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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 9, 2016 14:34:57 GMT -5
We talked about the Creeping Things yesterday, so let's do a bit about the Cattle. There's a lot of stuff about cowboys in the songs. An unreal amount, actually. But it starts with Gideon being described as a "cowboy" in Sweet Payne: Gideon was living up in South Minneapolis He was the cowboy on the crosstown bus And all the little phillies at the Yukon Club Are gunning for the goldrush This is Gideon as a Skin, now with ready access to drugs; the implication here is that the girls, including Holly as detailed in Milkcrate Mosh etc., are gunning for what he can give them. Here the image is supplier : kid-with-habit :: cowboy : filly and in Cattle and the Creeping Things the variant is supplier : kid-with-habit :: cowboy : cattle There are a lot of references to the Skins as cowboys, most obviously in Look Alive and in Saddle Shoes. In the latter song we get: Shepard showed up when we were wrapping up the counting up He's coming off some problem block ... The Wild West begins right where your body ends Blacked out in blue jeans I never rode a horse but I'm sleeping at the saddle shop And so are most of my friends The Wild West begins right where your body ends That's where the Wild West begins The "saddle shop" is a real place in Minneapolis, namely the Schatzlein Saddle Shop at 413 Lake Street. It's kitty-corner (across Grand Ave) from the Yukon Club, which it seems used to be located at 320 Lake Street. Two blocks east is the intersection of Lyndale and Lake, mentioned in "Silver metal flake up on Lyndale and Lake / The boots and braces and the kid with the cape" [R&T], which as already noted is a reference to the Skins and Gideon. So this cowboy world is the world of the Skins and their drugs; Gideon and the others are caught in the middle of it. I've said that I've tried to stay away from things Craig has said about his music as a guide to what's happening in the story, but there was one quote that helped me a lot early on, and I'm going to bring it in here. I don't think this key was something he necessarily needed to reveal; the lyrics are detailed enough for the patient listener to sort everything out without it. But I'm describing my path through the maze here, and the fact is that I got a huge boost from this, both in terms of the information in it, and in terms of what it confirms about about how to parse Craig's lyrics. The quote is from a Cloak and Dagger feature back in 2004, still up on the Wayback Machine (posting the link and the full URL): web.archive.org/web/20040430210733/http://www.cloakanddaggermedia.com/features/craig_finn/features2.htmlThe stuff about Payne Avenue is key, but we'll get there when we talk about Sweet Payne. The other little note of importance is when Craig goes out of his way to identify the cowboys, of whom Gideon is one, with drifters. This brings us back to Cattle and the Creeping Things. CatCT is a fantastic Biblical epic (Creation, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, plagues of Egypt, Exodus, Revelation, and I bet I missed something) of the kids' descent into trouble, with commentary by the principals. It's another song where the time frame jumps all over; the tensions are from the middle of the story, but some of the events described are from the end. It opens with a particular conversation between Gideon and Holly "down [in] Ybor City," reimagined by Charlemagne from a vantage point over the whole sequence of events: They got to the part with the cattle and the creeping things, said I'm pretty sure we've heard this one before Don't it all end up in some revelation with four guys on horses and violent red visions Famine and death and pestilence and war? I'm pretty sure I heard this one before Well, you in the corner with a good looking drifter, two cups of coffee and ten packs of sugar I heard Gideon saw you in Denver, he said you're contagious Silly rabbit, tripping is for teenagers, murder is for murderers and hard drugs are for bartenders I think I might have mentioned that before They got as far as the creation of the "cattle and the creeping things" when Holly said to Gideon "I'm pretty sure we've heard this one before": the world of drug-seekers (cattle) and -suppliers (creeping things) is familiar to them. She asks, "Don't it all end up in some revelation with four guys on horses and violent red visions --- famine, death, pestilence, and war? I'm pretty sure I heard this one before" ... Well, says Charlemagne, commenting from outside the narration, let's see: - We've got you in the corner with a good-looking drifter. Here "good-looking" confirms that the drifter is Gideon, the "quote/unquote gorgeous guy" [HF] of Holly's party. The "corner" is where he was "camped out by the coat check" [Weekenders] (see also "Casanova's in the corner, and he's asking for a dance" [CiS]). And the interview quote above confirms that "drifter" is a gloss on "cowboy". So there's horsemen. - You're on speed, getting by with "two cups of coffee and ten packs of sugar" for food (elsewhere Holly is "making meals out of marzipan" [C&N]; compare also Charlemagne's "let this famine end" when getting speed-shooter Jesse cleaned up [SM]). So there's famine. - You got high (Denver signifying Rocky Mountain High) with Gideon and fucked him [MM], and he said that you're contagious. So there's pestilence. - Death's up next, and you can't say I didn't warn you: "The things that make you high will make you die" [HF]; that guy giving you the "hard drugs" is a "murderer." That's some pretty tight writing and we haven't even unpacked the whole thing. Here are a few more good things, still not all of it: - there's a further implication that, after death, war is coming; for a long time Charlemagne's been thinking about this, as we noted in the bit about his "revelation songs" and "driving around with Walter" [CF]. The "violent red visions" have a particular referent, but we'll get to that later. - "drifter": if we didn't have the Cloak and Dagger interview to refer to, we would find confirmation of the drifter=cowboy identity in the movie High Plains Drifter, where the cowboy title character turns out to be a ghost (Gideon = Holy Ghost). Too obscure? Maybe Craig thought so too, but it doesn't matter. More likely I missed a better link. - "tripping is for teenagers": there's obviously the elided "Trix/tricks" under tripping, but again it's the drug situation Charlemagne is worried about, not the prostitution. And "teenagers" is strictly literal: Holly's party (from MM/HF/SN) is her 19th birthday party. She was 18 when she went to California and got into porn; now she's back [C&N, MINTS]. Then there's "She said the theme of this party is the industrial age / You came in dressed like a train wreck": the age in question is the 19th, that is, the 19th century of the Industrial Revolution, when the train was invented (first steam train 1804). This is not a frivolous finding, there are points in the timeline which hinge on this dating and which confirm it. Craig doesn't waste a word, or a chance to make one word count for two. Since I've stooped to quoting Craig's authority once here, I'll do it again, because the industrial age thing might feel like it is getting a bit out there ... There's an old MAGNET interview from 2005, again up on the Wayback Machine ( link and full URL) in which Craig and the interviewer are talking about his lyrics: web.archive.org/web/20051024071900/http://www.magnetmagazine.com/interviews/holdsteady2.htmlAnd in a 2015 God Is In The TV interview ( link), the interviewer notes, "We had lengthy discussions about all manner of other things, such as ... his love of using ambiguous double meanings in songs." (Craig's first band was probably named No Pun Intended for a reason.) Back for a last note on "phillies" [SPayne] and "pestilence" [CatCT] while we have the Cloak and Dagger interview to refer to. Pestilence: In his comment on The Swish, Craig notes that "City Center is a lame mall in downtown Minneapolis that is 50% vacant with 50% low budget gangsters hanging out" (see link). We've already linked "bloodsucking" [Swish] to the bloodsuckers/spiders gangster theme, and it's pretty clear that the "guys that looked like Tusken Raiders" are Skins, but it's nice to have Craig make the association of City Center with gangsters explicitly. The implication of the hanging ending of the song is that they looked like Tusken Raiders, not only because they had no hair, but because they had some weird warty things going on (wikipedia's got a nice picture). There's nothing good about blowing dudes for money in general, but these two appear to have marked a particularly bad milestone for Holly. Phillies: the spelling is intentional, and links to the "Philly" metaphor in Killer Parties. "Philly's full of friendly friends that'll love you like a brother" [KP] refers, in part, to Holly getting stuffed by the same Skins who beat Charlemagne almost to death a little later on. Which we're getting to. I have to keep asking: if this stuff is a source of any kind of joy or satisfaction to you, and you could take just a second to say a prayer for Still Alive Carl when you're done reading, I would be grateful. Thanks.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 10, 2016 13:38:04 GMT -5
We talked about knowing where the boundaries of the universe are, and about having a pretty good idea that the Narrator, Charlemagne, and Gideon are the only male POV/main characters in the story. We obviously would like to work out the same thing with respect to the female characters, but this is complicated by the Sapphire problem. We started out by defining The Test as something that gets applied afterward. You can't deduce your way through the story. You have to try things out and see how far they get you. Every conclusion presented so far was just a hypothesis that (to my mind) has held up after a crapload of backtracking out of ones that didn't. Same for this next bit, only now I'm going to be a little more explicit about the try things out part. People have guessed that "Sapphire" was another name for Mary or Holly, and there are plenty of good reasons to do that (ignore for a minute the fact that Craig has said something somewhere about Sapphire not being Holly). Sapphire, we know, has precognitive visions [YS]; similarly: - Holly reports having had "visions" [CatCT]. - The description of the visions experienced by the girl in Both Crosses is followed by the exclamation "Hail Mary, full of grace" [BCrosses]. - In fact, Jesse too, as the POV character of Criminal Fingers, reports having had "visions" [CF]. So we have plenty of options for identifying Sapphire with already-known characters; quite rightly, no one wants to make this more complicated than it needs to be by hypothesizing yet another precog girl into the mix. Following this same line of thinking, I decided to see how far I could get with the idea that there are only three female POV/main characters: Holly, Mary, and Jesse. Add two more things we think we know to the mix: One: that the Narrator met Holly for the first time at a bar party [FN] where his band was playing [BBlues], when she'd just arrived in the Twin Cities after having traveled with Charlemagne from Lynn, MA [HM, CiS]. (We discussed this in detail already, I include the song references just to keep the basic evidence handy.) Two: that the Narrator met Jesse for the first time when she jumped him backstage after a show [SM]. Also, Jesse's a lot younger than Charlemagne ("I guess you're old enough to know" [CSongs], she identifies him with her father [CF, Magazines], etc.); if, as appears to be the case, the Narrator and Charlemagne are more or less the same age, we have pretty good reason to believe she's a lot younger than the Narrator, too. Now, Party Pit. I guess I met her at the party pit She said those kids she's with were selling it So we sailed off on some separate trips She got pinned down at the party pit I went away to school that fall She stuck around with all those stickpin dolls Sped through the scene until the engine stalled At some suburban shopping mall [chorus] I came back to start a band, of course ... The POV character here is the Narrator; he's the one who came back from school to start a band. He reports that he went away to school "that fall," that is, sometime in the year after meeting "her" at the party pit. So who's "she"? He met Holly in a bar after he came back from school. He met Jesse backstage much later than that (who was anyway a little girl when he was in high school). If we're running with the idea that there are just three main female characters to choose from, that means that the girl he met at the party pit, in his senior year in high school, has to be Mary. The girl at the bar party who says "It's good to see you back in a bar band, baby" [BBlues] would therefore also be Mary, who for the rest is identified as being present [Swish]. His response, "It's great to see you're still in the bars," is consistent with what we know of their past; he knows her from the drug scene, where she stuck around after he left [PP]. It's just a hypothesis, but so far it's looking all right. A quick note about what happens in Party Pit. There's been a lot of speculation in these boards, the Hold Steady wiki, etc. about "pinned" versus "pinned down" and the meaning of those words. The term is definitely "pinned," which means "high" in some way that isn't quite positive, as is shown by "she's pinned and way too shaky" [CT] and the annoying girl from BU who "asks if you want to come in and get pinned" [FB]. I think the confusion here comes from the fact that the movement of the music makes "pinned ! down at the party pit" sound like "pinned down ! at the party pit." Which is how it sounds, and which is definitely confusing. But there's an explanation for this, namely, that Craig wrote the lyrics first and then gave them to Franz to score, rather than fitting the lyrics to music that Tad already wrote. And Franz, like most of us not being familiar with the term "pinned," read it as "pinned down" instead. That's my inference from the 2006 Pitchfork interview ( link): Thank you for reading, and please think of Still Alive Carl for a moment if you can.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 11, 2016 13:15:05 GMT -5
Gearing up for a heavy week here, so I have to keep these a little shorter for now.
If the Narrator knows Mary from high school, that's interesting. His "It's great to see you're still in the bars" [BBlues] sounds a little ironic. There might be kind of a note of regret in "So we sailed off on some separate trips" [PP], some bitterness in "She stuck around with all those stickpin dolls" [PP].
Where did that come from? What happened?
Well, what else do we know about the Narrator's life in high school?
We know kind of a lot, actually. But the first stop we're looking for is Massive Nights: the story of the Narrator and Mary at prom together.
Everyone knows what kind of night it was. It was a massive night, it was perfect. Everything was right. They were all powered up. Everyone was cool. Mary and the Narrator drank, they kissed, they did more than kiss --- sometimes Craig swaps in the lyric "and we fucked in your church," but the sex is already in the album version: the Narrator was getting busy when he was down on his knees, going down on her, which is why the chaperone said it was time for him to leave [MN] ...
The night comes to a climax, and the Narrator learns that they've been crowned the king and the queen --- a moment of exaltation that he later identifies with the "unified scene" of his dreams [SPositive]:
When the chaperone crowned us the king and the queen I knew that we'd arrived at a unified scene And all those little lambs from my dreams Well, they were there too
It was heaven. But something's off ... the music falls away, and the last verse describes Mary in weird, ambiguous language [MN]:
She had the gun in her mouth She was shooting up at her dreams When the chaperone said that We'd been crowned The king and the queen
A gun in her mouth, and shooting? Shooting up? It sounds like suicide, it sounds like heavy drugs. What's going on?
Massive Nights alone doesn't give us enough to answer these questions. But we have an idea, now, why the Narrator is thinking about her later, in Party Pit. They've got a history together; she's an important person in his life. (Still hypothetically, of course. We need more confirmation to feel sure this is right.)
