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Post by skepticatfirst on Jul 28, 2021 6:31:39 GMT -5
WIREDWhen the Narrator says that he "sold [Juanita] out" [SWH], then, it doesn't mean that he laid the blame for the "nightclub fires" at her feet, but rather that he implicated her in the criminal life of the gang --- the same implication from which he'd earlier tried to shield her by not going to the police when she was interned at the Summer House (see DETECTIVE above). and hey, juanita, well i sold you out got the pliers on my fingers and your name slipped out [SWH] It's also not the case that he "sold [Juanita] out" in the sense of turning her over to the cops: he explicitly states that he didn't tell em 'bout your whereabouts [SWH] This protest is surprising for two reasons. One, the cops already know about the wreck (which the Narrator knows they couldn't have missed anyway) and have asked him questions about it ("it wasn't just an accident" [SWH]): which *should* mean that they already know exactly where Juanita is. Two, he left Juanita for dead ("your girlfriend's dead and you've got blood on your stereo system" [RfLB], "calling you and me the chappaquiddick kids" [LiaL]): which *should* mean that he doesn't need to protect her from arrest in any case. What can it mean, then, that he didn't tell the cops about her whereabouts? It must mean two things: 1) The cops must have told the Narrator, falsely, that the car was empty when they found it. This is of course an inference, but it has two strong points in its favor: a) it's exactly consistent with the THS version of the interrogation, in which the cops tell the THS Narrator the same thing (the THS cops are described, in allusion to John 20:12, as "a couple bona fide angels" [NS] for reporting that they found the wrecked car empty --- in other words, for announcing that Charlemagne, like Jesus, has left the tomb; heregoes; heregoes). b) it's a plausible real-world development: "minimization" of the crime of which a suspect is accused is a standard police technique for extracting a confession ( wikipedia. In this case, "minimization" would mean reducing the scope of the Narrator's alleged wrongdoing to only that minimum which is clearly on the table, i.e. crashing a car and possessing a small amount of drugs --- which for a "rich kid" [MiM] from the suburbs amounts to no more than a fuckup --- while leaving out the serious part, i.e. running from the scene of an accident and abandoning the injured victim, in a bid to make him relax and get him talking). 2) The Narrator, believing this report, can't actually *know* where Juanita's gone; the implication of "didn't tell em 'bout your whereabouts" is that he assumes that she's headed right back to the gang. This assumption on the Narrator's part is consistent with the farewell advice he gives her, which is to go back with the gangsters to one of the two "coasts": - either (East Coast) to go back with "the train" (see THE RIDE and THE GREATER TRIP DOWNTOWN above) to "get lost" in the downtown St. Paul brewery bar gangbang "crowd" [SGS, TLaDiLBI, LGI]:
take the train downtown get lost in the crowd [SWH] - or (West Coast) to go back to her internment, hidden from the sun, at the Summer House:
my advice is dye your eyes and stay inside [SWH] We can't miss the fact that this ambiguous East-Coast-or-West-Coast fate is exactly how Mary ends up in the aftermath of the THS story: I was sitting on the kitchen tryna guess where she was living now. Hotel room in Houston with the shades against the sunshine Or maybe still in Scranton like in 1999 [EC] Here "Scranton" is The East (see FRONTAGE ROAD and BACK TO THE CITY above; for "1999" in association with the Final Party, see LASER SHOW and 15TH AND FRANKLIN above); "Houston" is The West. Note that "shades" is a word with multiple meanings, [*1] including: 1) drugs ("the shades against the sunshine"="the speed against the sedatives" [Eureka]; see LISTED above); 2) literal curtains ("Bedsheets for curtains" [NF], "Saw the sun through a crack in the curtains" [R&T]); 3) literal "shades"=sunglasses, as in "she always wore sunglasses" [PSunglasses], consistent with "dye your eyes" [SWH]. Lord I'm Discouraged indicates that it's the Summer House back in The West where she winds up after all: There's a house on the south side Where she stays in for days at a time [LID] The correspondence of "stays in for days at a time" to "stay inside" [SWH] is self-evident. (For "house on the south side," see the Summer House's location on the southernmost border of Osseo; see OSSEO above.) ***Once the cops get the Narrator's confession and learn that he's in the gang, they offer him a chance to cooperate and become a wire-wearing "informant" in order to avoid prosecution: got a tape deck, not the regular kind it's a secret, you can't see it you can't believe it, i'm the informant [SWH] and those guys got me wired [SWH] This deal is the "amnesty" referred to in Math Is Money (we've already identified "new bedford" with Edina; see RENTAL above): well hello, new bedford, mass won't you hit me with a little bit of amnesty [MiM] ***This episode is the LP source of the "wire" referred to in several THS songs, only in THS it's been turned into something else: in Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night, "tired" and "wired" apply to the police, not the Narrator; in T-Shirt Tux and You Did Good Kid, it's become a metaphor for a kind of alien perception of unanticipated feelings: but the things they didn't tell you when you went off to work how does it feel? where does it hurt? you can't see the wires when they're under your shirt but they're taking down every single detail [YDGK] Johnny Cash was in the service When the news came through the wire. And its weird how you feel when bad people die [TST] This change is linked to the single biggest point of difference between the LP and THS stories, namely, the fact of the Narrator's confession. Under the pressure of police interrogation, the LP Narrator "sold [Juanita] out" [SWH]; but in the same situation, the THS Narrator defends Mary and refuses to cooperate ( heregoes). The THS Narrator never ends up wearing a wire; instead, he and Mary go free. Still, the THS story maintains a memory of the LP outcome, both in the above references to a "wire" (which again have no natural basis in the THS plot) and in generic allusion to "cracking and caving in" [HM]. We'll come to a broader discussion of this difference between the stories shortly (see POSITIVE JAM below). ***The Narrator's betrayal of Juanita, bad in its own right, is made worse by Juanita's strong defense of the Eyepatch Guy (the Narrator gives in to the "pliers" [SWH], but Juanita is ready to stand up to "electric shocks" [Bloomington]): [*2] cause i'm a spy girl, i'm just old fashioned i never took to callin it espionage cause I'm a spy girl you must know all about it i just never had you figured for the other side and you can burn me in the name of revolution you can try to make me talk with electric shocks i never saw his face, don't know who the man is he just puts his instructions into my mailbox [Bloomington] His incrimination of Juanita in order to save himself is alluded to in Sherman City as well: i guess she caught what was coming for me [SCity] ***And yet the LP story ends on a note that isn't totally negative, in that Juanita does get away from the gangsters, and does get clean (it's not quite Holly's "ok in the end" [SN], but there's no hint of Mary's post-"thought it got better" [TOT] relapse, either): queen went clean yeah she ran out of screen she said it's too much hassle, it's too much hustlin i'll miss the people but i won't miss the feeling of six am burnin like split lips and bourbon [Viceburgh] The "screen" [Viceburgh] she ran out of is drugs (see PHARMACY GOODS above); the "people" [Viceburgh] she'll miss are the gangsters. The line about who/what she'll "miss"/"won't miss" [Viceburgh] lets us identify the THS version of the same end to the story: Came back from the mission and her hair was in her mouth again. It's just another part of her don't wanna take the medicine. She wont miss the city but she'll miss all her friends. I said "Vice versa for me, man. Vice versa for me" [CitM] This "mission" [CitM] is the same rescue "mission" [Esther] that began with the Mission Party (see LOOKING FOR K above), and that now, in the LP world, is finally at an end. The "other part of her don't wanna take the medicine" [CitM] is the Katrina drug fiend in the alpha girl, forced now to suffer through detox in the hospital. Compare to this the account of the THS Narrator's visit to Mary at Methodist Hospital in Almost Everything; they both go in and get "medicine" [AE], but she's kept there under observation, while he's allowed to go: [*3] We checked into Methodist We met with some residents. They maxed out my medicine. And let me back loose again [AE] Finally, the "friends" [CitM] who she'll miss are the gangsters. But for the Narrator ("Vice versa for me"), it's the other way around: even after everything that happened down at the brewery bar, he still loves The City (see THE CITY above), he's just happy to be done with the gang: I like the party favors but I hate the party people [EC] [*1] The close association of "shades" with Juanita's room in the Summer House suggests that lovers in the lockdown under shady circumstances [TCMaMG] refers to her internment, and to the Narrator being brought back with her to the Summer House under guard (see CARGO VAN above), rather than to the kids' sequestration by the cops, which is an invention of the THS version of the story, rather than the LP version. [*2] I suspect (but can't be certain without more evidence) that the Narrator's dejection at having caved is the reason why "you did good kid" [YDGK], which I take to be the cops' reassurance after he spills the story and agrees to become an informant, is repeated with such bitter insistence (for the implicit reference to the LP version of the story, see THS CHARACTERS below). [*3] The opening lines of Almost Everything: Something might happen but nothing will be never ending. Right from the start I told you I can't spend the night [AE] carry a double shadow of the original LP story: One, this visit to the alpha girl in the hospital is not the "ending" of the THS narrative (which has yet to progress to the trial of Gideon, the confrontation of Jesse and Holly, etc.: heregoes), but it *is* the ending of the LP story. Two, "right from the start I told you I can't spend the night" suggests that the Narrator and the alpha girl see each other after entering the hospital separately, after the Narrator has been evaluated and told that he won't be admitted; this doesn't square with the progression of events in the THS story ( heregoes), but it *is* consistent with what we know about the LP story (the implication being that the cops sent him to Methodist after the interrogation was over). Note too that Methodist Hospital is the closest hospital both to the Londonderry Rd/Bren Rd exit in Edina (the approximate location of the wreck; see BLOODY CAR WRECKS above) and to the Edina Police Department ( gmaps), a clear indication of the LP origin of this THS detail as well.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jul 29, 2021 6:36:29 GMT -5
CALENDAR: THIRD PASSThe last line of Rental contains a key piece of information for calendar purposes: that whole september seems so blurry [Rental] What this tells us is that the Narrator's intermittent career as the Eyepatch Guy, with glasses off and eyepatch on ("blurry"), is a close overlap with the month of September (see RENTAL above). We already knew that that career begins on Friday, September 2 (see CALENDAR: FIRST PASS above); now we learn that it ends approximately a month later. [*1] This fact resolves our remaining uncertainty about how much time has passed between The LBI on Labor Day weekend and the events that follow; the one-month timeframe leaves just enough room to sandwich in the three Wednesday night parties (separated by two-week intervals) at the end of the story, which in turn constrains all of the remaining dates. We already know (see CALENDAR: SECOND PASS above) that the Wednesday night party of Solid Gold Sole takes place on September 7; from this it follows that the Mission Party takes place two weeks later on September 21, and the Final Party two weeks after that, on October 5, exactly one month after Labor Day. ***One indication that this is correct is found in the THS calendar: the succession of LP episodes [1] Summer House -> [2] Two Weeks -> [3] Final Party is mirrored in the succession of THS episodes [1] Charlemagne stays with Gideon on Columbus between 28th and Lake -> [2] two weeks with the Skins -> [3] THS Crucifixion party That first THS episode, during which Charlemagne stays with Gideon, is described by One For The Cutters as lasting precisely two weeks ( heregoes): She gave him a ride to some kid's house in Cleveland He stayed there for two weeks, the cops finally found him [OftC] The fact that the THS story features two consecutive two-week cycles in the runup to the final party provides good evidence that the deduced two-week timeframes for the corresponding LP episodes are correct. ***These anchor dates confirm that the events of the Summer House period for which we knew the day of the *week*, but not the day of the *month*, in fact occur on the earliest-possible dates which we calculated upthread (see CALENDAR: SECOND PASS above; these dates are now set out explicitly in the calendar below). The same dates also let us check our handling of the two-week sleepless stretch reported in TGatSD (see TWO WEEKS above). We can now say the following: - The dating of the Mission Party to Wednesday, September 21, 1994, means that the last night the Narrator slept before being jumped into the gang (see CARGO VAN above) was the night of Tuesday, Sept 20.
- The statement "it's been 15 days" [SShoes] is made by the THS Narrator during the day of the THS Crucifixion party, prior to going down to the Party Pit for the festivities (referred to by "later at some party" [SShoes]). The analogous day in the LP story would be the day of the Final Party on Wednesday, Oct 5, which is in fact exactly the 15th day since the Narrator's last night of sleep on Tuesday, Sept 20.
- After the raids, revenge and highway madness of the night of the Final Party, the Narrator is apprehended by police in the wee hours of Thursday, Oct 6.
- In Minnesota, a suspect arrested without a warrant is supposed to see a judge within 36 hours, and can be detained for up to 48 hours without the judge's further authorization (link). Those limits are meant to allow time for thorough investigation of the suspect before presentation to the court; the police have every incentive to let that time elapse while they wait for more information to emerge. Star Wars Hips indicates that the detention and interrogation of the Narrator is a lengthy process ("i got tired" [SWH]), and that the police are acutely interested in his connection to the gangster arrests --- this being the motive for making him wear a wire --- which the St. Paul police are investigating during the same timeframe ("Now the cops want to question everyone present/ They parade every townie in town through the station" [OftC]). The most probable implication of this is that the Narrator was held for something more than 24 but less than 36 hours, and released on the morning of Friday, Oct 7.
- After leaving the police station, the Narrator checks in at Methodist hospital, gets a methadone prescription, and is released the same day (see WIRED above); having paid a visit to Juanita in her hospital bed, he finally goes home to sleep.
