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Post by skepticatfirst on Dec 24, 2020 16:07:51 GMT -5
PREFACEHey all. Hard for me to believe, but today makes five years since I joined the boards and kicked off the Here Goes thread ( link) for a long-form walkthrough of the story in The Hold Steady lyrics. As I mentioned to tableinthecorner a few days ago, I have mixed feelings about Here Goes. I did it under particular circumstances, and don't have any regrets; but as an analysis, it could have been a lot cleaner. It wasn't presented clearly (yes, it's a complex subject, but we have orzelc in the house who writes accessibly about quantum physics and relativity, and this ain't that). I made mistakes --- most of them corrected, but not all. I missed some things entirely. These are in principle problems I could have fixed. muzzleofbees suggested that I rewrite the whole thing in a different format, which was probably the thing to do; but for a variety of reasons, including the fact that it looked like a lot of work to reconcile the fuzziness at the edges of the story with the newly exploding catalog, I found that a daunting prospect. All the same, I felt like I still somehow owed it to, I don't know, Craig's achievement? my own sense of doing right by what I set out to do? to finish the job properly. While I was thinking about this, a door opened on another front. In the aftermath of Here Goes I'd started listening to Lifter Puller, and I was now increasingly certain that, like the THS lyrics, the LP lyrics too came together to tell a story. So at some point, I decided that I could just do a fresh round of analysis with the much shorter and definitively complete LP catalog, do it right this time, and call it day. This thread is the product of that decision. On approximately a Massive Nights V scale, I got more than I bargained for. ***A few leadoff comments, just to set expectations: - There is in fact a Lifter Puller story. It's neither short nor simple, but it's much shorter and simpler than the THS story. For good reasons that will appear later, it's also **much** more tightly written than the THS story. If you're the sort of person who has a jones for the narrative, and especially if you were in the "I buy into a lot of the Here Goes analysis but there's still a lot of I-don't-know there," let me say that I think you will appreciate what's on tap here.
- The THS story and the LP story are separate, but they're built out of the same scenes, and there's a *lot* of THS in this thread. Nearly everything we learn about the LP world, it turns out, breaks new ground for understanding the THS universe.
- In the interest of making the best possible presentation, I've written up the entire analysis ahead of time. It may not be perfectly polished, but it's going to be a lot more polished than Here Goes was (see TABLE OF CONTENTS below).
- It's not exactly necessary to have read Here Goes in order to read what follows, but I do assume a basic knowledge of the characters and main events of the THS story, and I won't spend time here re-establishing the major conclusions of that thread (I do link to relevant sections for arguments about specific details). For anyone who hasn't read Here Goes but wants the gist, the closest thing to a summary is in the timeline sections, linked below.
Timeline of the THS story01) Sept 1970 - Summer 1996 ( link) 02) Summer 1996 - Summer 1997 ( link) 03) Interval - Winter 2002/03 ( link) 04) Summer 2003 ( link) 05) Fall 2003 - Spring 2004 ( link) 06) May 2004 - End Spring 2004 ( link) 07) Summer 2004 : Gideon's apartment ( link) 08) Summer 2004 : Saddle Shop ( link) 09) Summer 2004 : Crucifixion ( link) 10) Summer 2004 : Car ride ( link) 11) Summer 2004 : After crash ( link) 12) Summer 2004 : Trial ( link) 13) Summer 2004 - Years later ( link) Again, I now know that there are things in this timeline that aren't quite right, or are missing, but I'm not going to go back and fix them. It'll be evident what corrections need to be applied as we move forward through the new thread. ***As a last note in the offing here, I'd like to make a final salute to Still Alive Carl, who got me into THS so many years ago: and outside the club is where we spill our drinks in memory of all those guys that didn't make it till the dawn rest in peace
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Post by skepticatfirst on Dec 24, 2020 16:25:39 GMT -5
CONVENTIONSOn the way in, a few notes about conventions are in order. (For the sort of reader who isn't bored by this kind of thing, I've also included two long footnotes about methods, mine [*1] and Craig's [*2], below.) ***1) LinksWith a few exceptions, all of the evidence for the arguments I'm about to make comes from the internet, and that presents some challenges. There's already been plenty of link rot in the Here Goes thread, which is barely five years old. The fact that most of the evidence used in what I'm about to post dates to an even earlier era than the THS stuff makes it that much more vulnerable (thanks to thrasher9294 for making lots of old material available on youtube, where it's likely to stick around). To try to add some protection against this, in most cases I've done the following: - Quotes from articles, videos, and podcasts have been carefully transcribed, credited, and furnished with a link to the original source.
- Images (except when under copyright) have both been copied/uploaded to imgur.com for embedding, and furnished with a link to the original source.
- Links to reference works are labeled: "wikipedia" for Wikipedia, "gdict" for Green's Dictionary of Slang, "heregoes" for Here Goes, etc.
If links break in the future, I hope that the combination of transcribed information and URLs will allow the sources to be traced to new locations. The Wayback Machine (web.archive.org), too, is a strong last ditch against oblivion (it's already the case that most of the 00's-era Lifter Puller web evidence can only be found there). ***2) CitationsI've followed the Here Goes practice of referencing the songs with bracketed names, e.g. [SH1999], [SCity], but with a few special considerations: - I've been a little less aggressive about abbreviations, using e.g. [MTape] rather than [MT] for Mick's Tape (there are a lot of songs to keep track of, now).
- When referencing Brokerdealer songs, solo songs, or alternative lyrics from the liner notes (some of which may be unfamiliar to even hardcore fans), I've tried to make explicit mention of the context before resorting to abbreviations, or else have skipped abbreviation entirely.
To make paragraph text a little less busy, I refer to the full names of Craig Finn songs and album titles in Capitalized form, without quotation marks. Other artists' works are named in quotes. ***3) Lifter Puller vs. the End Of ...About the only important source that I *haven't* consulted in putting this together is the Lifter Puller vs. the End Of ... book that was issued back in December 2009. (My original thought was that I already had access to the lyrics, and that any pictures, interviews, or testimonials that I was missing probably wouldn't provide evidence for a reading of the story. But as this thread will show, that may not be a good assumption.) Obviously the book is long since unavailable, but if anyone has a copy they want to sell, please PM me. I'll pay up. [*1] My methods In so much chasing after wisps of the long-gone 90's, I've found myself pulling evidence out of some pretty hard-to-reach corners, and I think it's worth stepping back for a few words about what I guess I'll call my "methods." The main approaches I notice myself using to build arguments about the lyrics are the following (with non-spoiler examples): - Connecting views of characters through their attributes. (For example, "she slips the shade inside her shoes" [SGS] and "she puts the lipstick in her pocket and then she casually leaves" [CRoom] give two different views of the same thieving girl.)
- Connecting views of events through matching patterns. (For example, the question "have you ever seen the way these city slickers look?" [Sublet] and the question "what do you mean you ain't never comin back to the city?" [SH] resemble each other in several points, and in fact give two different views of the same conversation.)
- Using repeated patterns of composition as a guide to interpretation. (For example, the pattern of "[drug 1]/[drug 2]" lines appearing across songs makes "your cokey kisses in the tunnel of love they taste like black ice" [RtF] evidence that "ice" is a drug reference.)
