skepticatfirst

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Member Back to Top Post by skepticatfirst on Hey all,



My name's Andrew; I've been reading things here for a while but this is my first post. I've got a story to share which is going to run a little long, so my apologies in advance, I hope it'll be welcome anyway.



Unlike everyone else here, I've never been to a THS show. I'm not even a big music guy, which is why I'm only now coming to the Hold Steady, years after everyone else already figured out who they are. Lucky for me I've got a friend who does pay attention to good things happening in music, and he turned me on to them, starting with Separation Sunday. I know I'm the millionth person who got to Cattle and the Creeping Things and was already thinking "this is the best thing I've ever heard" only to have Your Little Hoodrat Friend come on and completely blow me away. No explanation needed so far.



It wasn't too long after that that this same friend went to the ER with pain in his abdomen, only to find out that he had a big tumor in his colon (which they removed) and four smaller tumors in his liver (it had already metastasized). He's a young guy but the prognosis in this situation is pretty grim. I kind of froze up when it happened, looking for something to do about it; there's not a lot you can do. But then a couple of days later another guy made a vow that he was giving up booze until our friend got through it, one way or the other. And when I heard that it hit me: my friend had introduced me to the Hold Steady, it was all I was listening to right then anyway, and there was something special about the music that was probably the closest thing to a church feeling that I could put a hand to. So I kind of made a vow to keep listening to the Hold Steady, and only the Hold Steady, until he got through it, one way or the other.



That was about nine months ago. Since then I've been religiously listening to THS, day in and day out. If somebody else happens to put something on, or I hear something random on the radio, or whatever, that's allowed. But if I pull something up myself, it's the Hold Steady, period. So that's pretty much all I hear.



When this started I hadn't even listened to all the albums yet, and it took me a little while to get through them, because I kept going back to replay them from the beginning. When I got to Stay Positive, I hit the Yeah Sapphire line "these miracles work," and that kind of became the light by which I'm doing this. Statistically, the odds are what they are; medically, what I'm doing has no meaning. But I'm looking for a miracle here.



Eventually I got through the albums, and took to youtube, where I discovered the bonus tracks. In particular, there's a fantastic cellphone video of Milkcrate Mosh from the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland in 2009 that I was listening to over and over at work. One day I stopped and noticed the comment beneath it, just one little five-word comment: "Hallelujah meets Gideon. Poor Charlemagne."



Obviously the names meant something to me at this point, because I'd been through the albums. But those two sentences baffled me. I had no idea how you could get from the actual lyrics of Milkcrate Mosh, to that. What was I missing?



So I did some googling with the names and right away found the Hold Steady Plot Chronology on these boards. That was an eye-opener. A lot of the proposed readings there didn't make sense to me, but I could see where five (the author) was going, and there was good discussion of the claims further on in the thread. And there were other great threads talking about various aspects of the characters and story. So that was pretty cool.



More than that, the community was amazing. Meetups and T-shirts and people being excellent to each other: a real live Unified Scene. I spent time over the next few days reading through old threads; I felt like my first instinct was confirmed. Looking for a miracle is a weird thing to be doing, but what was going on here made me feel like I was looking in the right place.



At this point we're in late May or early June of this year. A few days later, in the same week that I found the Unified Scene boards, I happened to be walking down the stairs in the office when I see this mystery guy who I've crossed paths with a few times. I work in a funny place where people appear out of nowhere to do weird projects a lot: designing things, building things, painting colored walls and tinkering with doorknobs; this guy is one of those guys, a big, cheerful dude, but you never hear him speak and you don't know who he is. So I come down the stairs and there he is, crossing the landing through a fat diamond of sunlight: and he's wearing a Unified Scene T-shirt.



I had Sweet Payne going through my head from a couple straight hours of headphones and for a second I thought I was just seeing the words that were stuck in my brain, but that's really what he was wearing. A surreal moment, silence and bright light. And maybe two hours later I get a phone call from the hospital, where my friend's been visiting a specialist; they see a chance to resect the liver enough to get the tumors. It's an exaggeration to call it good news. But it was a chance, certainly the best news he'd had since the whole thing started. And I'm thinking about the Unified Scene guy, and feeling like I've been shown a sign.



Anyway, that was six months ago. We had a few hopeful weeks there, but they never did get a chance to do the surgery; they were about to, when things took a turn for the worse, and have only gotten worse since. But my friend is still alive, and it's not too late for a miracle. So I'm still looking. And I'm still listening only to the Hold Steady.



Two things have developed out of this on my end. The first is that, over time, I started having aha-moments about the story. At first it was small things here and there. There's stuff in one song that will shed light on another one, and when you suddenly hear the two things side by side, you think, that can't be a coincidence. But then something big comes to you, something satisfying and with real explanatory power, and you know you're on to something. And it snowballs, even through false starts and seeming contradictions, until you understand more and more. There's a ton to be said about that, but in short I now believe there is in fact a detailed, carefully crafted story that involves not just nearly all of the songs, but nearly every line of nearly all of the songs.



The second thing is that I've been thinking a lot about what I'm doing, and about miracles. Listening to these songs made me pick up the New Testament this summer, and for the first time in years I read the gospels. I'm not a Christian and you won't catch me going to church. I don't think Jesus is the son of God any more than all of us are daughters and sons of God. But man, you read about what he was doing and saying, and it is hard not to feel that he was onto something, something that came out in a very powerful way through his healing of people. There was one passage that really stuck with me, the one about the father of the child possessed with a demon, who came to Christ to ask him to heal his son:



Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief [Mark 9:23-24].



If I believed more, would it make a difference? If I kept it before my mind constantly, could I affect my friend's illness in a way that I can't because I don't? I'm human; I mean I am busy, I have a job, a family, I have to work, and get the car fixed, and sleep; but more than that, I forget. I forget so easily. It slips my mind all the time. Worse, I become accustomed to things going badly for him, and end up believing that, more than I believe in the miracle that he needs. The more I think about this, the more it seems to me that the only answer is to look for the needed belief, not in one mind that simply isn't up to it, but in many minds that can keep up, as a whole, what one mind would let drop. Help my unbelief.



Which brings me to what I'm doing here. As a result of all this, I find myself with what looks to me like a coherent story of Charlemagne and the rest of the crew in my hands. There are a few corners I haven't worked out yet, and I'm sure I missed some things and got others wrong, and of course Craig can keep spinning it out with new material as long as he likes. But at any rate, there's this thing in front of me, and it really is awesome, and I love these characters like crazy, and my friend is running out of time. So I'm going to lay it out here, and if there's some little footnote or explanation that makes someone out there happy, or gives them joy in some way, I'm going to ask them to spare a thought for my friend, to imagine him with the cancer gone from his body, or say a prayer, or do whatever they do, however they roll. Let's call my friend Still Alive Carl. Not quite his real name, but whatever God is or are, he or she will be able to find him at that address.