The dates all check out, and in fact result in a stretch of exactly sixteen consecutive nights without proper sleep, satisfying the "he stayed up for sixteen nights at a stretch" [TL] constraint of Teenage Liberation. ***From beginning to end, then, the final calendar covers April-October of 1994 ("I spent seven months in another town" [Western Pier]; see SHEPARD'S MANSION above), letting us state with confidence that we know which year is referred to in the lines from Girls Like Status: It was song number three on John's last CD, I'm going to make it through this year if it kills me And it almost killed me [GLS]
1994 ----- FRI APR 01 - Ride in Dwight's car down to brewery SUN APR 03 - Easter Sunday. Party Zero assault WED APR 20 - Wednesday night party --| WED MAY 04 - Wednesday night party | WED MAY 18 - Wednesday night party | WED JUN 01 - Wednesday night party | somewhere(s) WED JUN 15 - Wednesday night party |-- in here, the WED JUN 29 - Wednesday night party | frontage road WED JUL 13 - Wednesday night party | WED JUL 27 - Wednesday night party | WED AUG 10 - Wednesday night party --| MON AUG 22 - Narrator turns 24 WED AUG 24 - Wednesday night party: attempted drowning WED AUG 31 - Narrator leaves apartment, moves into Jeep FRI SEP 02 - Return to brewery, The LBI costume party SAT SEP 03 - Jeep Encounter. Juanita leaves with gang WED SEP 07 - Wednesday night party of Solid Gold Sole FRI SEP 09 - Summer House Call 1 (Narrator/Juanita) SAT SEP 10 - Driving around looking for Juanita day 1 SUN SEP 11 - Driving around looking for Juanita day 2 MON SEP 12 - Planned day to bring Juanita home (failed) MON SEP 12 - Summer House Call 2 (Eyepatch Guy/Juanita) [earliest possible date] TUE SEP 13 - Narrator has phone number, hires detective [earliest possible date] FRI SEP 16 - Detective comes back with photo of Juanita [earliest possible date] WED SEP 21 - Wednesday night party: the Mission Party THU SEP 22 - Early morning meetup with Shepard WED OCT 05 - Wednesday night party: the Final Party THU OCT 06 - Car wreck, Narrator arrested, interrogated FRI OCT 07 - Released; visit to Juanita at Methodist
[*1] The implication is that Juanita's post-comeback exclamation: cash advances and jenny's back on campus i can't believe that it's september [SSC] is also subject to the same month-end approximation; her end-of-story return coincides closely with the new school year, but it's not strictly September (and she won't be going back to school for a while, either).
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jul 30, 2021 5:41:43 GMT -5
FINAL PARTY: SUMMARYHere's a summary of the events of the Final Party: ***- The gangsters with cars drive down with the merchandise and set up in an adjacent parking lot, from which (through open windows) they can transact with the partygoers [WE ALL WENT DOWN].
- The rest of the gangsters, including the Narrator and Juanita, take the crosstown bus from the US-169 corridor down to the east side of St. Paul [WE ALL WENT DOWN].
***- The party kicks off in the usual way, with Juanita and the Narrator (and other addicted kids?) blowing gangsters in the shrubbery and doing drugs [LASER SHOW].
- The Narrator ducks offstage, where he's stashed a backpack that he's brought along, and reappears in costume as the Eyepatch Guy [LASER SHOW].
- He meets Juanita and gives her a bag of shermans (joints laced with PCP) and a lighter, with instructions to hand them out to the partygoers [LASER SHOW, SHERMAN CITY].
- He announces to the crowd that he's come to free their party. Outwardly, it's the "party favors" that are free; secretly, his plan is to free Juanita [LASER SHOW, SHERMAN CITY].
- Just as people start tripping, the cops raid the party [SECOND BUST].
***- The Narrator grabs Juanita and Dwight and flees through the park to the Kittson Street lot, where Dwight's car is parked [15TH AND FRANKLIN].
- The Narrator has Dwight, who thanks to the PCP is in a compliant state but still functional, drive them back up I-94 (their old route) to 15th and Franklin [15TH AND FRANKLIN].
- On arrival, Dwight wakes up enough to recognize Juanita and the Eyepatch Guy, and to note that Juanita is looking straighter than before [15TH AND FRANKLIN].
- The Narrator has Dwight obtain the usual dose of meth from the 15th and Franklin wholesalers, and then accompany him and Juanita to the bathroom [15TH AND FRANKLIN].
- The Narrator stands Dwight in front of the toilet and goes down on him in a deliberate bid to knock him out completely [15TH AND FRANKLIN].
- The Narrator takes the meth off Dwight's hands in payment; then he has Dwight sit on the toilet, while Juanita raises a vein in his neck [15TH AND FRANKLIN].
- The Narrator repays Dwight for the original "shot in the shoulder" by injecting the meth in his neck, while Juanita looks on [15TH AND FRANKLIN].
- With Dwight shooting off into outer space, Juanita rifles his pocket, taking his keys, his wallet, and the drugs on his person [15TH AND FRANKLIN].
- Juanita and the Narrator exit the stall, leaving Dwight "halfway gone," i.e. "half dead," i.e. "dead in his grave," the owner of a terrible new addiction [15TH AND FRANKLIN].
- Juanita and the Narrator shoot up the meth she stole from Dwight. Seeing this, Juanita thinks she understands why the Eyepatch Guy blew Dwight earlier [15TH AND FRANKLIN].
***- With Dwight's car in their possession, Juanita and the Narrator are home free. She rides shotgun; he heads for his parents' house in Edina [RENTAL, WRONG WAY].
- They drive west on Franklin past Electric Fetus, then south to 31st Street, and take the 31st Street onramp to 35W southbound [RENTAL, WRONG WAY].
- Juanita tunes the radio to Radio K, and sings along to In A Jar by Dinosaur Jr [RENTAL, WRONG WAY].
- They make it through the Crosstown Commons interchange to Highway 62 (i.e. the Crosstown) westbound without incident [RENTAL, WRONG WAY].
- Heading west, they both start jonesing again. Juanita gets the idea to search the car, to see if Dwight has anything stashed that they can take [WRONG WAY].
- As they drive past Edina High School, she opens the glove compartment and finds a gun [WRONG WAY].
- Trying to impress the Narrator (who, still in costume as the Eyepatch Guy, she's still excited about), Juanita shoots the gun off in the car [WRONG WAY].
- The Narrator (sleepless, jonesing, driving a stolen car at highway speed, without his glasses) panics, and briefly loses control of the vehicle [WRONG WAY].
- Thanks either to the bullet or the uncontrolled car, the Narrator almost dies [WRONG WAY].
- In the short interval before he regains control of the car, they blow through the US-212/Hwy 62 split and end up on the wrong side (US-212, on the left) [WRONG WAY].
- He'd meant to stay on Hwy 62 in order to hook up with the US-169 N entrance ramp; now he's blocked by the barricades between US-212 and Hwy 62 [WRONG WAY].
- They miss the US-169 N onramp. Juanita is dangerously unstable; he's desperate to get them to their destination before she completely loses it [WRONG WAY].
- With the onramp past, the barricades come to an end, reopening a short gap between US-212 and Hwy 62 [WRONG WAY].
- In a moment of inspiration, the Narrator darts through the gap just in time to catch the entrance ramp to US-169 S [WRONG WAY].
- Whipping the car 810 degrees through 3 full turns of the Hwy 62/US-169 cloverleaf junction (W to S, S to E, E to N) he gets them back onto US-169 N at last [WRONG WAY].
- The Narrator sprints the last half-mile up US-169 to the Londonderry Rd/Bren Rd exit in Edina, where things start to get a little residential [WRONG WAY].
- The cloverleaf run put Juanita over the edge; she wants drugs, and wants them now. Desperate, she tries to go down on him to provoke an exchange [WRONG WAY].
- Fending her off, it occurs to the Narrator that they've looked in the glove box, but haven't yet checked the tape deck [WRONG WAY].
- He reaches for the tape deck and feels a bag in there; but while trying to get it out, he runs the car off the road and wrecks it [WRONG WAY, BLOODY CAR WRECKS].
***- He wakes up to find his hand jammed in the bloodied tape deck, and Juanita apparently dead in the passenger seat [BLOODY CAR WRECKS].
- Still clutching the bag of powder from the tape deck, he crawls out of the car, sticks the bag in his pocket, and flees on foot for home [BLOODY CAR WRECKS].
- He never makes it. The cops stop him; finding the pocketful of powder, they take him down to the station for questioning (Oct 6) [BLOODY CAR WRECKS, APPREHENSION].
- The cops also find the wreck; they extract Juanita from the car and send her to Methodist in St. Louis Park, the nearest hospital [BLOODY CAR WRECKS, APPREHENSION, WIRED].
- The cops interrogate the Narrator but deliberately play down the trouble he's in, telling him that they found the car empty [WIRED].
- The Narrator, utterly exhausted at this point, gets tired and caves in, revealing that the wreck is connected to the Party Pit bust in St. Paul [APPREHENSION].
- Under pressure, he rewinds back to Party Zero and tells them the whole history of the parties, including Juanita's role in the story [APPREHENSION, WIRED].
- He doesn't tell the cops where to look for Juanita; believing that she left the car, he supposes that she's going back to the gang somewhere [WIRED].
- At the end of the confession, the cops get him to agree to become an informant and wear a wire (though he never returns to the gang to use it) [WIRED].
- On the morning of Oct 7, 1994, the cops finally release the Narrator. He goes to Methodist Hospital to be treated [WIRED, CALENDAR: THIRD PASS].
- The hospital gives him a methadone prescription and releases him. He visits Juanita, who's been admitted, in her hospital bed [WIRED].
- After sixteen sleepness nights, the Narrator leaves the hospital and finally goes home to rest [WIRED].
- Juanita has a rough time in detox, and is angry at the Narrator for caving to the cops; but she gets clean, and doesn't go back to the gang [WIRED].
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jul 31, 2021 8:11:30 GMT -5
It's been a pretty wild ride! Well done, man. I can't wait for the bonus tracks, with pretty excting titles.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Aug 2, 2021 4:47:15 GMT -5
DOUBLE TAKESNow, with the complete Lifter Puller story behind us, we can take a step back to consider a big-picture account of the combined LP and THS worlds. It's abundantly clear at this point that the THS story is constructed almost entirely from the events of the LP story, cut up and rearranged. We'll come to the motivations for this rewrite (see POSITIVE JAM below), and for the creation of a new cast of characters to carry it (see THS CHARACTERS and GIDEON below), in a moment. Before that, I want to pause for a few general observations. ***When I first came to an idea of what Craig had created in the THS story, there were a lot of things that blew me away: the ambitious scope covering decades; the fearless inventiveness, with supernatural phenomena (future visions, body switches) built on top of natural elements that were every bit as wild as the supernatural ones (Gideon's special effects, Mary's rationale for not touching Charlemagne); the extended metaphors with deep resonance in the gospels, books, movies, and American history; the way in which these things were all brought together in a genuinely human, and satisfying, story. Now that I know that THS was actually Craig's second crack at the same material, it does seem, in one way, less miraculous. The multi-decade canvas turns out to have been projected from a single continuous summer. The wild/supernatural elements are revealed to have simple and prosaic underpinnings. The extended metaphors prove to have had a multi-year round of development in LP before being deployed for THS use. The core of the story, which was embellished but not fundamentally changed for THS, turns out to have been an organic whole in LP already. Still, the leap in complexity from LP to THS is enormous, and the fact that this radical rearrangement of fine-grained elements comes together as well as it does is truly impressive (there are places at the edges where the pieces don't quite fit, leaving questions like "who's driving after the THS Crucifixion," see BLOODY CAR WRECKS above, or "where's Mary when she's living at the Ambassador," see DEPARTMENT STORES above; but these really are exceptions at the margin). And Craig's feat in being able to un-see one fully-formed story in order to re-see its parts in another is itself pretty unbelievable. ***This brings us back to the topic of LP "shadows" on the THS story, the gratuitous, dark ambiguities that are only visible by the light of the LP material in which they are founded (see LP SHADOWS above). We've already talked about several of these along the way; particularly memorable to me, at least, are the ones hanging over the high-school prom scenes, like "chaperone" [MN] and "I want to go to heaven on the day I die" [OWL] (see LP SHADOWS and HALF DEAD above, respectively). But there are many others, and the sudden shock of hearing these LP echoes after so many years of easy familiarity makes it worth drawing out a few more before we're done. ***The phenomenon of "double takes" is itself loaded with deliberate double meaning in the opening verses of Stay Positive: I gotta lotta old friends that are gettin' back in touch And it's a pretty good feelin, yeah it feels pretty good I get a lotta double-takes when I'm comin' around the corners And it's mostly pretty nice, yeah it's mostly pretty alright 'Cause most kids give me credit for being down with it When it was back in the day, back when things were way different When the Youth of Today and the early 7 Seconds Taught me some of life's most valuable lessons [SPositive] These words mean everything they seem to mean: the surface reading is a true reading. But look again, and the entire passage *also* appears as an affirmation of the lessons learned from being gangraped and turned into a drug slave by the gangsters: - "old friends": the gangsters; compare HDaD, LiaL, 4Dix, CSongs, KP, CC, YCMHLY, LiD, CF, BCig, CitM, NRoof.
- "touch": always with sexual subtext, and specifically gangbang/rape reference in Langelos, TMS, HH, SN, Smidge, Touchless, GoaH.
- "pretty": almost always a hedge, a sign that the speaker is suppressing bad shit: see ILtL, LPvtEotE, CaAoC, LDoL, MPADJs, SM, KP, PP, 40B, etc.
- "double-takes": double-teaming; compare MTape, LiaL, MiM, DStraps.
- "corner": the corner of the brewery bar where the Party Zero assault begins (see CORNERED above, etc.).
- "down with it": going down (giving bjs)/lying down (getting fucked); see SCity, Bears, Viceburgh, SdS, LDoL, TFatBR, BBlues, MPADJs, MM, CatCT, etc.
- "Youth of Today": the "positive youth's shootin hoops slippin roofies in your jungle juice" [NN]; "Youth of Today" in the brewery bar [BBreathing].
- "early 7 Seconds": a probable reference to 7 Seconds' early (1985) album "Walk Together, Rock Together," understood in the sense of 'if you do drugs ("rock"=meth; see LISTED above) with people, you have to go the rest of the way with them'; see next note about "you gotta dance with who you came to the dance with" [YGD].
- "valuable lessons": see previous note about "Walk Together, Rock Together"; the valuable lesson is specifically the moral of You Gotta Dance: "you gotta dance with who you came to the dance with" [YGD]. Narrowly, this says that if you get a ride to a drug party with a dealer, you can expect to end up fucking the dealer (see DANCING above); but the broader lesson is one of authorship and control (much more on this exact sense of "we gotta stay positive" at POSITIVE JAM below).
