1.
I’m looking for one specific live version of ‘Against Pollution.’ It’s the one where John Darnielle’s voice leaps and catches on the phrase in the song that, some days, seems to unlock everything about it. I thought it happened in 2004, but I was wrong.
2.
There are no live versions of ‘Against Pollution’ online from 2004, the year it was released, or the year or two earlier when it could have been written. The first I find is 2005 in Chicago, and that isn’t right, that isn’t it at all.
3.
The phrase I want to hear is ‘praying the Rosary,’ because in this performance Darnielle invests it with real, feral force, like it isn’t a meditative, bead-counting exercise, but something that can save your life. ‘Something just came over me’ can sound casual; this doesn’t.
4.
But there are more powerful ways a spiritual impulse might come over you: it could feel like ‘an enormous emotion... like something trying to get in; the pressure of gigantic wings against the glass,’ as it does to the teenage gangster Pinkie in Brighton Rock.
5.
Graham Greene’s protagonist, just before this, has consummated a sham marriage to help hide a murder. An unexpected tenderness for Rose, to whom he has lost his ‘soured virginity,’ calls to mind ‘the confession, the penance and the sacrament’ - the ‘huge havoc’ of belief.
6.
‘He withstood it.’ Nonetheless, the feeling was there, up against the glass. That’s how religion looks to me, in most of the Mountain Goats songs before this one: something hovering around the music and occasionally making its looming presence felt. Hail Satan. Set the table.
7.
The idols being dusted off in ‘Elijah’ connect the song to John’s Hare Krishna practice at the time it was written, though its subject is a Jewish prophet. And the prayer beads he was counting in Colo must have reminded him of earlier devotional exercises.
8.
Darnielle began life in the Catholic church, and has a fond memory of a Catholic schoolteacher helping him cut up his steak, aged four. He left the faith in the course of his parents’ divorce. He found his way back, and away, and back again.
9.
As I write this, I’m listening to two songs in a loop: ‘Against Pollution’ and ‘Whole Wide World,’ the 1995 Sweden cut from which Darnielle segued into the former, surprising himself along with his bandmates, during the Mountain Goats’ first post-lockdown tour in August 2021.
10.
What these songs share most obviously, as Liz Hamilton pointed out when I started a thread about this question on a Mountain Goats Facebook group, is a certain looping quality, rocking back and forth between the first and fourth chords in their keys. Tension; release.
11.
Both also deal with long-lasting ‘repercussions’; with repetition; with forward movement; with self-recognition. I toggle between the lyrics. When the last of the repercussions died off real slow. When I worked down at the liquor store, guy with a shotgun came raging through the place.
12.
‘Raging’ might introduce another touch of Biblical flair: King Herod comes ‘raging’ to massacre the innocents in a carol from a medieval mystery play. ‘Against Pollution’’s narrator seems to be acting in self-defence: ‘tried to kill me / So I shot him in the face.’
13.
In the same situation, he ‘would do it again.’ Would his choice be divinely vindicated? The chorus, adding the song’s only remaining chord change, reaches towards the ‘last days’ in which we will ‘see ourselves for the first time / The way we really are.’
14.
Those days are deferred for the duration of the song: just beyond it, on its horizon every time I hit repeat. And yet time moves forward, if mysteriously: in the absence of rain, ‘decorative grating on my window / gets a little rustier every year.’
15.
That grating rusting, and the 45 minutes in the pews praying the Rosary, are the only two things to occur in the song between Darnielle’s narrator’s first act and his final defence of it. Sometimes they happen in a different order. What does that change?
16.
The verses switch in the live performance I was seeking, for which I listened to version after version. The grating, then the chorus, then the instrumental. The monotony of the pews, five minutes short of a clinical hour. Then the shout, the jolt of recognition.
17.
It was recorded at the 40 Watt Club on August 10th, 2006, in Athens, Georgia - where R.E.M. formed, though this rendition has little of the guitar shimmer which, along with Peter Hughes’s gracefully swooping bassline, gives its album production a hint of 80s alt-rock.
18.
This is the end of the main set: Darnielle must be exhausted. The rhythm is more ragged than hypnotic, so this moment is something of a last stand. John's joined by Perry Owen Wright: both are yelling, not in harmony, but finding strength in togetherness.
19.
Some of this might be the vagaries of live recording, but here I have the sense of two people pushing on through. Getting towards your 44th minute of the rosary, you might feel like pushing on through is what’s required. This is my 19th round.
20.
By which I mean: my writing here is following its own ritual discipline. Previous instalments have loosened their belt a little – call this penance. 45 sections of 45 words each, mostly written in chunks of 45 minutes, with two songs and their two chords looping.
21.
Jeanette Winterson grew up in North-West England, surrounded by an older generation of working-class Pentecostals who heard ‘the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home,’ and consequently ‘quoted Shakespeare and the Bible,’ and sometimes John Donne, ‘without knowing the source, or misquoting or mixing.’
22.
She fears that modern Bible translations have severed an ‘easy everyday connection’ between ‘uneducated men and women,’ like her own family, and ‘four hundred years of the English language.’ I think about my granddad’s treasury of quotations. I run a Twitter search: ‘@mountain_goats “Vatican II.”’
23.
