Alright Alright (Here Goes part II: Lifter Puller)

[skepticatfirst]

NIGHTCLUBS

The Nice Nice is all the places where the Scene[*1] gets together. Some of these places, like the brewery bar, we can identify with an actual address and detailed physical description; of others, we can scarcely say more than that they exist. Each of the identifiable places has metaphors that are unique to it alone, which we'll come to in due course. But there are also shared terms that apply to *all* these places, ranging from the mostly literal to the purely metaphorical, which we want to catalog from the beginning. These include:

• "(night)clubs"/"discos" [SWH, DStraps, JBS, SGS, SCity, HDaD, Hardware, TCMamG, SdS, LGI, LPvtEotE, CRoom, NN, LDoL, TFatBR, SSC]: from the basic notion of a party in a big dark room with music, which is what the principal Scene gatherings referred to by this term are.


• "(after)bars"/"taverns" [DStraps, BBender, HDaD, Bears, TGatSD, Viceburgh, TCMamG, SdS, LiaL, LSifL, NN, LDoL, TFatBR, BiB]: from the brewery bar in St. Paul, which, being the most important of the party sites, casts its shadow over all the rest.


• "stadiums" [NC, Bloomington, 11AF, LDoL, TFatBR]: from "the club kids as they crowded around us" [LGI], compare "When the crowd went wild we were under the stands" [C&N], and the football metaphors documented upthread (see THE BEARS above). Specific referents are Fenway Park on Lansdowne Street [LDoL], the Metrodome [Bloomington] on 11th Ave [11AF] and 5th Street [TFatBR], Metropolitan Stadium with the Killebrew memorial in the present-day megamall [Bloomington], and (with a connection to Rome) Nassau Coliseum [NC].


• "motels" [Langelos]: from "pretty much living in" these places in drug slavery; more detail on this later. Note that the use of the motel/hotel metaphor is greatly expanded in THS [CatCT, SN, 212M, GoaH, Ambassador, EC, DH, Star18, TS&tT, Esther, FFarm, HCovenant] (see also GEOGRAPHY: FIRST PASS above).


• "domes" [Bloomington, Sublet, SCity, TGatSD]: from the idea of the big dark room, with additional allusions to drugs ("domes"=LSD, see LISTED above) and to Rome (the Pantheon [Sublet]).


• "houses" [Emperor, SH, Langelos, LGI, LQ]: from their function as trap houses, i.e. places to buy drugs ("party house" [TLTtSTtM, BSam]; "after hours house" [MMarker]; "House of Balloons" [Oaks]; see comments on "summer house" in DRUG SLANG above, and on "house cats" [Langelos] in RATS & CATS above). References to "houses" become more common in the post-LP lyrics [HF, HH, LiD, JaJ, AE, Oaks, ASitS, TsTux, TLTtSTtM, BSam].


• "caves": [NN]: again from the big dark room, but note also that the Skins' "bunker" [IHTWTDFY] has a real-world referent in the lagering caves beneath the brewery (link).


• "malls" [Bloomington]: from the sale of drugs, compare "they mostly sold it on the malls" [SN]. References to malls become much more elaborate in the post-LP lyrics [Brokerdealer DMN, SN, CSTLN, HSL, PP, SG].


• "theaters": [PSunglasses, ILtL, LDoL]: from the scenes of outer space and visions the kids see when high (see ON THE FLOOR: VISIONS below). References to theaters, movies, and matinees also become more elaborate in the post-LP lyrics [SN, MoC, SA, AE, Lanyards, Jackson, etc.].


• "churches": The church/temple metaphor for these places isn't introduced until THS ("Now heres the church, here's the steeple/ I like the party favors but I hate the party people" [EC]) [CatCT, YLHF, SA, ABlues, EC, BSam, J&J].

***

There are four "nightclub" addresses mentioned in the course of the LP story:

• 11th Ave [11AF] and 5th Street [TFatBR]: the location of the Metrodome


• 4th and 14th [Bears]: an intersection in Northeast Minneapolis


• Northeast bar [BBender]: in Northeast Minneapolis


• City Center/Nankin [Manpark, 4Dix]: in downtown Minneapolis

The Metrodome is a metaphorical "stadium"/"dome" club reference ("Metro"='city' is significant too, but it's special, so we'll treat it separately; see THE CITY below).

We've already shown that the "4th and 14th" address is cover for a football allusion (see THE BEARS above), and therefore another "stadium"/"dome" metaphor rather than a literal club location.

As we'll see shortly, neither of the other addresses is literal either (see THE CITY and THE EAST below). The story does take place in the Twin Cities, but not at any of these real-world locations.

By the same token, it's important to note that a fourth address:

• 15th and Franklin [Manpark, NN, 4Dix]: on the southern outskirts of downtown Minneapolis

*is* an entirely real location in the story, but is *not* part of the Scene. That is, it's a drug house under the control of a different gang than the ones who run the St. Cloud/Wednesday night distribution empire. There are no parties there; no one gets further than the door with the mail slot [NN]. It's only connected to the rest of what happens in the LP world because Night Club Dwight (who isn't a gangster either) happens to be a known quantity and credentialed customer there.

---

[*1] "The Scene" as such is from THS, but LP not coincidentally has the "nightclub scenes" [JBS], the "scenery" [Langelos], the "hardcore scene" [MTape].

[muzzleofbees]

Knowing Craig's lyrics, it makes a lot of sense that Nice Nice/the nightclubs are a metaphor for a certain kind of party. But it sure makes me wonder what "the nightclub fires" really are, then. And why the Eyepatch Guy wants "the Nice Nice up in blazes". It might be all metaphorical, but there's obvious some sort of intended destruction going on here, with a named arsonist and everything. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

[skepticatfirst]

AIRPORT & LBI

Two important place names in the map of the LP world, the "airport" and "LBI," are directly connected to each other in the song To Live And Die In LBI.

***

TLaDiLBI describes a party, one which (a) the title and (b) "out of the jersey pines" appear to locate somewhere on Long Beach Island in New Jersey, followed by this:

    and they all woke up at the airport in the arcade at the western concourse [TLaDiLBI]

That's some pretty specific detail, and likely enough to identify a real airport. So in an early line of investigation, I looked at airports in the NJ/NY/PA/DE area, to see if I could figure out which one was meant.

It turns out (surprise) that it's not an airport on the East Coast at all, but the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP).

MSP has two terminals (wikipedia; see map). The main terminal, to the east, has seven concourses and services all the major airlines. But the second terminal, the western one, has only one concourse, where the low-rent budget airlines are serviced; this concourse also has a big arcade in it (link).[*1]

I was pretty excited to have discovered this, and afterward spent a good deal of time trying to work out itineraries flying in and out of MSP. Turns out that's not quite what's going on here, but more on that in a minute.

***

If the airport is in the Twin Cities, it's looking more likely that "LBI" is in the Twin Cities too, which is what the similarity of "LBI" to "Ybor City" had led us to suspect anyway (see GEOGRAPHY: SELF-TITLED ALBUM above). Looking closely, "we stepped out of the jersey pines, headed straight for the neon signs" isn't a real-world pedestrian access plan, either: Long Beach Island is separated from the forests of the New Jersey Pine Barrens by miles of highway crossing Manahawkin Bay.

But now that we're thinking about it closely, there's something kind of familiar about this line ... something familiar about stepping out of the trees, to go to a party, where people get wasted to the point of blacking out/waking up:

    When there weren't any parties she'd park by the quarry
    Walk into the woods until she came to a clearing
    Where townies would gather and drink until blackout
    Smoke cigs 'till they're sick, pack bowls and then pass out [OftC]

In Here Goes (heregoes), we'd worked out that this scene from One For The Cutters describes the opening of the woods of Swede Hollow into the water tower clearing behind the former Hamm's Brewery, where the THS metal bar is located.

As it turns out, that's what TLaDiLBI is describing too. LBI and Ybor City are the same place. We're still talking about the neighborhood of the brewery bar in the East End of St. Paul.

***

Like many of the wilder LP/THS themes we've looked at, this one came from Steve (Cloak and Dagger interview, link):

TO LIVE AND DIE IN LBI: Steve Barone and I went to college together. This guy in my dorm had this t-shirt that said, "To Live and Die in LBI". LBI is Long Beach Island, and the shirt was a take-off on the movie, "To Live and Die in LA". Steve's family spent a lot of time on Long Beach Island, so it became a good setting for a song. Basically the story of a good person who has a momentary slip in judgement. I like those kinds of songs.

Craig doesn't actually say, but implies, that Steve had a joke about living the Jersey Shore party lifestyle in Minneapolis, which is in fact known to be the case, since he built The Hawaii Show (his lip-sync band about living the Hawaii party lifestyle in Minnesota) around exactly the same joke. Craig's command of geography comes in for more criticism on this point, see for example the comment of the Genius annotator (link):

“LBI” stands for Long Beach Island, a barrier island off the coast of Ocean County, New Jersey. It’s known for its beaches and its vacation homes and less for its tourist and nightlife attractions. Based on the narrative of this and other songs, it’s apparent that the narrator may be confusing LBI with the nearby Barnaget Peninsula, home to the famous party town of Seaside Heights.