***We've looked at a number of lines from You Gotta Dance already, but the double-take effects in that song are so strong that it's worth bringing them together in one place. There's the obvious stuff about the Narrator going down to St. Paul to meet the "Gangster Disciples" and missing his "bicycle" ride (see THE RIDE and THE GREATER TRIP DOWNTOWN above), but there's even more in the next verse about fucking the gangsters: You gotta go with what got you there. I came with chipped teeth and some bleached blonde hair. You gotta make do with what they gave to you [YGD] The "chipped teeth" and "bleached blonde hair" are references to greasers Steve Randle and Ponyboy from The Outsiders ( heregoes); they're the gangsters of the LP/THS world, and the "what they gave to you" is both needles and dicks: I was a Twin Cities trash bin I did everything they'd give me I'd jam it into my system [MPADJs] We've already considered these lines from MPADJs, and the term "jam" as slang for 'fuck anally' upthread (see THS REVISITED above, and "jamming jetskis into the jetty" with Charlemagne in STUMBLING & RESURRECTION above), but consider the further echoes in YGD: They powered up and they proceeded to jam, man [YGD] where "jam" combines the musical sense of the verb with 'to have anal intercourse' ( gdict). Compare too the noun senses of "jam," as alluded to by "positive jam" [PJ] and "jam jar" [SN]: 'a problem or difficult situation'; 'a drug overdose'; 'a spontaneous gay party that ends in an orgy or a big fight'; 'semen', and 'amphetamine' ( gdict; gdict; gdict). Again, we'll come to "positive jam" itself, and the reasons for this ambivalent framing, shortly (see POSITIVE JAM below). There are in addition other details which we now recognize as references to the Party Zero catastrophe. There is the allusion to the Narrator producing $10 in an attempt to pay Dwight for $20 of stolen drugs (see TWO TWENTIES above), and then being stripped for the gangrape: They took ten bucks and my tennis shoes [YGD] There is the allusion to Dwight "killing" Juanita via meth injection en route to prompting her resurrection as Katrina (see KATRINA above), who in turn smashes her hand on the mirror in the bathroom (see SMASHED HER HAND above) and from then on rebuffs the Narrator's advances (see EAST VS MIDWEST above): and my one friend got two girls in a twist. I got stuck with some priss that went and sliced up her wrists [YGD] As a THS song it's pretty fragmented. But as a reflection of LP events it's brutally on-topic. ***Following the above notes on "jam," the same extended double take opens up for Positive Jam as well. We'd already had a look at this subtext with "Queuing up for soup with scabby sores" [PJ] (see THE QUEUE above), but it's the final verse that's most eye-opening: Gotta start it with a positive jam All the sniffling indie kids: hold steady And all you clustered-up clever kids: hold steady [PJ] In the same way that "bloodsucking" [Swish] is a radio-friendly cover for "cocksucking" (see BREWERY BAR: THE STAIRS above), "clustered-up" now clearly appears as a cover for "cluster-fucked," that is, (literally) gangraped. The clever kids who thought they could catch a ride with a dealer to a dangerous party ended up getting stuck there, with ugly consequences; it's going to take "the steady type" [TLaDiLBI] to get them out. By the same token, "sniffling indie kids" looks like a reference to Juanita at the end of the Jeep Encounter, dressed in her "indian" costume and crying (see LAZY EYE above. "Sniffling" may also carry an overtone of "sniffing," which Juanita/Mary are seen to do in RtF, BBlues, and OftC). Finally, while the THS canon begins with a positive "jam" in the musical sense, it's the LP story, not the THS story, whose narrative wakes up in the "20's" with the "fruits" of the Party Zero gangrape (of course the THS story has the analogous metal bar party, but that's not where it *starts.* See TWO TWENTIES, FRUIT, ROOFIES, and THE CRASH above). ***There are several album titles that feature prominently in the "double take" mix. For "Separation Sunday," see HALF DEAD above; for "Open Door Policy," see SHEPARD'S MANSION above; for the "dark" sense of "Stay Positive," see Craig's comment in his 2015 Rolling Stone interview ( link). We've already noted that "Thrashing Through The Passion" makes reference to being gangraped on the floor with music going in the background (see ON THE FLOOR: INJURIES above); "Heaven Is Whenever," as it turns out, alludes to the same event: Heaven is whenever we can get together Sit down on your floor and listen to your records [WCGT] "Heaven" is a drug reference (see LISTED above), and more specifically a metaphor for the a drugged-out void where "we're gonna all be friends" [ABlues; see also A&H, FB, TSPotC, Smidge, RP, LA], in the recognizable sense of "friendly friends that will love you like a brother" [KP] (see THS REVISITED above). We know that the alternate title Craig had in mind for Separation Sunday was "Youth Services" ( clicksandhisses); we know now who the positive "youth" are, and we know what the "services" in question are too. ***I don't know what ironic God sent Seth Meyers to Craig saying, "my kid was born in the lobby of our apartment building and I'm doing a special about it; I need someone who can write a song about waking up on bloody carpets in the vestibule. Can u help??"; but apparently, this happened ( youtube). Meet Me In The Lobby is nothing more than one super uncomfortable allusion to the Party Zero gangrape after another, from plans gone wrong (see A LITTLE BIT above), to waiting around (see STRANDED above), to the struggle for freedom (see ESTHER above), to waking up surrounded by giant anonymous strangers (see THE CENTER above), to taxicabs (see THE RIDE above), to the city (see THE CITY above), to photos and a spotlight (see MAGAZINES & VIDEOS above), to the building (see BREWERY BAR: THE ROOF, etc., above), to the speed, to the blankets on the floor (see ON THE FLOOR: CARPET AND HARDWOOD above), all wrapped up in the fateful invitation to "meet me in the lobby" itself (see BREWERY BAR: THE VESTIBULE above). Watch the video, and you can see that Craig is really enjoying the joke, but man ... ***Finally, there's another kind of uneasy that comes with revisiting the familiar lines of Sweet Payne: I always dream about a unified scene I always dream about a unified scene There's James King and King James and James Dean At a table in the corner of my unified scene They want a double order of love and respect [SPayne] This is all too familiar, now: we know that the "double order of love" refers to the double-teaming "in the corner" of the brewery bar (see THS REVISITED above). Locally to the THS story, "James King and King James and James Dean" are the THS Narrator (band), Charlemagne (savior dealer), and Gideon (rebel who died young); but in the shadowing of the LP original, they're the Narrator, Dwight, and the gangsters, all tangled in the "unified scene" of one big homosexual gangrape. When the THS Narrator says that he "always dream(s)" about this scene, he is again deliberately exploiting the ambivalence of "dream"; the outward meaning, that he yearns for this it an ideal, is layered on top of a different one, to the effect that he has recurring nightmares about it. And the LP shadow lets us understand, too, why Mary figures so prominently in his dreams, with the gangsters, her bloodied hands, and the spotlights [AE].
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Post by muzzleofbees on Aug 2, 2021 14:38:54 GMT -5
Approaching the end of this adventure, I almost get a little sentimental going five and a half years back, to my very first post in Here Goes. This is what I wrote in early 2016: "3. LIFTER PULLER (AND THE LINK BETWEEN THE STORIES) Due to your strictly-THS-mode you obviously can't answer this, but at some point I hope you'll dig in to Lifter Puller and the solo stuff as well. And when you do, i'd like to hear how you hear and read Craig's Lifter Puller lyrics in regard to your Hold Steady storyline. I've been thinking a lot about Our Whole Lives the past couple of days. I had a decent aha moment myself back in 2010, when I finally remembered where I had heard those images and lines before. This is from Viceburgh by Lifter Puller, dating back to 1997:
"yeah these hescher guys are trying to give me high fives but they don't stick the sugar packets inside ripped and drippin down all over the barfly she's takin off her taven jacket last night swear i saw your face up there in the footlights she was mouthin the words to the national anthem and she was liftin her skirt just like a three dollar dancer we were hangin around just kickin "walk like a panther" prayin that your princess will pick up her pager sad ravers in freight elevators sucking on skyscrapers, living on lifesavers baby"
There's more where that's coming from. And therefore, while Our Whole Lives obviously refers back to a lot of stuff in the Hold Steady story, it also is anchored in a completely different story, the Lifter Puller story about Jenny, Nightclub Dwight, The Eye-Patch Guy and everybody else. I guess this mostly is a teaser of how much you'll gonna love diving in to Lifter Puller as well, but I can't help wondering what you'll make of the link between the universes. I also think it sheds new light on some of your interpretations. If you open up for some lines being a deliberate reference to Lifter Puller lyrics, you either have to accept that these two universes are story-wise connected to each other, or that Craig is having a narrative inside joke going on - and therefore also is present as a narrator himself. I could say a lot more on this thing, but I'll guess it's best to wait till you get around to listen to them,"
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Post by skepticatfirst on Aug 2, 2021 20:22:30 GMT -5
This is what I wrote in early 2016: ... Well, you certainly called it. I remember generally this one about Viceburgh and your other post about ILtL when I hear the songs, but I hadn't been back to read either post since I started work on Alright Alright, and damn ... 100% bullseye accurate. I've often wondered whether I could have worked out the stories in the opposite order, i.e. LP first and then THS; but I don't think I could have, given how thin the telling of the LP story is, and how often I needed to lean on the THS reflections for confirmation that I was on the wrong track. Doing it this way, the LP analysis has mostly just been stubborn grinding, whereas a couple of the THS breakthroughs during Here Goes (the body switches and the special-effects ghost especially) were about as close to a supernatural epiphany as I've ever experienced, about anything. It's a little strange how this has worked out, but here we are. you either have to accept that these two universes are story-wise connected to each other I have a very specific account of the relationship between the two universes that I've hinted at here and there, but I'll finally lay it out properly on Wednesday and Thursday of this week (in the posts POSITIVE JAM and THS CHARACTERS below). Hope it resonates.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Aug 3, 2021 6:31:39 GMT -5
LIFTER PULLERFinally, this is a standalone LP abstraction, not a shadow: but as a first-class double-take, it's worth our time to consider the name "Lifter Puller" in its own right. ***In the 2014 Magnet magazine interview "The Hold Steady: Ten Years After," interviewer Jonathan Valania records a paraphrase of Craig's account of the name ( link): This isn't a false account, but Valania's ascription of it to Twin Cities slang suggests that he knows it's not very satisfactory. Let's take a closer look. ***First of all, "lifted" is common 90's slang for "high" ( gdict). Second, "puller" is a documented term for a drug pipe mouthpiece ( ondcp): Power puller - Rubber piece attached to crack stem So the extension of these meanings to - lifter: something that gets you high
- puller: one who sucks the smoke out of a pipe
is entirely plausible. But let's compare these meanings to the evidence of the lyrics. ***The words "lifter puller" and variants occur three times in the LP lyrics. 1) Prescription SunglassesThe use of "lifter" in PSunglasses fits our working definition well enough: she came out of salon and she was walking sideways she got into her car and turned the steering wheel my way the lifters only pulled her into the corners of her eyes the walls fall all around her sunny skies [PSunglasses] Note that plural "lifters" reads awkwardly as a reference to bongs in particular; some more general sense, like the "something that gets you high" formulated above, must be meant. On the other hand, "pulled" in the third line clearly doesn't fit our working definition of "puller" at all. That doesn't mean our working definition is wrong; but it does mean (as for the rest is typical of Craig) that there must be multiple meanings in play here. ***2) Lifter Puller vs The End Of The EveningThe lyrics of Lifter Puller vs The End Of The Evening clearly describe the kids' struggle to keep Party Zero going, and keep it from turning bad, as the night rolls on toward dawn: we hit the nightlife like deer in the headlights ... it's too late for liquor but we could get some 3-2 ... and it seems pretty dangerous 1-2-3, yeah is this still a party 3-2-1, they just got too many guns too many guns and too many tongues [LPvtEotE] From this it's evident that "Lifter Puller" in the title refers to one of the kids, which in turn confirms that "Lifter Puller" a) is the epithet of a person; b) is a loose fit for our working definitions, in view of the kids' use of drugs at the party. But it's odd, in view of this, that we haven't seen *any other evidence at all* of the kids smoking a pipe or a stem, or hitting a bong, during their Party Zero misadventure. ***3) To Live And Die In LBIThe final instance of the term occurs in the words spoken by Juanita, on waking up after the end of Party Zero: and they all woke up at the airport in the arcade at the western concourse that's when she said that we should do this all over she wipes the blood from her mouth with her shoulder said i just need a little diet cola, or maybe just a little lifter puller [TLaDiLBI] In "diet cola" we recognize a drug reference ("cola"=marijuana, "diet coke"=Ritalin=speed; see LISTED above), which in turn calls to mind the first rule of LP lyric interpretation (see SEX FOR DRUGS IN METAPHORS above): The rule holds here as well. Compare "diet cola" and "the person who sucks the smoke out of a bong" (from the interview with Craig) with the following established examples of bjs-for-drugs exchange (see CASH MACHINE above): sucking off a soda [Bears] went down on the smoke machine [SdS] blowin smoke [BiB] Per Green's Dictionary of Slang, the verb "to lift" doesn't just mean "to get high"; it also means "to have an erection" ( gdict). "Lifter Puller" doesn't really mean 'a person who sucks the smoke out of a bong'; it means 'a person who sucks dicks for drugs'.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Aug 4, 2021 3:46:51 GMT -5
Two things I've been thinking of, one a little meta, one pretty specific (and I'm not sure if it's really relevant):
Who's driving the car?
I've been quickly reading through what you wrote about 15th and Franklin, the way the kids "rent" Dwight's car and wreck it, but I can't really get a grip of how you put The Narrator in the driving seat - and if it's important to the aftermath. I seem to remember plenty of ambigious references to someone outside of the song ("you", even "she"?) driving the car, but it could the THS stuff bleeding over ("She drove it like she stole it", "I remember SHE had satelite radio"). I just wanted to check if you're certain that The Narrator is driving the car, and if it really matters when you read what comes after the crash. I would assume the legal aspect would be different, if The Narrator believe Juanita is dead for real.