I learn in the process that John Darnielle had a brief stint teaching the catechism in the early 90s, which raises more questions than it answers. Unsurprisingly, he gave it up, having raised too many unanswered questions of his own to remain a practising congregant.
24.
Some of those questions were political: his support of reproductive justice was one major sticking point. But like my parents, he sees being Catholic as separable from doing what the Pope says: ‘I left the Church a long time ago, but you’re always Catholic, right?’
25.
When Pope John Paul II died, my Dad, who says he feels like a vampire when he steps into a church, came home drunk from the pub and tried to light a candle for him. This happened in 2005, but to me, it’s spiritual 2004.
26.
Spiritual 2004 is also when I went to Dublin for the first time since childhood and startled my Mum with a comment made while walking back from St Patrick’s Cathedral: the journey back is always shorter. I was referring only to our perceptions of distance.
27.
By spiritual 2004, I mean that between about 13 and 16 years old I couldn’t tell you what happened in what order. I was trying out many different selves. Each one must have shaped the next, but to me now they’re a blur, a loop.
28.
I have a song going round and round in my head: the closest I usually come to a devotional exercise. It’s ‘Whole Wide World’: a chill-hop remix by an artist called badgerblossom. Hushed downtempo beats, glacially phased guitar. It captures the slow way snow melts.
29.
Fingers coming off the strings is a texture. Breathing out is a texture. Getting high after school, telling my Nan I needed to lie down, I had concussion, I think I hit my head on a climbing frame, is a texture. Real arrogance burning inside.
30.
I get off the schoolbus around 4pm and go to her house for about an hour before my parents finish work, almost every day for seven years. I help with her crosswords, and she tells me about Kind Hearts and Coronets, Rock Hudson, Alan Ladd.
31.
I’m straightening my hair, buying wide ties, to look like Charlie from Fightstar, who used to be Charlie from Busted. I’m sitting morosely on the steps of Peterborough Guildhall with Liam: painted nails and flaky pastry. I know from Instagram that he’s since gone bald.
32.
On a train to Newcastle, another awkward metalhead gives me her number on a slip of paper: she’s seen me reading Kerrang! magazine. I take blurry photos of the Tyne; now I live here. On a ferry to Amsterdam, I watch Closer with my mother.
33.
I’m on the phone to this stranger in the passenger seat of a Škoda Octavia, immediately running out of things to say. I’m playing tennis, terribly, with a whole class watching me, laughing, from a forest-green demountable classroom. It’s been years since my last confession.
34.
There are ammonites in the marble floor of the Queensgate shopping centre. When we aren’t riding up and down the escalators for something to do, I look at them. Apparently the marble was sourced from Bavaria. Until now, I wasn’t even sure they were real.
35.
Ammonites were ‘born with tiny shells,’ onto which, ‘as they grew, they built new chambers.’ At unknown intervals, these animals - which my grandmother loved - would displace their entire bodies into the newest, outermost chamber, sealing off the old ‘living quarters’ they’d since outgrown.
36.
Another text that’s been circulating in my head: ‘The Chambered Nautilus,’ by Oliver Wendell Holmes. In Holmes’s intricate poem, the shell’s ‘frail tenant’ continually upends his ‘dim dreaming life’: leaving ‘the past year’s dwelling for the new,’ stealing ‘with soft step its shining archway through.’
37.
Holmes presented this movement in religious terms, as the progress of the soul towards freedom. Holmes also expelled three Black students admitted to Harvard medical school in 1850, ‘after a group of white students and alumni objected’: one among his own life’s many ‘chambered cell[s].’
38.
I tried, a few years ago, to write a shape poem about a nautilus:
39.
I’ve also been trying, and failing, to find another Darniellean document: a poem that I know exists, that I read a few months ago, that no longer seems to be anywhere online, its mysteries now behind a veil. It’s called ‘An Atheist Prays the Rosary.’
40.
Somehow, I’d never noticed before that something else happens in the 40 Watt Club performance, off-mic, after they scream ‘praying the rosary,’ something I couldn’t catch until Tiess McKenzie – a friendly stranger on Facebook – clarified it for me: The Lord is with thee…
41.
I don’t know the last time I recited a ‘Hail Mary’; I don’t think I know the words any more. To John Darnielle, in this moment, it feels as if they were present instinctively. He doesn’t make it to the end, but the song does.
42.
Pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death: the hour when we have to account for our actions, like, say, shooting somebody in the face at a liquor store. The Rosary here is immediately followed by the moment of re-affirmed transgression.
43.
The film of Brighton Rock ends with a loop: a skipping record, on which Rose (Carol Marsh), listens to Pinkie saying over and over, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ She doesn’t – yet – hear the cruel things he recorded after.
44.
Stardom never came for Carol Marsh, though she did appear as Lucy in the 1950s Hammer Horror Dracula. I’m looking at a picture of her in her 80s, smiling with another of the Count’s victims at a 2007 reunion. I hope she enjoyed her life.
45.
A Rosary ends at its beginning. An ammonite moves forward: a spiral is not a circle. But a prayer lifts up from the rounds of repetition, towards clearer air, where we will recognize each other: the way we really are; the way we’ve always been.
This week, Richard is getting into the first affogato of the year.
2004: 'Against Pollution'