We’re not done with the wrestlers yet. ‘Blood Capsules’ wasn’t actually released in 2016, but I think a few episodes ago I referenced the concept of time as an endless river so we’ll go with it. Played a fair amount on the band’s 2015-17 tours for a non-album release, ‘Blood Capsules’ might be seen as sonically bridging the hard-edged, driving aspects of the one-last-fight-type numbers on its sort-of parent record Beat the Champ, and the more exploratory, 80s-influenced songs of Goths.
Strolling into the listener’s lobby with a wriggly, Johnny Marr-ish riff which expands into what Peter Hughes referred to a little wistfully as the only time he’d ever get to play ‘disco wah-wah guitar’ on a Mountain Goats record, ‘Blood Capsules’ was released as a bonus single with some pre-orders of Beat the Champ on vinyl. Hughes encouraged Darnielle to record the track even though it wasn’t destined for the album, and deeply shapes its sound which is distinctive within the catalogue. While its spring-loaded movement might recall some of that stranger Champ middle section which I wrote about last time, the sounds Hughes is channelling point the way towards the engagement with genres from his and Darnielle’s adolescent days on the following, keyboards and bass-led album.
Thematically, it shares concerns with characters on both: the man trapped in a constant performance of rage, perhaps unable to even ‘dial it back backstage’ on ‘Werewolf Gimmick,’ for instance, or the speaker of ‘Shelved’ who has to face the fact that ‘the ride’s over,’ if he refuses to work with any of the music industry’s requests (touring as support for other, younger artists or co-writing songs in an L.A. studio):
You can’t pay me to make that kind of music
Not gonna swallow that pill
Not long after this, something extremely rare happens which, like much of the material on Goths, as I’ll discuss next time, is also very funny - Peter Hughes completes the song, both as lyricist and vocalist, as if to indicate how drastic a change of perspective the ageing goth is undergoing:
Maybe Dad is right
I’m still young
And I can write C++ just as good as anyone
Goths, which Darnielle would have been working on through 2016, reflects extensively on the passage of time, including the kinds of shifts in perspective this moment represents. ‘Blood Capsules,’ like the seasoned ‘professional’ featured on ‘Bones Don’t Rust’ and his kin on many songs on Bleed Out a few years later, is about what happens when you can’t really see your way clear to a shift in perspective.1
Like another old goth on ‘Paid in Cocaine’ - ‘work to pay down the interest on the mortgage / Used to get paid by the gram’ - the narrator here makes us fully aware of his economic constraints. The last of the East Coast money has run dry; there are payments overdue to what the speaker, with a tight-lipped insouciance which prefigures the swaggering style of ‘Guys On Every Corner,’ will only call ‘certain individuals.’ This first verse relishes its ‘casual’ wordplay so much that this seems to define its tone, but by the second we’re in no doubt how serious the situation is: even if our not-quite hero is ‘staying in nights, eating alone,’ ‘Somebody’s gotta pay the gas bill / It’s not gonna go away on its own.’
As is unignorably true in music, too, ‘there just isn’t any money / On the independent scene,’ and while the Mountain Goats are an established-enough concern that I don’t see them robbing banks any time soon, the narrator here is moved by the closing net of debt and poverty to make some pretty risky choices. In this he’s arguably on a continuum with the coal-miner characters addressed in ‘Dark as a Dungeon,’ a Merle Travis song which Darnielle covered in the solo set of the same 2016 Chicago performance from which I’m taking the main live recording of ‘Blood Capsules’ today:
It’s many a man I have known in my day
Who lived but to labor his whole life away
Like a fiend with his dope, or a drunkard his wine
A man must have lust for the lure of the mine
Though some of the characters in Darnielle’s (often elliptical) songwriting have more tangibly pressing economic circumstances than others, he grew up around the labour movement and has performed union songs on a number of occasions. There probably weren’t a lot of solidarity organisations assisting down-on-their-luck 1980s wrestlers, though, and so our narrator here opts for a real-life heel turn, intending to use his intimidating size and a mouth full of fake blood, a tool of his performances in the ring, to somehow rob a bank. The details of the scheme are never made clear, but we rush headlong in short phrases, over edgy extended chords, towards its central component:
I strolled into the lobby
Mouth full
Blood capsules
The wrestler-turned-robber is instilling fear in the normies in the bank line, but soon realises that whatever he has planned can’t go much further than this (presumably he has no desire to shed real blood): ‘I know this isn’t gonna work,’ and the outcome seems likely to be a long stretch behind bars or far away: ‘I guess I’ll see ya when I see ya.’ His final lament is darkly humorous, but in the circumstances it’s pretty crushing too: ‘I can’t work any other jobs / This was my last and best idea.’
