going to school with the mountain goats
>from for paper airplane pilots issue number five *the mountain goats' john darnielle certainly keeps life interesting. i haven't met anyone quite like him before. on one hand he'll seem like the most academic fellow ever, craving the newness of a foreign (or even dead) language, or writing theses and making references to ideas or people that i never knew existed. it looks like an ever-advancing thirst for knowledge on all borders -- a yen for new ideas and concepts to posit. yet then he'll be checked short of reaching the complete caricature of academia by his sincere uneasiness around modern technologies like computers and the internet. i guess he's more fascinated by the profoundness of life's simpler aspects than by its urbane aspects. so his intense wonder has a niche and it's a spot where he's combined some curious pursuits. it's the difference between "song for cleomenes" and "the monkey song" -- intense knowledge offset by a naive fascination with simple wonders. the parallels are many. here's our interview with john:* fpap: do you consider the article "the" an official and integral part of your band name? jd: yes, it's *the* mountain goats, lowercase "t", even though occasionally it appears otherwise (i think the spine of _zopilote machine_ is missing the definite article). this is the sort of question i used to think long and hard about but tonight i'm tired. fpap: do you consider yourselves a "band" in some classic rock and roll connotation? jd: i honestly don't understand the question. the mountain goats are john and rachel, if that's what you mean -- if you're asking whether we, like maybe smog, are a band which is basically one guy, the answer is an emphatic no. "rock and roll," though: i don't know that that's what we are at all. even the word "band," it's kind of derogatory, verdad que si? fpap: i heard that snoop doggy dogg has recently moved to claremont -- how do you anticipate his arrival to impact the "empire scene"? jd: his house is about three and a half miles from here. i don't expect him at a whole lot of satnam puppets shows, though, nor do i imagine he'll land the coveted sonic enemy contract. fpap: is it appropriate to grant "empire" status to the area where you and so many other bands perform? if it is inded an empire, who then is/should be the emperor or supreme ruling force? jd: since it's in the nature of empires, in gibbons's phrase, to "decline and fall," yes, this is one. clearly our _imperator omnipotens_ would have to be peter hughes. fpap: what was your favorite program as a child? jd: we both come from very liberal households, which means that lurking in the backs of our brains everytime we turn on the tv is the maxim "television will rot your brain," and so any answer we could give would only make us feel guilty for not answering "nova" without hesitating for a minute. fpap: okay, so what is the best thing you've seen recently on television? jd: the guy who does these "nadie vuele mas barato" ads on a local spanish television: old, withered, kinda dwarf-like, voice suggestive of semi-permanent upper respiratory infection, clearly a sexual dynamo of a man who has crossed over some essential line into a place which can only be called ecstasy. or "california." fpap: if a fan requests a song during a performance do you honor the request? jd: yes. we honor the request by not playing the song and thereby not ruining it for the person who made the request. we don't practice like most bands do: when there's going to be a show, we make up a set list and practice *those songs only*, so requests are pretty much out of the question. except for the time in northampton when this guy really wanted to hear "going to cleveland" and there was almost no one else around. fpap: give or take a handful, how many labels have released mg songs? why are you so diversified? jd: oh, ten to fifteen is a safe estimate. i have my own punk rock reasons for spreading the net so wide, to wit: label exclusivity is playing into the corporate snare, but nobody wants to hear about that. fpap: which mountain goats song is the best? jd: can't really answer because the answer will always be something nobody's heard yet, that is, something brand new, given that the mountain goats' *summa veritatis* is "we only like new stuff." next week in san francisco we're going to do a fleshed-out version of "going to lebanon," though, and it's really cool; "prana ferox" is another that we're fond of. i personally am partial to "raja vocative" from the forthcoming mountain goats & alastair galbraith single on walt. fpap: assume that you are on an island, which, aside from traditional island stuff that mother nature put there, has only a single vending machine as population -- your basic deserted island scenario. now then, luckily for you the machine is operational and you have an unlimited supply of spare change as well...what five items would you most want the machine to dispense? jd: water, cigarettes, lighters, pumpkin seeds, guitar strings. closely in the running: necco wafers, notebooks, pens. [tiberius claudius nero caesar is this issue's guest interviewer. while perhaps not the bloodiest emperor to rule, not a day went by without executions of some magnitude and friends and scholars described him as a crafty and rancorous tyrant, grim and morose.] fpap: do you feel any sympathy for the people who get gored during the running of the bulls in pamplona? jd: this question makes me angry. please don't take this too personally, but think about it for a minute...let us imagine that a young man of 17 or so goes out for the running of the bulls with some of his friends. they drink a