That's it for the back story. From here out I'm going to keep it clinical and just talk about the songs and the characters. I'm not even sure if this post will go through without moderation or whatever, but if it does I'll post again with a first installment. I thought about trying to lay out the whole story in its complete form right off. But it feels more in keeping with what I'm trying to do, and more respectful of the crazy, fantastic thing that the band have built, to walk you instead down the same path I went, keeping a lid on most of the fog and wrong turns. It's quite a ride.



Thanks to whoever ends up reading.











skepticatfirst

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Member Back to Top Post by skepticatfirst on Actually, before I start, two bits of prefatory matter.



1) I get that some people believe there's a story and some don't, and that's totally cool. I'm just putting this out there and everyone can dig it or not as they please. Nothing in the world would make me happier than to be corrected about stuff I've got wrong, either.



If people want to apply a standard of judgment to this or any other interpretation --- my personal preference is to do so, and with a high bar --- then I guess I would make an appeal to some standard of completeness and coherence. In other words, you have to try to explain as much as you can, and the whole thing has to be internally consistent. (For example, you have to pull in both Joke about Jamaica and Both Crosses at some point, and when you do, you have to be able to reconcile "one of them was crucified" and "two of them were crucified" and do so in a way that is supported elsewhere.) In my ideal world, this is The Test, and it gets applied afterward, after we've had a good look at the whole thing. We don't know from the beginning what Craig's rules are, and there's no way to know what they are until we try out different possibilities and see how far we can get with them by this light.



2) Before I jump in to talking for a really long time about something Craig Finn wrote, I want to express my massive, this-side idolatrous appreciation for what Tad Kubler has written. Nine months in and I'm still getting chills at all the same turns in the music, everywhere from Citrus to Criminal Fingers. It's not getting old. Craig's like Newton on the seashore honing jewels out of pebbles, Tad's bringing the ocean to do the honing with. Here's to them and the rest of the guys keeping it together, no matter what happens.



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Member Back to Top Post by skepticatfirst on So the first things that kind of clicked for me were all about Jesse, keying off discussions that took place here, back in the Heaven is Whenever thread and elsewhere. But the first really satisfying aha that I had was about Gideon. I love Gideon; I mean I love all the characters, they're all fantastic, full human beings. But Gideon is just awesome.



I can talk a lot about how Craig writes, but one of the important, and pretty obvious, things is that he's just not all that into names. He might write a song that was mostly about a spear, and another one that was mostly about a rope, and another one that was mostly about a tree trunk. And then a few albums later he might slip in something about an elephant --- and you suddenly realize that all four songs are about the same thing. (Or, more likely, he'll toss out something about Jumbo, or Dumbo. Or maybe "who the hell is the pink guy?")



But he does use names sometimes, and they're a good starting place. So what do we know about Gideon?



1) We know that "the gin was just like Gideon" [MM].



2) We know that there "ain't no getting through to Gideon. He lost his mind when they [the Cityscape Skins] jumped him in" [YGD]. That is, he got initiated into Skins' gang, and lost his mind.



3) We know that "He likes the part where the traders get chased out from the temple" [CatCT].



4) We know that "He got messed up with some messed up magicians" [SPayne].



We know a good bit more than that, but that's enough to start.



Let me begin with #3. I came into this having read the Hold Steady Plot Chronology and so forth, and so I had the idea that Gideon's a bad guy. He peels off Holly, and eventually stabs Charlemagne after Holly turns Judas on him; that was my running hypothesis. But #3 says different. I think it's self-evident that the only people who choose the part where the traders get chased out from the temple are people who have some fucking good thing going on deep down. There's lots more in #3 but let's take this much for now.



Then I was thinking about Knuckles, and what is it about? It's about a crazy-talking guy with gang tattoos who wants to be respected as a badass gangster, but nobody takes him seriously. Again, that's



- crazy-talking ("lost his mind" from #2)

- gangster with zero badass authority ("jumped him in" from #2)

- who's not at all the bad guy he wants to be (back to #3).



New running hypothesis: Knuckles is about Gideon, from Gideon's point of view. So let's take that, and add two more things to the list:



5) We know that Gideon is all about being "hard" [Knuckles]. (That's a double entendre, but I'll talk about Craig and double entendres --- "bash," "crush," "sweet," "rock," "score," etc. --- another time.)



6) We know that Gideon thinks "it's hard to stay in bed" [Knuckles].



Why is Gideon all about being a bad guy? Because he's actually a good guy. Why is he all about being hard (#5)? Because he's actually soft.



Then I was thinking about a couple of bits of Records and Tapes, including the last verse:



She disappeared with some kid in the cape

He's the one that always gets her the highest

...

Silver metal flake up on Lyndale and Lake

The boots and braces and the kid with the cape

That dude from your crew, who was always awake

I'm pretty sure I know how he did that

I'm pretty sure I know how he did that

I'm pretty sure I know how he did that now now now



Well, that first part sure sounds like Gideon getting Holly high and disappearing with her in Milkcrate Mosh. And even though the cape thing is weird, if the kid with the cape in the first part is the kid with the cape in the second part, then we have another connection: he was "always awake" ... like Gideon, for whom "it's hard to stay in bed" (#6). This is Gideon all right. (Also check out "He stayed up for 16 nights at a stretch, he was wrecked" [TL]. It took me a very long time to figure out what the no-sleep part was about; more on this much later.)



But what is the cape? And what does "I'm pretty sure I know how he did that" mean?



And then I realized that "I'm pretty sure I know how he did that" is what we say after we see a magician do a trick. And a cape is what a magician wears. And Gideon "got messed up with some messed up magicians" (#4). And if we go back to Milkcrate Mosh, as the tryst with Holly approaches, Gideon's "waving Marlboros like magic wands" [MM].



Gideon's a magician.



We now know who's got "psycho eyes and a stovepipe hat" [Swish], too: it's lost-his-mind Gideon in full magician gear. But that's not the most fun thing about this. The most fun thing about this is that Gideon is the "You" of Stevie Nix.



He "came into the ER drinking gin from a jam jar" because he's a badass gangster (#2) and "the gin was just like Gideon" (#1).



He's "up in his loft getting soft" because he's soft, not hard (#5).



The "long black shawl" is his cape.



Writing all this out is so much more work than I thought it would be, and this is just a drop in the bucket ... I'm going to try to keep cranking it out at a steady pace though. I'll see what I can do.



If you liked this at all, please spare a thought or a prayer for Still Alive Carl. Thanks.































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Member Back to Top Post by skepticatfirst on Man, thank you guys. I believe that, too, that they'll always be the Hold Steady. Even if I never get to see them play this thing they've done is permanent, and permanently with me.



To continue with an addendum to yesterday's post: one thing I love about Gideon with the "long black shawl" is how Craig uses the title of the song to set it up. You don't get any farther than the words "Stevie Nix" and you're already committed to identifying "you" in the first line with one of the girls ("shawl" closes the deal). And he chooses to tell the story from a perspective that addresses Gideon in the second person, since a third-person pronoun would give it away. This is painstaking, deliberate art, in both senses of the word.



