Alright Alright (Here Goes part II: Lifter Puller)

[skepticatfirst]

GEOGRAPHY: FIRST PASS

In the Here Goes thread, we worked out early on (heregoes) that many THS place names like "Hostile, Massachusetts" are not just metaphorical, but basically allegorical:

• Boston/Massachusetts is the state of Hostility


• Denver/Colorado is the state of Being High


• Ybor City/Florida is the state of Wild Partying


• Los Angeles/California is the state of Making It Big

et cetera. There are THS place names that are metaphorical in a non-allegorical way, too:

• Las Cruces [TS&tT]: literally, "the crosses," and like Dos Cruces in Both Crosses, evidently a reference to the place of Charlemagne's crucifixion.


• La Quinta [TS&tT]: a reference to the La Quinta motel chain, to go along with all the other motel references in the songs: Residence Inn [DH], Comfort Inn [Star18], Thunderbird [SN], and Motel 6 [212M]. (The pun has precedent: Residence Inn and Comfort Inn are "living in" [Ambassador] metaphors; Thunderbird and Motel 6 are drug metaphors ["Thunder"=cocaine/heroin, "6"=TR-6=amphetamine, see LISTED above]. Compare The Ambassador, the hotel where Kennedy was killed).

We could list others. The crucial point is that *these THS place names are not literal*; they don't affect the real-world setting of the THS story, virtually all of which unfolds in the Twin Cities.

At first blush, it's *not at all* clear that the LP world works the same way.

***

Florida, Colorado

Florida and Colorado in LP look nothing like their THS versions.

Despite an abundance of wild parties, there's no Florida in the songs at all, except for Miami in the NC list.

The only reference to Denver or Colorado is "these denver slums they look so good in text" [SBackwards], which, coming immediately after mention of the Dharma Bums, is an obviously metaphorical reference to Kerouac's On The Road --- but, precisely because it's so straightforward, seems very different from the crazy use of names in THS.

***

Massachusetts

The evidence for Massachusetts points in different directions.

There are only two LP references to Boston, both in simple lists of place names [NC, LGI]; neither appears to be anything like Hostile, Mass.

There is one reference to Massachusetts [Rental], but because it's in a purely negative statement, it's hard to use it to draw conclusions.

References to Springfield, Massachusetts and New Bedford, Massachusetts [MiM] give us a little more to work with. The Springfield lines:

    peter panned out here from springfield, mass
    ...
    peter panned back into springfield, mass [MiM]

seem to be something other than literal: "Peter Pan" is a drug reference (to PCP; see LISTED above), and Springfield is where the headquarters of the Peter Pan Bus Lines are located (wikipedia), suggesting a doubling-down on the drug reference, rather than a realistic destination.

The New Bedford line:

    well hello, new bedford, mass won't you hit me with a little bit of amnesty [MiM]

is also interesting: by escaping to New Bedford, the narrator of the song can be presumed to be getting a "new bed," but it's hard to make a strict connection between that and the "amnesty" he's looking for. Again, it looks like there's something metaphorical happening here, but it's not allegory.

***

California

There are, on the other hand, a number of LP references to California that begin to sound more THS-like.

There's an innuendo-laden road trip to the west coast in Mick's Tape that closely resembles Holly's trip in Star 18, C&N, etc.

We've already noted that "orange grove" [Langelos], like "strawberry stand" [TPatP], is a place where drugs are for sale, i.e. a trap house (see FRUIT above). But as the immediately preceding reference to "dust bowl" confirms (wikipedia), "orange grove" is also a reference to John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath, the story of the Depression-era Okies who went to California to work as crop pickers ("a grove of yella oranges" appears in chapter 18 of the novel, p. 281 in the Modern Library edition). So that's a California-as-drug-house metaphor, which, while not the allegorical California of THS, is certainly not literal, either.

***

Long Beach Island

Finally, there's the LBI (Long Beach Island, in New Jersey) and the other East Coast shore locations, which do sound a lot like the Ybor City of THS.