"Started"
I could probably go back to check the single phrases, but I figured it was easier just asking: Do you see a pattern in all the lines opening with "It started"/"It starts"? Is there any reason to believe this points back to the same event/scene?
I've been thinking a bit about this phrase the past couple of weeks for a number of reason. It has this weight to it, because it - strictly linguistic - implies a narrative, a time frame. It's also not very poetic or metaphorically loaded, it's a pretty straight-forward statement - that something started at some point, with a certain action or even.
"Guess it all started in your appartment" "It always starts of with a kiss" "It started when we were dancing" "It always seems to start when somebody takes a bottle outside"
I just wonder if there's a bigger/deeper meaning to the phrase. Like the "it" is important, in a broader sense - it's not just the particular scene in the particular song who starts off they way Craig describe it, it's The Story.
Again, it might not be a pattern in this, and I'm not sure if it really matter, but Craig has this way of breaking the fourth wall now and then, and this could be a small example of that. Like he's saying "this is what the story, everything I tell you about, actually started".
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Post by skepticatfirst on Aug 4, 2021 6:42:10 GMT -5
Two things I've been thinking of, one a little meta, one pretty specific (and I'm not sure if it's really relevant): Who's driving the car?I've been quickly reading through what you wrote about 15th and Franklin, the way the kids "rent" Dwight's car and wreck it, but I can't really get a grip of how you put The Narrator in the driving seat - and if it's important to the aftermath. I seem to remember plenty of ambigious references to someone outside of the song ("you", even "she"?) driving the car, but it could the THS stuff bleeding over ("She drove it like she stole it", "I remember SHE had satelite radio"). I just wanted to check if you're certain that The Narrator is driving the car, and if it really matters when you read what comes after the crash. I would assume the legal aspect would be different, if The Narrator believe Juanita is dead for real. It's a good question. For a long time I myself thought that the guy in Rental (before I was sure it was the Narrator) was sitting in the passenger seat; at first this was because of the "credit card" [Rental], which I understood literally as the credit card used to rent the car, and figured belonged to the girl described elsewhere as one of the "credit card chicks" [TCMamG], making her the likely driver; then, when I got used to seeing THS parallels, this idea was reinforced by the THS "she drove it like she stole it" [MoC] story. But no; things in the THS story have been rewritten to put Mary behind the wheel; it's definitely the Narrator who's driving in the LP story. Reasons to be confident about this include: - specifically, she's the one who pulls the gun out of the glove compartment, which puts her in the passenger seat [TCMamG] - specifically, she fires the gun, which she can't do if she's driving, in order to try to impress him, which indicates that he's in charge and driving [TCMamG] - specifically, she "tries to undress [him]" [TCMamG], which she can't do if she's driving - generally, she's super unstable at this point in the story and in no shape to drive - generally, he's the one who's running every aspect of the show at this point in the story, and is trying to get her out to Edina, where for the rest she's never been and can be presumed not to know how to drive to Those latter two points are more of the has-to-be-consistent-with-everything-else-we-know type of evidence than direct evidence, but consistency/plausibility is important in these arguments too. There might also be other reasons that I'm not thinking of, but anyway that's off the top of my head. "Started"I could probably go back to check the single phrases, but I figured it was easier just asking: Do you see a pattern in all the lines opening with "It started"/"It starts"? Is there any reason to believe this points back to the same event/scene? I've been thinking a bit about this phrase the past couple of weeks for a number of reason. It has this weight to it, because it - strictly linguistic - implies a narrative, a time frame. It's also not very poetic or metaphorically loaded, it's a pretty straight-forward statement - that something started at some point, with a certain action or even. "Guess it all started in your appartment" "It always starts of with a kiss" "It started when we were dancing" "It always seems to start when somebody takes a bottle outside" I just wonder if there's a bigger/deeper meaning to the phrase. Like the "it" is important, in a broader sense - it's not just the particular scene in the particular song who starts off they way Craig describe it, it's The Story. Again, it might not be a pattern in this, and I'm not sure if it really matter, but Craig has this way of breaking the fourth wall now and then, and this could be a small example of that. Like he's saying "this is what the story, everything I tell you about, actually started". This is probably something I should think about longer, because I suspect that there's a more complete answer here, but let me give a first reaction anyway. Craig regularly makes a point of digging into how things start for at least two reasons: 1) He spends a lot of time thinking about the causes of things that go wrong; see all the discussion of blame and volition in today's post (POSITIVE JAM below). 2) He spends a lot of time thinking about things in terms of beginning-to-ending symmetry: "it started ice cream social nice and ended up all white and ecumenical" [HSL], etc.; an illuminating real-life case of this is his story about coming "crazy full circle" with the Replacements, from learning about them on a tennis court as a teenager, to opening for them on a tennis court as an adult (see CANDY'S ROOM above). I think "it" in particular serves his elusive/evasive/allusive style --- "there's this thing, it's bad, you kinda want to be warned plus it's an interesting story, here's where it started." And I think "it" also points to the fact that he really does regard all of the bad things as being related (once you start chasing the drugs, you're going to wind up with a plateful of consequences whether you like it or not). But when you dig into different uses of "it" in this phrase, it's frequently different bad things that he's talking about: sometimes it's the whole story, or maybe more specifically the story of the Narrator's attempt to rescue Juanita from Katrina ("i guess it all started in your apartment" [Sublet]), but sometimes it's one or another party ("it started ice cream social nice" [HSL]="these parties they start lovely" [HaRRF]), or violence ("It always seems to start when somebody takes a bottle outside" [Touchless]="the fighting started friendly enough" [TMS]), or other things like the hunt of the cops and the Eyepatch Guy for Dwight ("it starts with the sharks" [Manpark]="the manhunts always start down in the manpark/ the manhunts always start out in the manpark" [Manpark]). I'll leave it at that for now, but I'll think about it at a little more too.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Aug 4, 2021 7:21:21 GMT -5
POSITIVE JAMWe've established that the THS story is a deep rewrite of the LP story. It remains to be asked: *why* did Craig rewrite it in this way? ***In the 2006 Pulse interview, Craig states his reason for wanting a second crack at the same material ( link): This desire for an expressly positive do-over is stated emphatically in the Brokerdealer track Do Me Nails (written in 2001, after the dissolution of Lifter Puller and before the formation of THS): I want to say I'm sorry that I used to be engulfed in negativity Cause the new me is going to be all about the positivity Too many parties ending loud and fast and violently Cause animosity just leads to reciprocity [DMN] Here we clearly recognize the LP story (referred to elsewhere in Brokerdealer as the "vision/fever dream" [INFHP]; see PARTY ZERO above) as the focus of the do-over. The parties ending loud and fast and violently are Party Zero and the Final Party; the Narrator's negative rage at Dwight and the gangsters just leads to the reciprocity of the Eyepatch Guy's revenge. With the "new me" THS story, Craig wants to do something different; he wants to turn that animosity into something else --- to transform his rage into a positive rage, and his jam (see DOUBLE TAKES above) into a positive jam. One crucial aspect of this transformation is that, where the Eyepatch Guy ends up taking revenge on Dwight in the LP story, the THS Narrator and Charlemagne's desire for vengeance is overcome by Gideon's ideology of non-violence ("no one wins at violent shows" [BBreathing], and see EYEPATCH GUY and CHARLEMAGNE above). This commitment to non-violence takes care of the problem of "reciprocity" [DMN]; but the underlying "animosity" requires a still deeper solution. ***A hint of the solution already appears at the end of the LP canon, in the "don't blame" formula of Back In Blackbeard. The guys and girls blame each other for the fights and the drugs, but that's "not right" [BiB]. Who's actually to blame, then? The song's final suggestion is "blame the boredom, blame the basements" [BiB]; but the boredom and basements are themselves already consequences of the fights and the drugs, not their causes (see BORED and CANDY'S ROOM above). So, really, who is to blame? ***The great change vis-a-vis the Lifter Puller story --- the epiphany of The Hold Steady --- is that the things that happened aren't to be blamed on anyone at all; on the contrary, they're "just what we wanted" [RP] (see ROOFIES and MAGAZINES & VIDEOS above). It's a lesson that has to be learned the hard way, but the *willed* character of the THS kids' choice is emphasized over and over: If you want to get a little bit light in the heady It's gonna have to get a little bit heavy [MPADJs] You know, the last guy, I guess he didn't even have to die But the first four looked so nice, I wanted five [Knuckles] They want a double order of love [SPayne] She said it's my party and I'll die if I want to [HF] And song number four on that first D4 You want the scars but you don't want the war [GLS] Everybody wants to suck on something sweet [NS] Maybe our anxiety lives in the spaces in between who we really are and what we want to be and the things that we let other people see when all we really want is to be in magazines [Spectres] I guess we all got pretty close to the roles we chose to play [Spectres] We used to want it all, now we just want a little bit [Smidge] Isn't this what we wanted? Some major rock and roll problems ... This is just what we wanted [RP] But you shouldn't be the singer in a be yourself band If you don't want to be yourself [GoaH] Eureka (literally, "I found [what I was looking for]") [Eureka] Pontius Pilate played to the crowd. And they all thought they knew what they wanted [TSTux] Ingested every offering. Tried to make it interesting. Caught up and consumed what we desired [BSam] And you want them all to love you [FFarm] Anything you want he can cover it [TPProcedure] ***But there's more. It's not only that the kids got "just what [they] wanted" [RP]; it's that every bad thing that happens to the LP kids, the THS kids take back, reclaiming it under their own authorship: - They take back gonna walk around and drink some more: from Juanita's last words at Party Zero before being lured to the bathroom and emerging resurrected as Katrina, to what appear to be Holly's first spoken words after her resurrection.
- They take back the crucifixion: from the LP Narrator being 'stabbed' by the gangster rapists, to the THS kids' own staging of Charlemagne's death.
- They take back Easter: from the weekend of Party Zero, to the weekend of Holly's resurrection & the THS kids' liberation from the gang.
- They take back the dying: from the LP Narrator being "murdered" at Party Zero, to the THS Narrator willingly letting himself be turned by Gideon into the Phil-Lynott-dead-rock-star "new kid."
- They take back the unified scene: from the Party Zero gangrape, to the world where the kids forget where they differ, and get big picture.
- They take back being connected: from sucking dicks for drugs, to the supernatural connection of Mary and the THS Narrator when sequestered in the interrogation sessions [AE].
- They take back the separation: from the Party Zero division of Juanita and the LP Narrator, to the sequestration through which Mary and THS Narrator maintain their connection and support each others' alibi.
- They take back the betrayal: from Juanita's turning the Narrator over to Dwight and the gangsters at Party Zero, to the kids' deliberate staging of the Judas moment in the Party Pit.
- They take back the kiss: from Juanita's perfidious Party Zero kiss, to Mary's staged kiss of Charlemagne's ghost in the Party Pit.
- They take back music: from the metal mixtape of Party Zero, to embracing the songs (see SHEPARD'S MANSION above) where everybody finally sings along.
- They take back the clicks and hisses: from the background noise of the Party Zero tape deck turning over, to the noise of Gideon's projector during the staged crucifixion.
- They take back the movie: from the Party Zero video of the gangrape, to the THS kids' own special-effects projection of Charlemagne's ghost.
- They take back the hot soft light: from the fill light of the Party Zero videocam, to the light of Gideon's projector after the end of the film.
- They take back the videos: from the Party Zero gangrape videos, to Mary's visions of going down on dealer Charlemagne.
- They take back the pictures: from the Party Zero gangrape pictures, to Jesse's (and the others' [Spectres]) desire to get her picture in the paper/be in magazines.
- They take back the tattered dress: from Juanita's torn dress after the Party Zero gangrape, to her deliberate "costume" for Holly's birthday party.
- They take back the summer: from the cocksucking summer of LP, to the constructive summer of THS.
- They take back the no touching: from Juanita not being interested in fucking the Narrator and the Eyepatch Guy failing to respond to her advances, to Mary deliberately following visionary Charlemagne's instruction not to touch him.
- They take back joining the gang: from getting jumped in at the Mission Party, to deliberately joining up with the Skins in order to fake Charlemagne's death.
- They take back being awake for two weeks straight: from the enforced deathmarch of the LP Two Weeks, to Charlemagne and Gideon working in shifts to carry out their plan (heregoes).
- They take back the pipe: from Dwight's badge of addiction (compare also Brokerdealer TLOUBL), to Gideon's device of salvation.
- They take back the haircut: from the gangsters shaving the LP Narrator's head, to Gideon shaving Charlemagne's head in order to save him.
- They take back the falling on the floor: from the gangsters raping the LP alpha couple on the floor of the brewery bar, to the Skins falling down in terror before the staged stabbing of Charlemagne's ghost.
- They take back the resurrection: from Juanita becoming Katrina under the influence of the gangsters' drugs, to Gideon bringing Holly back from the dead.
- They take back words won't save your life: from the LP Narrator's failed attempt to escape with a joke at Party Zero, to Gideon's decision that publicizing the rumor of Charlemagne's death on its own, without a body to back it up, wouldn't be enough.
- They take back the frontage road: from the place where Dwight transacted sex with Juanita for drugs, to the place where Charlemagne tries to connect with Mary, and Holly with Gideon.
- They take back i really don't remember: from a traumatic aftereffect of the Party Zero roofies, to the witness-stand testimony sealing Charlemagne's liberation.
- They take back their savior: from the predatory dealer who comes through with a hit when they're desperate, to the kids themselves ("we are our only saviors" [CSummer], "you could save yourself" [CSTLN]).
- They take back the dreams: from the nightmares about Party Zero, to dreams of a genuine Unified Scene.