- Aggressive exploration of possible connections, but with a reflexively skeptical bar for pattern matching. This is super important; you can't get very far at all without doing a lot of research and following up faint leads, but you have to be ready to recognize a rabbit hole when you're in one. (Examples: Lots of time spent driving around in Google Maps Street View, with occasional finds, but most of it yielding only noise. Lots of time spent researching pawn shops in the Twin Cities, only to decide finally that several promising connections didn't lead anywhere, and that "pawn shop" was just a metaphor. Or, to take a more complex case: (1) testing of a bunch of "sounds like" ideas leading to the discovery that Vicksburg, MS --- like St. Paul, a major port on the Mississippi River --- had a 19th-century spelling of "Vicksburgh," which suggested a referent for "Viceburgh," and a connection of that song with the American Civil War; (2) further research into the 1863 Siege of Vicksburg yielding many apparent connections to the song lyrics. The conclusions of (1) came in for confirmation elsewhere, and made the cut; the details unearthed in (2) never led back to narrative synthesis, and were tossed out.)
- Rejection of any interpretive idea that doesn't meet with confirmation from an independent angle. (The fact that another song on HDaD is named "Sherman City" means that the Civil War connection of "Viceburgh" can't be a coincidence --- "sherman" (drug reference)="vice"; "burg"="city"; Sherman was a Civil War general at the Siege of Vicksburg. But again, that's about as far as we can get with the Vicksburg connection; almost everything else down that path is noise.)
- Following the evolution of metaphors. (It's interesting to note that the Skins of THS are still called "townies" and "heshers," but the "townies" and "heshers" of LP aren't called Skins. Why's that?)
- Playing with interpretations of statements until they are factually consistent. (The Nice Nice has parties "every other wednesday night" [CRoom], but it's "one week ago" that the sad girl, presently reported to be at the disco, "wouldn't have missed one wednesday night" [SGS]. How can these statements be squared with each other?)
- Playing with the interrelation of events/situations until they combine to form a motivated, plausible story of cause-and-effect. (A simple case where we're invited to do this explicitly is "think about what you've got compare it to what i've got and ask yourself/ what do you think my girl wants?" [SH1999]).
- Elimination of combinations that result in an improbable or poorly motivated story. (Examples of this are long and hard to show out of context; I don't always lay out rejected theories in the posts that follow, either. But weighing and discarding alternatives is a key part of working through the evidence, and at certain critical points, I do actually consider them explicitly, see for example BALTIMORE BELTLINE below.)
[*2] Craig's methods More important than my "methods," of course, are Craig's. Craig is always evolving as an artist; technically, we can't talk about what he "does" except as shorthand for what we've seen him do in the past. But it's useful to catalog his observed go-to techniques, since it makes it easier to spot them when we meet them in the wild. Besides storytelling itself, techniques of his that seem especially important are: - Persistent metaphor. Important, because deciphering a metaphor in one song often opens up fresh angles on another. (A simple THS example is that being in the "mountains" means being high; we see this first in the "Rocky Mountain [High]" and "Sugar Mountain pines" of Milkcrate Mosh, and thereafter in C&N, A&H, GoaH, Oaks, ASitS, CitM. etc. [heregoes].)
- Opportunistic ambiguity. Listed right after persistent metaphor, because the reflexive vigilance against weak readings that's fundamental to this kind of project makes it hard to recognize a second reading once you have a first. Two key classes of ambiguity are:
- Both/and meaning: words that have not merely a metaphorical vs a literal meaning, but *two actual literal meanings at once.* ("Crank up your amps" [LPvtEotE] means *both* "turn your music up loud" *and*, in documentable drug slang, "inject your amphetamines"; see LISTED and THE TUNES below.)
- Both/and syntax: words that have one function in relation to the words that precede it, and a second in relation to the words that follow. (In "i wish you wouldn't call me cuz/ i know i'm not your relative" [DStraps], "cuz" is both 'cousin' in "i wish you wouldn't call me cuz" and 'because' in "'cause i know i'm not your relative.")
[/ol] [li] Jump cuts. These are pairs of statements --- Statement A. Statement B. --- whose juxtaposition encourages the inference that A and B refer to the same person/thing, or that they describe cause and effect, when in fact they don't. (THS instances include, for example, a variety of lines from OftC and the end of MoC [ heregoes].)[/li] [li] Recasting of a set of facts to create an apparently different story. (One THS example is Hurricane J, which sounds like a standalone restaurant story, until we recognize it as a part of the ongoing "restaurant" story; another is One For The Cutters, in which a jump-cut selection of events before, during, and after Charlemagne's crucifixion is recast as a Breaking-Away-style murder story [ heregoes; heregoes].)[/li] [li] Symmetry of pairs; symmetry of triads. Important, because identification of one member of a symmetric set often makes it possible to identify the other(s) with confidence. (THS examples include "I remember the metal bar/ I remember the reservoir" [Weekenders] for the two main parties in the story [ heregoes] and "There's James King and King James and James Dean" [SPayne] for the Narrator, Charlemagne, and Gideon [ heregoes].)[/li] [li] Flat language concealing vivid meaning. Examples of this include the use of weak common expressions with literal force ("we departed from our bodies" [KP], "she don't look like that same girl we met" [FN]), or use of Spanish terms, ignored by the ear as just names, with deliberate significance ("Dos Cruces" [BCrosses], "Las Cruces" [TS&tT], "Sacramento" [MTape, YS, TSPotC], etc.).[/li] [li] Singular details from life, obsessively reused. Important, because the fact that there's established precedent for this gives us confidence that repeated sightings of strange phenomena aren't imagined. (Examples are the gangsters with dogs who appear in Lifter Puller [RfLB] and The Hold Steady [BC, Eureka], and the girl with visions who appears in Lifter Puller [NC], The Hold Steady [CatCT, SN, MoC, YS, SA], and the solo songs [Indications].)[/li] [li] Triangulation into an elided point of focus. (Examples are "Rocky Mountain [High]" in Milkcrate Mosh, and "Clear Heart, Full Eyes, [Lose]" [ heregoes].)[/li] [li] The unreliable narrator. (THS examples are Jesse's lies in 40 Bucks [ heregoes] and Criminal Fingers [ heregoes].)[/li] [li] Songs written from a single point of view. (THS examples are Knuckles from Gideon's point of view [ heregoes] and The Swish from Holly's [ heregoes]. For general comment on this technique see heregoes).[/li] [/ul]
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Post by skepticatfirst on Dec 24, 2020 17:02:44 GMT -5
TABLE OF CONTENTSNote: the titles of some posts might have spoiler significance, so for the first pass I'll leave them X'd out until we actually get to them (I'll add links to all the titles over time as well). Future readers who want the gradual reveal might want to skip ahead, too. *** Introduction (groundwork; shiny low-hanging fruit; a working theory about the LP story) Major Metaphors (the rosetta stone of lyrical interpretation) Characters (a first pass at the good people of the LP world) More Metaphors (when they say ___ you know they mean ___) Geography (probably be easier if i knew where she was living now) Story, Part 1: PARTY ZEROStory, Part 2: RETURN PARTIESStory, Part 3: THE LBIStory, Part 4: THE SUMMER HOUSEStory, Part 5: TWO WEEKSStory, Part 6: FINAL PARTYBig Picture
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Post by tableinthecorner on Dec 25, 2020 0:18:31 GMT -5
skepticatfirst I was so excited to open up the board and see this thread. As someone who is a bit younger than a lot of people on the forum, I never got to see The Hold Steady in the late-2000s heyday, and, in fact, I don't think I'd even been listening to them for a year (although they were already far and away my favorite band) before I discovered Here Goes. After reading the whole thread, though, I started to understand not only how monumental this music is, but also how connected this fan base is. I may never have the same experience with the music as those lucky enough to be at any of the shows in the semi-early days of THS, but I really believe that listening to Craig's oeuvre after reading Here Goes is as close as it gets. Regardless I have been able get through a really strange time in my life because of that thread (as well as The Hold Steady, of course). I honestly love Lifter Puller almost as much as I love THS, so seeing these posts is one of the best things that could've happened this Christmas. I'm really sorry for interrupting the flow of the thread. I hope you know that the insane amount of effort you put into this is not going unappreciated.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Dec 25, 2020 16:12:03 GMT -5