It's Christmas, so for today I'll just add a little more to the Gideon portrait, keying off the following two verses from Hostile, Mass.



He had a painters cap, it said Panama Jack

It had the flaps on the back that kept the sun off his neck

He woke up deep in Hostile, Massachussetts

Reaching out to try to touch the special effects



He had no shoes and no pants

And they dressed him in a shirt with a collar and called him Porky Pig

The two of you went up to his room

Later on you wouldn't admit you did



There are a number of things here:



1) "He had no shoes and no pants, And they dressed him in a shirt with a collar and called him Porky Pig": that's a hazing ritual; this is Gideon "when they jumped him in" [YGD].



2) "He had a painters cap, it said Panama Jack, It had the flaps on the back that kept the sun off his neck": the guy who needs to worry about a sunburn on his neck is the guy who's unexpectedly had his crust punk dreads [BBlues, GLS] shaved off. This, too, is Gideon when the Skins jumped him in.



3) "He woke up deep in Hostile, Massachussetts, Reaching out to try to touch the special effects": again, Gideon "lost his mind" [YGD] when they jumped him in, and this same image of him reaching out to try to touch the unreal is repeated in Sweet Payne: "Gideon's been living up in Bay City, Michigan ... Strung out on residuals and visuals and laser shows / Reach into the speaker and try to hold on to the quarter notes" [SPayne].



4) "The two of you went up to his room. Later on you wouldn't admit you did": In talking about Stevie Nix we already established that the "you" of "You're up in your loft getting soft" [SN] was Gideon. So in HM and SN both we have Gideon living upstairs. (This is interesting too vis-a-vis "Upstairs at some hesher's apartment" [SS] in an apparent rehash of the stabbing scene in Saddle Shoes, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.)



These things lead into yet more about Gideon, but let me tie it off there; it's a reasonable approximation of how far I got early on (in reality I struggled for a long time to confirm some parts of the above, while there were a few additional things that I was already wondering about; but I want to try to present this in neat packages).



Just a bit more about him getting his head shaved when they jumped him in:



"Went down with some crust punk junk and woke up with a straight edge band" [BBlues]: again, this is Gideon getting jumped in by the skins, and his head shaved. Dreads are a crust punk thing, "straight edge" refers both to the Skins somewhere on the punk spectrum and to a straightedge razor (I assume that the sXe handle and Minor Threat line ultimately came from the headshaving razor, but if this is just another Finn double entendre, that'll do too). There's also "He was dreadlocked in the dorms in the Colorado corn" [GLS], apparently also about Gideon.



Here my almost null knowledge of the late 80's early 90's Twin Cities punk scene runs completely out of gas, and I can't say whether Gideon's knowledge of Bob Marley ("He said I got through the part about the exodus / And up to then I only knew it was a movement of the people" [CatCT]) and his having worn dreads are related. But somebody here probably knows.



Merry Christmas to everybody. A double order of love and respect all around.

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Let's go back and talk about Jesse a little bit.



When Heaven is Whenever came out there was some great discussion about Jesse here, and people figured out a lot of things (some particularly good posts are these, from



Jesse's been present in the story since AKM; Hurricane J on HiW is merely the first time that she's named. (Again, Craig's *not* big on using names, *is* big on not spelling stuff out.)



From Hurricane J we hear that Jesse:

1) is a waitress, bangs around in the restaurant

2) is hanging with a bunch of not-positive kids, met a lot of boys this summer

3) smokes a lot of cigs

4) is 22

5) goes to a guy's car a lot in a way that is puzzling to someone who already knows she's banging around (#2, #5)

6) in spite of banging around, has an intimate relationship with the speaker that she wants to hang on to

7) is younger than the speaker ("I want you to grow ... forget all the things that I showed you ... wait till she gets older")

8) is made happy by a place that you can drive to, where you can stop and drink and kiss

9) feels one way at night, and another way in the morning

10) is preoccupied with heaven, but says that it's hypothetical

11) is preoccupied with feeling warm



We know that the speaker in Hurricane J:



12) is concerned about Jesse's welfare and the influence of kids around her, and feels responsible for teaching her things

13) is particularly concerned about her getting with the "hard" boys at the harbor (see what we said about Gideon earlier)

14) wants to break up with her but at the same time suggests driving somewhere to make out

15) thinks of her as being named for a storm, not a saint, even though there's no Hurricane or Tropical Storm Jesse/Jessica, and there are traditions for both St. Jesse and St. Jessica



In Certain Songs, the person being addressed:



- is a younger girl ("I guess you're old enough to know"); cf. #7 above

- is roughly twenty years old; cf. #4 above

- works in a restaurant (she knows "bartenders and the kitchen workers," there's a "jukebox") and wears a waitress' "shirttails"; cf. #1

- is banging round in restaurants ("pulling out her shirttails and she's jacking up her socks" after sex on the job); cf. #1

- is obsessed with "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights," but hasn't found a heaven/paradise that she can hold on to; cf. #5, #8 and #10



We also get a speaker who:



- is trying to tell this girl some things about life ("I guess you're old enough to know"); cf. #7

- notices her being eyed by the "guys along the harbor bars"; cf. #13

- is warning her that "hard drugs are for the bartenders and the kitchen workers and the bartender's friends"; cf. #12

- is trying to coax her away from her current peril, with stories of the east coast promising things that are very dear to her:

... there is a perfection (like heaven or paradise); cf. #10

... of "warm" beer and summer "smoke"; cf. #3, #11

... and Meat Loaf and Billy Joel, authors of the 1977 songs "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights" and "Only the Good Die Young" that she loves, a love that, again, explains the car thing: cf. #5, #8



That's quite a lot of correspondence in support of the claim that the girl being addressed in Certain Songs, and Jesse, are the same girl.



I haven't yet established that Cattle and the Creeping Things is told from Charlemagne's perspective. But in the meantime I think I can advance that here and get people to accept it as a working hypothesis.



So when Charlemagne says: "Silly rabbit, tripping is for teenagers, murder is for murderers and hard drugs are for bartenders / I think I might have mentioned that before" [CatCT], we get a few things out of it:



Certain Songs and Hurricane J are both told from Charlemagne's perspective. He is the bartender in a restaurant where Jesse works as a waitress. She's much younger than him and they've got a complicated thing going on. He's dealing drugs from the bar, but at the same time he's trying to keep her away from the hard stuff. And although he's worried about her getting with the hard boys at the harbor, and trying to get her to go to some other part of the country, he's also half-assedly trying to break up with her. Not a complete picture, but all these things are apparently true.



There are more songs about Jesse, and lots more to be said about Hurricane J and Certain Songs. But a bit at a time.