This deliberate authorship redeems the great failing recounted in the LP story, when, under interrogation, the LP Narrator blames Juanita for what happened, and sells her out to the cops; unlike the LP Narrator, the THS Narrator owns that he and Mary were in it together willfully, and doesn't crack: In daylight she looked desperate That's alright, I was desperate too [SiM] ***With this, the motivation for the most outrageous parts of the THS story suddenly becomes plain. 1) One, Craig is deliberately going out of his way to put as many LP events as possible into the willing hands of his THS protagonists. Apparently crazy elements like Gideon's special-effects movie and Mary's Noli Me Tangere turn out to be, literally, the result of his asking himself, "how can I rewrite the story so that the kids *wilfully* make a movie at some point? how can I rewrite the story so that the kids *wilfully* institute a no-touching rule?" 2) Two, while Craig is clearly a master of realism and motivated real-world detail, narrow definitions of unrealistic or deus ex machina writing are not going to get in the way of the goal outlined in (1) above. Difficult matters like Gideon's pipe, the movie-slash-laser-show, the magic body switches, the future visions, the sequestered connections --- all are constructed as they are in service of a purpose stronger than the demands of conventional literary critique. The story is still amazing work by conventional standards; but it's not beholden to them. ***In the Lifter Puller lyrics, Craig expressly frames his vocation as news reporting, telling hard truths that the newspapers won't touch (see the Pulse interview quote --- "you’re seeing what happens" --- and NEWSPAPERS above). In The Hold Steady, this is changed; the mission is no longer reporting the news, but spreading the gospel: We mix our own mythologies, we push them out through PA systems We dictate our doxologies and try to get sleeping kids to sit up and listen And I'm not saying we could save you, but we could put you in a place where you could save yourself If you don't get born again at least you'll get high as hell ... We gather our gospels from gossip and bar talk then we declare them the truth We salvage our sermons from message boards and scene reports and we sic them on the youth We try out new testaments on the guys sitting next to us in the bars with the bars on the windows, alright Even if you don't get converted tonight, you gotta admit the band's pretty tight [CSTLN] We are our only saviors [CSummer] The gospel of liberation is that we're the ones who author the news; we're the ones who make the movies: We are the theater, they are the people ... We're the projectors, we're hosting the screening ... We are the actors, the cameras are rolling ... We're the directors, our hands will hold steady ... Man, we make our own movies [SA] I guess we all got pretty close to the roles we chose to play [Spectres] ***It's the rewrite of the story that brings volition, authorship, and salvation to the fore in The Hold Steady; but at some level this really is just a fresh look at the same events from another perspective, and Craig exploits his hand with ambiguities to make the same point. There are several important examples of this: In Lifter Puller, the emphasis of the "half dead" state clearly weighs on the side of death; but while the same fate persists in the world of The Hold Steady [SN], now it's the other side, namely survival, that's emphasized: But people keep calling me Five Alive 'Cause the last guy didn't really die, I just lied And the first four didn't really die, I just lied [Knuckles] The darkness of the Lifter Puller story still shadows the events of the THS story, but now it's the light casting the shadow, rather than the shadow itself, that's in focus: you wouldn't be so impressed with the sunrise if it wasn't for the darkness [YDGK] Craig goes so far as to acknowledge this ambiguity as a condition of all stories, and asserts that it's an authorial, i.e. a personal, choice to take one side over the other: Every single story has a few different versions You tell the one that makes you look better [R&T] In this light, the intensive use of words with double meanings appears as part of deliberate strategy: the ambiguity permits a transformation of base negatives into positive things, rape "jam" into making music "jam," rape "unified" into spiritually "unified," drugged "heaven" into real "heaven," cynically "saved" into actually "saved." ***To bring the argument full circle back to Positive Jam: it's the rewrite of the story in terms of the kids' volition that puts what muzzleofbees has called "the redemptive power of music" ( link) front and center. The kids in the LP story are bored, and the boredom leads them to drugs and destruction: don't blame your daughter's downfall on her dancin don't blame your baby's binging on the bass bins blame the boredom, blame the basements [BiB] She says she loves the way these little flames Make everything all black and grey. But sometimes all that smoke can make you sick. Still a scorch mark or a blistered hand Seems a whole lot better than Sitting around and waiting for the click [Epaulets] In the THS rewrite, the answer to the boredom is the will to do something different, expressed repeatedly as the will to make one's own music: Baby take off your beret Everyone's a critic and most people are DJs And everything gets played [MPADJs] Someone saw her breaking off the tape machine. All I really said was that the clicks were in her head [TLTtSTtM] And I got bored when I didn't have a band And so I started a band, man We're gonna start it with a positive jam Hold steady [PJ] It's a gospel Craig got from his favorite song, The Replacements' "I Will Dare" ( link), and from Saint Joe Strummer's teaching "The Future Is Unwritten" (see SHEPARD'S MANSION above); he's got his own band now with which to gather these gospels, and to "get sleeping kids to sit up and listen" [CSTLN].
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Post by skepticatfirst on Aug 5, 2021 7:40:32 GMT -5
THS CHARACTERSOne of the satisfying things about having finally worked through the LP material is that it lets us in on the rationale behind the names of the THS characters. Gideon is the only character whose name we actually nailed in the Here Goes thread ( heregoes): he's named after the Biblical judge who routed the Midianite army using visual and sound effects (trumpets and torches; see Judges 7:17-22). "Mary" we correctly identified with Mary, the Queen of Heaven, and the Sapphire Throne of God ( heregoes); but we missed the allusion to "Mary"=marijuana. Now, seeing that Mary is the THS version of Juanita, that "Juanita"=marijuana, and that most of the other girls' names in the catalog are also slang for different kinds of drugs (see LACED SUBSTANCES above), we're in a position to appreciate this aspect of the name too. "Charlemagne" we've first worked out here in Alright Alright, along with the LP metaphor of Charlemagne returning to the Vatican to have himself crowned Emperor (see CHARLEMAGNE above. If the "big fella" meaning of the name itself is not coincidence, then we had that right in the Here Goes thread too, see NIGHT CLUB DWIGHT above; but it's hard to be certain that that's intentional). That leaves "Jesse" and "Holly." We'd already noticed in the Here Goes thread ( heregoes) that the two important prayers to Mary the Queen of Heaven mention Jesse and Halleluiah, respectively, and that the spelling of "Jesse" without an i, very unusual in a woman's name, makes this unlikely to be a coincidence: The Ave Regina Caelorum ( wikipedia) begins: The Regina Caeli ( wikipedia) begins: Now that we recognize Mary as the avatar of Juanita in THS, we understand that "Root of Jesse" is literal: Holly, Mary, and Jesse are all drawn up from different aspects of the character of Juanita (Jesse's the one who's into music, Mary's the one with the bloody hands, Holly's the one who makes noises during sex, etc.), but Mary is the root of the three; Jesse and Halleluiah are branches of her main line. In the Open Door Policy release thread, somuchjoy identified the "she" of Parade Days as "the SHE" ( link), and that's exactly right. There's one alpha girl in the LP/THS world; her name's now Juanita, now Mary; Katrina, Holly and Jesse are what William Blake might call her emanations; but in the fundamental story we've worked so long to uncover, they're all the same person.***We've noted this already (see KATRINA above), but it's worth noting again how the LP background illuminates the development of the "Hurricane Jesse" motif from the advent of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Craig plotted out the THS story first, and was well into it before the fortuitous discovery of an obscure but real Hurricane Holly that happened to fit the timeline ( link). ***A major and truly surprising consequence of the shift from a "negative" story in LP to a deliberately "positive" story in THS is the rehabilitation --- or better, rehumanization --- of Night Club Dwight. Looking past the evil things Dwight did, in the THS story Craig brings him "on side" as one of the kids; though enriched with some sympathies of the LP Narrator, Charlemagne is, in essence, the THS avatar of Dwight, transformed from villain into a deeply flawed human hero.This is a dramatic act of reimagination in its own right, but what's doubly interesting about it is that Craig seems to feel that it's not enough --- it's clear that he continues to be unsettled, in retrospect, by the story of the LP Narrator's personal revenge on Dwight. We see this in several places. In the 2012 Good Times interview, when asked whether the story has come to an end or not, Craig's answer is revealing ( link): Of all the hanging questions, "what happened to Charlemagne?" [DLME] --- what happened to Dwight? --- is the one at the front of his mind. And the question persists: now that we've recognized not just Charlemagne, but Dwight, in the character of "Blackout Sam" (see 15TH AND FRANKLIN above), we know what's being worried about here: Take a little comfort it's just thunder. Put another sticker on the van. Now that it's a haunted house Break the lease and empty out. Somebody should check on Blackout Sam. Somebody should check on Blackout Sam [BSam] All the bad feelings, the negative story of the Nice Nice and Party Zero --- it's time to leave those things behind; while we're at it, somebody should go back and make sure that Dwight's OK. Finally, there's the evidence of T-Shirt Tux: A boy and a girl were draining their beers. He said Stalin was a weatherman to start his career. Johnny Cash was in the service When the news came through the wire. And its weird how you feel when bad people die. She said yeah I guess, whatever. All your fun little facts are never gonna keep us together [TSTux] This is a deliberately funny take on what happened at 15th & Franklin (for all of the below points, see 15TH AND FRANKLIN above): - "A boy and a girl were draining their beers": refers to the LP Narrator and Juanita shooting "beers"=meth (see LISTED above) after they've "killed" Dwight.
- "Stalin was a weatherman": refers to Dwight, the "guy who got [Juanita] high/ and the drum and bass sounds a lot like rollin' thunder" (for drugs as weather, see "fooling around with thunder and lightning" [ASitS], "last winter there was weather and his eyes they iced right over" [CiS], and "thunder," "lightning," and "ice" in LISTED above). Stalin, along with Hitler, is the unexceptionable True Bad Guy for Americans who like tidy moralities; like Dwight, he's "the devil [in] person" [NF] (see NIGHT CLUB DWIGHT above).
- "Johnny Cash was in the service": "Johnny Cash"=the musician, that is, the LP Narrator; "cash" and "in the service," because he's working the Lifter Puller ATM (literally, servicing Dwight before he "killed" him, see CASH MACHINE and 15TH AND FRANKLIN above).
- "When the news came through the wire": a reference to the fact that the LP Narrator is about to be fitted out with a wire (see WIRED above).
- "And its weird how you feel when bad people die": this is the line we're here for. The Narrator got his revenge, after all; but now he feels weird about it.
- "She said yeah ...": of course, things didn't work out too well with Mary, or Juanita, either.
***There's a crucial presupposition in the notes about Dwight above that we haven't clearly stated, but want now to make explicit: namely, that *there's material in T-Shirt Tux and Blackout Sam that isn't about the THS characters at all, but is in fact about Dwight, Juanita and the LP Narrator.* This isn't the first time we've seen this, though we've managed to pass it by without comment before. What exactly is going on here? Let's pan out to the wide view for a moment. Just as every album in the LP and THS catalog has its own sound, one that evolves in quantum leaps from each record to the next, so too Craig's narrative style evolves from release to release. It's illuminating to track the progression: - Almost Killed Me is uncannily similar to Fiestas & Fiascos. Both albums have lots of "jump cuts" from a line or two about X to a line or two about Y, description without narration, radical points of view; both feature many new names (Night Club Dwight and the Nice Nice on the one hand, Mary, Holly, Charlemagne, Gideon, and the Cityscape Skins on the other). Both albums are intensely focused on story: F&F represents the beginning of an attempt to bring the LP story full circle, while AKM aims to set the remixed THS story on a strong footing from the beginning.
- Separation Sunday and BAGIA are pretty different albums, but both have multiple references to Holly, Charlemagne, Gideon, and (obliquely) Mary; the songs on both are strongly "voiced" from the point of view of individual characters; both make assiduous strides in working out the story.
- Stay Positive is still story-focused, something we can follow because we know enough now to recognize the main events and characters of the THS universe; but other aspects of Craig's style have changed dramatically. The album has just one glancing reference to Mary in Both Crosses ("Hail Mary, full of grace"), and B-side Ask Her For Adderall tells us the last we'll ever hear of Charlemagne and Gideon by name. The jump cuts are gone, replaced by what appear to be self-contained vignettes about unnamed characters. The strong POV "voicing" has disappeared too (One For the Cutters is a narration about, rather than by, Mary; Joke About Jamaica is a narration about, rather than by, Jesse). If it weren't for the fact that the Skins reappear in Slapped Actress, a superficial listener would wonder if we weren't done with the world of the first three albums.
- Heaven Is Whenever kind of holds the line: it's not as exclusively focused on the story as earlier albums (we get SitC, Touchless, SV); but against that, Jesse is finally given a name, the Skins are still around, Holly gets one more mention in outtake Wonderful Struggle, and we get three strong POV songs (A Slight Discomfort and Wonderful Struggle from Gideon's, and Criminal Fingers from Jesse's). After that, though, things change in a big way.
- Teeth Dreams clocks in after a four-year break in the life of the band, and is strikingly different. It's true that we get Runner's High from Gideon's POV, the strong storytelling of The Ambassador, and a Cityscape Skins sighting. But the center of gravity has shifted hard toward sketches rather than particular events, and especially toward the Narrator's late meditations on Mary. We get the impression that the focus is narrowing in on his relationship with her, that the Narrator's omniscient POV is crowding out the carefully unreliable voices of the other characters, and that the story as such is pretty much behind us.