But it's clear from what we've understood above, and from the Cloak and Dagger interview, that Craig's reference to "LBI" is made for the sake of the phrase "To Live and Die in LBI"; no geographic precision beyond a clear association with the Jersey Shore and its party scene is required. This raises the question whether three other beach party locales referenced in the songs --- "Coney Island" [Sublet], "Jones Beach" [Sherman City], and "Jersey Shore" [LSifL] --- aren't also, like LBI, references to the brewery bar and Swede Hollow in east St. Paul.

***

Related to this question, the Genius commentator goes on to make an astute connection:

“To Live And Die In LBI” introduces an important event in the Lifter Puller mythos, the meeting of Juanita and the Eyepatch Guy on the Jersey Shore. The importance of this meeting will become apparent on “Fiestas and Fiascos.”

The F&F reference is to Cruised And Accused Of Cruising, which ends with the Eyepatch Guy (we know it's him because he's revealed to be behind the fires at the end of The Flex And The Buff Result) recruiting Juanita to be his fire-lighter, and begins (from the EPG's point of view) with:

    and she was drippin wet with rum punch and hangin off the video games
    at some sea-side arcade you know she looked pretty played
    and we were bored on the boardwalk so we just started talkin
    ...
    she said these sea-side towns they get pretty grey after labor day [CaAoC]

In TLaDiLBI, this pick-up event is described as taking place in the LBI, but in CaAoC, it's described as taking place at sea-side town with a boardwalk and arcade, things that the real LBI doesn't have. Coney Island and the larger Jersey Shore, on the other hand, do have boardwalks with arcades (and Jones Beach has a boardwalk). It's hard to avoid the conclusion that these places are all just different handles for the shore-as-metaphorical-party-scene in east St. Paul, and that Craig just prefers one to another for lyrical reasons (like the phrase "To Live And Die In LBI" itself).

***

Well, but what about that arcade? The "arcade" of TLaDiLBI has a definite referent at MSP airport; where is the "arcade" of CaAoC located? The two songs are tightly connected by the Eyepatch Guy recruitment scene, and it must be the case that the arcade in one is the same as the arcade in the other. But if one's in the "east end" and one's at the airport, how does that work?

It was several months after first noticing this problem that the solution finally occurred to me: just like Greece is the home of the greasers, the airport is the home of the Jets ("tequila takeoff, Tecate landing" [EC]).

So the "airport" of TLaDiLBI is the "east end" too, which explains why "sleeps at the airport" [NC] is glossed as "living in an airport bar" [LiaL], i.e. the brewery bar ("she was pretty much living in ... she was pretty much crashing there" [Ambassador]). The same goes for "She's sleeping at a storage space by the airport" [TOT]; the building on top of which the brewery bar was located was literally a storage space, stockhouse #4 (heregoes).

---

[*1] Note that this second terminal was rebuilt in 2001, post-Lifter-Puller, but that its location and principal features are unchanged.

[muzzleofbees]

Feb 11, 2021 7:38:35 GMT -5 skepticatfirst said:

It was several months after first noticing this problem that the solution finally occurred to me: just like Greece is the home of the greasers, the airport is the home of the Jets ("tequila takeoff, Tecate landing" [EC]).

Hah, of course! That makes a lot of sense. And it puts a different spin on how I hear Denver Haircut too. In light of Here Goes, I always heard it as Charlemagne trying to turn into Gideon, with the line about ordering the usual without knowing what it is as the kicker. But in Here Goes terms, the opening now sound a lot more like Gideon actually joining The Skins, which obviously was a transitional time for him.

Not sure if this holds up, but imagining airports as a place where gangsters live, is pretty helpful.

[skepticatfirst]

Feb 11, 2021 8:49:04 GMT -5 muzzleofbees said:

Hah, of course! That makes a lot of sense. And it puts a different spin on how I hear Denver Haircut too. In light of Here Goes, I always heard it as Charlemagne trying to turn into Gideon, with the line about ordering the usual without knowing what it is as the kicker. But in Here Goes terms, the opening now sound a lot more like Gideon actually joining The Skins, which obviously was a transitional time for him.

There's some nuance to this that we'll get to (like, why doesn't he sound like Gideon here? and if you extend the point of view throughout the song, why can't he get any "jet fuel" when the first consequence of Gideon getting jumped in is that he now has access to the gangsters' supply? etc.), but fundamentally, yes, this is right.

Feb 11, 2021 8:49:04 GMT -5 muzzleofbees said:

Not sure if this holds up, but imagining airports as a place where gangsters live, is pretty helpful.

Live, or congregate, or set up shop, or party.

Speaking of the "sorry but this city's a cesspool" verse of DH, here's the next one, a little early today ...

[skepticatfirst]

THE CITY

In THS, we're used to hearing about the "city" as an ambivalent place, a beacon of exciting adventure on the one hand ("everyone was coming towards the center of the city" [MN]) and a fast track to sketchy outcomes on the other ("swishing through the city center/ I did a couple favors for these guys who looked like Tusken Raiders" [Swish]).

The THS world follows the lead of the LP world in this respect. But the LP lyrics are much more explicit in framing the "city" as a very particular term. Two examples stand out, one in Double Straps and the other Lifter Puller Vs The End Of The Evening.

***

Double Straps comes right out of the gate with the story of the "smalltown" narrator who "came into the city" to experience a variety of wild and exotic, but ultimately menacing, situations in the company of one of the "downtown girls" [DStraps]:

    well i came into the city
    the buildings made me dizzy
    i got kicked out of a fern bar
    slept beneath a race car
    i was feelin kinda lucky
    the queen of spades just fucked me
    she came with some jack of diamonds
    she's standing right beside him somewhere

    she climbed into my bunk bed
    put ashes on my forehead
    and the way she touched my eyebrows
    made me feel so smalltown [DStraps]

This smalltown/city contrast is fundamental to the definition of "city." Unlike the naive, safe and wholesome place the narrator comes from, it's urban, disorienting, and sketchy.

***

The danger of the place is further underscored in a particularly strange line in LPvtEotE:

    it's too late for liquor but we could get some 3-2
    we could always get some 3-2
    we could always get some 3-2

    3-2-1, are you still havin fun
    1-2-3, yeah is this still a party
    it looks an awful lot like a city to me
    and it seems pretty dangerous [LPvtEotE]

This "it looks an awful lot like a city to me" goes so far out of its way to frame the setting of the party as a "city," I had to listen to the verse many times to make sure the transcribed lyrics were correct. But that is in fact what it says. Coming from a writer with Craig's bent for metaphor, this looks an awful lot like terminological emphasis to me.

We've already worked out upthread that the party referred to here is the one in the brewery bar on the East Side of St. Paul (the "3.2 bar ... club" [Ambassador] down Lake Street and across the Mississippi river; see NICE NICE and GEOGRAPHY: FIRST FIVE TRACKS above). The term "city," then, seems to have a special connection with the party at the brewery bar.

***

To test this hypothesis, we can take a closer look at descriptions of the THS metal bar party, which we also know to have taken place in the brewery bar (heregoes). Sure enough, the "city" framing is emphatic, and strained beyond casual description:

    Payne Avenue lives up to its name
    Some nights it's painful and strange
    The whole city seemed sane in the day
    But some nights it seems distressed and deranged
    The East Side is where we met with those guys [SPayne]

This is the same problem we run into in the comment that a "party" seems like "a city"; in what sense is Payne Avenue "the whole city"? And it is Payne Avenue specifically, not all of St. Paul, that gets bad at night, per the 2004 Cloak and Dagger interview (link):

Payne Ave. is in the East Side of St. Paul. My thought is that it always looks like a nice family area during the day, but it tends to seem a little sinister at night.

Some insight into this comes from Sketchy Metal, which also takes an expansive view of the party ("light"=meth; see LISTED above) as "the city":

    It was dark along the edges of the city
    But the light shined through behind the reinforced doorways [SM]

The reference to "reinforced doorways," plural, clues us in that we're not just talking about the brewery bar, but the entire brewery complex --- which does, indeed, look like a city:



Abandoned Brewery - St. Paul, MN by relux., on Flickr

***

This vision of the brewery complex as a city is a solid explanation of the usage we're seeing; but the usage doesn't end there. The association of "lights"=meth with "the city" is extended to "New York City" too:

    Hey New York City, I love it when you turn on your lights [ASD]

And, coming back to Lifter Puller, "Baltimore":

    the bright lights always pick me up
    ...
    it's a big big city like the rotodome
    these baltimore homes are all in a row
    ...
    wanna talk about the chick with the chalk outline
    on the side of the baltimore beltline [TGatSD]

And, looking elsewhere in LP, we find

    newport lights [11AF] ("newport"=city; "lights"=meth)

    new york city kool [KNYC] ("new york city"=city: "kools"=PCP)

    Sherman City [SCity] ("city"=city; "sherman"=joint laced with PCP)

where the insistent allusions to laced cigarettes/joints (compare "I think you got something in those cigarettes" [SPayne], and see LACED SUBSTANCES and LISTED above) seem very likely to have something to do with why "the city/ the buildings made me dizzy" [DStraps].

