like Tom Waits or Godspeed! you Black Emperor. I feel the need to slash Godspeed! from the list, as these days I can understand how some people can not handle the Godspeed!. Sure, it still means that those people are stupid, ignorant, foolish and lost, but I can dig it. I’ve come to terms with the fact that some people can’t see greatness when it’s staring them in the face in the form of 45 minute orgasmic epiphanies all sputtering with strings, guitars, whispers and high tension power-lines spotted with miles of myopic magpies. I am now replacing Godspeed! with the Mountain Goats. If I come across a person that doesn’t believe in the greatness of the Mountain Goats, I will forever loathe them.
Saw them the other night, fuck, the words kill me. John Darnielle sings of the doomed, the troubled, the recklessly hopeful. People who have hit puberty, and decided that they know what love is via shitty pop songs and bad TV shows. They find a target, home in on it, only to have their love unrequited. Cue a year or so of self-mutilation, under-aged drinking binges, broken knuckles on unyielding brick walls, useless counseling sessions on Mom and Dad’s dime, and more drinking.
They also sing of a "past the last exit" kind of love– of people who have been in love for 20 years, in a various and identical mid-western trailer parks, from the POV of a person who has had a knife slowly driven into their face for the past 20 years or so, living the sucker life and wishing things could be the way they were at the beginning, when things were fresh, when love was awesome and not some rote exercise in lifelong tolerance. That love is dead, but dammit you’ve got to hold on for all it’s worth, because what else is there? Controlled... driven by those first few months or years (sometimes minutes, scant seconds even) when all things were pure, tender, stretching beyond the horizon, when, as Crowley put it, "Every man and woman is a star," and he wasn’t talking about a movie star. But alas the love is no more, that terrible realization that we all have to face at one time or another, unless you’re the protagonist of a Mountain Goats song, then you ignore it, turn your back on the obvious, and forge ahead fueled purely by memories of another time... a dead time. For fuck’s sake, what was was then and can never be again... love is rough, as it has every right to be. It’s no more than a feebly controlled nuclear reaction in one’s soul, ready to melt down at any moment, at the slightest slip-up.
But not all is hell at a Mountain Goats show as they pull their ray of sunshine, one admittedly draped in blood and gunfire, with "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton." Nothing ties a night together, hell nothing ties a life together when you can raise your beer with a room full of hipsters and sing along, as one voice, the words "HAIL SATAN!" Cyrus and his buddy surely went down in a blaze of glory and black trenchcoats, but at least they left us an anthem.
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It’s a good night to be a Bike Seat
Driving over the Burnside bride we come across the naked Critical Mass... 200 nude bicycle riders at midnight, on our way from the Mountain Goats to Tony’s Tavern. After a few beers, Billy Joel’s "Piano Man" on the juke, they come back the other way, and back again, back towards the river as they obviously had no intention of heading over the mountain and into Hillsboro, and beyond. Places like that don’t tolerate this kind of behavior, and more than likely, no one would be awake to appreciate it. This town is awesome, for all things nude and discombobulating for those under the influence. 200 nude bike riders. Beautiful breasts, vaginas, sad penises reacting to the cold night air, an awesome night to be a bike seat as naked vaginas, thighs, and assholes shift back and forth for kilometer on various styles and ergonomically correct seats.