Which brings us around to Thrashing Through The Passion. Five years and a major THS hiatus came and went between Teeth Dreams and the release of TTtP. Craig spent the interval focused, deliberately, on material that he described as "mundane" in comparison with THS fare ( link); by the time he came back to THS writing, he'd only doubled down on the tendencies in evidence on Teeth Dreams. On TTtP, it's abundantly clear that Craig is no longer interested in the intricacies of the THS plot with "stuff taped up all over my walls, drawing arrows, trying to envision the whole thing" ( link). The Stove & the Toaster excepted, he wants to focus on sketches, and on the intimacy of the Narrator and Mary. Other THS characters are still peripherally present (e.g. Gideon in "The Maharaji" [CitM]), but the complex elaboration of the original story which they represent has mostly been relegated to the background. With TTtP, in short, Craig's come back to the core of what he cares about, back to the story that he doesn't have to keep taped to the walls in order to keep it straight: basically, he's come back to writing about Dwight, Juanita, and the Narrator of Lifter Puller.Take a look the individual tracks, and at the details that we've reviewed in the course of this thread: Thrashing Through The Passiontrack | details | comments | DH | Focus on alpha couple. Party Zero gangrape. Revenge on Dwight | DAWN, BREWERY BAR: THE CORNER, ON THE FLOOR: MUSIC, ON THE FLOOR: VISIONS, 15TH AND FRANKLIN | Epaulets | Juanita coming out of bathroom at Party Zero. Jeep Encounter. | THS REVISITED, CONTRITION, ON THE FLOOR: VISIONS, LABOR DAY, BORED, BACK TO THE CITY | YDGK | Focus on alpha couple. Detailed account of Party Zero. LBI arrival. Narrtaor wired. | A LITTLE BIT, CONTRITION, VARIETIES OF PHYSICAL ASSAULT, MAGAZINES & VIDEOS, ON THE FLOOR: INJURIES, ON THE FLOOR: MUSIC, CRUCIFIXION, THE JOKE, NIGHT CLUB DWIGHT, BORED, WIRED | TV | Party Zero confrontation. LBI arrival. Summer House details. | SHORT BY AN OUNCE, YOUR LAUGH, PERFUME COUNTER GIRL | BSam | Two Weeks w/Juanita in Summer House. Party Zero betrayal. "Killing" Dwight at 15th and Franklin. | CONTRITION, ON THE FLOOR: CARPET & HARDWOOD, 15TH AND FRANKLIN | EC | Focus on alpha couple. Jeep Encounter. Searching for Juanita on West Coast. | THE RIPPLE AND THE CHAMPAGNE, REAR VIEW MIRROR, WIRED | TSTux | Focus on alpha couple + doofus dealer. Party Zero (Pilate, dawn, roofies). "Killing" Dwight at 15th and Franklin. | ROOFIES, CRUCIFIXION, DAWN, SHERMAN CITY, WIRED | Star18 | Calls with Juanita on West Coast. Summer House transactions. Jeep Encounter and Juanita departure with gangster. | DAWN, THE WEST, OSSEO, STAR 18 | TS&tT | (exception to rule, but) Party Zero injection and gangrape. | (exception to rule, but) THE KITCHEN, CORNERED, THE RIDE, A LITTLE BIT, SHOT IN THE SHOULDER, BREWERY BAR: THE ROOF | CitM | Focus on alpha couple. Juanita on "west coast" phone. Narrator desire for revenge. Final party confusion, car theft, story crumbles. Juanita back from mission. | DAWN, EYEPATCH GUY, BACK TO THE CITY, WIRED | ASitS | Party zero: laced joint; failed joke; terrible decision; words won't save your life. | THE JOKE, NIGHT CLUB DWIGHT, LABOR DAY | Eureka | Jeep Encounter and Juanita departure with gangster. West Coast. Summer House. | JEEP ENCOUNTER: ORIGIN, THE WEST, DETECTIVE, LOOKING FOR K, ROUGH RIDERS, NOSEBLEED, IN THE PARKING LOT, WRONG WAY | Esther | Focus on alpha couple. First bust and Jeep Encounter. Mission Party. Detective. Party Zero summary. Summer House w/Juanita's room. | LACED SUBSTANCES, THE KITCHEN, ROOFIES, JEEP ENCOUNTER: ORIGIN, ESTHER, TWO WEEKS, CANDY'S ROOM | TLTtSTtM | Focus on alpha couple. Party Zero (ride, kiss, tape deck). | WALK AROUND, SINCERITY, SHOT IN THE SHOULDER, ON THE FLOOR: VISIONS, NIGHT CLUB DWIGHT |
All along, there have been *occasional* details of the THS lyrics that seem to fit the THS story poorly, only to appear with the clarity of hindsight as references to events of the LP story ("They did the been caught stealing into dancing on the ceiling" [CiS], "Drove the wrong way down 169/ Almost died up by Edina High" [HH], "I'm gonna walk around and drink some more" [PP], "I've been thinking about both crosses" [BCrosses], "two kids died" [JaJ, R&T]). But as of TTtP, *most* of the material fits this description. We're told that kids got a ride to the THS version of the Mission Party [RP]; but in Esther, the Narrator and Mary end up sitting in her car, because the LP Jeep Encounter has emerged from the shadows and taken over the scene (see ESTHER above). The original cast of the THS kids only learn of Holly's fortunes in Hollywood after her return [MINTS]; but in Star 18, the Narrator is in contact with the alpha girl in California by phone, and this for the same reason (see STAR 18 above). What we're getting now is the Lifter Puller story, seen anew through the lens of THS positivity.***Since I wrote the above about TTtP, we've had the release of Open Door Policy, which vindicates the conclusions of the argument. [*1] Like TTtP, ODP revisits the Lifter Puller story in its original version, where the Narrator, on a rescue mission, follows the alpha girl to a Summer House/Ambassador that's unambiguously located in The West (rather than ambiguously in St. Paul; see again THE WEST and DEPARTMENT STORES above). Gideon, Holly, and Jesse are nowhere to be seen on the album; even Charlemagne's presence is limited to the appearance of Dwight as the Heavy Covenant music club guy who'll take a date in the back seat of his taxi on the frontage road in lieu of the full 40 bucks for a breakdown (see FRONTAGE ROAD and TWO TWENTIES above). The surprise in ODP, and the big difference with respect to TTtP, is the amount of attention it lavishes on Shepard (see NICE NICE and SHEPARD'S MANSION above); referred to just once in passing on TTtP (in Star 18), on ODP he is featured as a primary character in Feelers, HCovenant, TPProcedure, Riptown, and M&M. All the other tracks on the album add detail about life in the Summer House as well. It's true that the LP narrative doesn't distinguish Shepard from the other "teachers" of KatKH; but the story in which he figures is beyond doubt the story of Lifter Puller. [*2] [*1] ODP strengthens the evidence for other patterns on offer in TTtP as well. It used to be, for example, that technology references in the songs were a close fit for the era in which they were set (from coin-operated pay phones in TGatSD, to answering machines in Viceburgh and Magazines, to cell phones in AE); now, in making a late return to the world of the LP story, Craig has abandoned this pattern, bringing the metaphors of firmly 21st-century technology to bear on the world of 1994 (texting in Epaulets; internet shopping in TVillage; "airplane" mode in Heavy Covenant; computers in TPProcedure and Riptown). [*2] The late development of these details surrounding Shepard gives a clear illustration of how to understand the inference, drawn all the way back in STORY: WORKING THEORY, that the telling of the Lifter Puller story was never completed. Without the significant additional detail furnished by later reflections in the THS world, we would have struggled to untangle the LP story start to finish. But the beginning, end, and main events of that story were already all documented in the original LP canon; it's only the details of those events that left, and still leave, room for what Craig characterized as "Let's talk in more detail about that little scene" ( link). It's evident too now what Craig means when he says of his storytelling, in the lead-in to the quote about arrows taped up on the walls, that "It's a method" ( link) for writing songs. He's got a story, but he's not in any kind of hurry to lay it out for the listener (it took 10 years after Ascension Blues came out before we found out anything more about what happened in Shepard's mansion). The goal is not to tell the story and get it told; the goal is to write songs. It's a pretty good method.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Aug 5, 2021 14:33:36 GMT -5
I wish I could go back and read this again and again, without knowing where it's heading. An amazing post, and (as you probably already know) I agree on a lot of this. To me, the lyrical shift in THS wasn't all that clear at the time, but Open Door Policy made me look back on the last few albums in a different light, and I also sense a clear shift around Teeth Dreams. Not only in content as such, but as you say (when you talk about sketches), in style. There's less of characters doing stuff, moving from A to B or setting of actions X or Y. And there's a lot more emphasis on conversation, relationship and general scenic descriptions. Just as Craig himself have said about looking closer on this and that detail. I would also like to dig deeper into how the solo material translates to all of this. Not in a narrative way, but with all this in mind, it's even more interesting to try to understand what he does there that he won't or can't do under the THS umbrella. And with that, maybe even understand more about the alpha couple, and how and why they are the sole center of the LP/THS world. Such a thrill, really. I can't believe these posts have been coming five days a week for over half a year. I've been extremely curious about that GIDEON sitting at the bottom of the list of posts, and I'm looking forward to read it tomorrow.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Aug 6, 2021 5:39:20 GMT -5
I wish I could go back and read this again and again, without knowing where it's heading. An amazing post, and (as you probably already know) I agree on a lot of this. To me, the lyrical shift in THS wasn't all that clear at the time, but Open Door Policy made me look back on the last few albums in a different light, and I also sense a clear shift around Teeth Dreams. Not only in content as such, but as you say (when you talk about sketches), in style. There's less of characters doing stuff, moving from A to B or setting of actions X or Y. And there's a lot more emphasis on conversation, relationship and general scenic descriptions. Just as Craig himself have said about looking closer on this and that detail. I would also like to dig deeper into how the solo material translates to all of this. Not in a narrative way, but with all this in mind, it's even more interesting to try to understand what he does there that he won't or can't do under the THS umbrella. And with that, maybe even understand more about the alpha couple, and how and why they are the sole center of the LP/THS world. Such a thrill, really. I can't believe these posts have been coming five days a week for over half a year. I've been extremely curious about that GIDEON sitting at the bottom of the list of posts, and I'm looking forward to read it tomorrow. Thanks. It's taken a very long time to tunnel up through the details to the broad conclusions of the last couple of posts, but with those conclusions in hand, I think coming to terms with the details of individual songs becomes a lot more intuitive. I'm glad it resonates with you, in any case! There's obviously a ton of interesting material in the solo stuff, but it's really hard to try to look at it systematically, just because there clearly isn't a presumption of narrative continuity to lean on. Still, even going through it piecemeal, there's a lot to look at. All right (alright!), let me wrap this thing up. :-)
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Post by skepticatfirst on Aug 6, 2021 6:44:18 GMT -5
GIDEONOf the six THS characters, we've shown - that Holly, Mary, and Jesse all reflect aspects of Juanita;
- that the THS Narrator is the successor to the LP Narrator;
- that Charlemagne is essentially Dwight rounded out with sympathies of the LP Narrator.
To end on another positive note, let's look at the genesis of the character of Gideon. ***At first blush, Gideon seems to have been invented by Craig from whole cloth. There are many motivations, narrative and thematic, for adding him to the story: - he's the third figure needed to complete the reconciliation of the Narrator, Dwight, and the gangsters ("unified/ the punks, the skins, the greaser guys" [JaJ]), and to round out the THS Trinity in token of that natural unified order ("We didn't see the holy ghost/ But the father and the son they seemed like regular folks" [SM]).
- he provides a figure to advocate non-violence against the Narrator and Charlemagne's shared desire for revenge.
- he provides a figure to expiate the sins of the story --- the introduction of Mary to hard drugs [ASD], the drowning of Juanita/Holly, the killing of Dwight/Charlemagne, and even the betrayal of Juanita/Mary --- in a way that leaves Charlemagne and the Narrator behind to either learn their lesson, or not, and to spread the gospel.