In short, we understand that "Newport," "New York City," and "Sherman City" are all referred to for the sake of the "city" metaphor, and that they have something to do with a dangerous party with gangsters and drugs on the "East Side" of St. Paul.

***

The actual city repeatedly referred to in the lyrics of Sherman City is Rome, which calls to our attention the aggressive connection of the "city" metaphor with the "dome" and "stadium" metaphors for the Scene:

	city	dome	stadium	notes
Rome	X	X	X	dome=Pantheon [Sublet], stadium=Coliseum [NC]
Rotodome	X	X		"it's a big big city like the rotodome" [TGatSD]
Metrodome	X	X	X	Metropolis+Dome
Metropolitan Stadium	X	X?	X	Present in the Killebrew/megamall references in Bloomington (wikipedia). City in "metropolis" and in Bloomington; dome in covered mall?

***

Another exotic city which is explicitly linked via Rome itself is Oz. Two scenes are alluded to:

• the scene in which Dorothy and friends tiptoe through the woods saying, "lions and tigers and bears, oh my!" (wikipedia).


• the scene in which Dorothy puts on the ruby slippers, taps her heels together, and repeats "there's no place like home" (wikipedia).

song	line	notes
SCity	"tap my toes"	Dorothy, wearing the ruby slippers, taps her heels
SCity	"this ain't no place like rome"	Dorothy: "there's no place like home"
Bears	"lions ... tigers ... bears"	"lions and tigers and bears, oh my!" (see THE BEARS above)
Hardware	"dorothy"	Dorothy
Trapper Avenue	"rubies in my shoes"	the ruby slippers

***

A final important "city" is the City Center. In the Lifter Puller lyrics, there's explicit documentation of the historical location of the Nankin Cafe on the site of the City Center shopping center (wikipedia; link):

    we knew you were a dancer when we saw you at the city center
    getting nice at the nankin [4Dix]

But Manpark, which like Sketchy Metal at "the edges of the city" [SM] is set at "the outskirts of the downtown" [Manpark], suggests that 15th and Franklin is "up" with respect to the Nankin, when in fact it's a mile *down* from it (a mile east *and* a mile south):

    woke up up on 15th and franklin
    with a straight looking chick and the prick that she picked up at the nankin [Manpark]

The solution here, too, is that City Center is referred to for the sake of the "city" metaphor, rather than literally. Craig provides confirmation of this in the 2004 Cloak and Dagger interview (link), where the City Center is cleverly described as a vacant mall (for "malls" see NIGHTCLUBS above; the brewery complex was abandoned in 1997) with low-budget gangsters (see HESHERS above) in it:

City Center is a lame mall in downtown Minneapolis that is 50% vacant with 50% low budget gangsters hanging out.

***

One of the shortcomings of Here Goes was that I never came up with clear, unambiguous names by which to refer important places, events, and concepts. I'd actually got as far as realizing, for example, that "all these locales at the bottom of Lake Street in St. Paul" belong to a single stage ("one big sketchy place"), and even listed them (heregoes):

• The East Side
• Payne Avenue
• The Railroad Yard
• The brewery complex
• The brewery bar
• Swede Hollow Park
• Lowertown

but I'd missed (of course I didn't have the evidence of LP to lean on) that Craig actually provides his own names to do the uniting. Every place in this list is linked with the "city" in the discussion above:

• The East Side, Payne Avenue [SPayne]
• The Railroad Yard ("baltimore beltline") [TGatSD]
• The brewery complex and bar [SM, LPvtEotE, 11AF, KNYC, SCity]
• Swede Hollow Park [Manpark]
• Lowertown ("downtown") [DStraps]

From now on, rather than refer endlessly to "the brewery bar, Swede Hollow, Party Pit and environs in the 'east end' of St. Paul" when talking about this locale, we can simply refer to The City.

[skepticatfirst]

THE EAST

Craig has a second term for this East-Side-of-St.-Paul stage (which, like The City, we'll capitalize for later reuse), namely, The East.[*1]

***

We've noted, for example, that all of the metaphors for The City are big cities of the East (i.e. the Eastern United States):

• New York City (see THE CITY above)
• Baltimore (see THE CITY above)
• Boston ("the city" [CatCT]; connected with Swede Hollow via the "Back Bay fens" [HM]: heregoes)

or else oceanside/party towns of the East Coast:

• Ybor City (see GEOGRAPHY: SELF-TITLED ALBUM above)
• Coney Island (ditto)
• LBI (ditto)
• Jones Beach (ditto)
• Jersey Shore (ditto)
• Pensacola (ditto)
• Tampa (ditto)
• Newport (see THE CITY above)
  

The emergence of Ybor City as the paragon of the party towns in THS seems to be due to the "City" in the name, rather than to any reputation for parties or beaches; it's the location and the name, rather than its real-life character, that make it a perfect unifier of both metaphors (The City *and* The East).

***

Like the other "nightclub" addresses ("11th Avenue"/"5th Street," "4th and 14th," and the "City Center/Nankin"; see NIGHTCLUBS above), the "Northeast bar" [BBender] isn't a literal pointer to Northeast Minneapolis after all: in the same way that "city" identifies "City Center/Nankin" with The City (see THE CITY above), "northeast" identifies the "Northeast bar" with The East.

***

We also see the mapping of The East to The City in I Like The Lights, where the "lights" are strongly associated with The City on the one hand (see the repeated allusions to "city lights" in THE CITY above), and the action is explicitly set in the "east end" [ILtL] on the other.

Just to recap, the "east end" where Jenny (Juanita, see THE GIRLS above) missed her ride in ILtL is the same as the "east end" where she missed her ride in the song Nice Nice; this locates these events "upstairs at the nice nice" [NN], i.e. in the rooftop brewery bar on the "East Side" [SPayne] of St. Paul (see NICE NICE above).[*2]

It's important to observe that Craig characterizes this area of the East Side/East St. Paul as the "east end" because it's located at the eastern end of Lake Street, explicitly named as the road to "the city" and the "party" in LPvtEotE, and to druggy/sexy "vices" in LPvtEotE and LSifL.

***

If we follow up this observation with a close look at Lake Street itself, running from The City/The East at its eastern end up to St. Louis Park at its western end, we recognize a number of symmetries from the LP/THS world. Some notable ones are

• Uptown [Smidge, ABlues, CF] in the west vs. Lowertown [MPADJs, MoC] in the east


• Methodist Hospital [AE, LA] in the west vs. Regions Hospital [TMIT] in the east


• Cityscape Apartments (gmaps) in the west vs. the view of the city from the brewery bar (heregoes) in the east

We're going to want to see more evidence that this framing is real, and to get a strong sense that it's part of a *system* of the LP/THS world, before we get too comfortable with it. But as a spoiler-free preview of that system, note that Methodist Hospital and the Cityscape Skins themselves are explicitly associated with the west in Look Alive:

    They're dripping wet in western wear
    They hang up at the Methodist [LA]

---

[*1] An interesting question is whether, next to The City and The East, The Party Pit makes a third special handle for the entire "east end," as opposed to being a name for just Swede Hollow.

The MinnPost illustration of Swede Hollow that first confirmed its identity with the Party Pit shows the "pit" coming to a dead end right behind the Swedehenge "clearing" [OftC]:




This strong first impression led me, in the Here Goes thread, to identify "The Party Pit" with Swede Hollow exclusively. But in reality, that clearing opens directly into the brewery complex; there's no dead end between them. There are in addition other strong reasons --- Craig's interview comments on the Party Pit (link), the Banging Camp reference that connects it to the riverbank, etc. --- to imagine that "The Party Pit" is meant to refer to the *whole* "east end" stage, not just the park.


[*2] Relatedly, Jenny's "6 6 6 am" [ILtL] departure is a play on 666, the Number of the Beast, and correlates with the description of the brewery bar as being "just like hell" [GoaH] at the bottom of Lake Street (heregoes; heregoes).

[muzzleofbees]

Excellent stuff! I'm very easy sold on the idea that almost everything happening in these lyrics takes place in the Twin Cities. And I think I'm pretty much on board with "the city" being a specific area/place as well. Not much to add here, other than that I keep checking in here every morning to get the latest update.

Oh, and one more thing. I went through the photos from that relux on Flickr, and in one of the photos there was a link to a music video shot at Hamm's. I bet skepticatfirst have seen it, but some of you other guys might not.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzwhfNmfhlg

There were plenty of interesting photos on that Flickr page. I stopped at the one with the bathroom stalls, and doors made of plywood painted black.