***

Viceburgh

A final case that's easy to assess is Viceburgh, the story of a group of kids meandering on foot between several locations:

- "1st and 59th": Google Maps confirms that there's only one such intersection in America, and that's the one in Manhattan at the end of the Queensboro Bridge, also known as the 59th Street Bridge. (Possibly a reference to the "59th Street Bridge Song" by Simon and Garfunkel, another song about wandering around on foot; compare "Just kicking down the cobblestones" [link] to "just kickin walk like a panther" [Viceburgh]; the Paul Simon connection found by muzzleofbees makes this more likely [link].)

- "the fens": this is definitely a reference to "the Back Bay fens" [HM] of Boston.

- "dogtown": this is a reference to either the abandoned settlement in Massachusetts (wikipedia) or else the Beltrami neighborhood in Northeast Minneapolis (link), or else the SoCal skate punk mecca (link).

It is self-evident that these places cannot all be meant literally, not all at the same time.

***

So already there's no question but that some of the use of place names in the LP story is metaphoric, even if it doesn't seem to be extended to allegory in the THS style. But it's also noticeable that the more clearly non-literal uses mentioned above (California, LBI, New Bedford) don't show up until later in the catalog (the documented lyric "the shore's a bore" in Double Straps was evidently changed after the album was released; what's actually sung is "you're sure a bore").

Since we're looking for clues to the real location of the story, we still want to consider whether the early LP geography may be literal, even if the later geography isn't. Could it be that place names on the first album, or at a minimum in the early five tracks, are still descriptive in the ordinary sense, rather than metaphoric?

[skepticatfirst]

GEOGRAPHY: SELF-TITLED ALBUM

There are a few interesting place references on the first album, but the ones that most stand out are "India" in Jeep Beep Suite, and "Europe," "Greece," and "Coney Island" in Sublet.

***

At first glance, the India reference appears *very* un-THS-like. What's going on here? If we take the entire verse for context:

    entertaining the soldiers, makin eyes at the sailors
    and we walked between these velvet ropes, went straight for the bathroom soap
    tried to make ourselves clean
    tried to make ourselves sparkle, i mean india seems just like a dream
    i left with five bucks and i lived for five months like a queen
    and these nightclub scenes aren't ever what they seem
    liquid soap won't get you completely clean ... [JBS]

we see that we've already worked out the keys to most of the interpretation upthread:

• "ropes"=roofies, "soap"=meth (see LISTED above).


• "bathroom"=back room at the party where sex happens (see BATHROOM STALL above).


• "nightclub scenes" with "velvet ropes" and "bathroom soap" mean they're going to the "clubs" (see THE FOAM above).


• "entertaining the soldiers, making eyes at the sailors" with ropes/soap/bathroom mean servicing gangsters for drugs.

There's more to "liquid soap" than meets the eye, though. As it turns out, the pump-dispensed household liquid soap with which we're all familiar was invented in the late 70's by the Minneapolis-based Minnetonka Corporation (wikipedia).

This Minneapolis origin is the key to "India," too: it's an allusion to the Aveda brand of beauty products ("shiny shiny hair"), which was founded in Minneapolis in the late 70's after founder Horst Rechelbacher returned from a trip to India (hence the Sanskrit name; wikipedia).[*1]

Note that Steve refers to Aveda (and to fellow Minneapolis institution Famous Dave's, maker of "those pickle chips" [BBlues]) in The Hawaii Show's legendary Babysitter (youtube):

    Dissed! Fuck!
    Confirming my worst fears
    About my hair
    It was so fucked up beyond belief
    I headed to Aveda for some scalp relief

So "India" and "liquid soap" are references to two Minneapolis pharmacy-goods brands, just as "Stop-n-Shop" and "CVS" a little earlier in the song are references to two New England pharmacy chains. We understand already that the pharmacy-goods and pharmacy references are to drugs and drug houses, respectively (see PHARMACY GOODS above). The fact that these drug house references are described as "nightclub scenes" is a strong indication that the drug houses and "clubs" are actually the same thing, but more on this later (see NIGHTCLUBS below).

***

The Minneapolis vs. New England contrast being drawn here is elaborate enough that we can be absolutely certain it's not imagined, even if we don't know what it means. In fact, now that we see it, we can recognize the same contrast being drawn in three different songs:

• "India" and "liquid soap" (Minneapolis) vs. "Stop-n-Shop" and "CVS" (New England) [JBS]


• "Rainbow" (Minneapolis) vs. "Friendly's" (New England), "eagle" (Minneapolis) vs. "seagull" (New England) [SCity]


• "Midwest" (Minneapolis) vs. "East" (New England) [BBender].