To be honest, I'm feeling a little embarrassed to ask for my thing, especially because I know you all have lost truly close friends here, and I'm just some guy. But the situation is what it is and I can't really allow myself to feel embarrassed about it. So, if you're getting a smidge of happiness out of anything in the above, I would be grateful if you could say a prayer for Still Alive Carl.

Ha, yeah, I know. Seriously, I really appreciate being given the space to do this sort of obsessive thing that I need to try to do. After the first post I said I was going to keep it clinical, so let me move ahead with the story. I promise we'll get to the characters' ideas about Jesus soon enough, which is going to be more interesting.Let's go back and talk about Jesse a little bit.When Heaven is Whenever came out there was some great discussion about Jesse here, and people figured out a lot of things (some particularly good posts are these, from spanishjohnny and st5801 and there's somuchjoy 's awesome discovery of Hurricane Holly in 1976). It was this discussion that first made me realize that paying close attention might lead somewhere. But let me start from the beginning, just to cull the good stuff and get it in one place.Jesse's been present in the story since AKM; Hurricane J on HiW is merely the first time that she's named. (Again, Craig's *not* big on using names, *is* big on not spelling stuff out.)From Hurricane J we hear that Jesse:1) is a waitress, bangs around in the restaurant2) is hanging with a bunch of not-positive kids, met a lot of boys this summer3) smokes a lot of cigs4) is 225) goes to a guy's car a lot in a way that is puzzling to someone who already knows she's banging around (#2, #5)6) in spite of banging around, has an intimate relationship with the speaker that she wants to hang on to7) is younger than the speaker ("I want you to grow ... forget all the things that I showed you ... wait till she gets older")8) is made happy by a place that you can drive to, where you can stop and drink and kiss9) feels one way at night, and another way in the morning10) is preoccupied with heaven, but says that it's hypothetical11) is preoccupied with feeling warmWe know that the speaker in Hurricane J:12) is concerned about Jesse's welfare and the influence of kids around her, and feels responsible for teaching her things13) is particularly concerned about her getting with the "hard" boys at the harbor (see what we said about Gideon earlier)14) wants to break up with her but at the same time suggests driving somewhere to make out15) thinks of her as being named for a storm, not a saint, even though there's no Hurricane or Tropical Storm Jesse/Jessica, and there are traditions for both St. Jesse and St. JessicaIn Certain Songs, the person being addressed:- is a younger girl ("I guess you're old enough to know"); cf. #7 above- is roughly twenty years old; cf. #4 above- works in a restaurant (she knows "bartenders and the kitchen workers," there's a "jukebox") and wears a waitress' "shirttails"; cf. #1- is banging round in restaurants ("pulling out her shirttails and she's jacking up her socks" after sex on the job); cf. #1- is obsessed with "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights," but hasn't found a heaven/paradise that she can hold on to; cf. #5, #8 and #10We also get a speaker who:- is trying to tell this girl some things about life ("I guess you're old enough to know"); cf. #7- notices her being eyed by the "guys along the harbor bars"; cf. #13- is warning her that "hard drugs are for the bartenders and the kitchen workers and the bartender's friends"; cf. #12- is trying to coax her away from her current peril, with stories of the east coast promising things that are very dear to her:... there is a perfection (like heaven or paradise); cf. #10... of "warm" beer and summer "smoke"; cf. #3, #11... and Meat Loaf and Billy Joel, authors of the 1977 songs "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights" and "Only the Good Die Young" that she loves, a love that, again, explains the car thing: cf. #5, #8That's quite a lot of correspondence in support of the claim that the girl being addressed in Certain Songs, and Jesse, are the same girl.I haven't yet established that Cattle and the Creeping Things is told from Charlemagne's perspective. But in the meantime I think I can advance that here and get people to accept it as a working hypothesis.So when Charlemagne says: "Silly rabbit, tripping is for teenagers, murder is for murderers and hard drugs are for bartenders / I think I might have mentioned that before" [CatCT], we get a few things out of it:Certain Songs and Hurricane J are both told from Charlemagne's perspective. He is the bartender in a restaurant where Jesse works as a waitress. She's much younger than him and they've got a complicated thing going on. He's dealing drugs from the bar, but at the same time he's trying to keep her away from the hard stuff. And although he's worried about her getting with the hard boys at the harbor, and trying to get her to go to some other part of the country, he's also half-assedly trying to break up with her. Not a complete picture, but all these things are apparently true.There are more songs about Jesse, and lots more to be said about Hurricane J and Certain Songs. But a bit at a time.To be honest, I'm feeling a little embarrassed to ask for my thing, especially because I know you all have lost truly close friends here, and I'm just some guy. But the situation is what it is and I can't really allow myself to feel embarrassed about it. So, if you're getting a smidge of happiness out of anything in the above, I would be grateful if you could say a prayer for Still Alive Carl.

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Member Back to Top Post by skepticatfirst on Thanks, delboy. I seriously appreciate it.



Let me go a little further with Jesse.



We left off with the idea that Hurricane J and Certain Songs are both told from Charlemagne's perspective, about Jesse. If we look at Big Cig, we can draw strong connections between it and these songs also:



- "She says she always smoked cigarettes / Ever since she was seven"; cf. "all the cigs" [HJ], "smoke" [CSongs]

- "Some nights she's a scientist / She pulls me into experiments / Squeezes hard and / Charts the forward progress"; Charlemagne and Jesse have a thing going on, but it's kind of complicated, not exactly a pure and simple love [HJ]



For his part, the speaker says:



- "I know that she's gorgeous"; cf. "you're a beautiful girl" [HJ]

- "I serve my purpose"; cf. all the evidence that Charlemagne is trying to keep Jesse away from the hard drugs, the hard boys at the harbor, to persuade her to leave the Twin Cities scene [HJ, CSongs]. He tells himself he's serving his purpose, anyway.

- "She can probably find a better guy": cf. "Jesse, I don't think I'm the guy" [HJ]

- "I'm pretty sure we both agree / We can both take some liberties": Charlemagne knows she's banging around and he's OK with it [HJ, CSongs]. He's pretty sure that she feels the same way about him, too. But it sounds like he might not have actually checked with her about that.

- "This little tryst is hard to quit / So we just sit here and live with it": again, Charlemagne's half-assedly trying to break up with Jesse, and failing [HJ]

- "It's not love / It's not even a crush": again, not exactly a pure and simple love [HJ].



So it appears that Big Cig too is song told from Charlemagne's perspective, about Jesse.



Not to get sidetracked, but holy hell, I can't get enough of Steve's guitar on Big Cig. "Burns on her skirt and smoke in her eyes" is a great line, but nothing breathes life into Jesse's anger like the urgency of his playing under the words. He makes you feel it in your gut and really care about her. I've got a soft spot for Gideon but I really love Jesse too.