I hope this is getting more interesting and more convincing as we go. Thanks for reading, thank you for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 12, 2016 11:33:36 GMT -5
Massive Nights ends with the Narrator finally arrived in the heaven of the "unified scene" (we already noted parallels between heaven and the unified scene back in our discussion of Hostile, Massachusetts), as he and Mary are crowned the king and the queen of the prom [MN, SPositive]. But again, that last verse is strange: She had the gun in her mouth She was shooting up at her dreams When the chaperone said that We'd been crowned The king and the queen Along with the earlier questions: why "at her dreams"? We don't have enough to answer that question now, either. But we remember that Sapphire has "dreams," too, dreams that are explicitly identified with her precognitive visions [YS]. That's a second vote (after "Hail Mary, full of grace" [BCrosses]) in favor of an identification of Sapphire with Mary. This is uncertain stuff; we're a long way from being able to make a call about the Sapphire question. But we want to be keeping track of arguments for and against. Of more immediate interest, there are elements of Catholic prayer that keep coming to the front in all of this. 1) There's the moment when the Narrator was down "on his knees" [MN], praying to her in the sexualized way typical of Hold Steady songs (e.g. the famous "she was awkward and thoughtful and ascending into heaven dripping wet" of Arms and Hearts). 2) From Both Crosses we've quoted a literal prayer to Mary, the Ave Maria ("Hail Mary, full of grace") [BCrosses]. 3) And in Massive Nights, in the moment they reach heaven, she's crowned the Queen. In this context the words remind us of Mary, Queen of Heaven, and the two important prayers addressed to her: the Ave Regina Caelorum (Hail, Queen of Heaven) and the Regina Caeli (Queen of Heaven). About these prayers (all of the following is taken from Wikipedia): The Ave Regina Caelorum ( link) "is said from the Feast of the Presentation [the 'Meeting of the Lord'] ... through Wednesday of Holy Week," and begins: Hail, O Queen of Heaven enthroned. Hail, by angels mistress owned. Root of Jesse, Gate of Morn Whence the world's true light was born The Regina Caeli or Regina Coeli ( link) "is sung or recited ... during the Easter season, from Holy Saturday through the Saturday after Pentecost," and begins: Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia. The Son whom you merited to bear, alleluia. Has risen, as He said, alleluia. Pray for us to God, alleluia. The fact that the one opens with Queen of Heaven ... Jesse ... and the other with Queen of Heaven ... Halleluiah ... is pretty damn interesting, in the way that the occurrence of Hurricane Holly nine months before July 1977 & "the songs that everybody finally sings along" is pretty damn interesting. The fact is that none of the names in the story are arbitrary. All of them are meaningful. We saw that "Shepard" is an allusion to Tim Shepard of the Outsiders. In an identical but far more important way, "Mary" is an allusion to Mary, Queen of Heaven. She stands beside the Narrator, Charlemagne, and Gideon as characters mapped to the figures of religion (Mary, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost respectively). We're not close to done talking about this subject, but this will do for a start. In the meantime we're feeling pretty good about the hypothesis that the girl from Party Pit is Mary. This idea has led us to a number of conclusions that square nicely with what we know so far, and has turned up a few more things that seem very unlikely to be a coincidence, even if their meaning is not yet clear. So we're going to keep running with it --- always looking for more confirmation, but with a good deal of confidence that we're on the right track. We still don't know what's up with Sapphire, but we haven't yet run into anything that requires a fourth character in order to be explained; we can keep working on this too. I know there was more innuendo than conclusion in the above, but I need to keep things a little shorter this week. While talking of prayers, if you have a moment, please remember Still Alive Carl. Thanks.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 13, 2016 12:46:54 GMT -5
Let's get back to Charlemagne for a short series of things centered around Sweet Payne. (Sorry for jumping around, but this is how it really went: a little aha here, another one there, slow tunneling in from all sides.) From the Hold Steady Plot Chronology and other discussions it's clear that most folks are in agreement about the basic facts of Charlemagne's troubles. He gets almost killed once, as chronicled in Sweet Payne, and later gets crucified, as chronicled in Both Crosses. There are plenty of questions around the outcome of the crucifixion, but I'm pretty sure no one doubts that it happened, or that these are the two fundamental life-or-death episodes in his story. Thanks especially to Both Crosses, the different terms used to describe the crucifixion are clearly linked together: Charlemagne was crucified, stabbed, penetrated, punctured, etc. Physically, there are two main grounds for drawing this link. The first is Charlemagne's Christlike posture, per the brief description from Saddle Shoes: That one guy in camouflage dancing Eyes shut with his arms out like Christ The other guy was licking his knife And then it went white The second is the fact of his being stabbed in the side, as when Christ was stabbed in the side during his crucifixion [John 19:34]: She saw the angel put a sword in his side Of course Christ was stabbed with a spear, not a sword, and by a soldier, not an angel. Craig, knowing that he's got the crucifixion angle sewn up, isn't missing an opportunity to pack in extra layers of meaning here. Gideon is called an "angel" in part because of the link to the plagues of Egypt in CatCT: He said I got through the part about the exodus And up to then I only knew it was a movement of the people But if small town cops are like swarms of flies and blackened foil is like boils and hail I'm pretty sure I've been through this before The tenth and final plague that triggered the Exodus was the slaughter of the firstborn by the Angel of Death [Exodus 11-12]. Christ is the firstborn son of God; the Angel of Death is the Holy Spirit (see wikipedia here). Gideon is being cast as the Angel of Death; this is a fundamental scene for him in his role as the Holy Ghost. The other obvious allusion is to the angel with a sword that presided over another Exodus, namely the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden [Genesis 3:24]. We're going to have to come back to this Exodus idea when we have a little more detail about the circumstances of the crucifixion. But in the meantime I think most people will allow that this additional Biblical material is in there, and that the parallels are not coincidental. The fact that the second episode is clearly described as a crucifixion does a lot to help us through these multiple layers of meaning. But the description of the first episode is a little more "elliptical," to use Craig's word (see the 2014 Providence Phoenix interview, here), and we need to focus on Sweet Payne itself for a first cut at the details. The east side is where we met with those guys That said they'd get us high but that changed Now they're down in the basement And they're bashing out his brains Kids are getting cut up with the motorcycle chains And St. Paul had it all when we called And they were maxing out on medicine A shaved head and the blood on the bed And those guys you recognize, they got the same tattoos as Gideon At a very general level, what appears to have happened is that the kids met with "those guys" on the "east side" of "St. Paul"; the next verse confirms that "those guys" are the Skins, with "the same tattoos as Gideon." The meeting was friendly at first; the Skins "said they'd get us high." But "that changed" later, and some bad stuff happened; in particular, they started "bashing out [Charlemagne's] brains" "down in the basement," cutting him (and at least one other of the kids) up with "motorcycle chains." So as opposed to a stabbing, this is a beating, but also a flogging with motorcycle chains. For comparison, we have this from Runner's High: I remember a dream about you. Getting hit on the head And left to bleed to death in the vestibule. And then it came true. and this, from Banging Camp: When they say killer whales They mean they whaled on him till they killed him up in penetration park So again this is a beating, focused on the head, with lots of bleeding, which is consistent with the motorcycle chain flogging. So far so good. The last few words of the BCamp reference seem to complicate things though: they *almost* killed him, not killed him, right? And isn't penetration park the scene of the crucifixion, that is, the second episode rather than the first? The aha that puts these things together is that this first episode too is a chapter in Charlemagne's Christ story. See, just a few verses before the crucifixion stabbing, John 19:1-3: Then Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged him. And the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, and they put on him a purple robe, And said, Hail, King of the Jews! and they smote him with their hands. Here again, Charlemagne is in the role of Christ, sitting in Pilate's judgment hall. The motorcycle chains are the scourge. The head injuries are the crown of thorns. And the beating is when they smote him with their hands. In the 2005 MAGNET interview ( link), Craig tosses out a fantastic line that confirms this reading: Like Christ, Charlemagne is supported by money from women [Luke 8:3; see MINTS, CA, etc.]. He's "second-generation" like the Son. And he wears a "purple suit" like Christ in the hall of judgment [John 19:2]. Thank you for reading, and if you can please take a moment to remember Still Alive Carl.
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Eric
True Scene Leader
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Post by Eric on Jan 14, 2016 6:11:02 GMT -5
This is my first time checking the boards for a few months I think.. Just wow. I read your first post in full but became a little overwhelmed after that. Sorry, I'll try again. Anyway, My love to Still Alive Carl, I hope you find the Unified Scene shirt guy, And you really need to go to a show. Really. And meet Craig too preferably.
I am on the unbelievers bench to be honest, the one that says Craig's lyrics (just like any holy book) are mostly made up as they go along, yes there are parallels, but one can look too deeply. I believe that a lot of the parallels are just happy coincidences, and some are intentional. The Hold Steady catalogue makes for great listening when you can piece these things together in your own imagination but I wouldn't personally go further than that, trying to find some deep hidden truths. The truth is, everything Craig wants to say is there, written clearly, hidden in plain sight.
I'm also going to bring up the controversial subject of illegitimately-sourced B-sides. Some people on the boards think this is wrong, but personally I think if you cannot reasonably get hold of them, and if it is doing the band no harm, go for it. -> there is a blog out there called "Asides B-Sides". Again, many users have heard of it but wont touch it. Search for Asides B-Sides, and there is a full Hold Steady B-side and rarity compilation album to download, called American Music. It contains nearly all the extra songs that you won't find on albums. Some are only live recordings.
I hope this is of some help, if there are any other EPs or singles or whatever that you can't track down I will help you find them to buy.
Brotherly love, and a warm welcome. Eric.
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Post by delboydrums on Jan 14, 2016 7:41:17 GMT -5
This is my first time checking the boards for a few months I think.. Just wow. I read your first post in full but became a little overwhelmed after that. Sorry, I'll try again. Anyway, My love to Still Alive Carl, I hope you find the Unified Scene shirt guy, And you really need to go to a show. Really. And meet Craig too preferably. I am on the unbelievers bench to be honest, the one that says Craig's lyrics (just like any holy book) are mostly made up as they go along, yes there are parallels, but one can look too deeply. I believe that a lot of the parallels are just happy coincidences, and some are intentional. The Hold Steady catalogue makes for great listening when you can piece these things together in your own imagination but I wouldn't personally go further than that, trying to find some deep hidden truths. The truth is, everything Craig wants to say is there, written clearly, hidden in plain sight. I'm also going to bring up the controversial subject of illegitimately-sourced B-sides. Some people on the boards think this is wrong, but personally I think if you cannot reasonably get hold of them, and if it is doing the band no harm, go for it. -> there is a blog out there called "Asides B-Sides". Again, many users have heard of it but wont touch it. Search for Asides B-Sides, and there is a full Hold Steady B-side and rarity compilation album to download, called American Music. It contains nearly all the extra songs that you won't find on albums. Some are only live recordings. I hope this is of some help, if there are any other EPs or singles or whatever that you can't track down I will help you find them to buy. Brotherly love, and a warm welcome. Eric. Now there's a man talking some sense.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 14, 2016 13:22:20 GMT -5
Eric, thank you, this is great. There's only one song that I haven't been able to find some version of to listen to, and that's Teenage Liberation; I'll follow your pointer here and see if I can locate it. (I assume that Gideon's Conversion was a working title for a song that we now know by another name, otherwise that's another I haven't heard, or seen the lyrics to for that matter.) Of course I bought all the officially released albums but I know the band's main income comes from shows, which is another major reason to get out and see them if they tour again. That's a priority for me regardless.
About not looking too hard for a story, I get you, that's totally cool. If people think I'm seeing what isn't there, but can say a prayer for Still Alive Carl anyway, that's a fantastic outcome for me. I mean, I'm not trolling anyone; I believe what I'm writing here, and believe that it comes together in a really satisfying narrative (and maybe that'll appear better when I've summed it up and people can work back through the evidence from the end, I don't know). But my being right or wrong about that doesn't much matter in the big picture.
I've seen the T-shirt guy a couple of times since then but I haven't approached him. I know this is magical thinking or whatever, but it's like things with my friend are in a bubble, and I don't want to touch it. Maybe there'll come a time when that'll change. If I ever do see the guy at a show I'm buying him a beer, though, even if I can't tell him the whole story.
Anyway, thanks, seriously.
Picking up where I left off: in talking about the MAGNET interview quote,
I forgot to throw in the THS dealer=Savior metaphor. So that's a 4x mapping of Charlemagne to Christ, "pimp," "purple suit," "second generation," and "drug dealer," all at the same time. Craig's having a lot of fun with this.
I want to pull together a larger slice of the story today, tracing the background of Charlemagne's "scourging" through Sweet Payne, Southtown Girls and On with the Business.
Again, in Sweet Payne, Charlemagne gets very badly beaten ("left to bleed to death in the vestibule" [RH]).
In Southtown Girls, the fact that the guy on the other end of the deal says:
Hey Bloomington, what'd you let them do to you? Now I think they're almost through with you
tips us off to the fact that the POV character is Charlemagne, showing signs of having been beat half to death, and looking for a new source after the Skins have "cut off supplies" [OwtB]. Southtown Girls follows shortly after Sweet Payne, in other words, and foreshadows the worse handling to come in his eventual crucifixion.
And On with the Business opens with the following lines:
Let's get on with the business. I'm really sorry about that prick in the parking lot. I wanted this to be our year.
So, the "prick in the parking lot" is the dealer they met in Southtown Girls; the POV character is again Charlemagne, trying to put a brave face on his relentlessly small-time failure in front of the two friends ("I'm a little bit surprised, you didn't tell me there'd be three of you" [SG]) who've stuck it out with him thus far. Who these friends are and why they're there is important, but for the moment let's just focus on Charlemagne's own account of what's got them there:
First, he entered into a deal with the Skins to sell some of their merch for them (that's the Skins' business [Knuckles, SN, SS]).
Next, some bad luck (though you can't call it bad luck if you go looking for trouble, which is the point of saying that you gotta dance with who you came to the dance with) [YGD]:
Say a prayer for sweet Charlemagne. He had the pigs at the door. He put the drugs down the drain. He's gonna have to come up with seven grand some other way.