We'll come back to the significance of this opposition later (see EAST VS MIDWEST below). In the meantime, we've established that "India" is a stand-in for Minneapolis.

***

What about "Europe," "Greece," and "Coney Island" in Sublet?

The one to start with is Greece; the full text is

    and i got your postcard, it was from the pantheon
    it was the first peek at greece that i'd had in weeks [Sublet]

There's an obvious problem with this, namely that the Pantheon is in Rome, not in Greece. Craig has been accused before of geographic illiteracy --- of intending "the Sonora" when he wrote "the Sonoma" [MoC], some Southern California city when he wrote "Modesto" [MINTS], etc. --- and here too the obvious thing is to suggest that he meant the Parthenon, not the Pantheon (see for example the genius.com comment: link).

But no; as in those other cases, Craig knows exactly what he's doing. That he does mean the Pantheon here is confirmed by the characterization of the clubs as "domes" in Sherman City, and by the other ongoing references to Rome that we've catalogued upthread (see THE FIRST FIVE TRACKS above). The Pantheon is, and for almost 2000 years has been, the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world:





In short, the Pantheon = dome = club = Nice Nice.

If "the Pantheon" is deliberate, the next question is, why "Greece"? That had me stumped for some time, until, in an offline message, muzzleofbees suggested to me that it's a pun: "Greece," pronounced "grease," is the home of the "greasers" of Bruce Bender (like the cosmetics metaphor, this is a riddle whose solution is deliberately provided in the context of the same album; see PHARMACY GOODS above).[*2]

Like THS' Mary, who "was pretty much living in/ A 3.2 bars a stretch to call a club" [Ambassador], the girl in Sublet has pretty much left to take up living at the Nice Nice. Much more discussion of this, with evidence, to come; for now, the point is that "Greece" serves a metaphoric function, and "Europe" too is a metaphor, serving to blur the distinction between "Greece" and the "Pantheon," which are in fact the same place.

***

Now that we have clear evidence of exotic geographic handles standing in for prosaic locations in LP as well as in THS, we can feel pretty confident that "Coney Island" is just another of the coastal party spots whose names litter the lyrics in both worlds: "LBI" [TLaDiLBI, Manpark], "Jones Beach" [Sherman City], "Jersey Shore" [LSifL], "Pensacola" [KP], "Tampa" [SA], "Ybor City" [MPADJs, CatCT, etc.].

***

It doesn't yet rise to the level of solid evidence, but there's a lot of information here pointing to the Twin Cities as the real locale underneath the various place names.

---

[*1] I can't prove, but am willing to bet, that "like a dream" was part of an advertising slogan for Aveda products back in the 80's or early 90's.

[*2] Recognizing that "rocks" [BBender] is a drug reference ("rocks"=meth, see LISTED above), we understand that BBender is describing the "greasers" as dealers, aggressively offering their wares from outside the Narrator's car. By the same token, it seems probable that with "greece" [JBS] Craig is making a secondary allusion to "Greek," defined by the ONDCP document as marijuana laced with cocaine (ondcp).

[muzzleofbees]

I've been mostly offline for a few days, but I really dig this geography stuff. It just makes so much sense that a skilled writer as Craig use these references both for colour, context and scenery, but at the same time filling them with relevance and meaning. Also, how this on another level is weaved together with other ongoiing metaphors or topics.

I remember stumbling upon that Greece/grease parallell, and still think its pretty cool.

I know it's a little bit on the side of the Lifter Puller story, but talking about Europe, what do you make of "Her parents are in Paris/ it's the best place we can access, yeah/ it's not exactly sanctioned, man, but she still god a key"? Or have you actually written something about that, and I just don't remember it? I'll ctrl + f my way through the other pages when this is posted.

[skepticatfirst]

Thanks! yeah, that was a big aha-moment for me, for sure. The fact that there are a number of these things on the first album --- obscurities that turn out to have an explanation tucked into another song on the same album --- is pretty cool, too.