[skepticatfirst]

Feb 16, 2021 5:10:21 GMT -5 muzzleofbees said:

Excellent stuff! I'm very easy sold on the idea that almost everything happening in these lyrics takes place in the Twin Cities.

I remember you said once that you would expect that "California/Hollywood" where Holly ends up doing porn would be in the Twin Cities along with everything else, rather than out on the literal West Coast; it turns out you were right, but more on that later.

Now for the last post before we can finally get on with the story ...!

[skepticatfirst]

TENNIS COURT

Looking at the presentation of "the city" in Double Straps, I wrote (see THE CITY above):

This smalltown/city contrast is fundamental to the definition of "city": unlike the naive, safe and wholesome place the narrator comes from, it's urban, disorienting, and sketchy.

We know now where The City is located. Making the reasonable assumption that the narrator of DStraps is the Narrator of the story, the obvious next question is: where's the Narrator from?

***

There's one scene in the LP story that's explicitly set in the Narrator's hometown, namely the conversation in Summer House, where he's actually on the phone from his parents' house ("here in the same house"):

    My parents never got me a summer house
    we'd just sit here in the same house and we'd sweat it out [SH]

Is there something else in the song that can help us work out where "here" is? A few lines later, he tells the girl

    the first time that i scored was at a tennis court [SH]

Well, that's interesting. We hear a fair bit in THS about the connection of townies (the gangsters; see HESHERS above) with tennis:

    townies ... making guitars out of tennis rackets [OWL]

    she said he [Charlemagne as seen in Mary's vision, in townie sweatpants (heregoes)] looked like Jimmy Connors [ABlues]

    they [the townies] didn't seem that different except for maybe their haircuts
    and they didn't seem that different except they didn't play tennis [Creepy Harpsichord Jam (OftC Demo)]

So there's a pretty substantial trail of evidence to suggest that gangsters in sweatpants hang around the parks of the LP/THS world, not to play tennis, but to deal drugs. It would certainly be great if, while we're trying to nail down the map of that world, we could work out where that Summer House tennis court was located.

Which we wouldn't be able to do, except that we get one more clue from an unexpected quarter.

***

There's evidence that the early upper-half/lower-half Lifter Puller album covers were designed by Craig. He's officially credited for the cover of the self-titled first album, and we know that he's responsible for the photos on the Mezzanine Gyp/Star Wars Hips 7-inch --- the Descendents photo was his selection (link); "Sweetest Day" was Craig's college band (link).

Among the releases with this style of cover is the Slips Backwards/Nassau Coliseum 7-inch, which, in the lower panel on the back, features the picture of a green and empty tennis court (youtube; I don't own the 7-inch and couldn't find a better quality image):





That picture is 25 years old, but the court seemed unlikely to have changed so much that it couldn't still be identified from a Street View shot, if I could find the right place. And how many places could it be?

Well, it turns out that there are quite a few places it could be. Like the airport of TLaDiLBI, I started out (because at that time I was still taking LP place names at face value, and was interpreting the lyrics of Summer House and Mono as college scenes) looking for it in the vicinity of Boston College. But eventually I came around to the Twin Cities, and after a good deal of searching found this (stview):





We know that the THS Narrator is a fictional alter ego sharing important aspects of Craig's personal profile ("started a band" [PJ], etc.; heregoes), and we've already had reason to suspect that the LP Narrator is one too (see for example THE BEARS and GEOGRAPHY: FIRST FIVE TRACKS above), so this shouldn't have been surprising. We don't know exactly where in Edina "here" [SH] is, but from here on out we'll take the Walnut Ridge Park tennis court as a stand-in.

***

So "smalltown" is Edina, a place that's maybe not quite literally at "among the windmills" [Emperor] levels of "naive, safe and wholesome," but in reality has nothing more dangerous to offer than tennis-court drug deals ("I guess the heavy stuff ain't quite at its heaviest/ By the time it gets out to suburban Minneapolis" [HH]).

***

And with that last bit of background in place, we're ready to turn from locations to the story itself.

[star18]

That's insane detective work. At first I just thought you had simply found a very similar-looking court/layout to the LP photo (which would be interesting enough) but no, you found literally the exact same goddamn court.  The specific location (right at the net) and distinctive shape of this particular tree seals the deal. 

Even if this tennis court had nothing to do with anything, that's impressive just on it's own!

[skepticatfirst]

Feb 16, 2021 12:34:48 GMT -5 star18 said:

That's insane detective work.  

Thanks a lot! Have to say, it's pretty cool what Street View makes possible for this kind of investigation. Anyway, I think I won't disappoint you if I promise several more things in this genre that are better than this one. 

[skepticatfirst]

THE KITCHEN

OK, time for the story. I'm going to fall back for a minute into the "how I got here" narrative, since we're on the threshold of the first big aha-moment I had along the way.

***

Up to this point I had the Eyepatch Guy connections worked out (see FIRST CONNECTIONS above), but couldn't get any further. I could see common themes, including ones familiar from the THS story, but couldn't make anything solid out of them. And that's where I was stuck for a long time, listening, kicking things around, trying to come up with an account that stood up to scrutiny.

Somewhere at this stage I had the THS song The Stove And The Toaster on my mind. TS&tT threw me for a loop when it came out, thanks to the "shot in the shoulder" ending: nowhere in the THS story as I'd worked it out did I have a shooting identified, which meant either that I'd missed something huge, or else that TS&tT was an outside-the-story song, neither of which was an attractive conclusion.

I was prepared to suspend judgment about the whole thing, when muzzleofbees pointed out (heregoes) that the "chef" [TS&tT] should probably be understood as a cook in the sense of "Militia men cooking up a batch of the crystal meth" [Knuckles], which would make "kitchen" [TS&tT] a meth lab, or a place where meth cookers congregate.

This was clearly the right answer, and so in Here Goes I identified the "kitchen" with the brewery bar --- not as a literal meth lab, but a place where the meth-cooking gang gathers and distributes their wares. There were two strong reasons for this identification:

1) The brewery bar is the one clearly identifiable place in the THS universe (there are several such places in the LP universe) that's still called a "club" [Ambassador]; the MPADJs/RP party, also characterized as a club party ("all these clubs" [MPADJs]), has both a "kitchen" [MPADJs, RP] and a "room that's all the way in the back" [RP] (see BATHROOM STALL above).

2) The TS&tT link to the brewery bar is confirmed by the resemblance of the "wholesale crew" in their "fortified fortress" [TS&tT] to the supplier Skins in their "bunker" [IHTWTDFY, Ambassador, YGD, OwtB], which is a literal description of the lagering caves of the brewery (for pictures see: heregoes).

As it turns out, the identification is a little more flexible than that; in looking at the LP world, we've understood that the "clubs" are *wherever* the Scene can get together (see NIGHTCLUBS above), and this is true of the "kitchen" as well. But just as the brewery bar is the first and most important of the "clubs," it's the first and most important "kitchen," too.

***

One THS indication of this moveable identification, which we'll follow up on in detail later (see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL below), is in the connection of the "kitchen" with the THS "restaurant."

The link to this "restaurant" is established via "the kitchen workers" of CSongs, and "in the kitchen" of CFingers. In fact, the metaphor is continuous: the "kitchen" is the place where the meth cooks work; the "restaurant" is the place where they sell their stuff.

That this is the meaning of "restaurant" is further confirmed by the CSongs description of Jesse "making eyes" while working as a "waitress"; "making eyes" is the phrase used of kids standing on the corners selling drugs to passing cars ("Standing on the corner making eyes at the commuters making eyes" [LSifL], "The kids on the corner making eyes at the cars" [Oaks]).

CFingers puts Jesse's kitchen workplace somewhere that isn't Uptown, suggesting, by contrast, Lowertown in St. Paul; AfhA and WCGT are explicit in locating her home base in St. Paul. This is all consistent with the identification of the "kitchen" as the St. Paul brewery bar.

The only problem with this picture is that there really isn't a practical way for Jesse, or any other "waitressing" kid on the corner, to run orders from the street back to the brewery bar for fulfillment. *That* aspect of the image comes from a different base of gang activity in the Twin Cities, with a different physical situation. But again, we'll come to this later.

***

At any rate, the "kitchen" of TS&tT specifically is correctly identified with the brewery bar, a point that I did have in hand early in the Lifter Puller investigation.

And while I still didn't know what to do with the shooting, back-burner preoccupation with this question led me to the first big LP breakthrough.

[star18]

I've been wanting to share some THS-cinematic-universe thoughts lately and this latest post seems like a good place to cut in.

Before I do though, I have to properly thank Skepticalatfirst, as well as all the other awesome folks who made the original Here Goes thread so unbelievably compelling. That thread was quite literally life-changing for me. I was a big THS fan already, and was always drawn to figure out more about the story, but like most fans I never had much luck piecing it together. Obsessing about the songs in such depth has not only made me love THS 10x more, but changed how I listen to other music and even how I approach writing my own music. I've read the entire thing at least twice, I can't wait to see what new gems get unearthed in this thread (not to mention the new "ODP" material), and I'm looking forward to being a more active part of the community here going forward.