But where did the material for such a memorable character come from, if, in stark contrast with the others, it wasn't taken from the LP story? ***We've taken note of Craig's statement that he builds his characters out of people and things he's "been around ... It might be half one person from eighth grade and one from college in two different states" ( link; see UNIVERSES & CHARACTERS above). It turns out that that "one from college" hits close to the mark, in this case. Most of the material for Gideon doesn't come from Lifter Puller, the *story*; it comes from Lifter Puller, the *band*. Gideon is fundamentally based on Steve.In what respects is Gideon patterned after Steve? It's a long list ... ***1) Visuals In the 2005 Tim Scanlin interview ( link), Steve is described by Craig as bringing "a cool visual element" to Lifter Puller. Not only does Craig use the same language in the THS lyrics to describe Gideon --- "Strung out on residuals and visuals and laser shows" [SPayne] (compare "we can use a couple visuals" [RfLB]) --- but, from Simon Calder's epic Back To The City interview, we learn (beginning at 35:30 [ youtube]) that *Steve actually had a smoke machine and a strobe light,* which he brought along for The Hawaii Show performances when Lifter Puller went on tour. The real-world inspiration for Gideon's "special effects" [HM] is Steve. ***2) Into the speaker Gideon is not only described as "Reaching out to try to touch the special effects" [HM], but specifically as "Reach[ing] into the speaker [to] try to hold on to the quarter notes" [SPayne]. This image too is owed to The Hawaii Show. Steve built a foamcore 8x8-foot-high Marshall amp stage prop which he would *physically enter* for The Hawaii Show costume changes (see Back To The City interview link above. The amp can be seen in the videos that come with the self-titled The Hawaii Show CD --- still available and worth the money many times over [ link] --- as well as in a stage plot from the band's shows [ link]). *** 3) Psycho eyes Gideon has "psycho eyes" [Swish], and so does Steve; see, for example, in Mike Daily's famous photo: ***4) Stovepipe hat & magic wand Gideon has a "stovepipe hat" [Swish], and so, in the person of Mr. Hawaii Dude, does Steve, as seen in the clip accompanying the second verse of Hawaii Rocks in the official video (available on the CD): The hat that Steve's ghost is wearing here is, like Gideon's, a magician's hat, as the lyrics accompanying this image make plain: Redheads are on a diet So the brunettes thought they would try it That's when I busted out with my magic wand And turned them both into beautiful blondes In other words, Steve, in the person of Mr. Hawaii Dude, brandishes a dick-joke cigarette "magic wand" that he uses to transform girls from A into B --- foreshadowing both Gideon's more sinister magic wand: Waving Marlboros like magic wands. Listen up closely to the lit tips of your cigarettes. Can't you hear the serpent hiss? Saying, sweet baby, suck on this [MM] and his magic-trick transformation of Mary into Holly during the THS Crucifixion ( heregoes). We know that Craig had already developed the Juanita-becomes-Katrina story for Lifter Puller; it's plausible that, being repeatedly exposed to The Hawaii Show music and videos over the same timeframe, and not missing the irony that the Hawaii Rocks dick joke was literally applicable to the Juanita-Katrina transformation, he already had this material front of mind when writing Gideon's part in the THS story. (The same material may also have served to bolster Gideon's identification with the Holy Ghost [SM, A&H, GoaH]; but that's speculation.) ***5) Cape Besides the stovepipe hat and magic wand, Gideon's magician costume also includes a cape. This is described in the lyrics as a magician's cape (via the combination of MM, SN and R&T: heregoes); in view of his membership in the vampire Skins, it's also suggested that it's a Dracula cape (via the combination of BCamp, Jester And June, TMIT and HSL; for gangsters as vampires, see BREWERY BAR: THE VESTIBULE above). I haven't been able to locate evidence of Steve wearing a magician's cape, but I did find an image of him wearing a Dracula cape --- check out the fangs! --- in the thumbnail for the lost "Blood Brita Filter" video, deep in the bowels of the Wayback machine (this is from a Flash version of the site that was barely viewable before, and is no longer runnable at all as of Jan 2021, but nevertheless existed: link): (That's Craig stooping in the foreground of the picture; the image is a crudely photoshopped version of the Lifter Puller cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker in 2002, when the band reunited to play at Brownies.) That barely-surviving image is just the tip of an iceberg of evidence that *hasn't* survived, but that certainly existed. Youtube has a Minnie Indie video of Steve wearing a Superman cape ( youtube): The Mashed Potato Wrestling Federation website has a photo of four-time Universal Champion "Steve O'Gratin" wearing an American flag cape ( link): These images are variations on an uninterrupted theme. The Hawaii Show ran for years as a live show with lip-synch band costume changes; in the Back To The City interview, we're told that it was involved in fashion shows (including an occasion when Steve rented Revolutionary War costumes for the entire troupe from the Guthrie Theater for Bastille Day). We have photos and videos of Steve in robes, tasseled jackets, turbans, you name it; we see him wearing a Jedi cloak at the end of the Hawaii Wars video; we learn that he was the author of a fashion advice column ( link). In short, we can be confident that Steve is the source of Gideon's cape, as well as his wand and hat, and that this was Craig's reason for naming THS' Gideon-in-his-long-black-shawl song **Stevie** Nix. Craig took Tad and Jessica Hopper's overheard trash-talk ( link) and turned it into an homage to Steve, changing "Nicks" to "Nix" either by way of canceling the part that's irrelevant to the tribute, or else in description of Gideon's role, at that point in the THS story, as an interloper among his former friends ( ondcp): Nix − Stranger among the group ***6) Crust punk In the 2000 Mike Daily interview, Steve jokingly describes himself and The Hawaii Show as “huge with the crust punk scene in Cleveland” ( link), going on to explain that crust punks are the ones who go around with their dogs and girlfriends, and have dreads. Gideon too is described as a "crust punk" [BBlues], with dreads that get shaved off when he gets jumped in [BBlues, GLS, CatCT] ( heregoes). ***7) Can't stand it when the banging stops In the same interview, Steve describes himself as "sexually crazy"; Gideon too (not that the fiction reflects on real-world Steve) is portrayed as sex-crazed, leading him to drown Holly when she stops fucking him: "And I can't stand it when the banging stops" [BCamp] ( heregoes). ***8) Raise up a giant ladder In the same interview, Steve is described as "scaling the sides of buildings." There's lots of evidence in interviews and videos of him climbing equipment, including scaffolding, on stage, and I haven't read the Lifter Puller vs. the End Of ... book, so I can't say which particular incident or incidents are referred to. But the graphic description of Gideon's use of ladders to scale the water tower in the Party Pit [CSummer] appears to relate to this habit. In general, Gideon's capacity for crazy plans is a faithful reflection of Steve's talent; see for example in the 1999 Halloween interview ( link): ***9) We make our own movies Gideon's idea of filming Charlemagne and projecting the film as a means to saving his life is the origin of the THS "we make our own movies" [SA] theme. From the Back To The City interview, we learn that The Hawaii Show started as a "video project" after Steve and his friend Taavo Somer learned to edit VHS at the St. Paul Neighborhood Network cable access station (this information is delivered in two parts of the interview, one around 38:15 and the other around 49:00). In an epic "full circle" moment, Steve is actually pictured shooting video on the cover of the self-titled Lifter Puller album: Compare Steve's T-shirt in the image below, taken from the fourth photo here ( link): ***10) Didn't really die Of all the ambiguous deaths of the characters in THS, Gideon's is the most real ( heregoes), but even so it's ambiguous ("Cause the last guy didn't really die, I just lied" [Knuckles]). One of the jokes of The Hawaii Show, playing off the Beatles' famous "Paul is dead" legend ( wikipedia), was that "Steve is dead" ( link). ***11) Friend from the tire shop Gideon works at the Michelin tire shop (he's "your friend from the tire shop" [Ambassador] who's been "working at the Michelin" [SPayne]). A few years ago, Steve wrote a song called Jeeter & Jenny, about a guy who works at Tires Plus and is in a band called Burnt Rubber (see the Back To The City interview [ youtube], with detail at about 1:17:15, and Steve's Facebook page [ link] ).
In the same interview, Steve makes a point to the effect that he has to deliberately avoid writing things that would make him appear to be "ripping off Craig" (youtube); the fact that Jeeter & Jenny passes the not-ripped-off-from-Craig test in the face of Gideon's prominent tire shop resume suggests, conversely, that the tire shop is another fixture of Steve's world that Craig borrowed for Gideon. ***12) Don't got time to mix it all together In Banging Camp, Gideon is bizarrely but memorably described (in Charlemagne's imitation) as touting the virtues of pre-mixed black and tans: When they say black and tans You know they mean the kind from the cans We don't got time to mix it all together I'm a very busy man, man [BCamp] The point of this is clearly to work in a reference to the Skins as militiamen like the historical Black and Tans ( heregoes); but why would Craig use the pre-mixed beer cocktail, besides the fact that it's self-evidently a funny concept, to convey such an elaborate allusion? It turns out that enthusiasm for premixed comestibles is one of Steve's things, too: as he told Oren Goldberg in a 2001 interview for the Minnesota Daily ( link): ***13) France Ave & Lyndale South The interrogation-session answers delivered (again in Charlemagne's imitation) in Gideon's voice include two specific locations: I was France Ave when they came out dancing I was Lyndale South, I was kicking it with cousins [HSL] Both of these locations were addresses of Steve characters. The address of Mr. Hawaii Dude (and, for a time, of Steve himself) was on Lyndale South ( link): Shaved Ice and Southdale Super Singer were both from Edina, and hung out on France Ave (at the Southdale Mall and the intersection of 50th and France, specifically). These facts are documented in the lyrics of "Shaved Ice" on the The Hawaii Show self-titled album, and on the Press page of the old website ( link): Images from the old website also document this location ( link): ***14) Hard CoreyGideon's use of insane nicknames --- Hard Corey, Freddy Knuckles, Sunny D, etc. --- is also based on Steve, who invented dozens of these for himself and other members of The Hawaii Show: Estee Louder, Dr. Strange Pockets, Vinny Testosteroni, Faux Pas "pronounced FOX PAUSE," The Afro-Disiac, Princess Layus, Cousin Brad, Janie Guns, Honolulu Higgins, Evel Knutdsen, Osama Ben Affleck, etc. etc. (see the "list of performers" document that comes with the CD, and assorted content from the old website, e.g. the Flash version under 'characters': link). ***Steve's had an influence on Craig's material in both Lifter Puller and The Hold Steady that extends well beyond Gideon, too. Examples include: - Star Wars: the Hawaii Wars epic postdates Star Wars Hips, but Steve's obsession with Star Wars goes back at least as far as his own Boston College "band," called Boba Fett (link).
- the Jeep: from the Mike Daily interview (link), we know that Steve drove a Jeep Wrangler, like the one pictured on the cover of the self-titled Lifter Puller album (see above) with Dave Gerlach at the wheel. Is that Steve's Jeep, with Dave in the driver's seat because Steve, directing a video shoot, put him there? Did the Jeep as an element of the LP story come from him?
- The LBI: we've already documented that "The LBI" concept came from Steve (see AIRPORT & LBI above). But the repercussions of this idea are surprisingly far-reaching, through not only the East Coast beach party spots of the LP story, but Pensacola and Ybor City in the THS story as well. Even details like "jetskis" in MPADJs (following the first Ybor City reference) appear to have a precedent in "we partied apres-jetski" [Hawaii Rocks] from the beach-party lyrics of The Hawaii Show.
- cowboys and indians: as already documented, this too is owed to Steve (see ORIGINS OF IMAGES above).
- Flex And The Buff Result: We already noted that the "flex" references are allusions to the Hulk as a figure of violent revenge (see CHARLEMAGNE above); but the odd expression "flex and the buff result" itself seems very likely to come from Steve, who was big into the idea of pumping iron. Check out the videos from his weightlifting project "Muscle Beach DVD" (youtube version1; version2) and various posts about getting buff ("getting a post practice pump on": link; "curls for the girls": link).
***These things bring us around to a final bit of speculation. As a band name, "The Hold Steady" is awkward. The motivation for it isn't hard to see: Craig's express purpose in rewriting the LP narrative for THS (see POSITIVE JAM above) was to reframe it as a positive story; in alluding to the LP Narrator's performance as the "steady type" [TLaDiLBI], he's chosen the most positive aspect of the old world as his foundation for the new one. But why "The Hold Steady"? We're told the name was taken, maybe offhandedly, from the phrase "hold steady" that appeared in several of their early songs [PJam, Swish, Knuckles, and maybe particularly MPADJs]. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but still doesn't account for the "The." Why this weird combination of definite article and imperative verb? We know that Craig pays close attention to initials in formulating names (linking the C.F. of "Clear heart/Full eyes" to his own initials: youtube). While this is pure speculation, my guess is that he named The Hold Steady in deliberate symmetry with the other positive THS to come out of Lifter Puller, namely, The Hawaii Show. Whether that's true or not, I don't expect ever to know for sure; but as a positive note on which to end this thread, I like it a lot. Thanks for reading along.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Aug 9, 2021 4:30:01 GMT -5
I just want to express extreme gratitude for this entire thread, and the work that skepticatfirst have put into it. I've said this several times before, but even if you don't buy into all the extremely deep links, references and conclusions, it should a) add a pretty enormous value to listnening to the songs, reading the lyrics, and b) appreciate the sheer analysis, which is at a level very, very few are able to pull off. The fact that Craig writes lyrics who even makes it possible to inspire these posts, is something to be valued of its own. That said, I think pretty much all of this is spot on. And to repeat myself once again: I think the links established between songs, lines, metaphors and recurring themes are so well-founded that it is more likely that this is intentional than that it isn't. I get that follow an enormous project like this over the span of several months, require something too. But I really hope that guys like tableinthecorner, star18 and others eventually will come back to the thread to read it all through. I would love to hear some other takes on all of this - and especially how this sheds new light over some of the themes in THS lyrics too. So cheers to skepticatfirst, and a big, big thank you. I can't wait to meet up at a show again, once we're able to.
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Post by star18 on Aug 10, 2021 16:24:36 GMT -5
I also wanted to express my massive appreciation for the insane amount of thinking and writing that went into this project. Although I didn't chime in all that frequently, I was definitely following along and enjoying the journey! I am, as always, awed by Skeptic's mind. I fancy myself as a person who thinks about lyrics more than most, but Skeptic, you're just working on an entire different level from the rest of us. Even if I didn't love the source material, I would still be impressed by your methods and delivery. I didn't comment here as often mostly due a different level of knowledge/connection with these songs. While I am broadly familiar with the LP catalog, I don't have these songs "scratched into my soul" just yet, so for me it was a very different experience than working through "Here Goes," (where I already had quite a few preconceived notions of what those songs were "about.") Of course, the parts where the stories collide and shadow each other are fascinating to consider. The general idea that Craig is repurposing ideas and scenes from LP into THS seems completely undeniable. Exactly how much of those connections are fully intentional -- versus how much is a result of a writer telling two similar stories in the same setting and using the same language -- is probably unknowable. But it's fun as hell to think about. Working with Skeptic's idea that -- "at some level this really is just a fresh look at the same events from another perspective" -- makes me consider if we have any parallels in the rest of the entertainment and arts. I think it's safe to say the achievement is unprecedented in rock music. But in cinema (which we know inspires Craig) there is a minor tradition of directors remaking their own films. That's what this reminds me of. He was still interested in telling these types of stories, wanted to build on the musical/lyrical chops, but present these ideas with a new cast of characters, new motifs, and bigger budget. There are a few elements here of which I remain slightly wary. I don't want it to seem like I'm nit-picking, especially because I don't really have alternate solutions, but just for the sake of discussion, here are two: 1) Based on the time and place, the relative lack of stigma (on the gangsters' part) regarding the homosexual rape/coerced sex scenes seems unusual to me. I grew up midwest-adjacent (Pennsylvania) and during the 1990s, there was a ton of bigoted stigma around anything gay-adjacent; you'd get called slurs for glancing at someone accidentally in the locker room, etc. Yes, sex and power are always linked, but I have some difficulty imagining these tough, image-conscious gangsters (Dwight, Shepherd, et. al.) hanging out in the same room, fucking other men, and not being concerned about their tough-guy reputations. Especially when this doesn't seem to be the "last resort" for junkies paying their debts, but more or less the goal of these parties. To be clear, it's not the homosexuality that bothers me -- rock & roll needs more queerness! -- it just doesn't match how I imagine those characters and their understanding of sexuality in the 90s. But maybe I'm off base, or maybe Craig was just imagining relatively queer-positive gangsters. 2) Both of your interpretations prominently feature periods of time during which characters are unrecognizable to friends based on relatively minor cosmetic changes. This feels a little bit like the Shakespeare comedies where a guy puts on a dress and suddenly his buddy falls in love with him. It's a little sitcom-ish and (to me) doesn't seem to fit with the otherwise serious, dangerous world of the gangsters. You've made the case that the disguises are more effective due to these characters frequently being incredibly fucked-up, which does help. But I've been pretty fucked up a lot (albeit not on meth) and I think I would still recognize a friend or former lover under an eyepatch and different clothes, if not immediately, at least after having a conversation. Just my $0.02. That said, please don't let my quibbles be the takeaway here. It's a staggering accomplishment, it has already inspired me to re-listen to lots of Lifter Puller with fresh ears, and I am ever so glad that these posts, and this board, and this community exist.