About "her parents are in Paris": I'm going to get to this in XXXXXXX XXXX XXX XXXXXXX :-) ... we need story context before we can open up what's being referred to in the verse as a whole. But about "Paris" itself, I can say a few things.

Regardless of who "she" is, "her parents" aren't really part of the story (apart from being inclined to blame their daughter's downfall on her dancing, providing lawyers, having her because they had to, etc.). In this sense, "Paris" just means "offstage"; they're not actively parenting.

Why "Paris," then, and not another offstage location? Again, ignoring for a moment the question of who "she" is, the fact that her parents are in Paris (like credit card chicks, Brooklyn Heights, turtleneck sweater, etc.) says she's a rich girl. And it's "Paris," rather than some other place that says "rich girl," for lyrical reasons (par-is/par-ents).

[muzzleofbees]

I see That money will come in handy if they ever need to fund a blockbuster summer.

[skepticatfirst]

Sorry I'm running so late today, got crushed at work. Upside is that this is probably as bad as it gets for the methodical boring stuff, should be mostly more interesting from here, starting tomorrow AM.

[skepticatfirst]

GEOGRAPHY: FIRST FIVE TRACKS

So place names on the first album, while not allegorical, are in any case not the names of literal locations. But what about the five tracks that came before the first album? It's still possible that these songs, with lots of evidence of geographic distribution, use place names literally.

***

1) Prescription Sunglasses

We've already noted that the "three day rave" of PSunglasses has a lot in common with the three-day crucifixion weekend in THS (see THE FIRST FIVE TRACKS above), which at least suggests a connection with the Twin Cities.

A stronger link is provided by "swimming pool" [PSunglasses]. This reference to a meth den (see DRUG SLANG above) is repeated in "swimming pool" [HDaD], and HDaD in turn mentions crossing a river:

    run across the river liquor lasts a little later [HDaD]

This "run" closely resembles the one described in LPvtEotE:

    it's too late for liquor but we could get some 3.2 [LPvtEotE]

which, besides alluding to Minnesota liquor laws concerning 3.2 beer (clicksandhisses), explicitly describes the solution to the narrator's quest to satisfy his "lake street vice" [LPvtEotE], meaning Lake Street in Minneapolis. This reference to Lake Street, one of only a handful of streets that actually runs over a bridge across the river to St. Paul, makes "the river" [HDaD] the Mississippi River, and puts the "swimming pool" [PSunglasses, HDaD, RfLB] in the Twin Cities too.

***

Emperor

Emperor mentions a ride "back to Connecticut" that's currently "on the freeway/ at the exit by the campus" and is soon to head back "down the turnpike." All of these details suggest a setting at Boston College, where Craig went to school; "the turnpike" in this context would be the Massachusetts Turnpike, putting Connecticut within easy driving distance. So far this is plausible.

But then the narrator of the song invites the girl to rejoin him "here among the windmills" [Emperor]. There are no windmills near the BC campus, and there certainly weren't any back in the 90's; on the contrary, the farm-country stereotype associated with windmills would suggest that he's locating himself in the non-urban Midwest.

If literal, then, these locations are hard to reconcile. Note too that we've already documented Craig's use of "connect" as a special term at the intersection of sex and drugs (see SEX FOR DRUGS IN METAPHORS above); we can't fail to entertain the possibility that "Connecticut" doesn't refer to the State of Connecticut at all, but rather to the place where the "kids connect" [Brokerdealer MCIGOaCT, DMN].

***

Rental

Rental tells us that the narrator and his girl companion are driving around "up in New Hampshire"; the references to midterms, and the base orientation with respect to NH ("up"), again suggest a Boston College setting.

The final lines of the song:

    massachusetts valleys and the new york city east side 20's
    are not what I remember
    that whole september seems so blurry [Rental]

could be consistent with this; but September is early for midterms, and the detailed reference to NYC is hard to account for.

There's also mention of an airplane in apparent connection with the rental car, but that doesn't fit the suggested geography, either. We have the evidence of the drug slang documents and LiaL to suggest that "airplane" may be a drug reference (see LISTED above), but this too tends to undermine the literality of the described scenario.