Then there's the familiar, rainy-morning sadness of 40 Bucks, which makes you care in another way. We can hold that too up against HJ and CSongs:



- "her favorite band": Jesse's obsessed with music [CSongs]

- "She didn’t go to work again": Jesse's a waitress at a restaurant

- "She’s always been a pretty big fan / Certain songs get scratched right in": "Certain songs they get so scratched into our souls" [CSongs]

- "She stayed out too late... When morning comes round again / The sadness crashes down": Jesse has a tendency to feel one way at night and another way in the morning [HJ]

- "When he first came on to me it sounded kinda like a symphony": Jesse's banging around [HJ, CSongs]

- "It was hearts and horns and winds and warm and wet": Jesse wants to be warm [HJ, CSongs]

- "Her mother loves the seventies / The leather vests and the Dungarees": we're getting some back story here that explains why Jesse has a special love for the music of 1977 [CSongs]

- "They made her on the night they met / In a motel made of cigarettes": we're getting some back story here that explains why Jesse smokes so much, ever since she was seven [HJ, CSongs, BCig]

- "There are days when she gets fatigued": "all the cigs" are making Jesse "tired" [HJ]

- "our dreams sing-a-long to the music of our youth": Jesse is all about "the songs where everybody finally sings along" [CSongs]



So 40 Bucks is also a song about Jesse, told from Jesse's own perspective (in a third person voice, but from her perspective).



We should add Magazines too, just to get one more thing in:



- "She's always funny in the morning / She isn't always funny in the night": Jesse has a tendency to feel one way at night and another way in the morning [HJ, 40B]

- "She mainly trades in adoration": Jesse's not just banging around, she idolizes guys [40B].

- "She gets pretty wasted at the celebrations / The benefits and the building dedications": Charlemagne and Jesse met at a benefit [BCig].

- "When she storms out of the restaurant": Jesse's a waitress at a restaurant where Charlemagne tends bar [HJ, CSongs]. Hurricane Jesse doesn't run, she "storms."

- "I think you're supposed to chase her to the lights": that would be the Dashboard Lights [CSongs, HJ]. Jesse's trying to provoke Charlemagne into a reaction and a commitment. Ellen Foley gives her hope [CSongs].

- "One boy hits her like a tambourine ... She's got boys on board and boys on deck": hits=bangs [same term with same meaning is used in YGD]; she's banging around [HJ, CSongs].

- "The other dissing me on her message machine": even the boys know Charlemagne's kind of in their way. He and Jesse have a complicated, but special, relationship [HJ, BCig].

- "I know you're pretty pissed, I hope you'll still let me kiss you": things are pretty hopelessly effed up, but Charlemagne still wants to kiss her [HJ].



So Magazines also is a song about Jesse from Charlemagne's perspective.



We've got a lot more to work with now. Let's start with a few things.



1) "Her bio-dad played bass guitar / In a five-piece out of Wichita" [40B]: her mom loves the seventies and loved, recklessly, the seventies musicians; Jesse loves the music, too, and has a thing going on with the musicians that's pretty similar ("favorite groups" shows that the episode with the guy from her "favorite band" isn't a one-off).



2) "She’s never even met the dude but she heard the song and it was pretty cool / A sad, slow waltz about a pure and simple love" [40B]: Jesse hasn't ever met her dad. She hasn't found a pure and simple love yet either. And the two things are kind of tangled up, which sheds some light on her obsession with "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights" [CSongs, HJ].



3) "Her therapist says it's dangerous / The way she seeks validation" [BCig]: Charlemagne knows Jesse's seeing a therapist, who's been talking to her about her "banging around" (in general, not just with musicians) and who thinks it's dangerous.



4) "daddy issues" [Magazines]: Charlemagne thinks she's got daddy issues.



Now, one last runaround with 40 Bucks.



There's a psychological peach of a line at the end when Jesse says: "Guys let me cover this / I know you don’t make much money yet, I know it mostly goes to cigarettes" [40B]. We know enough about Jesse to know that *she's* the one who doesn't make much money, and mostly spends it on cigarettes. She has no idea who she's talking to, and isn't even stopping to ask; she's not being frank with anyone here. She's on fire, and she's going to get burned.



The lead-in to the above line explains why:



She doesn’t really do it much

But she could probably get some party stuff.

She doesn’t really do it much

But she could probably get some party stuff.

She says she doesn’t know the guy but she’s pretty sure he’d stop by.

She barely even knows the dude but he’s come around for some other group.

And when he finally calls her back she says ...



The lady doth protest too much; the repeated denials show she's lying. She does do it quite a bit, in fact ("stern and stoned" [CSongs], "She's got some pills some in her purse" [BCig], "We power down and try to socialize" [BCig], "the hard drugs are for the bartenders" which is to say that he's OK with her use of the not-hard drugs [CSongs]). And she knows "the guy" very well: it's Charlemagne, who deals from behind the bar at her restaurant [CSongs].



She loves the music boys, but she can't help turning the whole thing into a demonstration for Charlemagne's benefit. It's him she really wants. And the primary reason for that is revealed in the fact that



She barely even knows the dude but he’s come around for some other group.



is exactly parallel with



She’s never even met the dude but she heard the song and it was pretty cool.



The second one's about her "bio-dad"; the first one, by implicit contrast, is about who she sees as her "real" dad. In a psychologically overpowering way, Jesse has identified Charlemagne with her father (see #1, #2, #3, #4).



Thanks for remembering Still Alive Carl.





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I wish that you'd think about your daughter

'Cause no girl needs her father riding around with Walter



There are other indications that this is Jesse, namely evidence that she's working in a restaurant with a bar: "Doing dishes in the kitchen ...," "Your uptown friends came by the bar last night," "The cops stopped by when I was opening up" [CF].



And the music is foremost in her mind: "They tried to take away the stereo," along with a fantastic bit of musical cognitive dissonance: "Don't you get tired of Revelation songs? / 1988 was a long time ago" [CF] (Revelation Records put out releases by Youth of Today, Shelter, etc. in the late 80's). She doesn't have time for his old-guy music, not reflecting that she's stuck in the songs of a decade further back [CSongs etc.].



More importantly, the Criminal Fingers daughter-father passage continues:



I know the bar isn't safe

But we should probably get together

We should probably get our story straight

'Cause if they take you away

This time I don't think that I can wait for you



We've already understood enough to see that, healthy or not, "dangerous" [BCig] or not, it's Charlemagne Jesse wants, and she's been waiting for him all along --- waiting for him to put a stop to her "liberties" [BCig] with the music boys [40B], waiting for him to chase her to the lights [Magazines]. Charlemagne is deaf to the double entendre, but she's a damn sight better than a pretty good waitress [HJ]. It's only in the above passage that she's finally saying to him, OK; if the cops take you away, then this time I think I really can't wait for you any more.