tableinthecorner , thanks very much for this. I'm glad to be able to make my little contribution to the connectedness, there's a lot of good people in the fanbase, all right. Also, please interrupt! I'm rolling it out on the boards to make it open for comments, questions, critiques, guesses, whatever. Not gonna bother me if there's not a lot of feedback, I've got my own reasons for seeing it through, but I'm definitely happy if it hits home with you and others, and happy to hear about it. I figured I'd drop a post every day on weekdays (there's a lot to cover) and take a break on the weekends (everything's written, but even a make-last-edits-and-hit-post job takes time, and it'll be good to have a few days off at regular intervals). That'll give people a chance to stay caught up, too, if it helps. Anyway, we'll see how it goes. Thanks again.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Dec 25, 2020 16:15:48 GMT -5
ORIGINS OF IMAGESI'd been listening to THS for a while before I realized there was a story there and went all-in. With LP, I went all-in from the beginning: listening to the music, reading old interviews and articles, digging through the archived website, trying to sketch out the band's history, etc. The first thing that struck me in doing this was just how *old* the LP world feels compared to the THS world. We already hear that difference in the lyrics, with lines like "stuck stickin slugs in the telephone" [TGatSD] from the days of coin-operated payphones, and "credit card chicks takin cash advances" [TCMaMG] from when credit cards were a privilege reserved for rich kids. But you really feel it on the documentary side, which in LP's case leads down into the most primitive corners of the internet. Some of that internet material is hard to get to, but for someone familiar with the THS world, it's a gold mine. Three minor, but solid, examples: ***1) Crust PunksThe incredible May 2000 interview by Mike Daily called "All The Right Moves, All The Wrong Notes: The Lifter Puller Story" ( link) contains the following snippet: Early in the Here Goes thread, I'd argued ( heregoes) that "crust punk" [BBlues] was evidence of Gideon originally having dreads (see also "dreadlocked" in GLS, the Marley reference in CatCT) that were shaved off by the Skins when he got jumped into the gang [HM, SPayne]. Substantiating that was hard: I'd found some internet references to crust punks having dreadlocks, but only a few, and they weren't very crisp, and none of them was from the AKM era, so I didn't back it up with citations. But here, all of a sudden, we get gift-wrapped evidence from Craig's own bandmate --- "they're the punks that have dreads" --- and, as if that weren't enough, we get evidence of a concrete image behind the otherwise obscure drifters-with-dogs-and-cars-and-girls references in BCamp and Star18. [*1]***2) Cowboys and IndiansIn the early-2000 interview by Ryan Sommer for Extra Lucky magazine ( link), Dan Monick begins to describe how the band's songs get written, and says: The cowboys and indians theme in THS is almost too bizarre to take seriously (see Saddle Shoes, Look Alive, Cheyenne Sunrise, etc.; heregoes). But again, here we get documentary evidence of its origin, right down to the way the battle's going ("he had blood on his boots and an arrow in his hat" [LA]). ***3) Dead Rock StarsThe Nov 1999 Keith Harris interview "Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Storming the stage with postpunk pirates Lifter Puller" ( link) describes a Halloween show in which the band plays dressed as pirates: This nugget confirms that the point of the THS comparison "some new kid who looked just like Phil Lynott" [MPADJs] is, precisely, "dead rock star": it identifies him as the Narrator (the singer in the THS-story band, hence "rock star"), who "died" in order to assume the role of the "new kid" (a transformation repeatedly alluded to as his having died-but-not-really; recall for example "I got hung up on the people who died" [RP], "tell her that I almost died" [AHfA], "And the first four didn't really die, I just lied" [Knuckles]; heregoes). ***That's high yield. And we've only scratched the surface. [*1] Crust punks made a brief appearance just recently; at the Dec 4, 2020 Massive Nights show, commenting on the pets in people's livestreams for the first time, Craig said, "It's always good to see dogs at the shows. The virtual shows, anyway. We're not a crust punk band, yet." (At 43:51 in the FANS video, which will probably be down by the time I post this.)
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Post by muzzleofbees on Dec 27, 2020 3:18:44 GMT -5
Yes! It's finally live. I have to say I've been waiting pretty eagerly on this, and that initial talks about this project with skepticatfirst have made me extremely excited. Can't wait to follow it.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Dec 28, 2020 13:12:49 GMT -5
Thanks man! I remember telling you in Brooklyn that it was going to be short, like 25 posts, ha. I kept the "chapter" summaries down to 6, anyway. We'll see how it goes ...
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Post by skepticatfirst on Dec 28, 2020 13:27:49 GMT -5
ORIGINS OF SIGNATURESLifter Puller doesn't just open a window on the origin of specific THS images; it also lets us observe a number of Craig's signature touches in development, making it clearer how to understand his use of them later. ***For example, all the THS "looked like [famous person]" lines (including the Phil Lynott quote from MPADJs above) descend from the two at the end of the LP catalog, namely "Frampton" [LPvtEotE] and "Roger Daltrey" [SSC]. The Daltrey line from Secret Santa Cruz reads in full: And I did it in a disco with some guy from San Francisco Who looked a lot like Roger Daltrey [SSC] With all the explicit references to "anonymous" sex in the LP lyrics [Hardware, RtF; see also Brokerdealer GMBMB] and the song title's allusion to "cruz"-ing, that is, cruising, offering sex for payment ( gdict) to, the "secret santa" ( wikipedia) who anonymously gives gifts of drugs in exchange: and i met this guy, and this guy i met he got me high ... i gave him fifty and he kissed me, spit a little treat between my teeth [SSC] it's clear that the point of the Roger Daltrey comparsion is, what else, the "Who" ("who?"=anonymous). We'd already worked out that these comparisons are figurative in our walk through the THS story (see e.g. heregoes), but this early example makes it plain that that's the right way to read them. ***For the record, the point of the Frampton reference appears to be Champagne for breakfast and a Sherman in my hand from "Do You Feel Like We Do" ( link); the girl is still partying at breakfast (compare "dawn" [SCity, SdS, LGI], "morning" [Langelos], "six six six am on the weekend" [ILtL]) under the influence of drugs, like Frampton's "sherman" [HDaD, SCity]. More on the sherman when we take a closer look at drug references in LP/THS below. ***If LP lets us see the development of Craig's minor signatures, the next obvious thing is to ask about the big one: Are the songs of the LP catalog, like the THS songs, part of a single overarching story? Or is that approach to songwriting something that Craig didn't develop until later?
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Post by skepticatfirst on Dec 29, 2020 14:46:40 GMT -5
To me, the question above is a mere formality. Anyone who tracks the names across the songs can see that it is part of an overarching story (or at least a bunch of stories having the same characters). Well, I agree with you! but there's plenty of people who aren't convinced, or who think that Craig is creating an illusion of a story, without actually having one. I hate to start slow out of the gate, but I think it's worth taking a few steps early to really consider the question, and to build up to a fairly well-substantiated answer (and of course you're right, the recurring names are first-order evidence). But aside from that, what is one thing that makes Lifter Puller and The Hold Steady different from a lot of other artists/bands? Answer: the multi-album epic story. I have to hurry and get a post out for today, but this, and everything you say about it, is a fascinating question to me. I'm really curious about Craig's novel-writing efforts, and his thoughts about that versus lyrical storytelling, for example. God knows there are other lyricists whose work I love, but there's nothing like what Craig does in the world, as far as I know. One of the strongest manifestations of the crust punk scene in Minneapolis was a collective called Profane Existence. They published a 'zine by the same name as well as running a record label.