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Post by thrasher9294 on Aug 11, 2021 19:12:39 GMT -5
LIFTER PULLERFinally, this is a standalone LP abstraction, not a shadow: but as a first-class double-take, it's worth our time to consider the name "Lifter Puller" in its own right. ... I'll be taking in this thread after having not been here in a while, and this may have been mentioned elsewhere, but until I'm able to really take in all the writing here (and we better goddamned archive this somewhere, this is fucking fantastic stuff), I thought I'd note this article as well: Now I don't think that this takes the place of the meaning behind the title that you've explained up above, just a little interesting note on where he might have first heard the name.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Aug 16, 2021 8:20:23 GMT -5
So cheers to skepticatfirst, and a big, big thank you. I can't wait to meet up at a show again, once we're able to. Thanks for sticking with this all the way through, man. I realized at some point about two-thirds through that it was starting to be a lot even to read regularly, let alone think about critically, so I really appreciate your hanging on throughout. Anyway, it's all out there, now, for anyone who finds their way to it and is interested. It's looking like 2021 won't be the year, but likewise, I'm really looking forward to meeting up again (New York, London, or who knows!). I also wanted to express my massive appreciation for the insane amount of thinking and writing that went into this project. Although I didn't chime in all that frequently, I was definitely following along and enjoying the journey! Thanks man! I saw that you were following, and again I appreciate it. Working with Skeptic's idea that -- "at some level this really is just a fresh look at the same events from another perspective" -- makes me consider if we have any parallels in the rest of the entertainment and arts. I think it's safe to say the achievement is unprecedented in rock music. But in cinema (which we know inspires Craig) there is a minor tradition of directors remaking their own films. That's what this reminds me of. He was still interested in telling these types of stories, wanted to build on the musical/lyrical chops, but present these ideas with a new cast of characters, new motifs, and bigger budget. That's a really interesting question, and one I want to think about some more. The only other narrative example I can think of offhand is Joyce continually reworking, and expanding, the autobiographical account of his own youth (from the 1904 short story A Portrait of the Artist, to Stephen Hero, to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man + Ulysses); but in his case, the end he's aiming at doesn't change the way Craig's does. Or, you could look at Rembrandt self-portraits and maybe get something of the same change in emphasis and approach, but of course the subject there is changing too. I can't think of anyone, in any medium, who's taken a story that they've written and deliberately turned it on its head like this. But I'll keep thinking about it. There are a few elements here of which I remain slightly wary. I don't want it to seem like I'm nit-picking, especially because I don't really have alternate solutions, but just for the sake of discussion, here are two: 1) Based on the time and place, the relative lack of stigma (on the gangsters' part) regarding the homosexual rape/coerced sex scenes seems unusual to me. I grew up midwest-adjacent (Pennsylvania) and during the 1990s, there was a ton of bigoted stigma around anything gay-adjacent; you'd get called slurs for glancing at someone accidentally in the locker room, etc. Yes, sex and power are always linked, but I have some difficulty imagining these tough, image-conscious gangsters (Dwight, Shepherd, et. al.) hanging out in the same room, fucking other men, and not being concerned about their tough-guy reputations. Especially when this doesn't seem to be the "last resort" for junkies paying their debts, but more or less the goal of these parties. To be clear, it's not the homosexuality that bothers me -- rock & roll needs more queerness! -- it just doesn't match how I imagine those characters and their understanding of sexuality in the 90s. But maybe I'm off base, or maybe Craig was just imagining relatively queer-positive gangsters. 2) Both of your interpretations prominently feature periods of time during which characters are unrecognizable to friends based on relatively minor cosmetic changes. This feels a little bit like the Shakespeare comedies where a guy puts on a dress and suddenly his buddy falls in love with him. It's a little sitcom-ish and (to me) doesn't seem to fit with the otherwise serious, dangerous world of the gangsters. You've made the case that the disguises are more effective due to these characters frequently being incredibly fucked-up, which does help. But I've been pretty fucked up a lot (albeit not on meth) and I think I would still recognize a friend or former lover under an eyepatch and different clothes, if not immediately, at least after having a conversation. Just my $0.02. Yep. I think the Lifter Puller takes on these are more believable than the THS versions, but I can't argue with you about either point. I have a recollection that one of the solo songs about what appears to be the jeep encounter suggests, in kind of a stripped-down "only the girls know the whole truth" moment, that the girl thinks she might know him but chooses not to make up her mind about it --- something that I actually found pretty subtle and believable, for what that's worth. I have to get to work so I'm not going to look for it now, but will try to find it later if I can summon the energy to dive back in. :-) I'll be taking in this thread after having not been here in a while, and this may have been mentioned elsewhere, but until I'm able to really take in all the writing here (and we better goddamned archive this somewhere, this is fucking fantastic stuff), I thought I'd note this article as well: Now I don't think that this takes the place of the meaning behind the title that you've explained up above, just a little interesting note on where he might have first heard the name. Hey man, nice to hear from you too! That's a great story --- I don't think it can be true in exactly this form, since the Farm Accident gallery closed when Craig was 11, plus it comes after paragraphs detailing how you had to be super-connected, or a visiting New York star like Robert Mapplethorpe or David Byrne, to talk your way in. But I wouldn't be surprised if Craig heard about that piece later, or if there were some other significance of the name to add to the double entendre; that seems to be how most of his titles work.
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Post by thrasher9294 on Aug 16, 2021 14:40:52 GMT -5
Hey man, nice to hear from you too! That's a great story --- I don't think it can be true in exactly this form, since the Farm Accident gallery closed when Craig was 11, plus it comes after paragraphs detailing how you had to be super-connected, or a visiting New York star like Robert Mapplethorpe or David Byrne, to talk your way in. But I wouldn't be surprised if Craig heard about that piece later, or if there were some other significance of the name to add to the double entendre; that seems to be how most of his titles work. Hah, that would make sense! I was kinda wondering how the logistics of it all would've worked out. I should've just checked his age at some point
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Post by muzzleofbees on Mar 25, 2022 4:55:19 GMT -5
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. I'm just casually dropping by here with some quotes from the material who came along with the new CF single and the album announcement. Scroll back through this thread, and make what you will out of these lines: "The title A LEGACY OF RENTALS acknowledges that we can never completely hold any of our possessions, and that our bodies are merely a temporary residence for our souls. All moments are fleeting. After the destruction of the past few years, I believe that there is joy in each and every living action, however mundane — walking to the kitchen, missing a train, spilling coffee, cleaning it up, meeting a friend for a meal. We all want to be remembered. We all want our time here to be consequential. In taking these daily actions, we engage in hope, and we guarantee our unique place in history."
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 26, 2022 13:50:44 GMT -5
"The title A LEGACY OF RENTALS acknowledges that we can never completely hold any of our possessions, and that our bodies are merely a temporary residence for our souls. All moments are fleeting. After the destruction of the past few years, I believe that there is joy in each and every living action, however mundane — walking to the kitchen, missing a train, spilling coffee, cleaning it up, meeting a friend for a meal. We all want to be remembered. We all want our time here to be consequential. In taking these daily actions, we engage in hope, and we guarantee our unique place in history." Yeah, and meeting a friend for a meal, too (see THE QUEUE): We got thrashed throughout the '30s, queuing up for soup with scabby sores [PJ] and maybe if you're feeling better then maybe we could get some soup together, we've been sick together before. [212M] ***The stuff about "rentals" and "our bodies are merely a temporary residence for our souls" all looks pretty familiar at this point, but there are two lines in Messing With The Settings --- pretty clearly another solo-stuff account of the Narrator's story with Her --- that struck me as meaningful evidence for the arguments I've made in this thread. One is They pulled me over five minutes from home [MwtS] which is consistent with the LP Narrator wrecking the car and getting arrested a few blocks from home in Edina (see BLOODY CAR WRECKS). The other is the end of the opening description of the alpha couple posting up in the Summer House: We used to post up for days at this place in the flats She'd stare off into space and draw smokestacks on her placemat She had a dwindling grace and a faith in the industry That never really made sense to me While we were combing the place trying to come up with the funds For some phone-number friend in some idling car She said this probably isn't where I see myself forever But for now it's pretty much where we are I never really argued with her basic observations Cause I wasn't super into confrontation back then I was mostly just about sitting by the window Watching the flag in the front just twisting and twisting and twisting For evidence that this is a description of the Summer House, compare "where she stays in for days at a time" [LID] (see THE WEST), "she was combing through the carpet" & "She said you get what you get when you push through far ahead/ They put us in these places for a reason" [FFarm] (see CANDY'S ROOM), and the lines in UB and R&T about staring out the window (see again CANDY'S ROOM). But that last line about the "flag in the front" --- that's new information. So of course I looked. Here ( gmaps) is the view out the basement window which I argued (for the argument and a photo of the window, see CANDY'S ROOM) was Juanita's bedroom in the Summer House: Nothing on that pole now. But I'll bet money there was an American flag flying there in 1994.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Apr 21, 2022 6:59:00 GMT -5
I'm re-reading this thread in full these days, and I would totally recommend it even to those who hang around till the end in the first place. It's so rewarding to read early discoveries with a notion of where it ends in the back of your head. A couple of general things that have struck me so far (I might pop back with a few more when I'm done):
* The absolutely incredible amount of drug references in these lyrics. I guess all of us understood pretty early on that a lot of the partying in the Hold Steady lyrics weren't strictly alcohol based, but they always gave me the impression of a narrator kind of jokingly refering back to a certain part of his youth where drugs were on the fringes of his scene. I guess there's a personal reason for hearing it this way. I've never been especially interested in drugs myself, aside from a few pretty mediocre to pretty bad experiences with hash/weed, but the people I know that have been into this, have been this type: Curious, kind of proud, buzzing over flirting with the illegal, finding some sort of release through it. That, and a couple of near friends who approached in a way more destructive way, and for deeply personal reasons rather than as a fun side thing, ending up dead. But they way I (first) heard Craig, were more in sync with the first type of users. And it might be a bias towards Craig as a type as well. His entire artist persona is built around this, in lack of better words, shy and boring type. You know, the accountant losing his shit at a rock show. So I guess I might put that into the equation: This guy, looking and sounding like Craig, bringing these topics in to colour the youthful, alcohol driven party tales, making his characters a little bit edgy and on the fringe of what the regular listener would know first hand, but still recognizable.
Of course, there's plenty of things in THS who turns pretty dark, and allready at first glance at Separation Sunday we get death and destrucion, but it was always casted in a somewhat romantic light. In Lifter Puller in general, and especially after reading this thread, things are quite different. I think I wrote somewhere else that Hold Steady seems like a slightly romanticizing tale told in hindsight, while the characters in Lifter Puller are right in the midst of it, expiriencing this stuff first hand. And that bring me back to the drug stuff: There's obviously more of them in Lifter Puller, but getting the scope of how integral it is in close to every line, have made me listen to Hold Steady (and also some of the solo material) in a totally new way. I'm kind of glad I didn't get this early on, and that I got to hear these songs in a "innocent" way, but at this point it make things both terryfing and a lot more interesting.
* The very, very strong case for an alpha couple, and how this bleeds into subsequent songs, are revelatory. Sure, there's been a strong sense of relationships throughout the different catalogs, but the way this thread have opened my eyes for one core relationship story, makes a lot of the songs feel way heavier, more important, in a way I really can't describe. It's both an intellectually stimulating task, and certainly fun, to suddenly see patterns between all these characters, many of them boiling down to a specific relationship. But it turns mindblowing when you think back at that "it's a simple story" quote about three people doing something, and coming back from it. After years of getting used to the narrative universes expbanding, it's a almost physical rush piecing the different paths back together to a simpler and more coherent story. I know it's an exaggeration to say that everything happing to Gideon, Jesse or unamed characters in the solo stuff, essentially are stories about The LP Narrator and Juanita - but just threading back, and realizing how many of the situations set up over the years, actually mimicing the pure narrative core from the LP days, are amazing.
* The twists and turns in geography, putting the enitre USA within the borders of the Twin Cities, are also mind-boggling. I re-read a discussion somewhere where someone pointed out that people DO travel in real life. To me it's beyond obvious that this is not the case in these lyrics - and that the geography metaphors are some of the most clever and effective there is. All the references have an unsung and beautiful effect, strictly lyrical speaking. I'm not sure how this feels for a US citizen, but as a European exposed with (and to some extent, brainwashed by - you would be amazed what the average Norwegian know abou american geography and culture, we're infused with it from pretty early on) America all my life, the lyrics take me on a virtual roadtrip, breathing in an entire continent. When you add the metaphorical level to it, and (in some way, like the alpha couple) then thread it back to a certain urban area, it feels thrilling. Craig is literally creating a world out of his hometown, in a language and a style that suggest he does the completely opposite: Looking outwards and dreaming, to paraphrase a single line.
* To bring those two points about the alpha couple and the geography together: It's pretty interesting that the smaller Craig makes the subject, the more universal and huge it feels. I mean, as a technique. By focusing in on a core couple's actions within Twin Cities in a certain time period, things feel like they're expanding, rather than feeling restricted. I remember listening to the I Only Listen To Mountain Goats podcast, where John Darnielle talks with passion about great art coming out of constraints. Like, that he decided to write songs only in a certain key, about a certain subject, without guitars - every constraint opened up new possibilities, and new ways to do stuff. I'm not sure if it's a great parallell, but I sort of feel Craig does the same thing: By consentrating on a core story, some core events, he's able to write passionately and deep about it, in a way he might not could have done if the scope was broadened. I don't think it's a coincidence that the solo tracks that sounds the most like they take place in his old universes, are the ones appealing most to me. It could be biases in myself, but I'm pretty sure that's just a part of the reason.
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