There are big pieces of the above story that we still haven't got to (and Jesse as POV character in CF opens another can of worms that we'll have to sort through later) but that much is all solid. Charlemagne is not quite an idiot, and he's certainly got his own issues that are distracting him, but when he says "She don't want to wait till she gets older" [HJ] and "You're a pretty good waitress" [HJ], he's being an ass. Craig took a bit of shit for Wait a While --- which is also addressing Jesse, see for example:



- "Another boyfriend": cf. "She's got boys on board and boys on deck" [HJ, Magazines, etc.]

- "you've got a broken heart": cf. "When morning comes round again, the sadness crashes down" [40B, etc.]

- "Making eyes": "C-9 is for the making eyes, it's Paradise By The Dashboard Light" [CSongs]



--- on the ground that the whole "why don't you wait a while?" line of advice was "paternalistic" and judgmental. But the thing is that all these songs are point-of-view songs, told from a particular character's perspective, not Craig's. Built back up into a whole, what we're shown is that Jesse *is* waiting, and that Charlemagne is oblivious to that. These kids all have their issues and weaknesses, but they are who they are, they're running their own lives, and it's OK. We'll get to Charlemagne's messed-up side of the ledger soon enough.



(Note: I can't quite sift whether the point-of-view character for Wait a While is Charlemagne or the Narrator; the jukebox allusion and "wait" itself point to Charlemagne, but the voice comes from a distance that sounds more like the Narrator to me. But I liked dabook's take



Thanks for reading, and for thinking of Still Alive Carl.

Now that we know a little bit about Charlemagne and Jesse's relationship, we can stop for a couple of interesting implications. The fact that they're the only "father-daughter" relationship in the universe of THS characters (the father of the girl in One for the Cutters is mentioned, but doesn't appear in the story) solves one problem for us, namely that the point-of-view character in Criminal Fingers is Jesse, and that she's addressing Charlemagne:I wish that you'd think about your daughter'Cause no girl needs her father riding around with WalterThere are other indications that this is Jesse, namely evidence that she's working in a restaurant with a bar: "Doing dishes in the kitchen ...," "Your uptown friends came by the bar last night," "The cops stopped by when I was opening up" [CF].And the music is foremost in her mind: "They tried to take away the stereo," along with a fantastic bit of musical cognitive dissonance: "Don't you get tired of Revelation songs? / 1988 was a long time ago" [CF] (Revelation Records put out releases by Youth of Today, Shelter, etc. in the late 80's). She doesn't have time for his old-guy music, not reflecting that she's stuck in the songs of a decade further back [CSongs etc.].More importantly, the Criminal Fingers daughter-father passage continues:I know the bar isn't safeBut we should probably get togetherWe should probably get our story straight'Cause if they take you awayThis time I don't think that I can wait for youWe've already understood enough to see that, healthy or not, "dangerous" [BCig] or not, it's Charlemagne Jesse wants, and she's been waiting for him all along --- waiting for him to put a stop to her "liberties" [BCig] with the music boys [40B], waiting for him to chase her to the lights [Magazines]. Charlemagne is deaf to the double entendre, but she's a damn sight better than a pretty good waitress [HJ]. It's only in the above passage that she's finally saying to him, OK; if the cops take you away, then this time I think I really can't wait for you any more.There are big pieces of the above story that we still haven't got to (and Jesse as POV character in CF opens another can of worms that we'll have to sort through later) but that much is all solid. Charlemagne is not quite an idiot, and he's certainly got his own issues that are distracting him, but when he says "She don't want to wait till she gets older" [HJ] and "You're a pretty good waitress" [HJ], he's being an ass. Craig took a bit of shit for Wait a While --- which is also addressing Jesse, see for example:- "Another boyfriend": cf. "She's got boys on board and boys on deck" [HJ, Magazines, etc.]- "you've got a broken heart": cf. "When morning comes round again, the sadness crashes down" [40B, etc.]- "Making eyes": "C-9 is for the making eyes, it's Paradise By The Dashboard Light" [CSongs]--- on the ground that the whole "why don't you wait a while?" line of advice was "paternalistic" and judgmental. But the thing is that all these songs are point-of-view songs, told from a particular character's perspective, not Craig's. Built back up into a whole, what we're shown is that Jesse *is* waiting, and that Charlemagne is oblivious to that. These kids all have their issues and weaknesses, but they are who they are, they're running their own lives, and it's OK. We'll get to Charlemagne's messed-up side of the ledger soon enough.(Note: I can't quite sift whether the point-of-view character for Wait a While is Charlemagne or the Narrator; the jukebox allusion and "wait" itself point to Charlemagne, but the voice comes from a distance that sounds more like the Narrator to me. But I liked dabook's take here , which squares perfectly with Charlemagne's half-assed commitment to Jesse.)Thanks for reading, and for thinking of Still Alive Carl.

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I think the think for me to do here is to try to get something out every day. Small doesn't matter as long as it's something good.



There have already been a few good things I could have pointed out along the way but didn't, so I'll pick a couple of those up now.



The first bit worth mentioning is about the couplets



She's always funny in the morning.

She isn't always funny in the night.



It's always sunny in the morning.

It sucks around the ending of the night.



from Magazines. We already saw that Jesse's prone to feeling one way at night and differently in the morning. But our evidence for that included clear examples of *not* being sunny in the morning [40B, intimated in HJ]. So how come we get "always" here?



Again, it's that Magazines is told from Charlemagne's point of view, talking about their relationship; she's always sunny in the morning *when she wakes up with him*. He's the one she really wants. And he's the provocation for the hurricane ("storm" vs. "sunny"). There's a lot of storytelling going on in very few words here.



The second bit has to do with Gideon being a magician. In The Ambassador, we hear about "A Bay City tire shop" and "Your friend from the tire shop" [Ambassador]. We know this is Gideon: "Gideon's been living up in Bay City, Michigan / And he's been working at the Michelin" [SPayne]. At this point, when The Ambassador continues:



Back behind The Ambassador.

Man it feels kind of magical.

I guess your friend can really move things with his mind.



we're in a position to understand that "magical" has a literal meaning. Gideon is going to stage a trick here (one that will later on give someone a chance to say "I think I know how he did that now" [R&T]).



Gideon performs two big tricks in the course of the story, actually. But the one "behind the Ambassador" is one of them. More on this to come.



Thanks always for reading, and for thinking of Still Alive Carl.





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When I started this, my first thought was that I didn't want to appeal too much to stuff that Craig has said directly. He's built this amazing thing, and quite rightly doesn't want to turn around and show everyone how it works. (If you haven't heard his damage-control scramble when Tad, clearly aware of what's going on, pulls back the curtain on Soft in the Center, you owe it to yourself to listen



In a 2012 Good Times interview (



“It’s not so much just about the characters,” [Finn] explains, “but [songs are] being sung from the perspective of characters, so there’s always an unreliable narrator.”