So truly, thank you all so much. 

Reading through the introduction for "Alright Alright," I was struck by something that bothered me just a bit about some of "Here Goes" as well, so I wanted to mention it in the spirit of friendly collaboration.

Essentially, when I first started engaging with this type of close-reading analysis, what's so wonderful about it is how many possibilities expand -- the idea that a place might be a state of mind (brilliant) or that a Meat Loaf reference tells us a lot more than just scene-setting.  I love that.  And the way that figuring out the meaning of a certain line might unlock a whole different song is amazing. But there's a bit of a flip side to that as well. As we keep expanding our collection of metaphors, slang, and signifiers, I think there's a  risk of actually restricting some possible interpretations, or ignoring the potential literal meaning of a sentence in favor of the metaphorical interpretation.

That's vague, but "kitchens" is actually a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
 

I was prepared to suspend judgment about the whole thing, when muzzleofbees pointed out (heregoes) that the "chef" [TS&tT] should probably be understood as a cook in the sense of "Militia men cooking up a batch of the crystal meth" [Knuckles], which would make "kitchen" [TS&tT] a meth lab, or a place where meth cookers congregate.

This was clearly the right answer, and so in Here Goes I identified the "kitchen" with the brewery bar --- not as a literal meth lab, but a place where the meth-cooking gang gathers and distributes their wares. There were two strong reasons for this identification

In the context of "The Stove & the Toaster," muzzleofbees' reading makes a ton of sense to me. The characters are clearly breaking into somewhere more heavily guarded than a regular house, and we get the fun note that the "kitchen" doesn't even have a stove (which, even here in tiny Brooklyn apartments, is pretty much a kitchen requirement). 

Having said that, I think it's a mistake to then assume that "kitchen" becomes a automatic slam-dunk for "meth lab" (or the brewery bar) whenever that term is used. I have two reasons for thinking this -- one that's strictly lyric-based and one that's a bit more squishy.

1) There are definitely instances of "kitchen" that easily translate into something sketchier ("the fingers get fried," "kitchen workers," etc. could all easily be folks cooking up meth.) But there are also a few instances where (to my mind) we see evidence of a more . . . legitimate . . . eating establishment. Two such examples come from the same verse of "Criminal Fingers:"

Doing dishes in the kitchen, I had the first of many visions

I see trouble for the both of us

The cop stopped by when I was opening up

No matter how good-hearted Jessie might be, it's hard to imagine someone actually washing dishes in a meth lab (or an abandoned brewery). But it's that third line that proves to me that we're in an actual restaurant -- first, that she's in the process of "opening up," and secondly, that the cop casually stops by to ask questions. I'm quite sure that if the police walked into an active meth lab (or found a girl living in an abandoned brewery), they'd have more immediate concerns than the whereabouts of one dealer.

We also have the "Hurricane J" contrast of "banging round in restaurants isn't that much prettier than banging round in bars" which lets us know that wherever she's working is at least slightly less tawdry than some of her other options. (It's also been mentioned that "pulling up her shirttails" ("Certain Songs") seems like an easy nod to a standard waitress uniform, but considering the various sartorial choices in the THS universe, I can't really count that as meaningful evidence.)

2.) From a broader artistic standpoint, I also think we have to look at Craig's storytelling style as a whole. Part of what makes the whole thing tick are the contrasts -- the glory versus the filth, the high versus the hangover, etc. And that extends (in my mind) to the plot as well. Yes, these characters get stabbed and arrested and resurrected, but they also bicker and go to prom and lose their keys. And so I think this type of "kitchen = meth lab" associations can lead us to close off some potentially interesting avenues. People really do hang out in (regular) kitchens, even meth gangsters, and interesting stories can happen in those situations as well (hell, you might even have a bathtub in your kitchen!)

I hope that makes sense. I know I'm not totally breaking new ground here -- Skeptical has made the point previously that some words work metaphorically and literally in different places, so I guess the crux of my argument is that we should all (well, those of us engaged in this level of obsession!) should keep an open mind to those complexities.  It's utterly fantastic to know that the metal bar is most likely the abandoned brewery, but if every single reference to a bar happens in one place, this universe suddenly becomes very small, which just doesn't feel right to me. 

Thanks for reading, and I hope I didn't derail your LP momentum! 2 days til' ODP!

[tableinthecorner]

Feb 17, 2021 18:06:56 GMT -5 star18 said:

But there are also a few instances where (to my mind) we see evidence of a more . . . legitimate . . . eating establishment. Two such examples come from the same verse of "Criminal Fingers:"

Doing dishes in the kitchen, I had the first of many visions

Back on page two or three of this thread Skeptic talked about cleaning or getting clean being used as a metaphor, and I feel like this line fits under that category somehow. Looking at it from under the scope of both that and the kitchen metaphor, I'm not sure it needs to be taken literally, but I'm sure Skeptic will explain it way better than I can. Overall, I agree that it's hard to believe sometimes that Craig could've crafted such an intentional and precise world, but it definitely is more fun to think that he did.

[star18]

Overall, I agree that it's hard to believe sometimes that Craig could've crafted such an intentional and precise world, but it definitely is more fun to think that he did.

Thanks for the response! To be clear, I 100% believe that Craig has created an immensely intentional, detailed, and self-referential world, and that even at our collective sharpest we haven't figured out all of his secrets. A lot of the criticisms on the original Here Goes were of the "Aw I don't buy this, it's too far-fetched" variety, and I'm not in that camp. If you want to spin off a new theory that beneath the Catholic stuff and the rock & roll stuff the entire thing ALSO serves as a critique of 13th century farming techniques, man, I'm all ears and buying the next round. I'm more or less arguing to being open to more complexity -- or just a reminder that because a line includes a specific slang term that we can recognize, we shouldn't discount the actual meaning of the line itself.

[skepticatfirst]

Feb 17, 2021 18:06:56 GMT -5 star18 said:

I've been wanting to share some THS-cinematic-universe thoughts lately and this latest post seems like a good place to cut in.

Hey man! this is pretty great, and of course I basically agree with everything you say. (Also, holy shit, you really have internalized the lyrics.) Let me make a couple of responses to the specifics, and then try to frame my general take on the same point you make.

About the kitchen specifically:

I fucked this one up a little bit, because I pulled up my pre-written post really late this morning, only to realize that I didn't like how it read. My idea was to explain the progression of "this is how I got here," starting from what I knew, and from there to show what clicked; but doing it that way meant that there were a bunch of basically obsolete quotes from Here Goes muddling the picture, which somehow survived my December redraft. So I redrafted it again on the fly in the course of a work meeting, and I don't think I did a very good job.

For clarity: there are no meth labs in the story, either LP or THS. The literal meth cookers, whether they're actual members of the gang or just affiliates, are all up in St. Cloud. The gangsters who handle the distribution, though, are real, and even if there's a great deal of poetic embellishment in "militiamen cooking up a batch of the crystal meth," there are grains of truth there too.

If I were presenting the "kitchen" from a perspective of fuller knowledge --- which might have been the better bet --- I would include it in the NIGHTCLUBS list of terms for "places where the Scene gets together."

Your lyric-based objections are deft, hats off! In the post I point ahead to PERFUME COUNTER GIRL as a place where we'll pick up a number of these threads, and I think I should wait until we get there to talk about Jesse. In the meantime I'm in any case more than happy to say, yes, by all means, we should keep an open mind about what any of these lines might mean.

About the bigger picture:

I've learned the hard way with Craig's work that the moment when I find myself arguing one read against another is the same moment in which I should be saying "it's probably both," and that goes double for literal readings that just happen to not be part of what I'm calling the "literal layer" of the story. I can only endorse what you're saying here.

I do think my point from way back about the goal being a complete and consistent accounting for the evidence is still a good light to steer by. My hope is that some of these things, say the story of Jesse as one of the "girls who'll come right up to your windows," is going to fit so self-evidently with everything else we've learned by the time we get there, that we can be satisfied with just that, at the same time that we appreciate Craig's other framings of the character and the narrative. We'll see how that goes.

The last thing I'll say is that I think you're right about the brewery bar feeling unnecessarily constrictive in THS; one of the most exciting things about the LP story is that it opens up a much wider and more detailed Twin Cities universe than the THS version (other physically real LP locations we've already mentioned include 15th and Franklin, the tennis court and parents' house in Edina, and there will be others).

Gotta sleep ... tomorrow, CORNERED.