The "other way" turns out to be by letting Holly earn it back for him in exchange for drugs (he takes the money, and deals with the dealers in exchange). We get this in BBlues:
Holly can't speak, she don't feel all that sweet About the places she sometimes has to go to get some sleep She said "I'm sorry, people think I'm pretty."
and in Swish:
Swishing though the City Center I did a couple favors for these guys who looked like Tusken Raiders
and in Curves and Nerves, where "Geppetto" is Charlemagne, her string-pulling pimp and her supplier:
She said: "Hey if that's Geppetto tell that puppeteer that I ain't here yet ... And if he wants to buy me some I'll be in the kitchenette"
His idea is that he's going to pay back the Skins with her earnings, so that he can keep the supply coming, and keep his "business" afloat. But she gets tired of his exploitation and the increasingly ineffective stuff he's giving her ("Dead receptors" [OwtB; see MM]), and leaves for California [C&N]:
Charlemagne ... didn't really fit the plans she made
Now Charlemagne is really in trouble [MINTS]:
You left me fifty bucks and nothing much to do but think about getting back at you.
He's got no easy money now, and when he stops making payments, the Skins send a warning [OwtB]:
But they cut off supplies and they sent over some guys. And those guys they made it perfectly clear.
He gets the message, but then the phone gets disconnected [OwtB]:
They disconnected the phone last week. That's how we lost the connection
meaning that he can no longer contact them (the all-important phone connection, see "St. Paul had it all when we called" [SPayne]; "Sapphire, if St. Paul don't call" [YS]). Things are dangerous now, but because he thinks he's a born big-timer ("I only bow down to the jetset / They move so quick we haven't met yet" [ABlues]), he decides to go down in person to let them know it's under control [OwtB]:
So we went down to the taverns And tried to make an impression.
Of course the Skins aren't having any of his small-timer crap [OwtB]:
I said a couple things that probably weren't technically true. ... I know I made them a promise but those are just words. And words can get weird. I think they made themselves perfectly clear.
which is to say that they beat the crap out of him [OwtB]:
Blood on the carpet Mud on the mattress ...
where "blood on the carpet" brings us full circle to "cut up with the motorcycle chains" [SPayne] and "left to bleed to death in the vestibule" [RH]. So there's the full background to the beatdown.
More on the "taverns" and the Cloak and Dagger quote about the Payne Reliever tomorrow.
Thanks all again for reading, and thank you for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 15, 2016 13:21:52 GMT -5
Sweet Payne is vague about where Charlemagne and the others met with the Skins; all it tells us is that it's on "Payne Avenue" on the "East Side" of "St. Paul," in a place with a "basement" and a "bed." Teeth Dreams gives us some important additional detail: Runner's High adds that it has a "vestibule," and On with the Business locates it among the "taverns." The 2004 Cloak and Dagger quote we pulled up earlier ( link) squares with this: The first two sentences above map more or less word for word to the lyrics of Sweet Payne, no new info there: - "Payne Avenue": Payne Ave. - "East Side": East Side - "St. Paul": St. Paul - "seemed sane in the day": nice family area during the day - "but some nights it seems depressed and deranged": a little sinister at night - "the cityscape skins are kinda kicking it again": hotbed of activity for racist skinheads But then we come to the last sentence: There's a reasonable amount lurking in this sentence. First, it suggests that the beatdown happened in a bar, which fits with "taverns" [OwtB]. The plural "taverns" suggests that we're not actually talking about the Payne Reliever, but it's one of the bars on Payne Avenue, something on that model. It's not just an ordinary bar, either; it's a bar with music (and maybe other stuff going on that can explain "bed," too [SPayne]). The music part would explain "basement"; basement shows, like those at the "Dead End Alley" [CSTLN], were a fixture of the Twin Cities scene. And as it happens we have another account of the "almost killed me" beatdown that backs up the music angle, namely Barely Breathing. In the first two verses (I've added quotation marks for the direct quotes), we get: "You should have seen them just after midnight. When they were down on their luck. And still high from the street fight." Talking like it wasn't really much of a big thing. To be out on the tiles and barely breathing. We were barely breathing. "Showing up at shows like you care about the scene still. Where were you when the blood spilled? They almost killed me." It got pretty sketchy. We tried to push forward. Now we're pointing at the scoreboard And it feels so amazing. And the crowd's going crazy. The references to 1988 Minneapolis etc. in the third verse show that the POV character in Barely Breathing is the Narrator. But the song opens with a direct quote from Charlemagne, talking to someone who wasn't there when the beatdown happened. As in Southtown Girls and On with the Business, Charlemagne's trying to be businesslike, to play it cool about having been beaten to shit. (The Skins, we find out, had showed up at the bar after getting bested in a street fight, and were more than ready to take it all out on a provoking target.) Hearing him, the Narrator thinks the same thing: You're telling it like it was no big deal, to be "out on the tiles" (a double entendre like "bash," meaning both "out on the town" partying in the Led Zeppelin III sense, and literally "laid out on the pavement" post-beating) and barely breathing. And with the "We" of "we were barely breathing" the Narrator confirms that he too got beat up, though not as badly as Charlemagne ("Kids are getting cut up with the motorcycle chains" and "They're gonna show these kids some discipline" [SPayne] both have "kids" plural). But suddenly the cool attitude cracks, and we understand that Charlemagne is upset after all, upset with the person he's talking to: "Showing up at shows like you care about the scene still. Where were you when the blood spilled? They almost killed me." The identity of this person and the answer to Charlemagne's question are pointed to by two things, namely, the "Where were you?" recrimination itself, and the description of the beating in the next verse. Again: It got pretty sketchy. We tried to push forward. Now we're pointing at the scoreboard And it feels so amazing. And the crowd's going crazy. Here the Narrator is taking the whole episode for a metaphoric ride, describing the regular bar/basement show (see "violent shows" later in the song) as a stadium show turned into a sporting event (see also "stadium seating" [SA]): the crowd's going crazy, pointing at the scoreboard as the Skins "run up the score" on Charlemagne (see "Running up the score and stocking up like it's World War IV" [IHTWTDFY], "Tell her we ain't even keeping score no more" [AHFA]). This isn't the first time we've seen the Skins, stadium shows, and an accusatory "Where were you?" linked together. In Curves and Nerves, right after Holly tells her phone-answering friend to give Charlemagne the brush-off, we get: When the crowd went wild we were under the stands Mouths and hands, hands and mouths So many shows where nobody comes out "Where were you when the call came in?" "I was on a Rocky Mountain freedom binge With all the living members of the Cityscape Skins You and me and Gideon" The implication is that "when the crowd went wild" --- that is, when Charlemagne was getting beat up ("crowd's going crazy" [BBreathing]) --- Holly and her friend were "under the stands" using their "mouths and hands" to do some favors for a bunch of guys (who, under the circumstances, and apparently this happens a lot, never ended up actually going out to the show). So it's Holly whom Charlemagne is accusing with "Where were you when the blood spilled?" [BBreathing]. Unfortunately for his angry stance, the answer to his question is that she was out turning tricks, like she'd been doing all along to cover for his fuckups. Then he gets asked in his turn, "Where were you when the call came in?" [C&N] --- meaning, where were you when that "kid from California" [MINTS] called up Holly to invite her out to be in films, and she took off? His answer is that he was out getting high ("Rocky Mountain freedom binge" [C&N]) with "all the living members of the Cityscape Skins / You and me and Gideon"; that is, he and the others were at the Payne Avenue bar, where the Skins "[got them] high," "but that changed" [SPayne], and they almost killed him. ("All the living members" of the Skins are the ones who survived the bad-luck "street fight" of Barely Breathing. "You" is the Narrator, who's being quoted asking the question; we already know he was there. Gideon was there too, and we'll see more evidence of that later.) In both exchanges, Charlemagne's blaming Holly for not being around when he almost got killed; in both he comes off looking like an ass. Meanwhile, the Payne Avenue bar is established as a place where there's music / "violent shows" [BBreathing]. Still more on the bar and the Cloak and Dagger quote to come. There are a bunch of these "elliptical" descriptions that are all just talking about the same place and/or the same beatdown, and the more of them we can parse, the simpler the picture becomes. We're getting there. Thank you, always, for reading, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by lukeindetroit on Jan 15, 2016 16:05:13 GMT -5
Just getting to this but man is it really great stuff. Keep up the good work skeptical. Prayers are up for Carl
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 16, 2016 17:35:10 GMT -5
Thank you Luke, I really appreciate the help. I'm glad to know this is resonating, too. Back to that last sentence from the Cloak and Dagger interview ( link) one more time: That "metal" thing kind of sticks out. The Payne Reliever is long since gone, but a little googling suggests that lots of acts played there, not just metal bands, and an all-metal strip club seems like a funny thing anyway. What's that all about? Well, Craig's having a little fun; "metal" in the THS world is another double entendre, this one for "metal" in the sense of music generally, and "metal" in the sense of "silver metal flake" [R&T], which is the "strong stuff" [SPayne] that the Skins gave to the kids when they "[got them] high." (By the way, I should apologize for beating the words "double entendre" and "metaphor" to death. I'm sure there are proper terms for all these things in different contexts, but I don't know them, and trying to keep up with Craig's bag of tricks is enough of a challenge already without having to classify them, too. Basically, if one word is used to point to two things, I'm calling it double entendre. And if two different names are used to refer to one thing, I'm calling it a metaphor. Hope that works.) So now we can get back to those verses we skipped in Sketchy Metal: Went through a skater phase Went through a raver phase I went through a razor blade phase I guess I went through a hundred dollars a day It was dark along the edges of the city But the light shined through behind the reinforced doorways They're tipping over in the taprooms They're shooting through the ceiling and they're bleeding on the floor And yeah, for sure we got dosed We hung out pretty close with some questionable folks We got ideas from some dangerous thinkers We put our mouths up to some dangerous drinks Some nights we almost froze But we rubbed up pretty close to some rock and roll promoters Stayed up pretty late with some rock and roll performers It's always entertaining when you're hanging out with entertainers This is the Narrator talking about the years after he came back from school up until the time he met Jesse, with a detailed nod to the Payne Avenue beatdown in the middle. The first verse "Went through a skater phase ... hundred dollars a day" describes his descent into serious drug addiction over this time. There are other allusions to this framing, like "We were living up at Nicollet and 66th / With three skaters and some hoodrat chick" [HH], but we'll come back to that later. The second verse is a description of the Payne Avenue beatdown: - "edges of the city" = the "East Side [of] St. Paul" [SPayne]. - "reinforced doorways" = sketchy nighttime parties in bars that are more clubs than bars - "taprooms" = "taverns" [OwtB], the Payne Avenue bar - "tipping over" = Charlemagne down on the floor, "slumping over" [SPayne] - "shooting through the ceiling" = speed shooting (metal), "sailing off with cherubim" [SPayne] - "bleeding on the floor" = Charlemagne "cut up with the motorcycle chains" [SPayne], "left to bleed to death in the vestibule" [RH] - "we got dosed" = "said they'd get us high" [SPayne]; & second sense: we got beat up [BBreathing] The third and fourth verses pan out from there to talk about the Skins and the scene over the next few years: - "questionable folks" = Skins - "ideas from some dangerous thinkers" = "I guess Shepard came out of St. Cloud with a little ideology / Some new way of thinking, man" [IHTWTDFY] - "rock and roll" etc. = "For me, it was mostly the music / A crew to go to the shows with" [IHTWTDFY] Those last bits (in SM and IHTWTDFY both) show that, despite the experience of getting beat up, the Narrator and the others are still frequenting the scene with the music and the drugs, and still rubbing shoulders with the Skins. We've got a much clearer idea now what Charlemagne's worried about when it comes to Jesse. The "harbor bars" of Certain Songs and Hurricane J *are* the "taverns" [OwtB] and "taprooms" [SM] of St. Paul; Payne Avenue ends in the area of the Harbor of St. Paul (see for example link). There are Skins among the "guys along the harbor bars" [CSongs]. She gets with the music boys to provoke him [40B] because they're in the same crowd as those "kids [that] don't seem positive," the "boys that you met at the harbor" [HJ]. When he tells her those boys are "too hard already" and will "only get harder," he's thinking of Gideon the gangster Skin, who wanted to be "hard" [Knuckles] and got Holly hooked on meth. Charlemagne's got Jesse off the speed and cleaned up [SM]; his concern now is to keep her from going the same route that Holly went ("But twenty-two and banging around in restaurants / Isn't that much prettier than banging around in bars" [HJ, compare MINTS]). She knows that's what's on his mind, and knows how to make him worried. Given all that, an obvious question is: why doesn't Charlemagne leave with Jesse for New York, to get her away from the perils of the scene? In Certain Songs, we see him trying to persuade her that the East Coast is the paradise she's looking for (a "certain perfect ratio" [CSongs]); he definitely wants her out of St. Paul. And in Magazines, we know that she's threatening to go to New York without him ("New York gets pretty heavy, girl, I hope it doesn't crush you" [Magazines]), though the fact that she doesn't go, and that she later says she's waiting for him [CF], make it pretty clear that she won't go without him, that she's threatening to leave just to try to get him to "chase her to the lights" [Magazines]. In Spinners, we find out that she eventually does go to New York (see "She's two years off some prairie town" and "inbound trains" [Spinners]). So why doesn't he just pack up and go with her, especially since he's got no shortage of trouble in the Twin Cities himself? There's a reason for that, which we're getting to. One more pass along Payne Avenue tomorrow, then we start tunneling into the "spooky stuff" at the heart of the story. Bless you for reading, and for thinking of Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 17, 2016 12:30:10 GMT -5