I don't see anything written about it in the "here goes" thread except the lyric quote from "Stevie Nix" that mentions it, so not sure if any of that is new information. They have a wikipedia page, which I looked at, and a website which I have not. There is probably a wealth of information on manifestations of crust punk culture (especially Minneapolis) on this website or the zine, depending how far you wanted to go with that.
This is golden, I had missed the Profane Existence/crust punk connection completely. I did write a little about Profane Existence in Here Goes ( heregoes): To answer your question about how far I want to go, I'm really just looking to substantiate a synthesis of the story, which for most of these references ends up just involving a few principal associations; but in this case the "crust punk" connection is clearly important. I do think that this is strong confirmation of my claims that "went down with some crust punk junk" [BBlues] and "Profane Existence" [SN] are both references to Gideon, so it definitely helps to shore things up. There are still other associations with "crust punk" that I'd love to have more evidence for. Fortunately, we have Steve and Craig's comments to substantiate the crust punks' connection with (a) dogs (b) traveling around in groups with girlfriends and dogs (c) dreadlocks. But are the dreads the *only* connection for Gideon's rastafarian attributes [HM/CatCT/GLS]? Maybe we don't need more than just that; but the answer will be of interest later in this thread, as well. (I did follow your pointers to the PE website, and took a new tour through some wikipedia articles, but couldn't find anything definitive, just a drive-by comment about dreadlocks in wikipedia. Naturally it's hard to enumerate characteristics of any subculture with confidence, let alone one from 25 years ago. But it would be cool if something more to lean on turns up at some point. And I'm very glad to have Steve's recorded comments.)
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Post by skepticatfirst on Dec 29, 2020 14:56:49 GMT -5
STORY: WORKING THEORYWhether the LP universe has a story or not is a hard question to answer up front. On the one hand, we're pretty sure there's an extended narrative in at least a few places, if only because characters like Night Club Dwight appear in multiple songs. On the other hand, we know that the very oldest song chronologically, Mission Viejo, was written by Craig in a Boston College dorm room after a trip to California in his junior year (the original youtube video in which Craig provided this info, a solo kitchen performance of the song, has been taken down [dead link: youtube], but he repeated most of the same information in Joseph Arthur's Come To Where I'm From podcast, here). It's hard to see how a solo song from 1991/92 could have been part of a planned future story involving Night Club Dwight. (It does contain a number of foreshadowings of later themes --- being too high to speak [BBlues, HH]; checking pulses [Manpark, Epaulets]; a guy irresponsibly introducing a girl he likes to drugs [ASD] --- but it's still a vignette, not part of a larger story.) So if Mission Viejo, at least, isn't part of a larger story; and many other songs in the early catalog sound like college indie songs rather than Nice Nice songs; and we see lots of evidence of story elements appearing out of nowhere over time, including the fact that Night Club Dwight isn't mentioned at all prior to Fiestas & Fiascos --- with all of these, we have to ask: is there in fact a single Lifter Puller story at all? If there is, when did it start, and how much of the catalog does it cover? Is it complete? ***The only one of these questions for which we have an immediate answer is the third one, "is it complete?" Mike Daily's "All the Right Moves" interview ( link) makes clear that the answer to this question is "no": Again, this interview is from May of 2000, just before the band broke up; that next album never materialized. But let's frame the implications of Craig's statement carefully: - There is at least one long-running LP story.
- At some point (when is still an open question) it began to be pre-planned by Craig at a scale spanning multiple albums and releases.
- The telling of it was never completed.
This still doesn't let us say for certain that there is *only* one LP story (with occasional exceptions like Mission Viejo). But it seems probable that there is, for a few reasons: - Craig doesn't balk at Daily's formulation of "*the* saga," singular, and himself implies that F&F, the singles, and the "next album" are exclusively about one story.
- In the 2004 Cloak and Dagger interview (link) Craig himself describes Star Wars Hips as "the origin of *the* story that spawned the Lifter Puller releases," again in the singular.
- There's precedent: this is in fact exactly how the THS catalog works, one story covering nearly all the songs, with occasional exceptions.
So our working theory is that there's one story, never completely told, and that it started at least as far back as Star Wars Hips on the self-titled first album.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Dec 30, 2020 12:43:54 GMT -5
@skywaywalker First, this is amazing. You blew right past the question I had about rastafarian connections into some specific detail that I'd wanted to tie in via rasta, but thought was out of reach. Thanks very much. Don't want to spoil but I'll link back to your post when we get there. Their artwork (cover art, etc) has a lot of black and white in it. (Sometimes their clothing could tend towards the black and white as well, like say, a black jacket with a white patch with black lettering). The art has lots of images and themes that you would find in heavy metal art, such as skeletons and other horror themed imagery as well as acts of violence; but with more specifically punk elements like spiked hair, mohawks and beer. In today's post (next) I've got a link to a 2005 Stylus magazine interview in which Craig and Tad go on for a few minutes about Venom, including a jacket with a "Venom / Black Metal" patch that Tad used to wear. Great read. Those chapter titles are pretty intriguing, I'm interested to see where this is headed next.... Yeah, I wanted to put some non-spoilery bits out there to whet the appetite (and to show that there's a well-formed plan). I'd forgotten that I'd included RASTAFARI GUY as one of the public titles ... referring to the guy in Rock For Lite Brite, of course, and it's with respect to that that I asked about the rasta/crust punk connection (as opposed to the Bad Brains connection, which I didn't think was classifiable with crust punk). I wanted to add that, prompted by your suggestions, I dug a little further, and found an article with John John Jesse, founder (in 1985) of Nausea, in which he does link rastas to what Wikipedia at least suggests is the origin of the crust punk scene ( link): Your first-hand account is much more valuable though. Not that it matters, but out of curiosity, were you in the Twin Cities, or was this New York (or someplace else)?