[skepticatfirst]

CORNERED

It was with this TS&tT background on my mind that I came around for the nth time to the ending of Double Straps:

    i'm in the kitchen, i'm in the corner
    do you really wanna get your problem solved [DStraps]

There's our kitchen again, in the opening track of LP's first album already. We know it's not just any kitchen, thanks to that "corner"; compare

    She got me cornered by the kitchen, I said I'll do anything but listen [MPADJs]

    That one girl got me cornered in the kitchen, I said I'll do anything but clean [RP]

In these THS lines, the word isn't just "corner," but more specifically "cornered," in an echo of the threat level that the TS&tT kitchen makes explicit.

Of course in these cases it's Mary, and not one of the TS&tT gangster/dealers, who's identified as the one doing the cornering; but then again, TS&tT describes Mary as a quasi-insider with the gang:

    She's got a line on some guys that are kind of insiders [TS&tT]

and we recall that she stands with the Skins when they turn violent on Gideon, Charlemagne, and the Narrator in what we now know to be this very same "kitchen" (the "metal bar" thrashing; see SPayne, and for the discussion, heregoes).

So the THS picture is internally consistent up to this point.

***

For as far as we've got, this is all consistent with the LP picture, too: Double Straps' "do you really wanna get your problem solved" not only suggests a threat level, but sounds very much like the response of a threatening party to a cornered person pleading "I'll do anything but X."

But then what's actually happening here? What is the X the Narrator has to agree to, under threat, in order to get his problem solved?

And in the same moment that I saw the question framed this way, I remembered the lines from the *other* "insider" girl song, The Mezzanine Gypoff:

    a little situation went down and now
    i've gotta eat my way out of it now
    i've gotta suck myself away from this [TMG]

and I realized what was happening, and what a fundamental thing I'd been blind to all this time.

[skepticatfirst]

PARTY ZERO

The incident we're looking at here opens the curtain on an episode of bad, heavy shit, and we need a name for it. The story doesn't really provide a good handle; descriptive phrases along the lines of "metal bar beatdown" are awkward and incomplete.

Long ago I resorted to a working label of "Party Zero," which seemed like a reasonable title for the LP world's "origin story" while being flexible enough to absorb new narrative details as they emerged. For lack of a better name, I've stuck with that.

So let's talk about Party Zero.

***

Party Zero is, like it says on the tin, a party. What happened there, exactly?

We can start with the bare-bones summary from Prescription Sunglasses:

    Swimming pool had purple lights
    Those purple drinks were dynamite
    I woke up I was black and blue
    Oh girl, what did we do?
    Said you might remember pretty soon
    I hope you don’t remember pretty soon
    Think it was a three day rave
    Think I got the flyer saved
    We were naked on a Sunday afternoon
    We made it until Sunday afternoon [PSunglasses]

Add to this a few details that we've picked up along the way --- the fact that "pool" is slang for a meth den (see DRUG SLANG above); the fact that we're talking about something that happened in the "kitchen" in the brewery; the fact that the brewery is an avatar of the Nice Nice (see NIGHTCLUBS above) --- and we get the following:

• The Narrator and his date go to a party/rave with meth dealers from the Scene (the Nice Nice) in the brewery bar.


• The party goes on for a considerable time.


• At some point colored drinks with roofies in them appear, and the couple are knocked out. (Other insinuations of knockout drugs and meth are present in "drink"=PCP, "dynamite"=laced drug, "purple"=ketamine/meth, "lights"=meth; see LISTED above.)


• Both kids get raped; the guy gets severely injured.

That's a start. Let's keep going.

***

The "three-day rave" is called a "three-day bender" in Mick's Tape (where "Mick's" is a reference to "mickey," the knockout drug, see LISTED above; this is definitely a reference to the same incident). "Bender" is commonly used of an alcohol binge (gdict), but the ONDCP document defines it as a drug party (ondcp); Party Zero is more the latter than the former.

This "bender" in turn is referenced in a few places. One of the more interesting ones is in the Brokerdealer song Do Me Nails (part of the Brokerdealer reflection on the LP story as a "vision"/"fever dream"; see NICE NICE above):

    And kids are forming posses but the gunshots got higher velocities
    and the posses start to shrink and the smoke turns into drink
    and the drink turns into powder and the powder usurps power
    and you cower in the corner singing sweet lord I surrender
    and it started like a get-together and it ended like a bender [DMN]

This episode presents with several of the same features identified above:

• The party goes on for a long time, as the crowd thins and the kids progress from smoke to drink to powder.


• The main character ends up in the corner again, i.e. the kitchen corner, singing "sweet lord I surrender."


• The regular references to drug dealers as "saviors" in THS make it easy to recognize "sweet lord" as a dealer.

So now we know that the conversation in the corner went something like this:

  Narrator: "I'll do anything but X" [MPADJs, RP]

  Dealer: "Do you really want to get your problem solved" [DStraps]

  Narrator: "<I surrender>" [DMN]

where "I surrender" means that the Narrator did in fact finally do X. Which is to say, per the unavoidable implication of "i've gotta eat my way out of it now/ i've gotta suck myself away from this" [TMG], that he sucked the dealer's dick.

***

But where does "black and blue" [PSunglasses] come in? Well, the Narrator didn't just suck a dick; he sucked a dick, and then the gang piled on and gangraped him. The Bears gives details:

    saw you sweating on the corner you were sucking off a soda
    sticky summer in the barrio
    didn't really think that he could be your romeo
    his friends busted in screamin rodeo

    thereafter we'll refer to this as the last time you attempt to kiss
    some fairy bear you've barely met, put your lips on his leather vest
    the mechanical bull is rubbing right though the wool of your pantleg
    the linedance starts, it pounds along with your heart and you're stranded
    his roommates came out, they came from under the couch and they jumped in

    i laid down with the lions but they're way too lame
    i went down on the tigers but they're way too tame [Bears]

Between explicit references to "sucking off," "went down" and "fairy bear," it's clear that this is talking about the (male) Narrator blowing men, specifically drug-dealing gangsters ("soda"=cocaine/heroin, see LISTED and CASH MACHINE above; note that the original Bear groups were modeled after biker gangs: wikipedia). The sequence of events is laid out explicitly: the Narrator starts off blowing one in [on] the "corner"; then the others jump him for a linedance/rodeo gangbang.

***

Math is Money expands on this appearance of drug-dealing, metaphorically leather-clad, man-fucking gangs in detail:

    this is the story of the kids called the crabs
    ...
    they got supply if you got demand
    they'd get a grand to the gram if they could decimate these other gangs
    and math is money and money is math, a leather vest, assless chaps [MiM]

They're a gang ("the crabs ... gangs"), dealing drugs ("supply ... grand to the gram"), described with attributes of over-the-top homosexual branding ("leather vest, assless chaps") --- and now our Narrator, having ventured out of his well-to-do suburbs in search of drugs, finds himself among them:

    newspaper said that some crabs stabbed some rich kid
    but what's a rich kid doin that far up on jefferson [MiM]

Well, he's there for the drugs. But what happened to him exactly?

    slumming, stumbling, gettin lost in his eyelids
    tried to do a little more but he dropped it in the toilet
    short by an ounce that's when they pounced dude [MiM]

Roofies and/or laced grass aren't explicitly named here, but it's clear that the Narrator got himself in a stupor while doing drugs. Then the gangsters pounced (compare "his friends busted in screaming rodeo ... they came from under the couch and they jumped in" [Bears]). And then?

    twin cities, they're gangin up on me
    twin cities, they're double teamin me [MiM]

So the Narrator wasn't merely gang-raped, he was literally double-teamed.[*1] Strictly speaking, the song mentions yet a third kind of penetration in "stabbed"; but from the lack of further elaboration of that theme, it looks like "stabbed" might be a metaphor for "fucked," i.e. stabbed with a dick. We'll revisit this question later (see CRUCIFIXION below).

***

There's a lot of inference here that needs to be chased down and substantiated. But it certainly looks like we've cracked something open.

---

[*1] We've already seen that Double Straps is an account of the Narrator going down to the brewery bar in The City and getting assaulted in the corner; we can now see that "double straps" isn't just a reference to smalltown-kiddie backpack-wearing style, but a reference to the double-teaming: "strap on"=to have sexual intercourse (gdict); "strapping"=violent sex (gdict); "strap"=gun (gdict).

For the last reading, "strap"=gun, note Craig's unambiguous use of "gun"=dick (gdict) in exactly the same party-gangbang context down in The City:

    it looks an awful lot like a city to me
    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]

    now everybody's makin love
    to guns and tons of biker drugs [TMS]

    She had the gun in her mouth
    And she was shooting up at her dreams [MN]

[skepticatfirst]

THS REVISITED

It's been evident all along (a) that some LP material has been, and continues to be, remixed for use in THS, and (b) that The Bears, Hardware, etc. introduce openly homosexual themes to the LP story. For a long time, I just assumed the latter and the former were unrelated, that the homosexual material had simply been left behind with the jump from LP to THS.