For the last round of this, just a few more things we want to tie up: 1) sketchy In the songs, "sketchy" always refers to the "harbor bars" area on the East Side of St. Paul, and often specifically to the night of the Payne Avenue beatdown [SM, BCamp, YS, CSunrise, BBreathing, OwtB]. We saw this already with "Sketchy Metal" [SM], "It got pretty sketchy" [BBreathing], and in the immediate aftermath with "Now all our friends are acting / Sketchy and lifeless" [OwtB]. That "harbor" area, where "it gets sketchy in the night" [BCamp], is also the location of the "camps down by the banks of the river" [BCamp]. I'm sure everyone's seen the awesome "Hold Steady in the Twin Cities" map ( link), which helped me out a lot in the early going. We'll do our own overview of the geography pretty soon, since there are a lot of things that we can usefully add to the picture. 2) bar/club Going on a Hike describes the kids' continuing quest to get high in pretty colorful terms: "almost every night" they climb up to the "mountains" to get high, only when they come down they sometimes end up "dying down in cliche canyon," where "there's blood down in the valleys" [GoaH]. The song ends with a further description of what we recognize as the bar on Payne Avenue: We were hanging at a rock and roll club It was painted just like hell The bar was plywood painted black They have skull mugs up on the shelves They throw such killer parties But some nights you don't feel so well But you shouldn't be the singer in a be yourself band If you don't want to be yourself We have the "killer parties" that "almost killed me" [KP] taking place in a "rock and roll club" [GoaH]. This is the first time we've looked at a description that actually used both the words "bar" and "club," but we already understood that, even if it's not really a strip club like the Payne Reliever, it's not a bar in the ordinary sense of the word. There's alcohol there but it's mainly about the shows and the drugs and the "light [shining] through behind the reinforced doorways" [SM]. Nor is this the only description of the place that uses both the terms "bar" and "club" [Ambassador]: A 3.2 bars a stretch to call a club. It was called The Ambassador We're coming full circle now: the Ambassador, the club not the song, is the Payne Avenue bar where Charlemagne got almost killed. In that song, too, it's described as a hotbed of skinheads; besides the fact that "the halls smelled like burning hair" (they keep their heads trimmed and burn the trimmings afterward), the guys there are the same ones "you'd recognize" [Ambassador]: I'm pretty sure you'd recognize these guys. That were asking around for you just the other night. There was blood on the bed And the lights in their eyes. The language in Sweet Payne is identical, right down to the "blood on the bed" [SPayne]: A shaved head and the blood on the bed And those guys you recognize, they got the same tattoos as Gideon We still don't know what the business about the bed is. But we've definitely identified the locale. 3) metal bar Having paid some attention to the "metal" angle, we have no problem understanding that the "metal bar" of Weekenders is yet another reference to the Payne Avenue beatdown. The POV character here is talking to the precog girl, and says [Weekenders]: There was that whole weird thing with the horses. ... 'Cause I was thinking we could pull another weekender. If you've still got a little bit of clairvoyance. I remember the metal bar. I remember the reservoir. You could say our paths have crossed before. What do those last three lines mean? There's a major aha here, but to get it we have to put a few things together: - We've speculated that Charlemagne is the POV character here for a number of reasons. As we saw in Both Crosses, the precog girl is in love with him, and that squares with "if you swear to keep it decent" [Weekenders]. He doesn't just live off women's money occasionally [MINTS, C&N, etc.], the fact that he does is a real character trait, and one of the things on which the Christ parallel is built. The comments on Holly's party ("train wreck" etc.) seem to come from his perspective. We're pretty sure this is Charlemagne talking. - In these lines, it's at least clear that he's remembering key moments of shared experience with the precog girl. - One of the clearest things we know about Charlemagne's relationship with the precog girl is that she foresaw his crucifixion, and that she did something to save him or to try to save him from it [BCrosses, YS]. And the three lines here are preceded by a long verse in which Charlemagne muses about her clairvoyance. - We also have a clear idea that Charlemagne's story pivots on two critical episodes: the Payne Avenue beatdown, and the crucifixion. Now, the "metal bar" is definitely a reference to the Payne Avenue beatdown. We've already seen a lot of cases of meaningful symmetry in the way things are presented in the songs. If there's a second episode that goes with the "metal bar" in an overview of Charlemagne's experiences, it's likely to be the crucifixion. (And if the evidence of Yeah Sapphire! is a reliable guide, he survived it; which means that there is a reading in which it can be part of a retrospective, too.) When Charlemagne says "you could say our paths have crossed before," why does he hedge it with "you could say"? That's as much as to say that their paths didn't really cross, or that they crossed in some way that wasn't strictly literal. Well, he's just been talking about her clairvoyance. And we know that she foresaw the crucifixion. Under the circumstances, it is hard not to conclude that he means that their "paths crossed" in her visions. In other words, he's saying that she foresaw *both* the metal bar *and* the crucifixion. If this reading is right, we would expect to see evidence that the precog girl foresaw the metal bar beatdown. And thanks to our observations about "sketchy" above, we've got it. In Cheyenne Sunrise, we have: Onward Christian Soldiers We're gonna bash right through your borders I bet your next party gets sketchy I saw the new kids nodding off "Onward Christian Soldiers" is a reference to the Skins; in Look Alive, after talking about Shepard and his crew dressed in cowboy gear, the POV character says of them: They hang up at the Methodist So hard to be a Christian soldier there "Methodist" is Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital, which is where the Skins are "maxing out their medicine" [SPayne]; the "Onward Christian Soliders" quip is a reference to the hymn and the Methodist founding of the hospital. The Skins seem to have adopted the sentiment to their ideology in a rather particular sense. (More on this when we get back to the geographical overview.) The rest is all familiar: - "bash right through your borders": bashing out his brains [SPayne] - "I saw the new kids nodding off": slumping over smiling [SPayne] - "next party gets sketchy": killer parties, sketchy [BBreathing, GoaH, KP, SM, etc.] So there's the evidence we want, right there: "your next party ... I saw" [CSunrise]. The precog girl is the POV character of Cheyenne Sunrise, and she saw the beatdown before it happened, too. Of course the other thing we have to figure out, if we want this to stand up, is what in the world "the reservoir" has to do with the crucifixion. But that's looking like a good line of investigation at this point. I remember when this clicked, and remember thinking that I really couldn't put off working out the story precog girl any longer. That's where we are now too. More on her next. That was a long trip through the details of the beatdown, but I hope the payoff was worth it to whoever's reading along. Thanks for sticking with it, and thank you as always if you can say a prayer for Still Alive Carl along the way.
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john k
Midnight Hauler
Posts: 2,035
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Post by john k on Jan 17, 2016 15:42:08 GMT -5
try emusic. they used to have all the singles and bsides.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 18, 2016 22:54:58 GMT -5
Thanks John, I will definitely check that out.
I'm running short of time today, so let me try to keep this one from going too far.
The first time I had to start writing things down was when I first tried to work out the "who's where when" problem, before I realized that most place names are metaphors, and that most of the action takes place in the Twin Cities.
The second time was here, when I started to look seriously at the precog girl problem. Since most of the questions come back to Sapphire, I figured the best thing was to start with Yeah Sapphire!, write down all the identifying information we think we get from that song, and then follow the links from there to other songs.
Here's what I originally came up with. From YS, it appears that Sapphire:
1) is devoutly religious 2) has precognition/dreams/visions 3) foresaw the stabbing of Charlemagne (who is identified by "big sketchy mess ... almost killed me") 4) has been to "Sacramento" with him 5) has "touched" with him in the past, and has suffered some kind of physical violence as a result 6) won't let him touch her now; nevertheless dreams of him coming to her with love and gratitude 7) "left" before he almost got killed 8) is apparently in "Cheyenne" --- possibly the real Cheyenne --- or else Charlemagne wants to take her there 9) is associated with the horse motif
Several of the above items are deliberate misdirection on Craig's part, or at any rate are aspects of major plot complications that would throw us off if we sat down to explain them all at once. But if we're just taking them as optional identifiers, we don't have to worry about any of that --- all we care about is matching them up with other identifiers of female characters found in other songs.
The first and easiest link to follow is the "Cheyenne" link, which leads to Cheyenne Sunrise and The Sweet Part of the City.
We've already proposed that the POV character of Cheyenne Sunrise is in fact the precog girl, thanks to her prediction of the sketchy "killer party." But looking at the whole song, we see that this girl:
10) also "left" (for how long is not clear; also not fully clear where her "home" is) 11) was held back by "first Al Green / And then Barry White," which seems clearly to be an allusion to margaritas and then some harder, white-colored drug (can't say for sure if it's cocaine/snow/white pony, or heroin/white horse, or meth/ice; but it's probably one of those). The reference to margaritas as "green," and as having power to seduce in analogy with the music of Al Green and Barry White, is explicit in 212-MARGARITA ("I believe in salt along the rims of the glasses / 'Cause that makes us thirsty / And when we drink / Then we all fall in love" [212M]). 12) has an injured hand, needs a bandage 13) is refusing to get into a fight with someone at home 14) describes the perils of the Scene as they're trying to get high (tipping over in the taprooms/ living for the one sweet fleeting feeling) 15) has an awful cough 16) does her business on the street, apparently prostitution 17) sees a "Cheyenne sunrise" and notices that things are changing, that they're getting older 18) predicts sketchy violence at the other person's next party 19) comments on the sorry Christianity of the Skins
The Sweet Part of the City gives us a little more; she
20) is called St. Theresa, with reference both to her visions and to her religious inclination 21) is wearing "standard issue" "see-thru" 22) drinks wine 23) is associated with both "Cheyenne" and "Sacramento" somehow
All three songs have suggestions of addiction and prostitution and domestic violence in common, none of them quite strong enough to stand on, but definitely giving the impression of a single portrait. The other links are stronger:
She "left": #7 [YS], #10 [CSunrise] She has predictive visions: #2, #3 [YS], #18 [CSunrise], #20 [TSPotC] She's associated with Cheyenne: #8 [YS], #17 [CSunrise], #23 [TSPotC] She's associated with Sacramento: #4 [YS], #23 [TSPotC] She's earnestly religious: #1 [YS], #19 [CSunrise], #20 [TSPotC]
As it happens, two of these links are an illusion: the "left" of #10 [CSunrise] and the "left" of #7 [YS] refer to two completely different episodes, and the "Sacramento" connection doesn't really support the argument we're trying to make here. But I didn't know that when I first made these lists. And the fact is that the other links, which are the most important ones, do hold up. So, either way, the case for identifying the POV girl in CSunrise and "St. Theresa" of TSPotC with Sapphire is looking pretty good.
It's probably clear where this is going but I'm running out of time for tonight so let me call a halt there. Will pick this up where I left off tomorrow.
Thank you for sticking with me this far, and for your prayers for Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 19, 2016 21:36:47 GMT -5
OK, picking up where we left off:
If we're feeling good about the girl of YS being the same as the ones of CSunrise and TSPotC respectively, then we want to look at those songs in turn and see what they link to. In this case, the easiest links to follow are the bandaged hand and cough of CSunrise.
Start with the bandaged hand. Girls with hand/wrist bandages show up in a lot of songs:
- "Bandaged hands and your hacking cough" [A&H] - "I came to bandage up my hand" [CSunrise] - "Nine stitches and bandages ... So keep your bandages clean" [SS] - "I got stuck with some priss that went and sliced up her wrists" [YGD] - "Making love to the girls with the wrapped up wrists" [SK]
That Arms and Hearts quote with *both* hands *and* cough is obviously a very strong link, so let's start there. We already established that the speaker and POV character in A&H is Charlemagne, as established by the reference to Gideon burning "a hole in me." About "you," the girl in A&H, we learn that she:
30) is putting off Charlemagne; she won't go out with him despite his "positivity" 31) claims to be a princess 32) has bandaged hands and a hacking cough 33) is "kissing [Charlemagne] in the center" while the band played "Ice Cream Castles" 34) is awkward and thoughtful and ascending into heaven dripping wet
In #34 "awkward" there's a weak link to CSunrise "awkward"; but there are two far more important connections here:
She's putting off Charlemagne, who wants to "go out with" her: #30 [A&H], #6 [YS] She claims to be a princess: #31 [A&H], "I got stuck with some priss that went and sliced up her wrists" [YGD]
Without even looking further at You Gotta Dance, we see that it brings the princess *and* bandaged wrists connections full circle. That's a nice confirmation.
And two elements of A&H, #30 "maybe now you might go out with me / 'Cause I got so much positivity" and #34 "ascending into heaven," make a strong double link to Ascension Blues, where the girl says to Charlemagne (identified by "positive"):
She said I know you've got a lot of love to give But now you know you can't know where I live I know you're trying to keep it pretty positive And if it makes you feel a little bit better We're gonna all be friends in heaven
The Ascension Blues girl is thinking about ascending into heaven, like the one in Arms and Hearts. She's putting off Charlemagne in spite of his positivity, again like the one in Arms and Hearts. So this song too warrants a closer look. The Ascension Blues girl:
40) is sick of all the sucking up, again suggesting prostitution 41) is terrified of coming down, i.e. is drug-addicted 42) describes what seems to be a vision, and notes in a separate but insistent way that she's seen things on television 43) is referred to as "Diane Lane" of the films Outsiders and Rumble Fish; the implicit identification is with Cherry from the Outsiders, that is, a princess 44) has Charlemagne around, still trying to figure out if she felt anything 45) is religious 46) is again putting off Charlemagne despite positivity 47) makes an allusion to the sweet part of the city
Now we're seriously getting somewhere; there are strong links from every one of these points back to every song we've been looking at along the way, including the other explicitly precog-girl songs Chips Ahoy!, Both Crosses, and Weekenders:
She's involved in what appears to be prostitution: #16 [CSunrise], #40 [ABlues] She's an addict: #11, #14 [CSunrise], #41 [ABlues]; lots of suggestion of drug use in TSPotC too She has visions: #2 [YS], #18 [CSunrise], #20 [TSPotC], #42 [ABlues]; obvious links to CA, BCrosses, Weekenders also She's a princess: #31 [A&H], #43 [ABlues], and the YGD line too She's earnestly religious: #1 [YS], #19 [CSunrise], #20 [TSPotC], #45 [ABlues], obviously BCrosses also She's putting off Charlemagne: #6 [YS], #30 [A&H], #44, #46 [ABlues], obviously CA also She's associated with the sweet part of the city: #47 [ABlues] and TSPotC generally
We never got back to the cough, but this is a regular motif too:
- "She had a confident smile and a nervous cough" [BBlues] - "Nervous cough, nervous cough, nervous cough and now we're off" [MM] - "Bandaged hands and your hacking cough" [A&H] - "I've been mostly dying and I've been mostly coughing" [BCrosses] - "I know my cough sounds awful" [CSunrise]
The quotes from CSunrise, BCrosses, and A&H tie right into the heart of the group of songs we've been looking at. The precog girl has a cough on top of everything else.