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Post by skepticatfirst on Dec 30, 2020 12:51:41 GMT -5
THS CHARACTERS IN LIFTER PULLER?That's a pretty good haul from one interview question, but there's still another point to be drawn out here. Even a casual run through the LP catalog reveals images and character sketches that bear an undeniable resemblance to the THS story. A quick-hit list of standout examples (these are meant as eye-catching parallels, not proofs of anything, so I'm skipping all the THS citations; if these sketches aren't already familiar from Here Goes, I assume they're at least recognizable from the lyrics) includes: - the Holly-like girl who makes a lot of noise during sex, until one day she stops letting her boyfriend fuck her, at which point he tries to drown her ("She's proud of her soundproof bedroom / It gets so loud, it's like thirty threesomes ... If we're really going to wait, baby, can we take a shower/ you look just like an otter when I push you underwater" [SCity]);
- the Gideon-like guy with dreadlocks who drops out of society to take a menial job, experimenting with laser shows and visuals in his upstairs apartment, until one day someone in his circle brings the cops down on him ("hey rastafari heard you're quittin school, smoking weed and cleaning swimming pools/ you smoke em up in your studio apartment, get em going with your stereo equipment/ and you're hooking up the laser show, we can use a couple visuals ... we all go down with our connections/ these feds sure ask a lot of questions/ nice place for a guy who changes filters" [RfLB]);
- the Mary-like girl who gets high and fucks while gazing at visions of Ezekiel's wheel ("don't call her lazy cause she's crazy 'bout the daytime tv/ channel 3 look at me, i'm a real wheel watcher ... woke up with your friend in the indian fringes/ bring on the bedspins ... that's when she said she says it's great gettin high" [SH1999]);
- the Jesse-like girl who carries two kinds of pills in her purse --- speed to wake her up, sedatives to put her to sleep --- and who's a mess at night but sunny again in the morning ("taking two kinds of pills from just one container/ swallowing them both without any water/ sometimes they stick in her throat, but in the morning everything's alright/ we could all use a little sleep tonight" [PSunglasses]);
- the Charlemagne-like figure of Night Club Dwight, who in trying to build a drug empire ends up in debt to a criminal leader, fails to maintain communications with the lender by phone, and so finds himself at the receiving end of a deadly personal lesson ("dwight was pretty nice when he took out that loan from us/ now dwight don't got the courtesy to pick up the phone for us ... i want night club dwight dead in his grave" [TFatBR]);
- the Charlemagne-like kid who gets murdered by gangsters at a party, with the implication that it happens in a knife fight ("i saw some raver kid get murdered ... the night of all that bloodshed ... a party" [SSC], "they got the dry ice and the knife fights on every other wednesday night" [CRoom], "every murdered raver was just dying by the hands dealt by the dealers" [LQ] --- the last quote from La Quereria whose title, according to Craig, is "supposed to be the center of the bullring where the bull goes to die after being stabbed by the matador": link);
- the Holly-like target of the horsemen in 4Dix, a song that was supposed to point ahead to "what’s gonna happen on the next [Lifter Puller] record," and instead gets recycled wholesale into the THS song Cattle and the Creeping Things;
and many more where these came from. Together with the interview quote above, these correspondences make it clear that Craig really did have the THS story planned out in its entirety before AKM was ever written. [*1] He'd already been working with the same plot elements *for at least six or seven years before THS was even formed*. And he'd already planned a multi-album narrative around it for LP, which he never got a chance to fully publish. How exactly he repurposed that material when THS got off the ground is completely different question, which we'll return to. But with this, the fact that the THS story was planned from the beginning is established beyond doubt. [*1] From the 2005 Stylus magazine interview, which you should read if you haven't ( link):
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Post by skepticatfirst on Dec 31, 2020 13:00:20 GMT -5
ORDERED CATALOGWe've got as far as hypothesizing that there's one LP story, never fully told, that started as far back as Star Wars Hips on the first album. One point which this leaves open is the question of exceptions. How big is the pool of songs like Mission Viejo that aren't part of the story? To get at this, we need an overview of the catalog. Working out the exact order in which the songs (that is, the lyrics) were written is pretty impossible at this stage, but there are a few resources available to help narrow it down: - the (now-taken-down) video confirming the Mission Viejo timeframe (see STORY: WORKING THEORY above) - the discography pages on the archived Lifter Puller website ( link) - the Soft Rock liner notes with recording dates ( discogs) - best of all, the personal recollections in the thread "The origin of some Lifter Puller songs" on this board ( link) Together these provide enough info to let us batch up the songs in a rough, but as far as they go hopefully accurate, chronological order. Batches are listed within a single row. Minor or merely possible breaks between batches are marked by row breaks; major breaks between batches are marked with an extra, empty row. song(s) | notes | - Mission Viejo | Autumn 1992 ([dead] youtube]; Joseph Arthur's Come To Where I'm From podcast, link) | | | - Prescription Sunglasses - Emperor - Rental - Slips Backwards - Nassau Coliseum | Recorded with Tim Mac at Amphetamine Reptile in 1994 (link) | | | - Double Straps - Bloomington - Star Wars Hips - Bruce Bender - Lazy Eye - The Mezzanine Gypoff - Jeep Beep Suite - Solid Gold Sole - Sublet - Summerhouse - Mono | Self-titled first album; tracks recorded and mixed at Idful Studios in Chicago, IL in January 1996 (link) | | | - The Pirate and the Penpal - 11th Avenue Freezeout - The Langelos - Mick's Tape | The "Half Dead Demos" (link), recorded for HDaD in 1997 (link), but not included in release; TPatP in particular had a "Lifter Puller self titled feel" to it (link) | -To Live and Die in LBI - I Like the Lights - Sherman City - Kool NYC - Half Dead and Dynamite - The Bears - Hardware - The Gin and the Sour Defeat - Viceburgh - Rock for Lite Brite | Half Dead and Dynamite; tracks produced at Albatross in the summer of 1997 (link) | | | - Plymouth Rock - The Candy Machine and My Girlfriend - Sangre de Stephanie - Roaming The Foam - Let's Get Incredible | The Entertainment and Arts; tracks recorded at Burr Holland prior to release in September 1998 (link) | - Bitchy Christmas | Released Dec 1998; lost; from self-released split-cassette w/ The Freedom Fighters (link) | | | - Lonely in a Limousine - Candy's Room - Space Humping $19.99 - Manpark - Lake Street is for Lovers - Nice, Nice - Katrina and the K-Hole - Cruised and Accused of Cruising - Touch My Stuff - Lie Down on Landsdowne - Lifter Puller vs. The End of the Evening - The Flex and Buff Result | Fiestas & Fiascos; tracks recorded at Burr Holland prior to release in first week of November 1999 (link; link) | | | - Back In Blackbeard - Secret Santa Cruz - La Quereria - Math is Money - 4 Dix | Recorded at Burr Holland prior to May 2000 "All the Right Moves" interview (link; link) |
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Post by skepticatfirst on Dec 31, 2020 14:07:54 GMT -5
Man these tables are going to be a @#$%&.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 1, 2021 12:12:49 GMT -5
THE FIRST FIVE TRACKSObviously the list order mostly follows the release dates of the albums and singles, but there are exceptions, especially at the beginning. And while all of the album releases bring important new angles to the story, that first batch of five songs written after Mission Viejo but before the first album --- Prescription Sunglasses, Emperor, Rental, Slips Backwards, and Nassau Coliseum --- weighs heavy in the question of where the story actually begins. A few examples are enough to show why this is both weird and complicated. ***1) Nassau ColiseumThe girl with the visions in Nassau Coliseum is a dead ringer for Mary in THS: line | text | Mary comparison (THS) | 23 | i might never get it | "I know it's unlikely she'll ever be mine" [LID] | 24 | it's behind the buildings | "Back behind The Ambassador" [Ambassador] | 25 | it's guarded by cameras | "'Cause they've got earpiece dudes in a fortified fortress" [S&T] | 26 | studied by doctors | "The doctors said that it was all in his head. Then they discovered the blood" [RH] | 27 | wrapped up in plastic | connect "woke up in rags and wrapped in a plastic bag" [SdS] to "Found dead on dirty mattresses, bleeding through the bandages ... they're covering the carcass" [Spectres] | 28 | it sleeps at the airport | "She's sleeping at a storage space by the airport" [TOT] | 29 | skips all its classes | | 30 | skips like a record | "Thought she was a dancer but her steps they made the records skip" [BBlues] | 31 | used to be better | "Remember when we thought this was better" [ASitS] | 32 | do you remember? | "Remember when we thought this was better" [ASitS] | 33 | used to have visions | "And it all went down exactly like your visions" [YS] | 34 | used to believe em | "She got confused about the truth" [SN], "In the end, only the girls know the whole truth" [Weekenders] |