It is, finally, extremely improbable that someone on a drive through New Hampshire, even back in the 90's, would happen on a radio station playing Dinosaur Jr. ("In A Jar"). You *could*, on the other hand, hear it on Radio K in the Twin Cities.

***

Slips Backwards

Slips Backwards has the "denver slums" reference which, again, is definitely metaphor in allusion to Kerouac (see GEOGRAPHY: FIRST PASS above).

The song further describes a girl, whom the narrator met "down on lake street" in Minneapolis, who's living at some point on West Coast.

The West Coast reference seems far-fetched, if literal: he "heard" that she was living there but then "had to call twice" to make sure? None of this is strictly internally inconsistent; it's just hard to put together in a story.

***

Nassau Coliseum

Much of the action of the song appears to take place on Long Island, at a show at Nassau Coliseum (link). There's no particular reason to imagine that this isn't literal.

There's also a reference to a picture of the narrator and his girlfriend as sophomores (Craig was a college sophomore in 1991, when the show on which the song is supposed to be based took place), which again suggests a college setting.

The list of places at the end don't seem to need integrating into the story.

***

In short, it's a mix. One song looks like it's based in the Twin Cities, one's got a mix of Twin Cities and West Coast (and metaphorical Denver), and the other three are on the East Coast. Little in the place names themselves, apart possibly from Connecticut in Emperor, suggests anything beyond that.

But in looking closely at these songs we notice some interesting commonalities:

All five songs are about a narrator and a girl.

Three of them are framed around the narrator's plea to get intimate again with the girl after a breakup ("we could all be friends again" [Emperor], "you told your boyfriend ... make me feel special" [Rental], and "you had just left me ... I wanna fuck you" [NC]).

And four of the five describe fragments of the same bizarre episode that's familiar from I Like the Lights and other songs in the canon --- namely, the one in which the girl wears a sexy dress to a trap house, gets high, takes it off, fucks, and wakes up messily afterwards:

    she's creepin out of the east end ...
    jenny looks a little jonesy
    she said i don't quite know what happened
    woke up with my dress wide open [ILtL]

Compare this with NC, PSunglasses, Emperor, SBackwards:

song	lines	factors	notes
NC	you're in a stupor ... you fell out your dress/ you fell off of the porch swing, we were kind of a mess ... did you sleep with that hippie?	trap house, high, takes off dress, fucks, mess afterwards	"porch swing" is a trap house ref: "you can buy it off the porch" [SSC]
PSunglasses	swimming pool had purple lights ... woke up ... i hope you don't remember pretty soon/ think it was a three day rave ... we were naked on a sunday afternoon	trap house, high, takes off dress, fucks, wakes up, mess afterwards	"pool" is slang for meth den (see DRUG SLANG above)
Emperor	you came in without your makeup wearing your new junk store dress/ your face covered in curls and tears ... you said your head was finally clear	trap house, sexy dress, high, mess afterwards	"without your makeup" means "sobered up" (see PHARMACY GOODS above); "junk store" (alternative lyric "drugstore") is a trap house
SBackwards	then i heard that you were hanging out at pawn shops/ you always get a good price, you sure get some good junk/ then i heard that you were dressin kinda hip-hop	trap house, sexy dress, high	"pawn shops"="junk stores," i.e. trap houses

This similarity isn't coincidence: we have what is apparently the same story being set in apparently different locales --- a fact that should lead us to regard *all* of those locales with a skeptical eye.

But if we have to choose one, the resemblance of these events to the events of the THS story, and the accumulation of Twin Cities allusions along the way, suggests that we may be looking at the Twin Cities here too. We'll see how this hypothesis holds up as the analysis progresses.

[skepticatfirst]

NICE NICE

In short, no matter how far back we rewind through the evolution of Craig's style, we *never* find a use of place names that is reliably and plainly descriptive. The LP experiments with metaphor are tentative, and stop short of the radical allegories of THS. But at no point are place names necessarily to be taken at face value.

***

Which brings us around to the decades-old questions about the Nice Nice. Is it in Minneapolis? Is it in Boston, on Landsdowne Street? Is it, as Steve joked, in Atlantis (link)?