With the epiphany about the corner of the kitchen, I realized that this was not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong. The same material, comprising an account of the same events, has been present in the THS lyrics the whole time; I just couldn't see it (which says something about me and my perception, but I digress). There's no end of examples:

***

    Ginsberg hit your dick [TMIT]

Not subtle, right? I guess I just ignored it before. (This is a reference to Allen Ginsberg, famous poet, open homosexual, and Kerouac's friend.) In the LP version of Party Zero, it's the Narrator who gets raped; in the THS analogue to Party Zero, the "metal bar" party described in Sweet Payne, it's Charlemagne, Gideon, and the Narrator who get raped, all three. "Ginsberg" here alludes to the Narrator as the singer/lyrics man in the THS-story band.

***

    The guys around the lockers got a story about the stomach pump [SN]

The rumor referred to is the famous legend that Rod Stewart blew his whole band and had to have his stomach pumped. I'd originally read the "rumor" part as foreshadowing Gideon's creation of the rumor of Charlemagne's death, which it does also do ("body in the garbage dump"); but I missed the frankly obvious point of the allusion.

***

On the topic of rumor, let's look at that verse of Rock Problems again:

    That one girl got me cornered in the kitchen, I said I'll do anything but clean
    She wants to know what I liked being better, a trash bin or an ice machine
    Some writer's by the fridge, said he didn't make the gig, wants to know if I was drunk
    He said some kids that he knows from the 'net said the sound kinda sucked [RP]

The rumor propagated by the kids that he knows from the net is that "the sound," meaning himself, the singer ("wants to know if I was drunk"), "kinda sucked," i.e. literally sucked some dick.

Note too that "clean" is also used as a euphemism for "blow someone" in Our Whole Lives: "Bang, bang, bang, she's a cleaning freak/ She scrubs the surface until it's sparkling" (heregoes). "I'll do anything but clean" really does mean "anything but suck dick."

That "trash bin" reference to MPADJs also warrants a second look. "I was a Twin Cities trash bin/ I did everything they'd give me/ I'd jam it into my system" [MPADJs]: everything the Twin Cities who were double-teaming him [MiM] gave him, he took it, and jammed it into his trash hole. Green's Dictionary of Slang defines "jam" as "to have anal intercourse; fuck" (gdict).

***

    Philly's full of friendly friends that will love you like a brother [KP]

Also not especially subtle. I had read the "love you like a brother" part as an ironic reference to the beating, but no: it's actual "love."

***

    Some Kennedys got shot while you were screwing San Francisco [PJ]

Screwing the whole city, with "San Francisco" as a stereotypical allusion to homosexuality.

***

    I'm a sucker for the dic- [Epaulets]

I cut this one short to emphasize the important bit (the song is a first-person account from the point of view of the Narrator). 

***

    in the corner ... a double order of love [SPayne]

Twin Cities double-teaming again. (Puts a totally different construction on "back then the scene was unified / the punks, the skins, the greaser guys" [JaJ].) To be clear, as in so many places, there's a deliberate play on two meanings here, but the darker construction is very real.

***

    I only bow down to the jetset
    Fame was so quick we haven't met yet [ABlues]

Here "jetset"=gangsters (see SHARKS & JETS above); "bowing down," like "sweet lord I surrender" [DMN], describes Charlemagne on his knees, blowing them.

The anonymous sex theme, clearly applicable to the gangrape, is repeated with "Fame was so quick we haven't met yet."

There are other references to kneeling and blowing, like in Hanover Camera:

    The singer put his finger in my mouth
    We were up the against the miracle, maxed out every night
    Our knees were shot from way too many prayers [HCamera]

and Constructive Summer:

    I met your savior, I knelt at his feet
    And he took my ten bucks and he went down the street [CSummer]

where we recognize the "sweet lord I surrender" aspect of "savior"; and finally the street robbery from You Gotta Dance, where the bad outcome of venturing down to Selby and Griggs recapitulates the bad outcome of venturing too far out on Jefferson Ave (both streets in St. Paul), bringing us full circle to the Math is Money double-teaming. All of these are elliptical allusions to the same situation.

***

    Went down with the girls gone wild and he woke up with a middle man [BBlues]

The sexual allusion in "girls gone wild" (the party porn franchise: wikipedia) is paralleled by the sexual allusion in "middle man"; this line is about Gideon, who woke up to find drug-runner Charlemagne in the middle of a double-team.

This also brings up the hazing of Gideon when he got "jumped in" [YGD] to the gang:

    He had no shoes and no pants
    And they dressed him in a shirt with a collar and called him Porky Pig [HM]

First, Green's Dictionary of Slang confirms that "jump in" means "to initiate someone into a street gang" (gdict), and also confirms the sense of "jump" meaning "to rape; to attack sexually" (gdict); Craig is definitely playing both sides of that ambiguity.

Second, well, I don't know what to say. I recognized that this was a hazing ritual, but didn't see the obvious allusion to the "squeal like a pig" scene in the movie Deliverance (wikipedia), or the inevitable implication of Gideon having lost his pants. Note that the LP Narrator losing his pants in Star Wars Hips, and the THS Narrator losing his shoes in the Constructive Summer lines above, are allusions to the same scenario (see SHOES AND SOCKS above).

***

Back again to The Most Important Thing:

    That's the thing about Charlemagne.
    He got all washed up in the amber waves of grain.
    Rubbed up on the bars on the bluff.
    Got tangled up in the double dutch [TMIT]

Sketchy Metal ("rubbed up pretty close to some rock and roll promoters" [SM]) and The Bears ("the mechanical bull is rubbing right though the wool of your pantleg" [Bears]) confirm that that "rubbed up" has a sexual connotation, which in turn confirms that "tangled up in the double dutch" refers to a double-teaming.

***

Finally, back to The Stove And The Toaster, where we started:

    Got pretty screwed by the chef and the chauffeur [TS&tT]

This is "twin cities, they're double teamin me" again; "screwed" is *strictly literal.*

With all that, we still don't have a solution for "shot in the shoulder," but we'll get there soon (see SHOT IN THE SHOULDER below).

[muzzleofbees]

I think it's fair to say that skepticatfirst and me have been discussing the themes of the past few posts online for a couple of years. And it's been a quite emotional thing to dig into, cause it turns so many lines and songs so dark. But I have to say, that it's a thing that's hard to unhear. Of all the things in these stories and narratives that rest upon two or three signs or similarites or whatever, the continious references to someone getting sexually assaulted is pretty staggering. It makes me wonder how on earth I hadn't heard it before, which again makes me question if I'm tricking myself into seeing things, but as this latest post shows, it's not a stretch by any means. And with sexual language in itself being so filled with metaphors and euphemisms, it's not hard to understand how it's possible to "hide" it.

And even without the specific references, or placing them into a narrative, it makes the entire "scene" (in a bigger sense, the entire world where everything in Lifter Puller and Hold Steady takes place) as a much more dark and murky place.

Not much more to add, other than that I buy very much into this. And for those who haven't heard these sexual themes in Hold Steady, have a listen to the Lifter Puller stuff mentioen throughout this thread, where this is so much more explicit, and a integral part of the scenery.

Through some detours, I stumbled upon something about crust punks today that should be added in this thread. I'm not very familiar with the sub genres of punk (at least not culturally, the music stuff is pretty known), and followed everything about this upthread with interest.

But I think you should have a look at this thesis:https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1113&context=etds&fbclid=IwAR0CMHMpvqRutDEOlWKusuJcyhhX4D7rciMI7PeuhDaD4Z7PwCUp4oLQT8w

Some outtakes:

"Crusty punk- A transient punk who primarily lives on the streets. Crust punks are similar
to gutter punks but often are more politically focused and active. They are often aligned
with primitivists and eco-anarchists. Transiency appeals to their need to be free of a
society which is actively destroying the planet. By their non-participation they do not
contribute to this destruction."

and

"One of the best descriptions that exists in the academic literature
concerning transient punks was written by Leblanc in ―Pretty in Punk: Girls‘
Gender Resistance in a Boys‘ Subculture.” Leblanc describes some important
aspects of this subcultural enclave:

Throughout the 1980s the most hardcore (both in the sense of
being fans of hardcore and being commited to the punk subculture)
of hardcore punks often adopted forms of street living, squatting in
abandonded buildings or ―couch surfing‖ from ones acquaintance‘s
home to another‘s. This type of subcultural population evolved, in
the late 1980s and and early 1990s, into it‘s own faction of the
punk subculture, whose members are known as ―street punks,‖
―crusties, (...) (Leblanc 1999: 61, 91)"

I don't think this changes anything, but it ties "crust punks" a lot tighter to a community actually living on the streets, or in squats around the town. And it makes it a lot more likely that these punks/gangsters who pops up in the lyrics, have a place they can call their own. A mansion, a bunker, what ever they'd like to call it. And to cross over into Hold Steady here, it makes sense that Mary actually is living there, not just spending a night here and there.

I doubt I will read the entire thesis, but I thought these parts was of interest.