It's especially strange to find the surprise at the end of the THS story --- when Charlemagne realizes that Mary's visions are unrelated to her few-seconds-into-the-future precog ability ( heregoes) --- anticipated in "used to have visions/ used to believe em" [NC], all the way back in 1994. (Compare "so concerned to learn that movies are just movies" [LDoL] on F&F a few years later.) ***2) Prescription SunglassesPrescription Sunglasses describes a party gone wrong that strikingly combines the characteristic features of both of the killer St. Paul parties (the metal bar party + the crucifixion) in THS: swimming pool had purple lights, those purple drinks were dynamite i woke up, i was black and blue, hey girl what did we do? said you might remember pretty soon i hope you don't remember pretty soon think it was a three day rave think i got the flyer saved we were naked on a sunday afternoon made it until sunday afternoon [PSunglasses] Recognizable characteristics of the THS metal bar party ( heregoes) in these lines include: - a mixed group (here just 1 guy and 1 girl, unlike THS 3 guys 1 girl, but still a mixed group) go to a dangerous party
- purple drinks, implied here to contain roofies (see NN, etc.); compare "we got dosed" [SM]
- guy gets beaten up badly
- "naked" suggests a sexual aspect to what happened
Recognizable characteristics of the THS crucifixion ( heregoes) in these lines include: - a mixed group go to a dangerous party
- "I woke up"; compare "we woke up in Ybor City" [KP]
- "said you might remember pretty soon"; compare "I really don't remember / I remember we departed from our bodies" [KP]
- the events of the party end after three days, on a Sunday [CatCT, NS]
It's hard to think that this similarity is coincidental. ***3) Emperor With "resurrection," Emperor marks Craig's very first recorded use of a religious metaphor, establishing a pattern whose development in the THS era requires no comment. But there's a second and more concrete link to the THS world in the "emperor" image itself. At first, I took "emperor" to refer to Nero, the Roman Emperor. This reading was suggested by all of the explicitly Roman context in the LP universe --- "there ain't no place like Rome" [SCity], the "Coliseum" [NC] with innocents attacked by wild beasts [Bears], nightclubs that are described as "domes" [SCity] like the "Pantheon" [Sublet], etc. --- as well as the fact that these nightclubs burn in fires [SWH, TFatBR], recalling Nero as the author of the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD ( wikipedia). The appearance, in solo song Saint Peter Upside Down, of Nero Augustus Caesar [SPUD] makes it clear that this body of evidence isn't coincidental. Which is to say that the Nero identification has to be right as far as it goes. But in a textbook case of Craig ambiguity, a closer look at the lyrics of Emperor reveals a second and stronger allusion. At the climax of the song, the Narrator declares, with great specificity: i am the emperor that is what the crown is for that is what the throne is for that is what the robes are for that is what the gloves are for this feels like a holy war [Emperor] Nero didn't wear a crown, or a robe, or gloves, or sit on a throne. Those are the characteristics, not of a Roman Emperor, but of a Holy Roman Emperor of the Middle Ages ( wikipedia) ---- the first and most important of whom by far, a ruler whose holy war against the Saracens and Moors is literally the stuff of legend ( wikipedia), is this guy: aka Charlemagne. ***We go looking for the boundaries of the LP story, and wherever we look, from 4Dix at the end all the way back to the very earliest songs, we keep finding ourselves back among the familiar landmarks of the THS story. What's going on here?
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 2, 2021 15:22:06 GMT -5
Thanks. We'll see if I can keep it both sufficiently methodical and sufficiently interesting as things pick up ...
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jan 3, 2021 1:53:07 GMT -5
We go looking for the boundaries of the LP story, and wherever we look, from 4Dix at the end all the way back to the very earliest songs, we keep finding ourselves back among the familiar landmarks of the THS story. What's going on here? This is a bit early to bring up, and not of any narrative relevance, but it's really hard not to hear those latest recorded songs as a thematical bridge between Lifter Puller and Hold Steady. 4 Dix is the obvious example, but La Quereria also have this feeling to me. There's a warmness and mellowness to it, and it contains that "the kids shouted 'halleluiah'!" line, which is pretty hard to overlook. 4 Dix was an early LP favorite to me, even before I knew it was part of the last recordings. I think I found a download of Soft Rock pretty early in my forray into Lifter Puller, and what was album tracks, singles or b-sides was a blur to me. 4 Dix had this amazing energy in it, also containing lyrics who just SOUNDED so damn good ("Pestilence pesenteted us with a kick as pen and pencil set/ and it was excellent").
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 3, 2021 22:30:09 GMT -5
Curious if there is a difference in what you are describing here with the lines about Frampton and Daltrey (who are both still alive) and what you were describing above as the "dead rock star" lines such as the one about Phil Lynott. Both lines follow the formula so and so looks like (x famous person).
Do you think the lines perform a different function depending on whether the person is alive or dead? I think the way it works is that all of these "look like" lines have a single point of comparison. The point of comparison should be something major, something that you should be able to say in retrospect "oh yeah, that's definitely one of the first things you think of with person x." With Daltrey, it's easy ... The Who is literally the first thing you could possibly think of. With Frampton, it's maybe a little less obvious, but in fact the champagne/sherman/breakfast image is by far the most memorable image of him in any of his big hits (Baby I Love Your Way doesn't have any self-description at all; Do You Feel Like We Do has champagne/sherman/breakfast, and the wine glass; then it's a big dropoff from there). Plus, the obscure "sherman" reference makes it inevitable that this is the right one ... the only place I've *ever* heard of a sherman outside of LP is in Do You Feel Like We Do. It has to be that. With Lynott, it's harder. Yes, he died very young at 36, but his early death didn't exactly leap to mind when I first heard the THS line. If I hadn't read Tad's quip about dead rock stars, I'd probably still be unsure what this one was about. So no, not alive/dead --- "dead" is just the point of comparison for Lynott. Everyone else has a different and independent point of comparison. I guess I should say that I think most of Craig's allusions reference pretty basic or even obvious aspects of the things alluded to --- he doesn't go deep or allude to obscurities, for the most part. I mean, he can't be obscure if he wants to be able to say of his art that it's there for anyone to appreciate. (I remember seeing an article a few years back by some guy writing for Poetry magazine, maybe, who was frustrated that Craig, in his opinion, didn't seem to have a deep knowledge of Berryman's poetry ... I was like, man, Craig knows that Berryman jumped off the Washington Ave bridge, and now you're watching poetry being made in front of your eyes. What more can you want?) Hope that helps.
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Post by eyepatchgary on Jan 4, 2021 11:15:22 GMT -5
1) Crust PunksEarly in the Here Goes thread, I'd argued ( heregoes) that "crust punk" [BBlues] was evidence of Gideon originally having dreads (see also "dreadlocked" in GLS, the Marley reference in CatCT) that were shaved off by the Skins when he got jumped into the gang [HM, SPayne]. Substantiating that was hard: I'd found some internet references to crust punks having dreadlocks, but only a few, and they weren't very crisp, and none of them was from the AKM era, so I didn't back it up with citations. ...