My take on this is that



1) every song that's part of the story (which is most of them) is told from the point of view of a particular character. Sometimes there is quoting (often, fortunately, with "She said" or "He said" in front of it, but not always), and even nested quoting (e.g. the Narrator quoting Jesse quoting Charlemagne). Sometimes the voice is an apparently objective third-person voice (like in 40 Bucks). But there's always a top-level perspective, and any quotation is always subordinate to that, which is to say that if Charlemagne remembers Holly saying something, it's because it's on his mind, and has to do with what he's thinking about in the song overall.



2) like he says, there's always an unreliable narrator. I've already appealed to this a few times; this is one way we get out of problems caused by apparent contradictions. Every character has his or her own motivations, including reasons to lie to other characters, or even to lie to him- or herself. Every character's knowledge is limited to what she or he has seen and heard, or has been told by others, sometimes falsely.



In a 2012 Guardian interview (



"I sort of know in my mind what happens. And it's not a majorly detailed story – it's a very simple story. I imagine it as this fake Christmas tree that I hang ornaments on – Oh, you know when he did that? Let's talk in more detail about that little scene. There's three characters and they went off and did something and came back. And it's as simple as that. It's not written down. It's in my head."



My take on this is that



1) there's not a chronology of songs. People here talked this through back in the day and most seem to have come to the same conclusion already. You do have songs like, say, Don't Let Me Explode, that report in an orderly way on a series of events in a narrow window of time. But you also have songs like (to take an obvious example) Stevie Nix, where the telling jumps back and forth between conversations at various places and times (the party, the ER) on the one hand, and sprawling retrospectives (when we hit the Twin Cities vs. it was OK in the end, she was 17 vs. she was 33, etc.) on the other. Both songs are part of the story. But time-ordering only applies to the events described in them, not to the songs as a whole.



2) like he says, he'll talk a bit about one little scene, and then jump to talk a bit about another little scene. The POV of the speaker is constant, but the events being described can be all over the place. Usually the jumping around is due to some combination of the top-level POV character's motivation in thinking about things in a particular light, and Craig himself rearranging certain pieces of his "very simple story" to create the appearance of another kind of story. This is the other major way out of seeming contradictions; we figure out that two things presented side-by-side belong to different times; things have changed.



There's only one yardstick for evaluating whether we've figured out a narrator's unreliabilities, or figured out where events belong on a timeline, and that's The Test. Do we get a coherent and satisfying story out of it, with characters we can believe in, that doesn't leave things out? That's on the listener. Craig's never going to say.



A big reason why Jesse's story is more accessible than the other characters' is that most of the songs about her are pretty straightforward, without a lot of jumping around (unlike, say, most of the songs about Holly). But there are a few that are "jumpy," and I'll pick up one of those next.



I guess I didn't really offer much here, so a quickie:



When, in Criminal Fingers, Jesse asks Charlemagne "Don't you get tired of Revelation songs" [CF] there's a double entendre: "Revelation" refers both to the record label, and the apocalyptic scenario Charlemagne is mulling in CatCT:



Don't it all end up in some revelation with four guys on horses and violent red visions

Famine and death and pestilence and war?



She knows what he's up to ---



Wednesday night I saw you riding around with Walter

We all know what you were looking for



--- and those violent red visions have her worried. Walter's last name is PPK, or P99; he's "the gun in the glove box" [CiS].



Thank you for keeping Still Alive Carl in your thoughts.



Thanks very much, guys. There's a lot more where this came from. If there are parts that are making you nod along, I'm sincerely happy about that.When I started this, my first thought was that I didn't want to appeal too much to stuff that Craig has said directly. He's built this amazing thing, and quite rightly doesn't want to turn around and show everyone how it works. (If you haven't heard his damage-control scramble when Tad, clearly aware of what's going on, pulls back the curtain on Soft in the Center, you owe it to yourself to listen here , starting at 53:00. The conversation at 55:00, where he fumbles after a second song besides Soft in the Center that isn't part of the "big story," is also food for thought.) And because he's better at ambiguity than anybody else, his answers to questions are mostly a Rohrschach test for what you want out of your music. But for the next batch of material I should probably try to square my sense of a couple of Craig's "rules" with what he himself has said about his THS writing.In a 2012 Good Times interview ( link ), Craig said:“It’s not so much just about the characters,” [Finn] explains, “but [songs are] being sung from the perspective of characters, so there’s always an unreliable narrator.”My take on this is that1) every song that's part of the story (which is most of them) is told from the point of view of a particular character. Sometimes there is quoting (often, fortunately, with "She said" or "He said" in front of it, but not always), and even nested quoting (e.g. the Narrator quoting Jesse quoting Charlemagne). Sometimes the voice is an apparently objective third-person voice (like in 40 Bucks). But there's always a top-level perspective, and any quotation is always subordinate to that, which is to say that if Charlemagne remembers Holly saying something, it's because it's on his mind, and has to do with what he's thinking about in the song overall.2) like he says, there's always an unreliable narrator. I've already appealed to this a few times; this is one way we get out of problems caused by apparent contradictions. Every character has his or her own motivations, including reasons to lie to other characters, or even to lie to him- or herself. Every character's knowledge is limited to what she or he has seen and heard, or has been told by others, sometimes falsely.In a 2012 Guardian interview ( link ), Craig said:"I sort of know in my mind what happens. And it's not a majorly detailed story – it's a very simple story. I imagine it as this fake Christmas tree that I hang ornaments on – Oh, you know when he did that? Let's talk in more detail about that little scene. There's three characters and they went off and did something and came back. And it's as simple as that. It's not written down. It's in my head."My take on this is that1) there's not a chronology of songs. People here talked this through back in the day and most seem to have come to the same conclusion already. You do have songs like, say, Don't Let Me Explode, that report in an orderly way on a series of events in a narrow window of time. But you also have songs like (to take an obvious example) Stevie Nix, where the telling jumps back and forth between conversations at various places and times (the party, the ER) on the one hand, and sprawling retrospectives (when we hit the Twin Cities vs. it was OK in the end, she was 17 vs. she was 33, etc.) on the other. Both songs are part of the story. But time-ordering only applies to the events described in them, not to the songs as a whole.2) like he says, he'll talk a bit about one little scene, and then jump to talk a bit about another little scene. The POV of the speaker is constant, but the events being described can be all over the place. Usually the jumping around is due to some combination of the top-level POV character's motivation in thinking about things in a particular light, and Craig himself rearranging certain pieces of his "very simple story" to create the appearance of another kind of story. This is the other major way out of seeming contradictions; we figure out that two things presented side-by-side belong to different times; things have changed.There's only one yardstick for evaluating whether we've figured out a narrator's unreliabilities, or figured out where events belong on a timeline, and that's The Test. Do we get a coherent and satisfying story out of it, with characters we can believe in, that doesn't leave things out? That's on the listener. Craig's never going to say.A big reason why Jesse's story is more accessible than the other characters' is that most of the songs about her are pretty straightforward, without a lot of jumping around (unlike, say, most of the songs about Holly). But there are a few that are "jumpy," and I'll pick up one of those next.I guess I didn't really offer much here, so a quickie:When, in Criminal Fingers, Jesse asks Charlemagne "Don't you get tired of Revelation songs" [CF] there's a double entendre: "Revelation" refers both to the record label, and the apocalyptic scenario Charlemagne is mulling in CatCT:Don't it all end up in some revelation with four guys on horses and violent red visionsFamine and death and pestilence and war?She knows what he's up to ---Wednesday night I saw you riding around with WalterWe all know what you were looking for--- and those violent red visions have her worried. Walter's last name is PPK, or P99; he's "the gun in the glove box" [CiS].Thank you for keeping Still Alive Carl in your thoughts.