[star18]

Hmm. Interesting stuff here, definitely gotta sit with this a little bit. This latest chapter makes more sense to me with LP, but I'm not sold on the connections back to THS yet.

My initial critique is that a few of these phrases work in isolation, but not within the context of the wider verse/song. The first thing that jumped out for me as pretty tenuous is the "double order of love" line.  Those four words in isolation could be a dark reference to a gang-rape, OK. But when we zoom out just a little bit, the verse is painting a very different picture.  Just for the record:  

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
They said they just got back from up in Hostile, Massachusetts

To me, this has always been a critical verse because it establishes the narrator's ideal. Regardless of which character maps onto which "James," we know that the scene is unified, they're drinking together, there's love and respect. We know that peace and calm never last very long in THS universe, but this "dream" shows what the life could be like, without all those Rock Problems. And the music matches that sentiment, as well -- this comes directly after the plaintive/distorted "hold onto the quarter notes" guitar solo, and --without getting too music-theory on you-- the return back to the root chord on "I always dream" seems, harmonically, to signify a good, comfortable thing. We know this is an important concept, because the later songs are peppered with references ("back then, things were unified . . ." etc.)

So if my overall understanding of that verse is basically correct, slipping the reference/memory of this horrific gang rape right in the middle of that mission-statement passage seems wildly out-of-place, thematically. 

That "trash bin" reference to MPADJs also warrants a second look. "I was a Twin Cities trash bin/ I did everything they'd give me/ I'd jam it into my system" [MPADJs]: everything the Twin Cities who were double-teaming him [MiM] gave him, he took it, and jammed it into his trash hole. Green's Dictionary of Slang defines "jam" as "to have anal intercourse; fuck" (gdict).

I'm not sold on this either. "I did everything they'd give me" implies that he would have done even more, if permitted, and "I'd jam it into my system" definitely implies intent on the speaker's part; he's not "being jammed," he's doing the jamming. I've always heard these lines as the speaker's boast that he'll do every drug/substance that he can get his hands on -- and while I see how it can work for sex too, I don't really see the implication of nonconsensual sex. In both of those phrases, I hear enthusiasm, intent and even a little pride. And I don't doubt that "jam" means anal sex in some contexts, but that's clearly not its primary meaning in THS's lyrical world -- we need look no further than "Positive Jam" for that.

~ ~ ~

I'm not saying the whole concept is wrong. Enough dark stuff goes down in this world that a gang-rape in the plot is conceivable. But it so significantly changes a lot of the aspects of the work that I think the bar for evidence has to be set pretty high (for instance, "Here Goes" contained the compelling idea that the story doesn't have an antagonist, the characters are all their own worst enemy -- this cuts against that.) 

To propose a counter-theory (rather than just try to poke holes in your work), I think some of these slang terms are best read as giving shades of emotional meaning rather than indicating specific plot points. To make a staggeringly obvious point, these stories have a lot of drugs, sex, and violence, all of which topics with a LOT of different (and frequently overlapping!) slang terms. That's especially relevant because the metamorphosis between a fun-sexy-druggy-party and a scary-druggy-violent-party is one of the dominant themes of the entire catalog ("these parties they start lovely but they get druggy and they get ugly;" a million more examples). Words like "punctured" and "scored" and "crashed" work so beautifully in these songs not only because they can refer to sex or drugs or violence, but because they call up all of those associations at once.

So is "I met your savior, I knelt at his feet / and he took my ten bucks and he went down the street" a sexual innuendo? For me, kind of -- but not to the extent you're claiming. I take the line to primarily be a description of the powerlessness and desperation of the speaker during a drug deal.  I see "kneeling at his feet" not literally but in the sense that the speaker will do anything for his needed drug fix. Now, does that "anything" extend to potential sexual favors? Probably! Does he actually do so? To me, that's not established.  I read any sexual implication in that verse as a reminder of the allure of the drugs and the lengths the narrator would theoretically go to score them.

~ ~ ~

All that said, I'll keep an open mind as we move through the LP world.  As always, my humble thoughts offered up with a double helping of (actual) love & respect! 

[muzzleofbees]

I agree that neither of these lines HAVE to imply (non consentual) sex, and it might not be their main purpose. But both the LP and THS songs are littered with these could-go-either-way lines, and I think the potential double meaning are there for a reason.

The lines that probably sold me on this reading wasn't mentioned above - several parts from You Did Good Kid:

"(...) Yeah, mutually assured destruction is oftentimes a no-brainer

The drifters in the kitchen
Were thrashing thru the passion
Boys, let's try to keep it on the carpet
You wouldn't be so impressed with the sunrise
If it wasn't for the darkness

You did good kid"

...followed by:

"He came into the club with the commemorative plates.
A depiction of The Slaughter at Shiloh
The light in his eyes was diminished
But they announced his arrival

Once the assistant hitched us into the harness
The wolves all started acting kinda sheepish
Woke up in a bed with a spray painted mattress
Dripping wet with the emotional weakness

And every single moment gets abandoned and emptied.
Every single speaker gets blown
And now you wanna go home

Oh dude. They made a movie starring you
Oh man. This wasn't what you planned"

This doesn't have to be about a sexual assualt. But keeping it in mind, I think it's maybe more plausable than any other reading, topped off with the "every single speaker gets blown" line.

[star18]

Well hey, yeah, there's some compelling stuff in there.  I gotta be honest, I've listened to "Thrashing" a fuckton but I don't think I ever caught that line about "the assistant hitched us into the harness." That bit, coupled with the spray-paint mattress, and the "oh dude, they made a movie starring you" is (to me) a clearer line to the sexual assault possibility than the lines that Skeptic provided above.

Still not convinced (I'm still hearing "they made a movie starring you" as a connection to "we make our own movies" and the movie-resurrection), but it definitely merits further thought.

Bit of a divergence, but "You Did Good Kid" is a weird lyric in general. The title/chorus, the "settled & bought a house" parts, and the "fold your hands and laugh at the jokes" all seem to paint a picture of someone trying to be "the good little soldier" and do things by-the-book. Obviously that's not working out real well in the parts that you mention. 

What's up with the commemorative plates of the Slaughter at Shiloh? I went Wiki-ing and I found this little gem:


On April 6, the first day of the battle, the Confederates struck with the intention of driving the Union defenders away from the river and into the swamps of Owl Creek to the west. Johnston hoped to defeat Grant's army before the anticipated arrival of Buell and the Army of the Ohio. The Confederate battle lines became confused during the fighting, and Grant's men instead fell back to the northeast, in the direction of Pittsburg Landing. A Union position on a slightly sunken road, nicknamed the "Hornet's Nest" and defended by the divisions of Brig. Gens. Benjamin Prentiss and William H. L. Wallace, provided time for the remainder of the Union line to stabilize under the protection of numerous artillery batteries. Wallace was mortally wounded when the position collapsed, while several regiments from the two divisions were eventually surrounded and surrendered.

So you could say that the "Unified" forces were helped by the "Hornets?"

Haha I know that's a probably stretch but its fun. Any other thoughts on the significance of Shiloh?

[skepticatfirst]

Feb 22, 2021 15:39:34 GMT -5 star18 said:

Just for the record:  

I always dream about a unified scene
...

To me, this has always been a critical verse because it establishes the narrator's ideal.

So now I have a problem, because I don't want to argue the end of the thread before we get to the end, especially when working steadily through the story is bound to be more effective.  But there's a reason why DOUBLE TAKES is one of the wrapup chapters, and I guess it shouldn't really be too much of a stretch to see that Craig is capable of going all out for a knee-buckling double meaning. 

Compare, while we're at it,

    in the corner ... a double order of love [SPayne]

    a lot of double takes when I'm coming around the corners [SPositive]

With "I always dream," he is definitely talking about recurring nightmares ("nights I get terrified" [AE] ... "times that it terrified me" [IHTWTDFY]). He is, also, talking about something transformative. This is Craig. It can be both.

we need look no further than "Positive Jam" for that.

Which is exactly why one of the two X'd out final chapters (which I will now de-spoiler) is POSITIVE JAM. For a host of reasons, the "cluster[fucked] clever kids" need a chance to start over on the other foot. Rather than try to explain this now, or to respond to your other points, I would really rather wait to show how LP deals with this eventually shared material, which I think will provide simple and satisfactory motivation for the do-over. But it sounds like you're cool with suspending judgment, so maybe I don't have to plead too much indulgence.

Any other thoughts on the significance of Shiloh?

Since you ask, and since I'm not taking on your other questions, I'll steal an answer from the upcoming COMMEMORATIVE PLATES:

"slaughter" is used of the Party Zero gangrape in Manpark and TS&tT (and evidently At Least Not Tonight as well); "Shiloh" was the first major slaughter of the American Civil War (wikipedia), and the beginning of Grant's "war of attrition" [OwtB, TSTux] (wikipedia)

And by "first major slaughter," I mean to contrast it with Vicksburgh, the pivotal battle for the Mississippi River. We're only at the opening act yet.