Explosives in the Cargo Hold

By: eriamjh

Dec 16 2009

Tags: Band, The Mountain Goats, Washington DC

Category: Greyscale, Indoors, People, Photography

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As a Mountain Goats fan, there is something fundamentally disappointing about attending a Mountain Goats show. I had such a bad time at this show back in DC that I didn’t put a picture of it up out of spite.

There are a few reasons I hate going to Mountain Goats shows. Firstly, you’re never ever going to hear all the songs you want to, because he releases a billion songs a year and so couldn’t even cram them all into a set; but on top of this he insists on playing the awful songs like Lovecraft in Brooklyn and Deuteronomy 2:10 instead of the best ones like Masher and Alpha Rats Nest. I read on cokemachineglow the perspective that “he’s careful to give you just slightly less than everything you came for”, but it’s not even close to slightly. Between the cryptic if not inane banter that separates Darnielle’s inept piano playing and the fact that he seems to craft his setlist to make sure every single type of Mountain Goats fan will leave the venue feeling disappointed, it’s little wonder Mountain Goats shows are one of the worst things a fan can subject himself to.

But it runs a lot deeper than that. The very worst part of a Mountain Goats show are the people. Discrimination is very 20th Century but in this case I feel it’s not only justified but still fashionable – it’s astonishing how effectively Darnielle has corralled all the very worst of the dregs of music fandom, all the pretence and all the fuck-ups and unified them under one banner. There are the fans who line up at the venue two hours before the door time just so they can stand right under his nose during the gig; the fans who smuggle cameras with foot long lenses into the show and start clicking away whenever he starts using his outside voice; the fans who, in attempting to prove just how authentic their obsession of the Mountain Goats is and how much of a bigger fan they are than you, wear t-shirts they bought from a 1998 show; there are the fans who seem to stage loud conversations about whether Nine Black Poppies is better than Zopilote Machine and why, again just to prove that they’re more legitimate fans than you; and then there is not only the worst kind of person to have at a Mountain Goats show but the worst kind of person in the world: the heckler.

Hecklers start about ten minutes in, however some Olympic-level cunts start at the end of the first song. And they always yell for No Children. Always. He is never going to not play No Children. The only time I saw that happen was when he didn’t have a capo – and for those still yelling for No Children in the encore while he’s putting the capo on the fourth fret – if you were a Mountain Goats fan you’d stop yelling because you’d know that a capo on the fourth fret means No Children is the next song. Then again if you were a Mountain Goats fan you wouldn’t yell for anything, no matter how obscure, because he’s not going to turn around and say “hey great idea, I mean I was going to stick to this shitty setlist I had but hey yeah I guess you know better, right?” And even if he does, you’ve just perverted the show away from the obsessive idiots that sway underneath him with their eyes half-closed, purely for yourself. I mean that’s whole new flavours of selfish.

I hate Mountain Goats shows, I hate Mountain Goats fans, and I think I always will. But, as the most authentic, obsessive, legitimate and dedicated Mountain Goats fan in the world, I will always go to every single show that I possibly can, and hate it with every particle of my being.