“People come up to me with questions like, ‘Is the Nice Nice in a certain town?’” Steve says. “I was lying. I was like, ‘I think it’s kind of an evolving city. You don’t know exactly where it is...’” “No,” Craig says. “It doesn’t have a physical location.” “It’s like Atlantis,” Steve says.

Craig's answer, "it doesn't have a physical location," is true as far as it goes. But like so many of his interview responses, it elides the essential truth.

Let's start with a couple of facts about the Nice Nice.

***

The first (and, prior to Fiestas & Fiascos, the only) use of "nice nice" is in an exclamation in Slips Backwards:

    thought you said that you were gonna get some zest soap
    and i thought baby nice, nice, that stuff gets your skin slick [SBackwards]

We've already looked at this line upthread (see SLIP AND TRIP above); it suggests that the essential characteristic of the Nice Nice is the sex-for-drugs exchange, which for the rest is exactly what we learn from Candy's Room --- the girl makes propositions, gets covered up with drugs, and gets her tights stained:

    baby ain't you heard about the night club called the nice nice
    they got the dry ice and the knife fights on every other wednesday night
    i can see all the stains in your white tights
    when you stand in the black lights down at the nice nice
    and we were born in these night clubs and you make those propositions with your sexy little shoulder shrugs
    you'll be covered up with powdered drugs by the end of the night
    if you're still at the nice nice [CRoom]

We learn a few more things from this passage:

1) What's happening here is the full cruising-for-drugs vicious cycle described in Roaming The Foam, which is also linked to the clubs (see THE FOAM above).

2) The action at the Nice Nice, with "ice"=meth (see LISTED above) on offer, happens "every other wednesday night."

***

The Wednesday night parties, alluded to only in passing in the THS story [CF], are *the* fundamental institution of the Lifter Puller world. References to Wednesday as a regularly recurring party day occur in SGS, RfLB, and CRoom. The reference in Rock For Lite Brite reveals the purpose of the parties:

    waiting on the wednesday shipment [RfLB]

What's being described here is a commercial enterprise of regular drug shipments, delivered from someplace offstage to wherever it is that the songs take place.

We already have reason to suspect that the real environment beneath the place-name metaphors is the Twin Cities. Per Craig, the great plague of the Twin Cities is speed (see DRUG LANDSCAPE above). It's very likely, then, that the Brokerdealer song If Not For Hipster Pictures --- which, under the mantle of a "vision"/"fever dream" [INFHP], describes a number of recognizable aspects of the Lifter Puller world --- is talking about the Wednesday shipments when it says:

    it was St Paul bars and St Cloud speed [INFHP]

We can't fail to note that this squares with everything we know about the figure of Shepard, leader of the Cityscape Skins, in the THS story. He too comes from St. Cloud:[*1]

    Shepard came out of St. Cloud with a little ideology [IHTWTDFY]

and is the "Maestro" [Feelers] running the wholesale trade of drugs into the city:[*2]

    The vibrations were impatient, city's sick of running out
    But first we set the prices, and then we talk about amounts
    ...
    Shepard [Feelers]

(We have to take care applying THS evidence to the LP story; but this kind of background information is very straightforward, and it won't be the last time we use the lamp of one of Craig's worlds to illuminate the other.)

So the Wednesday night parties are commercial-scale speed distribution events that, by definition, operate on a predictable schedule. How is it that they're not shut down by law enforcement?

The answer is that the gangsters running the parties do the same thing the organizers of raves do: they change locations every time, and only put out address information through hard-to-trace chains of flyers and word-of-mouth ("think it was a three-day rave/ think I got the flyer saved" [PSunglasses]). *The Wednesday night parties move around.*

***

It's important to note that, while these Wednesday night get-togethers are the foundation on which the LP world is built, they're not the only bashes in the picture. Sometimes, when the Scene wants to do something a little bigger, something with a little more room to run, they'll throw a special party as a one-off.

Those special parties aren't classified by name in Lifter Puller; but as a matter of factual description, they're the "weekenders."

***

There's one more important thing we know about the Nice Nice that has a bearing on the question of its location.

There is no doubt at all that 15th and Franklin is an intersection in Minneapolis. From the Right Moves interview (link):

Craig says ... "Franklin is a street in Minneapolis. When I wrote all that stuff I was living on Garfield and Franklin so it was always there for me to look at. If you went down to 15th you got into some sort of a little more dicey neighborhood. Fifteenth and Franklin isn’t—”

“Just say your options opened up going down there,” Dan says.