That's a big network of links, and we're not finished chasing down the ends yet. But it's already led us to a couple of quiet points which add up to something big.
The precog girl likes margaritas [CSunrise] and has a cough [CSunrise, BCrosses, A&H]. That's Mary of Barfruit Blues:
Mary got a bloody nose from sniffing margarita mix
She licked her lower lip and then she kissed that Halleluiah chick She came off kind of spicy but she tasted like those pickle chips Thought she was a dancer but her steps they made the records skip She came off kind of crunchy but she went down like a chicken strip
Dripping wet with the special sauce She had a confident smile and a nervous cough And we got off
Even if we discount "dripping wet" [A&H] as a link, we already have a number of other indications that this is right:
- One is that, in The Weekenders, the precog girl is addressed as "you," while Holly, hostess of the Industrial Age party, is "she" by way of distinction (and again, Holly's party predates Jesse's appearance on the scene). - Another is that the girl in You Gotta Dance is clearly the Narrator's high-school-dance date, and the only girl fitting that description we know is Mary. We still don't know exactly what went wrong at the end of Massive Nights, or how that could translate to getting "stuck with some priss who went and sliced up her wrists" [YGD], but there are certainly suggestions of suicide at the end of Massive Nights too ("she had the gun in her mouth"), with the implication that this is related to her "dreams" [MN].
We're onto something now, and we'll see more confirmation as we start chasing down the details.
As for the Sapphire question, for the time being we can formulate it in a new way. The POV character of Yeah Sapphire is Mary, hearing herself addressed by Charlemagne in her vision/dream. What we really need to work out is why she hears him calling her "Sapphire" and not "Mary." The answer is complicated; it's not just that he's using another name. But there is an answer, and we're getting closer to it.
Thanks as always for reading; if you enjoyed any moment of aha or recognition in this, and can say a prayer for Still Alive Carl, I would be super grateful.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 20, 2016 21:17:44 GMT -5
Now things get interesting. If Mary is the precog girl, and is identifiable by all of these characteristics, we're suddenly in a place where almost every song we listen to has new oh-shit moments attached to it. So we're just going to run around for a while and collect them. (And again, this is how The Test gets applied: the more this hypothesis explains in a clear and satisfying way, the stronger it becomes. We'll get to the problematic claims about Holly and Jesse's visions [CatCT, CF] before too long, too.)
Let's start with one from the Weekenders (which, if our account of the metal bar / reservoir symmetry is correct, comes late in the story, after the crucifixion). Looking back, Charlemagne says to Mary:
I'm pretty sure I wasn't your first choice. I think I was the last one remaining.
We've seen that Mary wants Charlemagne, that she sees him as her Christ [Weekenders, BCrosses, YS]. But there was a time in high school when she was with the Narrator [PP, MN, and we think YGD too]. That squares with what Charlemagne's saying here, as far as it goes.
But what he actually says is "last one remaining," which strongly implies not "second," but "last of all, the last of at least three."
The obvious inference --- which fits with our earlier hypothesis that, for the purposes of the story, there are only three male characters, the Narrator, Charlemagne, and Gideon --- is that she's been with Gideon too.
Back to the opening of the Party Pit. There, the Narrator says:
I guess I met her at the party pit She said those kids she's with were selling it So we sailed off on some separate trips She got pinned down at the party pit
I went away to school that fall She stuck around with all those stickpin dolls
He met Mary for the first time in high school, at the Party Pit (again, we know it's high school from the next verse). She was there with kids selling drugs --- not the bougie guys from school, but the townies, like Gideon. They hit it off and went to prom together, but something went wrong and they "sailed off on some separate trips." Then the Narrator went away to school (Sept 1989), while Mary stuck around with the townie kids shooting speed. (I'm pretty sure "stickpin dolls" are "speed shooters" [SM]; "stickpin" = stuck with a needle and "pinned," which as we've already discussed means "high in a not-entirely-good way" [CT, FB].)
It was shortly after this that Gideon made his move, and gave her a formal introduction to this world of harder stuff. This is the story told in A Slight Discomfort.
I won't comment on the whole song here, just the parts that are essential to Mary's progression from the Narrator to Gideon. Gideon, the POV character, opens (in his normal voice --- this is years before he got jumped in and lost his mind) by saying:
I thought you're through with all the bougie guys. Don't you wonder about the other side? They only get invited because they think that they might buy.
This perfectly matches the opening verse of Party Pit. Mary, getting away from her princess high school, had started hanging out in the party pit with the kids who were "selling it," when the Narrator came along. Gideon's been watching her, and is surprised that she went with him: "I thought you're through with all the bougie guys," he says --- those upper-class kids who only get invited to the party pit parties by the townies, because "they think that they might buy."
A lot of revealing info about Gideon himself follows, but we'll pick that up later. He continues about Mary:
And you say you're a princess. But I remain unconvinced. I've seen the guys that you've been with. They don't seem much like princes.
And you say you're much better. But I don't quite believe it. I saw the girls that you came with. I saw the guy that you left with.
We note the confirmation that Mary is indeed the "princess" precog girl [A&H,ABlues, YGD]. The guys that she's "been with" are the "bougie guys"; the girls that she "came with" are the other upper-class girls from her high school; the guy that she "left with" is the Narrator. She's told him that she's much better than those kids, but Gideon doesn't buy it.
The next couple of verses about Jesus and prayer will make sense later, after we break down a few other things. Finally, the song ends with Gideon introducing her to the needle, and to serious speed for the first time:
This shouldn't hurt. But you might feel a slight discomfort.
There's lots more to be said about Mary and Gideon together, about Mary and the Narrator together, and about A Slight Discomfort, but we have to do a bit at a time.
Thanks for reading. Still Alive Carl is still alive, so thanks for your prayers, too.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 21, 2016 20:14:44 GMT -5
More about Gideon and Mary tomorrow, but in the meantime, a short one. We talked yesterday about "princess" Mary liking to hang out in the party pit with townies. So at this point there's no surprise in my saying that One for the Cutters is about Mary too. Though it's pretty obviously an account of Charlemagne's crucifixion, One for the Cutters seems at first listen to come from outside the main story. It's told in a remote, objective voice (like 40B or JaJ), and emphasizes aspects of the POV character that we don't readily recognize in any of the girls we know from the other songs. But once we realize that Mary is the "princess," and in particular that she's identified with Cherry from the Outsiders ("Diane Lane" [ABlues]), it's no longer a stretch to see that she's the POV character of the song. (In case anyone hasn't read/seen it, the Outsiders is the story of a group of working-class Greaser kids who get in a knife fight with upper-class Socs from the other side of the tracks; during the fight, Johnny, one of the Greasers, kills Bob, one of the Socs. Cherry, Bob's wealthy girlfriend, offers to support Johnny in court. The parallel with OftC is pretty hard to miss. Breaking Away, the movie from which the name "Cutters" is taken, has a similar plot line involving the conflict of townie kids and wealthy college students.) The Hold Steady wiki article on One for the Cutters ( link) records the following bit of lore: It's hard to know exactly what Craig said, or whether he was speaking tongue-in-cheek, but the song isn't really "about" Bloomington, any more than Milkcrate Mosh is about Denver. In fact, we can appeal to something else Craig said in clear support of One for the Cutters' place in the story, and for its location in Minnesota. The song begins [OftC]: When there weren't any parties she'd park by the quarry Walk into the woods until she came to a clearing Where townies would gather and drink until blackout Smoke cigs 'till they're sick, pack bowls and then pass out In the 2006 Pitchfork interview ( link), Craig said: The "quarry/woods" where kids "drink" and "party" mentioned by Craig, and the "quarry/woods" where kids "drink" and "party" in One for the Cutters, are the same place. Which means that Charlemagne gets crucified at the Party Pit. Things really are getting simpler. Though the implication of the rest is that Mary takes Gideon's side after the fight, which adds a new twist. For maaskesr: I saw your question about Judas/Jesus and Both Crosses in the other thread. I don't know if you've read this far, but if you keep reading, I promise you'll get a complete answer. Before that, I need to use what we've learned about Mary to clean up most of the loose ends left laying around. But we'll get to the crucifixion, and it'll make more sense if we get through the events leading up to it first. I hope this is starting to get a bit fun, anyway. Thank you for reading along, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by maaskesr on Jan 22, 2016 14:51:14 GMT -5
Just read through all of this. There are certainly things I didn't know before that I think are true now (Like anything Denver/Mountains being about getting high), and others that I'm still unsure about, but it's certainly an entertaining read.
I said a little prayer for Stay Alive Carl. I hope he's doing ok.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 22, 2016 21:34:58 GMT -5
Thanks maaskesr! I appreciate the feedback, and I massively appreciate the prayer. I was thinking that tying up all the loose ends through Holly's party should help, since then I can give a finished account of the story to that point. Today I need to finish with Mary and Gideon as a couple. But after that I think I can do it in about a week: day 1) what's the story behind the wrists and bandages? day 2) wrap up loose ends re: Mary and the Narrator at prom day 3) get a few things out of Hostile Mass and Stevie Nix day 4) wrap up loose ends re: the "first night" party day 5) get a few things out of Cheyenne Sunrise day 6) wrap up loose ends re: the metal bar day 7) wrap up loose ends re: Holly's party Some of those might run long, but we'll see how it goes. Back to Gideon and Mary as an item. Gideon and Mary got together when the Narrator went off to school, and they were still together when he came back four years later. Gideon is with her at the "first night" party, when all the kids come together for the first time [Swish]: Ginger and Jack and four or five Feminax Psycho eyes and a stovepipe hat A ray of light in tight white rayon slacks We got cracked We already noted that the "psycho eyes" belong to Gideon; he's the guy "with the wild eyes when [he asks] to get you high" [HSL] at Holly's party, among other things. (There's other evidence that Gideon's eyes are "special" even when he's not out of his mind with the Skins, so I'm pretty sure this is a simple description of him at the party, not a jump to a later time.) We also noted that the "stovepipe hat" is part of his magician costume. The "ray of light in tight white rayon slacks" is Mary; it's characteristic of her to wear revealing white clothing, or indeed as little as possible (there are other examples coming in the next few days, but "St. Theresa showed up wearing see-thru / It was standard issue" [TSPotC] will do for now). "Ginger and Jack" is a double entendre; it's ginger ale and Jack Daniel's mixed to go with the Feminax, but it's also a reference to Mary and Gideon. 1) "Jack" = Gideon Way back at the beginning of these posts, we saw that "He had a painters cap, it said Panama Jack" [HM] was a description of Gideon after he'd been "jumped in" by the Skins (the flaps on the back of the cap kept the sun off his neck after he'd had his dreads shaved off ...). There are a few other references to "Jack" besides these two that are all about Gideon; one is "'Cause Jackie Onassis said that it ain't safe for Catholics yet" [DLME]. Don't Let Me Explode is an account of Holly being questioned about her and Gideon's movements together after they left her party; they didn't go to "Dallas" because Gideon said it wasn't safe. (We'll talk about the Dallas and Kennedy metaphors later, gotta stay on track here.) 2) "Ginger" = Mary Mary's an Irish Catholic girl and a redhead. The best confirmation of the Irish part is buried in the middle of a huge tangle a little later on, we just have to wait for it. But we've already talked extensively about her religious character, and her praying for specifically Catholic "indulgences" on behalf of Charlemagne in Both Crosses. As far as the redhead part goes, it's explicit in "Ginger," but also implicit in what's just about the most important metaphor in the story. We've already noted several times that Mary is in love with Charlemagne as her Christ. In this she is deliberately modeled on Mary Magdalene, whose unfulfilled, reciprocal love for Jesus is a major tradition of popular Christianity, most familiar from works like Kazantzakis' Last Temptation of Christ and Rilke's Pieta'. The eternally separated lovers of the "Dos Cruces" metaphor in Both Crosses are Charlemagne and Mary, again in their roles as Christ and Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene is famously portrayed with red hair in Church iconography (see wikipedia on Mary Magdalene), and that's why our Mary has red hair too. ("That's why" in the same sense as "that's why Gideon always lives upstairs.") While on the subject of Mary Magdalene: there are actually Three Marys (see wikipedia on The Three Marys) in Western Christian tradition; and while there are different sets of three to whom the name is applied, the main ones are clearly: - Mary, Mother of Jesus and Queen of Heaven - Mary Magdalene - Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus and Martha We've already seen that our Mary is mapped to both Mary, Queen of Heaven [MN, SPositive, etc.] and Mary Magdalene [Swish, BCrosses, etc.]. But who's Mary of Bethany? She was the one who anointed Jesus' feet with costly perfume, and wiped them with her hair [John 12:1-8]; as is noted in her Wikipedia entry ( Mary of Bethany): So Mary in the THS story is identified with Mary of Bethany, too, by the fact that she foresees the death of Charlemagne. The visions as such are St. Theresa, but the precognition is Mary of Bethany. It's probably not too early for me to say here that Mary is the moral center of the THS story. Holly, Charlemagne, and the Narrator all take the spotlight at different times, but the whole narrative revolves around Mary. Already in the "first night" party of Swish and Barfruit Blues, we see that she's the one who brings them all together --- Gideon, her boyfriend at the time; Holly, her cousin; Charlemagne, her cousin's companion; and the Narrator, her prom date from high school whose band happened to be playing in the bar that night. On to the bandages tomorrow. Thanks for reading along. If you're feeling a particularly strong belief in miracles and can say a prayer for Stay Alive Carl, thank you very much for that too.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 23, 2016 12:09:37 GMT -5
When we were trying to figure out who the precog girl is, we noted that girls with hand/wrist bandages show up in a lot of songs: - "Bandaged hands and your hacking cough" [A&H] - "I came to bandage up my hand" [CSunrise] - "Nine stitches and bandages ... So keep your bandages clean" [SS] - "I got stuck with some priss that went and sliced up her wrists" [YGD] - "Making love to the girls with the wrapped up wrists" [SK] What's this all about? There's a constant suggestion of suicide attempts, or assault, or some other violent reason for the bandages. Yet we never see a hint of the violence itself, or even a motivation for it. The answer hit me one night when I was listening to Almost Everything. (That song is one of my favorites; I like the full sound of Teeth Dreams generally, but Almost Everything in particular has those round, ringing, liquid notes that manage somehow to suspend all the weight and the sadness that are in the story at that point in a deeply convincing way. Truly great.) The song begins: Something might happen but nothing will be never ending. Right from the start I told you I can't spend the night. Forget all the feelings. Remember the sessions. How we made a connection. With the lambs from my dreams looking up at your hands. And your hands pointing up at the lights. We recognize the "lambs from my dreams" from Stay Positive; the Narrator is the POV character (confirmed by the descriptions of the band's tour bus rolling into Franklin Ave. off I-94 from the east, and the lights coming up at shows). And he's talking to Mary, and talking about her hands. The image here is a deeply earnest one, and a religious one; the idea of Narrator in the band : kids at the shows :: shepherd : lambs is explicitly Biblical [John 21:15]: So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my lambs. So what is it about her hands, stretched upward toward the lights, that could make them the centerpiece of this scene of holy wonder? The answer is that they are bleeding, not from self-inflicted wounds, but from stigmata. (Have a look at the cover of Heaven is Whenever, too. That picture has a particular meaning in the context of the sequence of liner photos, but when you hold it up against these lines from Almost Everything, the suggestion of stigmata is really hard to escape.) Mary bleeds from holy wounds in her hands in moments of religious exaltation, especially when seeing her vision of Charlemagne as Christ. This is a very important element of the story, and we'll start working through some of the specific episodes tomorrow. But before wrapping up here, we have to stop for another look at the mappings. At the time Craig wrote the story (around 2004), there were three female Doctors of the Catholic Church: St. Theresa, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Therese of Lisieux. (A fourth has since been added, but let's focus on the ones we've got. Wikipedia has info on all of these.) St. Theresa we know about. St. Catherine is the foremost stigmatic among the female saints; Mary is identified with her because of the stigmata. St. Therese of Lisieux died of tuberculosis, and her religious writings often mention her cough; Mary is identified with her because of the cough. (In the story, the cough serves to show how Mary's body is being destroyed by her progress through the world of drugs. In high school, she has no cough; four years later, at the "first night" party, she's got a "nervous cough" [BBlues]; a few years after that, it's still a "nervous cough" [MM] but it "sounds awful" and "some nights it hurts to breathe" [CSunrise]; finally it turns into a full-blown "hacking cough" [A&H]. But it certainly looks like Craig's choice of a cough, rather than something else, to show this decline had something to do with reasons of metaphoric symmetry.) So Mary is mapped to all Three Marys *and* to all three female Doctors of the Church: Mary, mother of Jesus | Queen of Heaven (and more to come) | Mary Magdalene | unfulfilled love of Christ, red hair (and more to come) | Mary of Bethany | precognition | St. Theresa of Avila | visions, ecstasy of transverberation | St. Catherine of Siena | stigmata | St. Therese of Lisieux | cough |
There are of course a number of ways in which these actual Church figures overlap, especially in their ecstasies and mystic union with Christ; check out "Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy" and the "Transverberation of Saint Theresa" below (throwing in "The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Siena" and "Saint Catherine of Siena Receiving the Stigmata" for good measure; all these images are from their Wikipedia articles). But this is still kind of insane. Craig's bringing some serious skills to the table. Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy (Caravaggio) Transverberation of Saint Theresa (Bernini) The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Siena (Giovanni di Paolo) Saint Catherine of Siena Receiving the Stigmata (Beccafumi) Thank you for reading, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 24, 2016 15:51:09 GMT -5
So what happened with Mary and the Narrator at prom in the spring of 1989?