Here in the UK there was a massive "crusty/crustie" scene back in the 90s. The two key elements were dreads and a dog on string. The scene had died out but may be making a comeback through ExtinctionRebellion... See www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-49970717Looking forward to the rest of the LP story.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 4, 2021 21:14:05 GMT -5
Here in the UK there was a massive "crusty/crustie" scene back in the 90s. The two key elements were dreads and a dog on string. The scene had died out but may be making a comeback through ExtinctionRebellion... See www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-49970717That article is fantastic, thank you very much for linking. It's bizarre that the dreads and dogs and drifting thing all had international currency, but apparently they did ...! Looking forward to the rest of the LP story. Thanks for this too. In a minute I'll post the last of the Introduction posts, just tying up the groundwork, but tomorrow I'll kick into second gear. Hopefully the interest will ratchet up with the change of focus. (Back at work now, so will probably be posting later in the day US time as a general rule.)
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 4, 2021 21:24:56 GMT -5
UNIVERSES & CHARACTERSCraig has commented more than once on the boundaries between the LP and THS universes (and the solo-stuff universe as well). Besides the AMtoDM interview from about a year ago (see starting at around 6:30): there's also his 2005 interview with Brian Howe ( link), which gets at the heart of this question: In the thread "I NEED A NEW WAR OFFICIAL DISCUSSION THREAD" ( link) I commented on this same interview excerpt, saying I still like that as a framing for the relationship of the solo stuff to the worlds of LP and THS, and as an explanation for things like the girl with "psychic awarenesses" [Indications] who looks an awful lot like the LP and THS girls with "visions" [NC, YS, etc.]. We've seen enough (see THS CHARACTERS IN LIFTER PULLER? and THE FIRST FIVE TRACKS above) to take it as a plausible theory of the relationship between the LP and THS worlds, too. So that's where we're going to start. If it should turn out that there *is* a richer relationship between them, our continuing comparison of the evidence on both sides will presumably put us in a position to discover it. ***On that note, we'll go ahead now with the explicit assumption that - there is indeed a single LP story that is somehow reflected in all the songs except Mission Viejo;
- the LP story is strictly separate from the THS story;
- the LP story is built on a store of themes, places, archetypes, and events that are shared with the THS story;
and see how that holds up as we put together an account of the story itself. It fits what we've already seen at a high level; now we have to start working through the details.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 5, 2021 21:36:56 GMT -5
SEX FOR DRUGS IN METAPHORSI presume anyone reading this is at least familiar with the THS story of Holly blowing gangsters for drugs [Swish, BBlues, etc.], and Mary doing the same with more complex motivations of her own (as Juanita says, commenting on her own "condescension"='going down': "I've got my reasons" [Bloomington]). In LP, this sex-for-drugs/bjs-for-drugs exchange is elevated to the status of a bedrock theme, with its most explicit framing at the beginning of Manpark: these guys they gather in the public garden they're duckin into shrubs, crawlin out all smilin and if you're into drugs i guess we're golden and if ain't that sucks, it sure beats starvin i'm like a pied piper, lead the kids into rats, lead the rats to the water i'm turnin teens into fiends, lead em straight to the slaughter i got the stuff that gets em slippin in the shower with the power to the people makin money with their mouths [Manpark] This exchange is the Rosetta Stone of LP metaphors. Over and over, we meet with examples in which the metaphor used for one of the two halves --- either the sex reference or the drug reference --- is uncertain; but because the other of the two is clear, we know how to resolve the uncertainty. [*1]***To take the first example in the catalog, from the third verse of Emperor: and a quaalude and a vacuum means a clean house and a clean break [Emperor] The two halves of "a quaalude and a vacuum" are obviously selected at least in part for the jarring effect of the double vowels, aa and uu, that don't normally occur in English. But leaving that aside: what is actually being described here, and why are these words used to describe it? The bjs-for-drugs Rosetta Stone says: "quaalude" is clearly drugs, so "vacuum" is a candidate for a blowjob metaphor. In fact, this looks very likely, since the essential activity of both vacuum and bj is sucking (this turns out to be supported also by multiple entries for "vacuum" on urbandictionary). So we'll put that in the bank, and conclude for the time being that this line describes an event --- a "clean house"/"clean break" --- that takes place together with an episode of sex-for-drugs exchange. This "vacuum" is, unfortuately, pretty much a one-off in the lyrics; deciphering it doesn't help us anywhere else. [*2] But there are also lots of metaphors that *are* reused repeatedly, meaning that the unlocking of one line quickly snowballs to others. We'll look at a number of these patterns in the posts ahead. [*1] There are also terms that are used standalone in *both* a drug-related sense and in a sexual sense, for example "connect." The senses "connect"='meet a dealer to obtain drugs' and "connect"='achieve sexual fulfillment' are both objectively documented in English slang ( gdict). But the best evidence of this two-sided meaning is Craig's own usage. Brokerdealer's Mommy, Can I Go Out And Chill Tonight uses the word in the sense of meeting with drug dealers ("thugs"=dealers; "dominoes"=amphetamines, see LISTED below), with also some sexual innuendo: cause ain't you ever heard of the domino effect it's a thing that kills the kids when the kids get kind of wrecked and these kids connect with heavy tech and swollen necks they let the thugs collect [MCIGOaCT] Brokerdealer's Do Me Nails uses it in the sexual sense: when kids connect they get triple X they get when kids connect they get X X X X X [DMN] Several songs clearly use it in both senses, as in Crucifixion Cruise (the "old connection" is dealer/boyfriend Gideon; note "put her mouth around" for the sexual sense, and "prescribe" for the drug sense): And sat reflecting on the resurrection and dreaming about an old connection And talking loud over lousy connections, she put her mouth around a difficult question She said Lord, what do you recommend to a real sweet girl who's made some not-sweet friends? Lord, what do you prescribe to a real soft girl who's having real hard times? [CC] The term "cruise" here is another important term at the intersection of sex and drugs; generically, it means "to offer sex for payment" ( gdict), but in the LP world that payment is always drugs, or money for drugs. Crucifixion Cruise conceals the metaphor in "cruise"='car ride', Secret Santa Cruz in the name of the California city (see ORIGINS OF SIGNATURES above), but it's the same metaphor in both places. [*2] We've seen "clean" used as a euphemism for giving a bj in Our Whole Lives ("Bang, bang, bang, she's a cleaning freak / She scrubs the surface until it's sparkling" [OWL]; heregoes); but that's not really the same thing as "vacuum," even if this one results in "a clean house and a clean break" [Emperor].
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 6, 2021 18:13:41 GMT -5
DRUG SLANGA lesson I learned too late in the course of Here Goes was that Craig's use of drug slang demands close attention (it took me a long time to notice that "rock"=meth/crack, for example, longer to guess that "ice"=meth, and there were other stumbles). But I hadn't been thinking about LP for long at all before a puzzle forced me to take a new look at this problem. ***In the second verse of Double Straps, we hear the following: she said keep this in your backpack carry it with double straps keep these wings beneath your baseball hat you look so cute like that, i want your autograph [DStraps] It's clear from context that "wings" here refers to hockey hair ( wikipedia), coming out from under the sides of his "baseball hat"; for the purposes of a first pass, that's the meaning. But maybe there's more going on here. "Keep these wings" is symmetric with "keep this" two lines earlier; what if "wings" and "this" refer to the same thing? And what's "this"? It's certainly thinkable that "this" is drugs. Keeping drugs in a "backpack" has a precedent in the "magic backpack" carrying drugs in Our Whole Lives, so that checks out; there are references to drugs concealed in a hatband in Lie Down On Landsdowne, so that checks out too. But I'd never heard "wings" used as a drug term before, and there was nothing to suggest that it is or was one even on urbandictionary (which is, for the rest, not always a reliable source, especially for the Lifter Puller era that we're trying to document). So how could I settle this? And how could I settle this, not just for "wings," but for other terms that might not telegraph "drugs" quite so insistently? ***Looking for an answer to the bigger question, I made a principled search for real documentation, and came up with two solid sources: - From the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the publication "Street Terms: Drugs and the Drug Trade." This dates to the 90's, the same era we want to document, with new terms added every few years. A copy of the February 2004 version can be found here (link); an undated later version, with a handful of additional terms, can be found here (link).