“Yeah.”

The song Nice Nice explicitly describes Jenny taking a taxi from the Nice Nice "up" (that is, uptown, in the direction from Lowertown to Uptown), to 15th and Franklin, and then "back to the east end":

    now jenny missed her ride and she's takin off her tights
    in the back seat of some taxi
    we went from upstairs at the nice nice up to franklin up by 15th
    ...
    it's the end of the night and now jenny's creepin back to the east end
    shot through with the sunlight [NN]

This locates the Nice Nice in the "east end," i.e. the "East Side" [SPayne] of St. Paul.

The East Side of St. Paul is of course also where THS's Ambassador/metal bar is located, in the Rathskeller bar in the old Hamm's brewery (this was a major result of the Here Goes investigation: heregoes). Recall that the Ambassador too is described as a "club" [Ambassador] like the Nice Nice, and as a "3.2 bar" like the final party destination in LPvtEotE, which is itself linked to the "club" "across the river" in HDaD (i.e. across the Mississippi, in St. Paul; see GEOGRAPHY: FIRST FIVE TRACKS above).

These reports all point to the same place; the "east end" episode of Jenny waking up with her dress wide open, reflected in NC, PSunglasses, Emperor, and SBackwards (see GEOGRAPHY: FIRST FIVE TRACKS above), takes place there too.

But the Nice Nice "doesn't have a physical location." So how can it be identified with the brewery bar in St. Paul?

The Nice Nice doesn't have *a* physical location. It moves from place to place with the parties, wherever the Scene can get together, including, notably, in the "east end" of St. Paul. The LP story, like the THS story, is set in the Twin Cities.

---

[*1] With "some are getting sprung" appearing prominently in the first verse, IHTWTDFY encourages us to imagine that Shepard "came out of St. Cloud" in the sense of getting out of prison, and that St. Cloud is being referred to specifically as the location of the Minnesota Correctional Facility (wikipedia). But this is a setup, a case of Craig setting a strong expectation on the way in order to put us on the wrong track later. The ones getting sprung from and going back into the gang are the kids themselves (heregoes).


[*2] Now that ODP is officially released with a lyric sheet, a few comments about Shepard's appearance in the Feelers. There is no doubt that the Maestro is Shepard: "the mansion up the mountain" [Feelers] is "Shepard's mansion" [ABlues]; he's the leader of the gang that sells the merchandise and counts the money in the "motels" ("counting up" [SShoes]), etc.

But after the Massive Nights V live version, which was clearly delivered with the following lyrics, with no "The" in front of the first line, and no "s" between "cowboys" and "trying":

    Shepard started spinning out
    The cowboy trying to dismount
    St. Francis with the pigeons on his shoulder
    ...
    The Scene [Feelers]

the lyric sheet now has:

    The shepherds started spinning out
    The cowboys trying to dismount
    St. Francis with the pigeons on his shoulder
    ...
    This scene [Feelers]

Having heard the first version, it's hard to believe that the second one is the "original." We already know Shepard as the "cowboy" who's "ready to snap" from Saddle Shoes and Look Alive; surely, that's him. The singular subject that's preserved in "St. Francis" fits much better with a singular subject in the first two lines as well.

Another retrofitted plural makes the awkwardness of these changes even more evident. The Massive Nights V live version was delivered with

    The pirate with the party mouth [Feelers]

but the lyric sheet now has:

    The pirates with the party mouth [Feelers]

The fact that singular "party mouth" straight-up doesn't work with plural "pirates" shows that something strange is being done here. It seems unlikely to be coincidence that "pirate," like "Shepard," is the identifier of a well-known character in Craig's stories, even if we're not yet in a position to explain what he's doing in the THS universe (see THS CHARACTERS below).

To me, it appears that Craig is going out of his way here to paper over black-and-white evidence of the continued presence of old characters, and of The Scene, on the new album. We know that his commitment to the written lyrical record is secondary in any case (link); it's not surprising that he would alter it to avoid being pinned down on this point (link).

[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.