I never followed up on it, but not long after I heard the song I had my own idea: to get those two lines cross-stitched and hung on the wall of my office. In 2016 I’d already started teaching undergraduate students while I finished my PhD between Birmingham and Stratford. I could work plenty of other jobs, of course, but just as there isn’t any money in the independent scene, there wasn’t much in writing, and becoming an academic along the way seemed like one of the most viable ways to keep it as a central part of my life (a fair proportion of poets I know my own age have done something similar.) By this point, although I was still oscillating between early modern studies and creative writing, I was publishing in both fields, and it was pretty clear that I now expected my professional life to turn around one or the other, or both. This picture of me reading children’s poems at a Blackwell’s bookshop in Holborn - in full flow and in dinosaur T-shirt - was on the homepage on my first professional website that year, which seems indicative.
As with the photo last time round, I’ve picked out a poem for today which in some ways predicts where I would be a few years down the road - passing over the plethora of unpublished stuff which, in attention-seeking titles like ‘Rebrand As Wound’ and ‘Cleaning The Apocalypse,’ mostly indicates that for this year and much of the next two I was steadily becoming a bit mentally ill. That year I took my first ever trip to the US: on the plane, I’d listened to the soundtrack of this new show everyone was raving about called Hamilton. The world in which Lin-Manuel Miranda has a guest feature on a new Mountain Goats album and Trump is president for a second time would have seemed as impossibly distant then as the abstract, more joyful being invoked in a self-pitying poem I wrote while feeling awful for no good reason in Northern California: ‘the self / I have kept under glass / for the future / a long time hence.’
Here we are now in the future, where most of my poems are not written for the purposes of private handwringing, but often for external prompts with some kind of public utility - as you read this, I’m currently coordinating a council-funded project to have lines of poems by local writers painted up on some walls around North Shields. When I wrote the poem below, about my local museum at the time - The Museum of the Jewellery Quarter, in Birmingham, where I lived with my partner in an apartment in a converted factory with large blue-framed windows - I think I was just starting to work out what it would mean to write poetry that faced outwards, that put the kinds of thing I could do in the service of someone other than myself. It’s certainly an early attempt at condensing this kind of social history into a poetic narrative, and rather too pleased with itself, but these days that community approach is a big part of my work. Which doesn’t mean there are any more residuals.
Smith & Pepper Factory, 1951
May the good god of shiny things look fair on Harry Martin, seventeen, his turn-ups turned away by Mr. Smith who’d clocked the danger glinting in their folds. What shame, to say he lived for dust; that tucked, like pens, behind his Brylcreemed peak, were egg-shell specks of fourteen-carat gold, his hair a nest of loot;
which might explain his hopeful gleam all hours beneath the howling radio, the screaming belts, the thud of blanking dies, and even his composure at the shriek when Patty caught a kiss-curl in the belt — shearing her free, returning to his peg, her scalp less ruby-red, more Tamworth ham.
For which of us has not been tempted by that old wives’ tale of hard-earned alchemy: a jeweller’s apron, shaken, melted down, yielding the gold to buy a wedding suit? And who would not wish to be lemmel? To see the shorn-off shavings of the years reformed into an ingot, solid, pure — a lifetime’s precious salvage totalled up, made more than worth its weight in what we’d lost.
These are the blessings sent to Harry Martin, clutching his off-cut prize down Branston Street, not knowing that his lungs, at seventeen, have started to collect their own fine spray; the rust-red treasury of jeweller’s rouge he smuggles out beneath his clothes the day he cashes in, swaps packets at the pub, ducks in a neighbour’s shop and buys two rings.
This week, Richard is getting into mince pies and the X-Files.
Credit for this point goes to Mateus Borges and Ben Franklin, who have pointed out this character type across the albums of this period in Darnielle’s writing.