- From the Drug Enforcement Administration (the "DEA" [LiaL]), the publication "Slang Terms and Code Words: A Reference for Law Enforcement Personnel." This dates to the 2000's, and has also been regularly added to over the years, but because it distinguishes newer terms from older ones, it's still a useful guide to LP-era slang. I've used the July 2018 version, which can be found here (link).
Both documents (which overlap substantially, but not completely) are a gold mine, with evidence for not only "wings" (cocaine or heroin) but many other drug terms from Craig's lyrics (see LISTED below). The fact that the government squares compiling these documents are a little comical, and that they may get the exact meaning of some of the terms wrong, doesn't matter. What's important is that Craig can be shown to use terms that are documented here and not elsewhere, "wings" being just the first example. ***Having this documentation puts us in a position to clear up a raft of ambiguities in the lyrics. Take for example the opening lines of Barfruit Blues: Kids with broken hearts, kids with broken bones Kids with kidney stones giving birth to bloody stereos [BBlues] We know there are some broken hearts in the THS story, sort of; the kids get beat up at the metal bar, so maybe that could account for the broken bones, although none of the other descriptions of the beatdown suggest that the violence goes quite that far; but kidney stones ...? As it turns out, none of these terms are literal: "hearts"=amphetamines, "bones"=crack, and "stones"=crack (see LISTED below). What these lines are saying is just that the kids are on drugs, and it's going to lead to a bloody end (as spelled out by the Lifter Puller line: "your girlfriend's dead and you've got blood on your stereo system" [RfLB]). ***Another example is "water" as slang for meth (see LISTED below): it had never occurred to me that this is a drug term, but knowing that it is adds a lot of clarity to lines like Hey sweet recovery, come on, won't you wade into the water with me? [BCamp] with "water"=meth now in obvious opposition to "recovery": Holly's resisting him --- apparently trying to get clean (see JEEP ENCOUNTER: ORIGIN below) --- but Gideon, who wants to fuck, is trying to lure her back with drugs. This revelation, a small thing in itself, quickly leads to bigger things. Take for example Summer House, which starts with an innocuous-sounding college-indie sigh: i know that you really like to waterski and at night that you can see the whole galaxy do you really like hanging out with hicks and townies what do you mean you ain't never comin back to the city [SH] But look closer. There's lots of evidence that stargazing in Lifter Puller isn't about astronomy: shootin stars and scrapin scars [MV] and your stars are shootin up and down my arm [SBackwards] i met this chick at a flick you know she hooked me up to the stars [TGatSD] Liking to "waterski" isn't about enjoying lake sports, either. There's a reason why the girl in question is hanging out indefinitely with the townies (compare the familiar story of Ambassador: "She was pretty much living in/ A 3.2 bars a stretch to call a club" [Ambassador]). The payoff snowballs from there. We wouldn't necessarily take the evidence of urbandictionary that "pool" is slang for "a drug drop location [for] meth" ( urbandictionary) on its own; but having learned in addition to this that "water"=meth, we can say with some confidence that the sinister "waterpark" of The Mezzanine Gypoff and "swimming pool" of Prescription Sunglasses and Half Dead And Dynamite (song) refer, in fact, to locations where meth is distributed. Not all the documented terms come with such high yield. But collectively they shine a lot of light on what's going on in the story. ***Along with slang terms for individual substances, the ONDCP document defines terms for drug-related activities as well, many of which are used by Craig in the documented senses. Examples of these (we'll look at others later) include: 1) Connect -- Purchase drugs; supplier of illegal drugs (see SEX FOR DRUGS IN METAPHORS above) 2) Dry up -- To inject drugs We drink and we dry up and now we crumble into dust [SBS] 3) Gaggle -- A group of strung-out junkies (in different version of document: link) there's a gaggle of gutted out swans [LGI] 4) Holding -- Possessing drugs When he's holding then the streetlamps, they seem an awful lot like spotlights [CiS] 5) Runners -- People who sell drugs for others He jerked around when we joked about the runner's high [RH] I completely missed this sense of "runner" in Here Goes; Charlemagne is "sick of running" [RH], not in the sense that he's sick of fleeing, but that he's sick of selling drugs for the Skins --- a fact consistent with what Jesse told the Skins themselves in Criminal Fingers: I said you said you've been thinking Thinking about trying to take a break [CF] Many other terms from the document are relevant, but we'll look at them in context as we progress.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jan 7, 2021 6:11:50 GMT -5
I want to make a general remark about these signifiers and metaphors. I remember when I started reading Here Goes, and though that some of these translations or readings was a little bit too optimistic or even "practical". I felt that a little bit too much was made out of pretty ordinary words or ways to describe a character. Like how Mary was identified with wearing white clothes, or that any reference to cigarettes was supposed to prove that the song was about Jesse.
I've changed my mind in a pretty major way on this. Mostly because if you look a little closer, Skepticatfirst shows us that these signifiers rarely appear alone. It's not like he reads "smoke" and goes "ah, this is Jesse". Each signifier goes into a bigger system, where they appear in pairs or even stacked on top of each other. And if you follow the path from one signifier to the next, you pretty quickly end up with a way to identify a character who is totally believeable.
But there's also a simpler and less scientific test I often find myself applying. I often ask myself: "Why would Craig put it this way?". I've listened to and read Craig's 25 years of lyrics pretty intensively the past 12-13 years, and even before Here Goes I was in awe of how extremely clever he is. He is certainly capable of writing pretty much perfect lyrics blindfolded, and I remember reading the alternative lyrics printed in the Entertainment And Arts EP booklet and getting even more impressed.
When someone is THAT good, it's quite easy for me to not only give him the benefit of the doubt when he write what at first glance seem like a simple or half-baked line, but even assume there's some deeper meaning to it. The most superficial example of this is to not read the repeating of certain lines or images as laziness or being uninventive, but rather as a deliberate move. On a deeper lever, I often read lines who seems very everyday or, in lack of better words, non-poetic, and think "well, there must be something else going on here".
So the general thought here is that if Craig writes something non-impressive, I think it's way more likely that I don't fully understand it than that he has written a bad line or a verse. This of course puts me in the danger of reading everything as high art, even if it maybe isn't, but after all these years I think that's a risk I'm willing to take.
When I read a line like "I know you like to waterski", I'm pretty sure it has a meaning more profound than Craig telling us about some character's hobby. I might not be able to fully understand what's between the lines, but I'm more eager to explore it than settle for the original meaning.
And that's why I'm a point where I fully buy that a pretty straight-forward word like "water" could have a systematic and metaphoric meaning. I have a feeling that a few people reading this thread get their guard up at that point. Isn't it a little bit too optimistic to think that almost every normal word have a metaphoric meaning, spanning through several songs and albums? And maybe it is. Except when you dig into Craig's lyrics, you get hundreds of examples of him doint exactly that: Hiding deeply intricate metaphors in plain sight, behind words who just fly by if you don't pause and think back.
And again, this is just as much praise to Skepticatfirst as it is to Craig. It takes a brilliant mind to write these lyrics, but I'm almost tempted to say that it takes an equal analytic and sharp mind to decipher them.
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