lot of wine and in the excitement the young man gets careless and is killed. whether it was foolish for him to go to pamplona is now no longer an issue, and it's heartless to make it an issue: his parents are suffering a loss the likes of which i can only imagine, and if you've ever had a friend die on you (let alone having to watch him die) then you know how empty his friends feel; if he had any brothers or sisters, they also have had their lives changed forever in a truly terrible way. so my anser is: yes, of course i feel deep sympathy for these people. nothing -- i repeat, *nothing* -- is so lame as to make it permissible for us to say that someone "deserved to die." fpap: what is your favorite cliched "bad punchline"? [i.e. "when she sits around the house, she really sits around the house"] jd: that would have to be: "when she conjugates *sum* in the imperfect subjunctive, she really conjugates *sum* in the imperfect subjunctive," but that's not really a *bad* punchline *per se*, only a senseless one. fpap: it seems that there are no models left, everyone is a "supermodel" instead. do you feel that this may be creating a unique situation where too many of a good thing leads to a watered-down effect? jd: gosh, you know, we just really hadn't given the matter a whole lot of thought. i don't know that there's really any difference between "model" and "supermodel," though. fpap: who's your favorite supermodel? jd: julie cafritz. fpap: have you ever in your life been at a party where there was a clown entertaining the guests? jd: i haven't. i think rachel may have, she's been to circus circus in las vegas. i *know* my latin teacher has and she found it really depressing. fpap: do you have any favorite fanzines? jd: without any disrespect to our present patrons, _beer frame_ is, simply put, the best *magazine* presently being published in the u.s. or anywhere that i can think of, for that matter. fpap: ever had a legitimate "fiasco" preparing a meal? jd: a "legitimate fiasco." hm, yess, i see. once i made about five quarts of hoppin' john that simple wasn't edible -- and before we left for chicago, rachel burned herself with cooking oil -- amy would be the one to talk to about this, and she lives in new york. fpap: i get the sense that the mountain goats have a nationwinde following, but that this following is generally very small from town to town. did you find this to be true? jd: well, demographically this question is super-predictable: you got your bigger crowds in the bigger cities (nyc, chicago) and your smaller crowds in your smaller cities (northampton, columbus). fpap: do you liek having a more "underground" following or do you aspire to have larger audiences? jd: i hate to be so precious about this sort of thing but i don't know what "underground" means. do we aspire to participation in the hoplessly corrupt "above-ground" music industry? no, we don't. but do we like it when we play for an audience with a couple hundred people in it? yes, it's nice. the audience has been steadily increasing without any significant changes in approach on our parts, so the answer to both halves of the question can realisticall be "yes." fpap: are you even concerned with attendance, or is the point more just to put your songs out there and hopefully connect with "x" number of people no matter what x represents? jd: please, see last question. ask anybody: if no one's listening, it gets hard to stay hungry. at the same time, though, if 25-50 people respond to a tape, that's plenty of mail to answer, in some cases, low availability makes for a nice little sort of family secret. fpap: who was the greatest emperor of all time and why? jd: tiberius (14 a.d. - 37 a.d.), who preceded nero and spent most of his time removed from the *res publicae*, preferring more delicate pleasures i.e. personal satisfaction. most "neronian" phenomena might be considered more genuinely "tiberian," since nero and his contemporaries were raised under tiberian "rule" and are therefore responding to the ruler whose policies (or lack thereof) shaped them. good writers spent their formative years in the relative calm of tiberius's tenure. he seems to have done little harm, and it is important to do as little harm as possible. i know that the post-modern answer to this question would be "the one who shed the most blood," but really, i think the intellectual appeal of this sort of thinking has just about played itself out. *the mountain goats are officially john and rachel. john is also one-half of the extra glenns and one-third of an outfit that goes by the name bloody hawaiians.* elsewhere in the 'zine: peanuts faves: john the mountain goats: well the obvious answer is linus, right? but what is linus without charlie brown or without lucy? they each represent a different aspect of humanity. one can't exist without the other. "tour rules": how about places to stay? john the mountain goats: we don't like staying at people's houses unless the people happen to be named varenka or clayton, and we've got lives in california -- well, rachel does, anyway -- and if we can't fix it so we don't spend the night in a single "bad place" then we'd just prefer to stay home until we've saved up the money to buy good rooms. music in the car? john: music in the car? only one rule, but it's a good one: avoid indie rock! avoid indie rock! avoid indie rock! easy solution, too: listen to the radio. what about sightseeing? john: we've pretty much failed to do any sightseeing at all. i saw the empire state from about half a mile away for all of a minute in new york, and we went to museums in ny and chicago -- we like museums, especially if they've got plenty of rodin + gaugin.