I'd figured out a lot of other things before this, including some of the important details of the crucifixion scene. But now that I see how long this whole explanation is running, I realize I need to start setting things out in story order.
As it turns out we have *three* songs about prom night --- all told from the Narrator's point of view, but each with a different emphasis. The three songs are You Gotta Dance, Massive Nights, and Our Whole Lives.
Our Whole Lives is the detailed account that answers the questions left hanging by the other two. I'm just going to go through the whole thing verse by verse.
The kids are ripping into sugar packets. Townies taking off their tavern jackets. I'm in the pews sticking bills in the basket. Praying that they're cool when I come pick up the package.
Tonight we're gonna have a really good time. But I want to go to heaven on the day I die. Going to make like a preemptive strike. Hit the 5:30 mass early Saturday night.
It's Saturday night before the prom. The kids are high ("We were all powered up on some new upper drug" [MN]), so they're eating sugar [CatCT]; there's excitement in the air. The Narrator is at the early 5:30 mass, making a "preemptive strike" for all the sins he's going to commit tonight. He's sticking bills in the basket and praying --- praying that when he gets to the package store (the liquor store or "packie" [MPADJs]) later, they won't give him any problems about buying a bottle, even though he's a high schooler.
Ring ring ring goes the telephone. Tell my little lambs that I'm on my way home. Stop by the shop and get a bottle to go. And maybe something stronger If the right guy's on the corner.
It's the Narrator all right, dreaming of his little lambs; tell them, he says, that he's headed "home," into the heaven of the Unified Scene. Compare Most People are DJs:
And when I dream I always dream about the scene All these kids they look like little lambs looking up at me
and Stay Positive:
When the chaperone crowned us the king and the queen I knew that we'd arrived at a unified scene And all those little lambs from my dreams Well, they were there too He describes the dream as a phone call; heaven is calling, he feels it coming. Time to go. He's going to stop by the packie and get a bottle to take along, plus maybe something to get high on, if the right kid is dealing on the corner.
Bang bang bang go the quarter notes. Saint Theresa told me we should rattle our bones. Now you're going off to the dial tone. Some kid started blowing on a saxophone.
Now they're at the dance and things are in full swing. The quarter notes are going "bang bang bang," full of sexual overtone; he's really into this girl, and wants her badly. Mary ("Saint Theresa" confirms that it's Mary) told him "we should rattle our bones"; maybe, he's thinking, she meant they should dance; maybe she meant they should fuck. ("Rattle our bones" is a reference to raising the dead by prophecy [Ezekiel 37:7]; the precog girl is giving him a hard-on.)
But something's happening; suddenly he's "going off to the dial tone" --- that is, he's going off, but all of a sudden she's not with him, she's off in her own world, as if the phone call from heaven hung up on him. What's she listening to? Some kid started blowing on a saxophone; what's that?
For me, this was a real holy-shit moment. There are a lot of places where Craig breaks the rules of conventional narration; lots of play-within-the-play episodes, unreliable tellings, selective accounts, etc. But I'm not even sure what you call this. Mary is getting excited, and slipping into her ecstatic state; the "some kid" she's paying attention to is her vision of Charlemagne, and the saxophone is a reference to the sax solo at the end of Hostile, Mass:
She hung a sleeveless dress up on a sleeved up lifestyle Girl you gotta cover that He was gushing blood from wide open wounds And she decided that she loved him ... They met as kids he was angry and angsty Yeah, she was a damned good dancer ...
Mary is the "damned good dancer," as we are finding out right now, at prom: "I didn't know that you could dance like that" [OWL].
She and Charlemagne "met as kids": this isn't actually the first time they "met" in her vision; Stevie Nix tells us that "she got high for the first time" and "got screwed up by her visions / It was scary when she saw him" at seventeen. She's eighteen now (and besides, the first time was "at the camps down by the banks of the Mississippi River" [SN], not at a dance). But yeah, she saw Charlemagne being crucified, "gushing blood from wide open wounds"; and right then, at seventeen, "she decided that she loved him."
"She hung a sleeveless dress up on a sleeved up lifestyle / Girl you gotta cover that" is confirmation of two things we've already noted. One, she's a princess (high-class provenance symbolized by "sleeveless dress," in opposition to her low-class lifestyle). Two, she wears revealing clothing ("sleeveless dress" goes with "tight white rayon slacks" [Swish] and "wearing see-thru / It was standard issue" [TSPotC]). It's not just showing skin ("sleeveless"), either; you can even see the tattoo on her lower back ("sleeved-up lifestyle" being a reference both to her tat-style lifestyle in general, and to the one she's actually got down there: "Girl you gotta cover that").
So Mary's starting to get pulled away by her vision of Charlemagne ("These teenage chicks ... I swear they must get sucked up by the television" [TL]). Without having a clue about the details, the Narrator knows she kinda goes off sometimes --- he calls her by the St. Theresa nickname --- but right now he wants to keep her here, with him.
Cheerleaders dream of quarterbacks. Jock Jills go for jumping Jacks. Goth girls love the vampire bats. They wanna draw a little blood for their bath.
I don't go much for all that spooky stuff. I like the lights and the uptempo tracks. You're damn right I believe in love. Because I've been in love and I've loved right back.
There's all kinds of girls in high school who like all kinds of guys; but he doesn't want any of them, and he's saying no here and now to the "spooky stuff." He likes the lights and the uptempo tracks. He's in love, dammit.
The words betray his vulnerability: the spooky stuff is coming straight on in front of him, and "I've been in love and I've loved right back" doesn't express a lot of confidence about whether she actually loves him. But he loves her, and damned if he isn't going to fight to have her love him too. So he steps it up.
Bang bang bang goes the backing track. Some kid is coming around with the magic backpack. I didn't know that you could dance like that. "I'm gonna have to ask that you take two steps back."
And it looks like he's winning. To his surprise and delight, she's a "damn good dancer" [HM]. On cue, as reported in Massive Nights, the chaperone steps in, and asks them to take two steps back ("I had my mouth on her nose / When the chaperone said that we were dancing too close" [MN]).
Sing sing sing every song we know. Blowing out the speakers on your stereo. You finally stopped talking about that boy back home. Maybe that's just better. If you want you can sleep over.
They sang and made noise until they drowned out the sound on Mary's "stereo" (we've seen a few instances of visions being described as telephone or television, and this is a regular metaphor; more on that later). And it's working; she finally stopped talking about Charlemagne, whom the Narrator at this time thinks is "that boy back home." (Mary either moved to the Twin Cities from Tennessee, or else in her cryptic, "weird-talking" way left him to understand that she did: "She always claimed that she was from Tennessee" [TSPotC].) So the Narrator makes his move, and invites her to sleep over. Yes!
We're good guys but we can't be good every night. We're good guys but we can't be good our whole lives. We're good guys but we can't be good every night. Father I have sinned. And I want to do it all again tonight.
And she went for it. He went down on her ("I was down on my knees / When the chaperone said that it was time for me to leave" [MN]). He has sinned all right. And he wants to do it again, tonight.
The townies taking off their tavern jackets. Making guitars out of tennis racquets. It's been getting so the hardest part. Is trying to talk some sense into our sparkling hearts.
He's high and happy of out of his mind now ...
Ring ring ring goes the telephone. Tell my little lambs that I ain't coming home. Yes yes yes go the majorettes. They lead the band onto the field with their cigarettes.
The "telephone" rings again, but with a summons that's a little less lofty than the Unified Scene (the Narrator means it in a tongue-in-cheek way, but there's foreshadowing going on here). Mary says "yes" to his proposal, and with her cigarette held high like a baton, she leads him out of the gym onto the field for round two (they "hit it again on the south side of the gym" [YGD]; this time she's going to go down on him). Besides the telephone and the lambs, there are other familiar metaphors here:
- majorette: "I saw a small town parade and the lead majorette / She made me feel all weak in the knees" [GoaH] (that is, he got on his knees [MN] and went down on her; that's another reference to the same event).
- the band: a regular way of referring to the Narrator; in You Gotta Dance, "say a prayer for the boys in the band" means "say a prayer for the Narrator," in parallel with the earlier "say a prayer for sweet Charlemagne" etc. We're going to see this shortly in Barfruit Blues too, where "We got the last call bar band really, really, really big decision blues" means that the Narrator has a big decision to make.
- cigarettes: in Milkcrate Mosh, too, the cigarette is the instrument of temptation: "Listen up closely to the lit tips of your cigarettes. / Can't you hear the serpent hiss? / Saying, sweet baby, suck on this."
Bang bang bang she's a cleaning freak. She scrubs the surface until it's sparkling. Neat neat neat until her fingers bleed. She was giving off blue light on the first night that she came to me.
They're outside on the field, on the south side of the gym [YGD], and now she's down on him ("bang" is again a double entendre with the second meaning "fuck"). She's "scrubbing [his] surface until it's sparkling" ...
And then something weird happens: her fingers start bleeding. At the time, the Narrator thinks it's because she was "scrubbing" him too hard. But we know what's really going on: she's seeing Charlemagne, and like St. Theresa being pierced by Christ's lance, she's in ecstasy, and bleeding from her stigmata.
The meaning of "came to me" is obviously sexual, and "blue light" has a double meaning: there's the sexual expression meaning "to be turned on," like in the Talking Heads song Creatures of Love: "when the blue spark hits your brain"; but in the case of Mary, it's the blue light of the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven.
So the Narrator didn't win after all: she's been exalted to heaven all right, but away from him, not with him. This, we realize, is the meaning of the Party Pit line "So we sailed off on some separate trips": the Narrator thought he was going off with Mary, but Mary was going off with Charlemagne.
We're good guys but we can't be good every night. We're good guys but we can't be good our whole lives. We're good guys but we can't be good every night. We're good guys but we can't be good our whole lives.
She was giving off blue light on the first night that she came to me. Father I have sinned and I want to do it all again eventually.
And that last line is also full of foreshadowing: he wants to do it all again ... eventually. Maybe he can't be good his whole life. But he's going to be waiting for Mary for a long, long time.
Most of the end of the You Gotta Dance take on the story is now explained:
So say a prayer for the boys in the band. I was out of my head so it was out of my hands. White wine and some tallboy cans. They powered up and they proceeded to jam, man.
Hit it again on the south side of the gym and my one friend got two girls in a twist. I got stuck with some priss that went and sliced up her wrists. But you know you gotta dance with who you came to the dance with.
The Narrator ("the boys in the band") was out of his head, all right ("the hardest part / Is trying to talk some sense into our sparkling hearts" [OWL]); he was drunk (for "White wine" [YGD] see also "All that wine was tight" [MN]) and high (for "powered up" [YGD] see also "all powered up on some new upper drug" [MN]), and partying with all his might.
Then, after he went down on her and got told to leave by the chaperone, she took him outside to "south side of the gym" where they "hit it again," meaning that she went down on him. But his "one friend" --- this, in a nod to the future, is Charlemagne --- "got two girls," including Mary, "in a twist" (there's both the high-school dance "twist" meaning, and the "tangled-up" meaning here). We know enough to realize that the second girl could be either Holly or Jesse, depending on how you look at it. There's a precise meaning, but we're going to have to come back to it later, when we know more about how things go with the girls in the years after Holly's party.
At any rate, Charlemagne's "presence" caught Mary up and carried her away, and the Narrator was left with someone who wasn't with him, someone bleeding from her hands: "I got stuck with some priss that went and sliced up her wrists." And now, well, "you gotta dance with who you came to the dance with." Craig's spent the earlier part of the song expertly setting up the metaphoric meaning of the phrase --- that when you voluntarily go down a path, you have to live with the consequences --- and then flips from that into this strictly literal use, which, loaded with all the weight of the metaphor, hits like a knockout punch. Nowhere to hide from it. This is just brilliant writing.
And the end of Massive Nights:
She had the gun in her mouth And she was shooting up at her dreams When the chaperone said that we'd been crowned The king and the queen
We know now that "the gun in her mouth" is when Mary's going down on him outside. On the one hand he's the one doing the "shooting," but on the other, it's she who's going off on a trip in the world of her "dreams," with the vision of Charlemagne overpowering her experience and her senses.
The chaperone's announcement lands ironically, with the same party-killing force of "we were dancing too close" and "it was time for me to leave," but 1000x heavier. It's over.
Just to complete the story, we get a view of these same events from Mary's point of view in Ascension Blues, when she tells Charlemagne about what *she* saw that night [ABlues]:
She said he looked like Jimmy Connors She said he tasted like the Calvin Klein She said we had a pretty huge time
He came onto the court and he knelt before the sword There was feedback in the speakers and the soundman fried the board I'm pretty sure I went there once before
There are three bits that identify this as the same scene on prom night:
- "court": they're in the gym for the dance [see YGD, OWL]
- "he knelt before the sword": the vision she's having is the vision of Charlemagne-Christ's "crucifixion," that is, his being stabbed; his kneeling before the knife is overlaid on the Narrator getting "down on [his] knees" to make her come [MN, GoaH].
- "There was feedback in the speakers and the soundman fried the board": the Narrator thinks that with enough singing and noise he's "Blowing out the speakers on your stereo" [OWL], but he's got it backward; it's the vision of Charlemagne that's blowing out her actual sensations, so that all she sees / hears / feels is him.
And we can fill in most of the rest:
- "She said he tasted like the Calvin Klein": Calvin Klein underwear, that is; she went down on him [YGD, OWL].
- "She said we had a pretty huge time": they had a Massive Night.
- "I'm pretty sure I went there once before": yeah, it's not something Charlemagne can really remember, but he was there all right. (Both the significance and the hedging expression are like that of "You could say our paths have crossed before" [Weekenders]; see also "They met as kids" [HM]).
- "She said he looked like Jimmy Connors": there's a lot to explain here, but for now consider that Craig basically used an extra verse in OWL just to mention "The townies taking off their tavern jackets. / Making guitars out of tennis racquets." The tennis racquets give us Jimmy Connors; in Mary's vision of the crucifixion, Charlemagne is dressed like a townie. And that fits with what we know from One for the Cutters and Both Crosses: the crucifixion takes place at a townie party in the Party Pit. It also explains something about princess Mary's "hard to describe" [OftC] attraction to townies.
I love these songs. YGD is so compact and so brilliant. MN manages to take the elements of this devastating moment and spin them into an anthem of high-school nostalgia that the world can relate to. And OWL makes us feel the excitement and innocence of the Narrator, and his subsequent heartbreak, in a way that is carefully guarded almost everywhere else.
It wasn't until the thing with the saxophone hit me that I understood who the Narrator really is, and where he's at through this whole long epic. He's in love with Mary, and has been from day one. She's going to a dark place with her eyes on someone else. But because he loves her, he's going to stick with her the whole way.
These things always take much longer to write out than I ever imagined they would. My apologies to people reading along who wish it were shorter, I don't know how to make claims like this without going through the evidence; when I look at the annotations to Our Whole Lives on Genius, for example, it feels like not a single point can be taken for granted. Plus I think there's a credit for what Craig's done here that is due in full, that shouldn't be shortchanged. Again, I promise a complete and compact summary of these early phases of the story in just a few days.
If you're still here, thanks, and if you can take a moment to remember Still Alive Carl, thank you very much.
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db
Cityscape Skin
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Post by db on Jan 25, 2016 12:45:40 GMT -5
Hey man, I signed up to the board just to say how much I'm enjoying these posts. They are making me revisit some songs I had overlooked and listen with new ears. So thanks for all the work.
Sending positive jams to Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 25, 2016 22:38:29 GMT -5
Thank you man! Those positive jams are massively appreciated, sincerely. I'm glad you're enjoying the rest too.
Here's the rest of the early stuff out of Hostile, Mass., Stevie Nix, and Charlemagne in Sweatpants for good measure.
Hostile, Mass. --------------
POV character is the Narrator, telling from a viewpoint out of time; events range from the beginning of the story to the end.
A knockoff necktie The way he wore it made it look more like a tourniquet I looked deep in his eyes I saw Lynn, Massachussetts
This is Charlemagne, described by the Narrator on their first meeting at the "first night" bar party, when he showed up with Holly. He's a guy who rolls with a cheap suit and tie (see Craig's "someone who would wear a purple suit" in the 2005 MAGNET interview).
She hung a sleeveless dress up on a sleeved up lifestyle Girl you gotta cover that He was gushing blood from wide open wounds And she decided that she loved him
We covered this; this is Mary, scantily clad, lower-back-tatted; she saw crucified Charlemagne in a vision (Stevie Nix tells us she was 17 when it first happened), gushing blood from his wounds, and decided that she loved him.
He had a painters cap, it said "Panama Jack" It had the flaps on the back that kept the sun off his neck He woke up deep in Hostile, Massachussetts Reaching out to try to touch the special effects
He had no shoes and no pants And they dressed him in a shirt with a collar and called him Porky Pig The two of you went up to his room Later on you wouldn't admit you did
We covered most of this; this is Gideon, who was jumped in and hazed by the Skins, had his head shaved, and woke up in the state of Hostility.
But the last two lines are new to us. The "you" of Hostile, Mass. is Mary; the Narrator tells her that he saw her going with Gideon up to his room, even though she wouldn't admit it later. The obvious implication is that, like Holly later on, she was trading sex for Gideon's new access to serious drugs. Mary and Gideon are still an item here, even though he's lost his mind; nevertheless the Narrator is dismayed at her new taste for the harder stuff, and tries to confront her about it. But as we'll see, Mary is serious about what she's doing. Well-meaning or not, she isn't taking that from him.
Seeing lousy movies but only for the A/C Skimpy little outfits and bad guys acting crazy That's how I know when you're lying It looks just like overacting
We've mentioned the telephone/television/stereo metaphor for visions, and video/radio/films all go in that same metaphoric bucket. Mary likes to hang out in the theaters because watching her "films" is what she lives for. The Narrator insists that they're only there for the A/C; in other words, they're not fooling around --- he's there because he really loves her (see "Sat in the back of the theater just drinking and talking" [AE]). Again, following on the last verse, "skimpy little outfits" is Mary, "bad guys acting crazy" is Gideon. The Narrator knows when she's lying because it looks like overacting; they've had these confrontations more than once.
Kids on the corner are cracking and caving in Turning over and turning other kids in I never want to make you feel uncomfortable I hope I never did
Things are bad out there with the kids cracking and caving in, etc.; the Narrator just wants to protect her from that, he says. But even though he loves her, he knows he has no standing to try to stop her, or to criticize; he can only lamely express his concern, and wish she would change her mind. "I never want to make you feel uncomfortable / I hope I never did."
They met as kids he was angry and angsty Yeah, she was a damned good dancer I'll be damned if they didn't disappear Wandered out of Mass one day and faded into the fog and love and faithless fear.
We already covered the first two lines: Charlemagne and Mary "met as kids" in her visions, when she was still in high school. She was a damned good dancer, back then. The last two lines belong to much later in the story; we'll get to them later.
Stevie Nix ----------
The POV character of Stevie Nix is Holly, telling from a viewpoint out of time; events range from the beginning of the story to the end. Here again we'll just deal with the parts that occur from the beginning of the story through Holly's party.
You came into the party with a long black shawl And the guys from the front lawn were making jokes about the white swan Some nights we just need to get touched and rub up against something plush Some nights it's just a crush and some nights it's blood lust
Again, the "you" of Stevie Nix is Gideon. He came into Holly's party dressed like a magician; he was accompanied by Mary, who was dressed like a train wreck [Weekenders] in white tatters like feathers (compare "stylish tatters" [NS]; that's from another episode, but this is how Mary rolls). Gideon's high on speed and looking for sex.
She said we might use you later on Meet me right back here around dawn
The "she" of Stevie Nix is Mary. Before this week is out we'll do a final pass through Holly's party, and will explain what's going on here.
You came into the ER drinking gin from a jam jar And the nurse is making jokes about the ER being like an after bar You know you're weak and effete and I'm coming up from the streets You're up in your loft getting soft and I'm coming up the stairs and I'm coming from the streets
This is a switch of timeframe back from Holly's party to the night of the metal bar incident a few days prior.
Charlemagne is in the ER after getting almost killed in the beatdown. Holly's there too, having heard about what happened and come to see him. Then Gideon comes in, out of his mind and drinking gin from a jam jar, because he's a gangster now (when we wrap up the last details about the metal bar in a few days, we'll see that he was there too, and that the night of the beating is the night when he got jumped in). The nurse cracks the after-bar joke because the beatdown was after midnight [BBreathing], and it's close to dawn (the thing that triggered Holly's memory at the end of the last verse).
Holly takes one look at Gideon's new status, and determines to make him hook her up with the Skins' goods ("gunning for the gold rush" [SPayne]). She's much tougher than him: she's out on the streets turning tricks for her drugs, and she'll be damned if she can't make a softie like him give her what she wants.
She said I love the guys you can't trust Meet me here about dusk
Mary again; we'll get to this when we wrap up with Holly's party.
I was half dead then I got born again I got lost in all the lights but it was okay in the end And when we hit the Twin Cities, I didn't know that much about it I knew Mary Tyler Moore and I knew Profane Existence
Holly pans out to an overview of her life in the Twin Cities, taking in the whole story at once. We know that she got born again, because she says she did in CatCT (some versions of MM say so too); beyond that, the first two lines are still pretty vague.
But the next two lines are straightforward: "we hit the Twin Cities" is the first thing that identifies her in the song, since she and Charlemagne are the only two characters who arrived there together. At the time, she didn't know that much about it; all she knew were her cousin Mary ("Mary Tyler Moore") and Mary's boyfriend Gideon --- the Ghost who "didn't seem all that holy" [A&H] but in fact rather unholy (profane), and who had "a cross all upside down carved in his arm" [Ambassador].
She got screwed up by religion She got screwed by soccer players She got high for the first time at the camps down by the banks of the Mississippi River Lord, to be seventeen forever
Now we're back to Mary, the "she" of SN.
Raised Catholic, she got screwed up by religion; we have a pretty good idea about that by now. Gideon refers to this upbringing gone a bit wrong when he says "you say you tried Jesus" [ASD]; later we see her praying for indulgences [BCrosses].
She got screwed by soccer players: these are the other "bougie guys" that she was originally "through with" [ASD], before the Narrator met her in the Party Pit and became the last addition to their number.
She got high for the first time at the camps down by the banks of the Mississippi River / Lord, to be seventeen forever. This is the time when the visions started (the time as of which she was through with the soccer-player bougie guys). Records and Tapes is specific about the date (again, records/tapes here mean her visions of Charlemagne, not music; they are part of the television/radio/video/film/stereo/telephone set of metaphors for visions): "She fell in love with the records and tapes," that is, she fell in love with her visions of Charlemagne, "staying out late, summer '88" [R&T].
And she got screwed up by her visions It was scary when she saw him She didn't tell a single person about the camps on the banks of the Mississippi River Lord, to be seventeen forever
We know about the visions, and we know that "he" is Charlemagne. "She didn't tell a single person about the camps on the banks of the Mississippi River" is the exact same thing that's reported of the girl in One for the Cutters, another indication that it's Mary:
It was hard to describe so she kept it a secret The girls that she lived with, they knew nothing about it
Charlemagne in Sweatpants -------------------------
We know Charlemagne in Sweatpants is a "boy meets girl and the rest is history" song: here I'm just going to pick up the basic early-story stuff and hold off on the rest.
Once again, the POV character is the Narrator, telling from a viewpoint out of time; events range from the beginning of the story to the end.
When he's holding then the streetlamps, they seem an awful lot like spotlights Yeah, sometimes Charlemagne gets uptight Running numbers between bars, running girls between the cars And sometimes Charlemagne feels all right All right All right
This is an introductory sketch of Charlemagne, as a kid in Lynn, Massachusetts. That he's a kid is suggested by his holding under streetlamps ("kids on the corner" [HM, Oaks], "boys working the corners" [Citrus]), by his gofer job running numbers, and of course by "boy meets girl." Besides selling on the corners and running numbers, he's doing a little pimping too, which sets us up for his solution to the how-to-come-up-with-seven-grand problem in YGD. (See also Craig's quip about a "pimp / second-generation drug dealer.")
Charlemagne had eyes just like a lover Last winter there was weather and his eyes they iced right over Casanova's in the corner and he's asking for a dance Speed shooters driving 'round and coming down and trying to hook up with an entrance [sung] / exit [liner notes] ramp
Fast forwarding to the time of Holly's party ... Charlemagne "had eyes just like a lover," but wasn't actually a lover; as Holly says of him in Swish, "They made a movie about me and you / They made it half nude and half true" [Swish]. In other words, the true half was the non-nude half. More about this to come.
Last winter was the winter of Holly's 18th year, when she was off in California, doing porn, and becoming increasingly addicted to speed ("iced out" [HF]). Now she's back, at her 19th birthday party, and Gideon ("Casanova," Mr. Lover) is in the corner ("you in the corner with a good-looking drifter" [CatCT], "there was a kid camped out by the coat check" [Weekenders]) asking for a "dance" with her.
There's also "speed shooters driving 'round and coming down and trying to hook up with an entrance [sung] / exit [liner notes] ramp"; this is a complicated line, but refers in part to Holly both trying to hook up with a reliable supply (see "if he wants to buy me some" [C&N]), and also trying to escape her fears (see "trying to reach emancipation" [GLS], "all freed up from the fears" [MM]). More about this later too.
Holly was supposed to be at CCD but she was walking around on shady streets She was looking around for something she could take up to a party And it's not like she's enslaved, it's more like she's enthralled She don't need it but she likes it so she always makes that call
First it makes her feel tall, then it makes her feel small and it's all a sweet fleeting feeling ...
This is an introductory sketch of Holly, as a kid in Lynn, Massachusetts. (We know it's Lynn and not Boston, because in CatCT it's reported that she made a "visit to the city" with the "subway.") She's in high school, still in CCD --- which is to say that she's several years younger than Charlemagne --- but into getting high too. We know there'll come a time when she needs it and is enslaved, but that's not yet; on the other hand, the distinction between enslaved and enthralled is pretty technical, and foreshadows her troubles to come (making her freedom/emancipation quest pretty ambiguous too). She was walking around the shady streets looking to buy, and met Charlemagne dealing on the corner (the lead-in with him holding under the streetlamps sets this up).
She's Alice in Wonderland, an innocent in this world of drug exaltation, getting high and then coming down again too soon. For now.
Tomorrow we'll wrap up the loose ends of the "first night" party.
Thank you for reading along. Still Alive Carl needs anything you can think his way, so if that's something you can do, thank you for that too.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 27, 2016 0:00:36 GMT -5
OK, so what exactly happened that "first night"? Let's clean up the details ... First, they're in an Uptown bar (in SW Minneapolis, near the intersection of Lake Street and Hennepin Ave). We know this from the song First Night: Holly's not invincible, in fact she's in the hospital Not far from the bar where we met on that first night The "hospital" is Methodist hospital in St. Louis Park, just a little further up Lake Street from Uptown (the address is 6500 Excelsior Blvd, St Louis Park, MN). Methodist has a drug rehab program, which is why the Skins "hang" there [LA]; it's where they go to max out their "medicine" [SPayne], as the Narrator does too when his addiction gets to that point [AE]. More about this when we get to "Holly in the hospital" and to the THS geography overview. As noted earlier, there are two songs about this party: The Swish, with Holly as the POV character, and Barfruit Blues, with the Narrator as the POV character. We already covered a lot of the details here, but left a lot on the table that we're now in a position to explain. The Swish --------------- POV: Holly Pills and powders, baby, powders and pills We spent the night last night in Beverly Hills This chick, she looked just like Beverly Sills We got killed As described in Stevie Nix, Holly and Charlemagne have arrived in the Twin Cities. Holly describes their new scene as "Beverly Hills," the state of being high ("Hills"; see also "we can't get as high as we got / on that first night" [FN]). They came into the bar, and met Mary. In the 2014 Providence Phoenix interview ( link), Craig describes his use of pronouns instead of proper names as something deliberately "elliptical"; "some chick" is an "ellipsis" in this sense. There are examples of this all over the place, where friends and acquaintances refer to each other to in a way that would be unnatural in normal speech, e.g. "some kid's house" [OftC], "some hesher's apartment" [SS], "that dude from your crew" [R&T], "some guy she'd originally thought to be her savior" [HaRRF], etc. But this isn't normal speech; despite being referred to as "some chick," Mary's not a stranger to Holly --- she's her cousin [MINTS], and Holly knew her before she came to the Twin Cities [SN]. Mary is compared to Beverly Sills, the sorprano whose signature role was Violetta, the tubercular prostitute heroine of La Traviata, who suffers a star-crossed love affair with the male lead (compare Mary's cough, apparent prostitution, and unfulfilled love for Charlemagne). Violetta dies in the end, foreshadowing what's coming up: "we got killed." Tights and skirts, baby, skirts and tights We used to shake it up in Shaker Heights This chick, she looked just like Patty Smyth She seemed shaky but nice Like the hills of "Beverly Hills," the heights of "Shaker Heights" are the state of being high. Mary's here described as looking like Patty Smyth. I've got the point of enough of these insane comparisons to celebrities that I'm certain they all have one, but some of them are tough to parse, and I honestly have no idea what this one's about. On the cover of The Warrior, Patty Smyth appears to have red streaks on her face; maybe that's supposed to recall "Mary got a bloody nose from sniffing margarita mix"? That's all I got. She seemed "shaky but nice"; she's come down a bit since high school. Four years of the drugs and the parties are adding up. She said my name's Rick Danko, baby People call me One-Hour Photo I got some hazardous chemicals So drive around to the window Rick Danko, obviously there's symmetry with Robbie Robertson as a member of The Band, but beyond that I don't know how he turns into One-Hour Photo. "One-Hour Photo" is apparently a nickname in reference to the visions (and then of course Craig plays on the One-Hour Photo shack image with "drive around to the window"). She said my name's Robbie Robertson but people call me Robo I blew red white and blue right into a tissue I came right over the counter just to kiss you I came right over the counter just to kiss you Robbie Robertson becomes Robo, short for Robitussin, and a nickname in reference to the cough (and an over-the-counter drug). We already linked the kiss and "red white and blue" to Barfruit Blues, so let's deal with those in that context. We also did the Ginger and Jack verse in depth a few days back. Moving on: Shoes and socks, baby, socks and shoes We spent the night last night in Newport News This chick, she looked just like Elizabeth Shue We got bruised The blood loss from Mary's stigmata is accompanied by heavy circles around the eyes; we see that especially in Lord, I'm Discouraged, where the Narrator says of her: The circles have sucked in her eyes ... And she keeps insisting The sutures and bruises are none of my business She says that she's sick, but she won't get specific The sutures and bruises are none of my business This guy from the northside comes down to visit His visits, they only take five or six minutes (The guy from the northside is Charlemagne-Christ; the visits that take about five or six minutes are the visions.) Mary is described here as looking like Elizabeth Shue, alluding to her role as a prostitute who is badly beaten (with a couple of black eyes) in Leaving Las Vegas. This also foreshadows what's coming up: "we got bruised." She said my name's Steve Perry, baby People call me Circuit City I'm so well connected My UPC is dialed into the system The Steve Perry reference escapes me, but the rest --- Circuit City, well-connected, and UPC dialed into the system --- are all allusions to Mary's visionary sensitivity, in keeping with all the audio/video metaphors for her gift. UPC stands for Uplink Power Control ( wikipedia), a boost in transmission power to overcome signal degradation. She said my name's Neal Schon but people call me Nina Simone Some people call me Andre Cymone 'Cause I survived the '80s one time already And I don't recall it all that fondly So hold steady I don't know what Neal Schon is for besides the rhyme with Simone/Cymone, and of course he and Steve Perry are both members of Journey. The comparison to Nina Simone makes Mary the "High Priestess of Soul" but in a pointedly religious sense; the comparison to Andre Cymone is for "Survivin' in the 80's" --- she "got screwed up" [SN] by the events of high school, with religion, the visions, and the drugs. But it's the 90's now. The rest of The Swish comes after the party, and we already did it anyway, so let's move on to Barfruit Blues. Though I should parse the name of the song while we're breaking it down. It's another double-entendre: "swishing through the City Center" suggests a sprightly walk in a skirt, but in fact it's a reference to Holly blowing gangsters, as in "swish" / "rinse your mouth out." Barfruit Blues -------------- Barfruit is all the crap that gets thrown in drinks, olives, cherries, lemon and lime wedges. The song is sung from the POV of the Narrator, who's at the party as part of the band. The song makes a lot of reference to things that happened both before and after the bar party, but most of it is present-tense. We'll pick up the things that happened before and during the party here. Mary got a bloody nose from sniffing margarita mix Mary saw her first vision of Charlemagne at seventeen [SN], and loved him [HM], but was soon disillusioned and gave up on her faith (the 80's were bad for her principally in this way). Gideon chides her for this in A Slight Discomfort: And you say you tried Jesus. But it was too inconvenient. You just didn't have the patience. You say you said prayers. But it felt like there was nobody there. So she gave up hope, and abandoned herself to a downward spiral ... and then her cousin walked into the party with Charlemagne, her Christ, in the flesh. The Narrator thinks she got a bloody nose, but what happened is that she's spontaneously begun bleeding from the stigmata, in transports of religious joy. Her Christ is there after all. He's real. She licked her lower lip and then she kissed that Halleluiah chick She came off kind of spicy but she tasted like those pickle chips Thought she was a dancer but her steps they made the records skip She came off kind of crunchy but she went down like a chicken strip We talked about the kiss that links Barfruit Blues to The Swish already. She "came off kind of spicy" in that she seems to be a degenerate party girl, but the Narrator knows her as "that sweet missing songbird when the choir sings on Sunday" [LID]. "Those pickle chips" are Famous Dave's Signature Spicy Pickle Chips, a Twin Cities thing; apparently they're labeled "Hellfire" but they're not spicy at all, they're super sweet. (Internet knows a lot of shit.) And in saying she tasted sweet, he's talking about going down on her during prom [MN, YGD, OWL]. "Thought she was a dancer but her steps they made the records skip": there's some deeper meaning here but the main thing is that she's lost a step since her days as a "damn good dancer" at prom [HM, OWL]. Again, the drugs have taken a toll on her body. "She came off kind of crunchy but she went down like a chicken strip": this is the other side of the reference to the mutual-going-down back at prom, when she went down on him. "chicken strip" is the unworn side of a motorcycle tire, next to the rim, evidence that you're too chicken to bank it on curves. And we have an idea that, with her fading off into periodic visions, Mary does come off "kind of crunchy." Dripping wet with the special sauce She had a confident smile and a nervous cough And we got off Mary was dripping wet with stigmatic blood just now (and no doubt downstairs too, but this line is more double entendre as misdirection, than double entendre for its own sake). She's got her cough, but she's smiling confidently as she beholds her Christ. And finishing the reminiscence about prom, the Narrator remembers that, yes, the two of them got off. She said, "It's good to see you back in a bar band, baby." I said, "It's great to see you're still in the bars." She said, "It's good to see you back in a bar band, baby." I said, "It's great to see you're still in the bars." The Narrator is conflicted as hell here. There's sincerity, but a lot of bitterness in "It's great to see you're still in the bars." Then we get some asides about Gideon and Holly, both present, and finally the Narrator closes: These clever kids are killing me For one they ain't that clever Number two, it really sucks when you get stuck here with these Trevors This was supposed to be a party This sucks this sucks this sucks. These kids are bad news; it was supposed to be a party. But now Charlemagne and Holly need a place to stay, and Mary is inviting them to get a house together with her and Gideon, and she's inviting the Narrator too. Half the crowd is calling out for "Born To Run" The other half is calling out for "Born To Lose" Baby, we were born to choose We got the last call bar band really, really, really big decision blues We were born to bruise We were born to bruise We were born to bruise The Narrator has to make a big decision: whether to say no, and run; or say yes, and sign up to lose. He opts for yes, and it won't be long before the path he's chosen will get the shit beat out of him down at the metal bar. Just before midnight. Thanks for reading, and please say a prayer for Still Alive Carl if you can.
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Here goes
Jan 27, 2016 12:56:13 GMT -5
via mobile
Post by spencerm on Jan 27, 2016 12:56:13 GMT -5
A couple thoughts 're: the swish
I wonder if Rick Danko is chosen because it also reflects Mary's trajectory. From Wikipedia: "Danko died in his sleep at his home in Marbletown, New York, near Woodstock. The cause of death was heart failure, arising from years of alcoholism, drug addiction and weight gain". (The weight gain is consistent with the heavy steps that made the record skip).
Wonder also if members of the band are selected also as a sort of subtle reference to the 'bar band'. Also from Danko's Wikipedia: "billed as Levon and the Hawks. Playing a circuit that stretched in an arc from Ontario to Arkansas, they became known as "the best damn bar band in the land." Not to mention the Hold Steady lore that the band was the motivating factor for forming THS.
On a similar note, I wonder if members of journey are chosen to come up with a Journey/Trip kind of identification. Steve Perry also had a song called Strung Out which maybe ties in here although perhaps too much of a stretch.
I'm a bit less convinced about the UPC bit. Given the circuit city reference, I'm tempted to read it as the most common use of UPC, the barcodes that get scanned at stores. On this reading, it's simply just a continuation of the image like the 'drive around to the window' bit. Circuit city might be a reference to stereos etc as you've mentioned but I wonder if 'well connected' is just along the lines of what you've said earlier: "Holly, Charlemagne, and the Narrator all take the spotlight at different times, but the whole narrative revolves around Mary. Already in the "first night" party of Swish and Barfruit Blues, we see that she's the one who brings them all together".
Thinking of Still Alive Carl.
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