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The song is sung from the point of view of the Narrator. We haven't said a lot about him yet but everyone knows the essentials: he's a Twin Cities kid who happens to resemble Craig insofar as he (a) was down with the Youth of Today, 7 Seconds, Shelter etc. back in high school in 1988-89 [CSTLN, SPositive, BBreathing] (b) went away to school that fall to acquire firsthand knowledge of Lynn, MA [HM, PP] (c) came back to start a band, of course [PP]. But that's as far as it goes; he's a fictional character. Like the other characters in the story, the Narrator is fully developed in his own right.



Sketchy Metal opens with a couple of verses of the Narrator talking about Jesse:



She only pays attention to the prices of cigarettes

She says she hopes they'll get cheaper



Compare "She says she always smoked cigarettes. / Ever since she was seven. / She always likes the big ones best. / You get more for your money" [BCig]. We've already established that this is Jesse.



She only takes the pick-me-uppers

To counteract all the put-me-to-sleepers



Compare "Some nights she's a pharmacist. / She's got some pills some in her purse. / One to wake you up / One if you're nervous" [BCig]. Again, Jesse.



She used to be a receiver

Went out deep for guys that looked like Johnny Fever



Jesse loves the music boys [40B] (the musicians, and all the boys who "talk about the music born into every single tune" [JaJ]), like DJ Johnny Fever. She used to go out deep for them; but that was before she met Charlemagne. This song is an "origin story" of sorts, and we don't yet see any sign of her getting stormy or angry with him for not reciprocating. But even later (as in 40 Bucks), she's not really going out deep for them, it's just that the threat of getting with the music boys and the boys in the harbor bars is the main stick she's got to provoke Charlemagne with. (I haven't established yet that there's a connection between the harbor bars and the music scene, but let me ask for that on credit, we'll get there.)



Last winter

I swear I thought she might be our savior



The Hold Steady Wiki notes that "savior" (



Here, the Narrator means "savior" in the former sense: in the "last winter" episode alluded to, Jesse did just what she does later on in 40 Bucks, that is, she hooked up with the Narrator's band (he's somewhere on the addiction spectrum at this point, see "I guess I went through a hundred dollars a day") and brought "party stuff," saying, "Guys let me cover this" [40B]. More details about this meeting follow a few verses further on.



We talked about songs that jump from context to context, and this is one. In the next four verses ("Went through a skater phase ... hanging out with entertainers"), the Narrator makes a sudden rewind to describe the events of a specific period following his return to the Twin Cities. This isn't just general bad drug scenery, there's a concrete history being reviewed here, one that serves to set up an uneasy dismount in the last verse of the song (and links in the title). But it took me quite a while to sort that out. We'll give it its own treatment later.



For the remaining five verses the Narrator comes back to Jesse. First, he comes back to "last winter," and talks about how he met her:



[She] Went through the publicist

To try to get through to the rhythm guitarist

We got so high that the audience, they looked just like ants

[-I] Woke up with the backstage pass in my pants



Jesse's "bio-dad played bass guitar" [40B] and she's got "daddy issues" [Magazines], suggesting a motivation for her targeting the rhythm guitarist to begin with. The publicist obliged her request (she's "gorgeous" [BCig]) for a backstage pass. The Narrator was high out of his mind and doesn't remember how it happened. But one way or another, he woke up with the pass in his pants, and with her. (This is alluded to later on in Charlemagne's remark "She used to fool around with some friends of mine" [BCig]; the Narrator and Charlemagne are friends).



The remainder of the song is all a direct quotation from Jesse; the Narrator is telling the rest of the story in her words. Included in that quotation are a couple of lines in which she directly quotes Charlemagne in turn. (I've shown all this by adding double and single quotes below.) The timeframe in which Jesse is speaking is the same one in which the Narrator initially began, before he went back to the how-they-met episode from last winter, which itself was interrupted by his retrospective of the early times back in the Twin Cities. (This is why I took a detour to talk about Craig's writing yesterday ... It's not just Sketchy Metal, the early albums are full of this kind of thing.)



Like the Narrator, Jesse starts by recalling the events of last winter:



She said, "I used to be a speed shooter

I went out deep for guys that looked like Alice Cooper

And last winter

They had my heart all hooked up to computers.



Last winter, she *was* going out deep for the music boys, and *was* fooling around with the hard drugs (speed) that Charlemagne is later at pains to keep her away from [CSongs, HJ]. Things with the boys weren't working out any better than they do in 40 Bucks; she was in a perpetual cycle of euphoria and heartbreak, which she describes metaphorically as having her "heart all hooked up to computers." But now the metaphors really get going, and this was my next big aha-moment:



"We didn't see the Holy Ghost

But the Father and the Son they seemed like regular folks

Jesus rolled his eyes when his dad made Jesus jokes



After the backstage pass incident, the Narrator invited Jesse to a benefit show [BCig, Magazines, JaJ] where she met Charlemagne, an experience she describes in the terms of a literal epiphany. Per her metaphor,



- The Narrator is the Creator, that is, the creative musician; and thus the Father.

- Charlemagne is the Savior, that is, the drug dealer; and thus the Son.

- And Gideon, who at this point in the story is absent because he's "living up in Bay City, Michigan" [SPayne, Ambassador], is the Holy Ghost.



Everyone knows that there's some identification of Charlemagne with Christ going on in the story (the explicit crucifixion theme, etc.), so that point won't be controversial. And there's nothing particularly difficult about the Narrator=musician=Creator=Father equation, either. The "Jesus jokes" the Narrator made started with the introduction, "this is Charlemagne; he's our Savior"; Charlemagne "rolled his eyes" just like we see him do whenever Jesse wants to start a fight with him ("Then you'll roll your eyes and then you'll probably fight" [Magazines]). They're regular folks all right.



It's worth taking a second look at what we have here: a couple of lines that are simultaneously (a) funny as shit, (b) narratively fully functional, and (c) tipping off the listener how to get past the metaphor. And Craig has more than one of these scattered around. This is not writing that you see every day.



The identification of Gideon with the Holy Ghost is more complicated because we don't have enough to see the narrative justification for it yet, but here's a couple pieces of superficial evidence.



We noted earlier that Gideon is always seen living upstairs [HM, SN, SS], and now we know "why": he's the Ghost in the attic, and the Spirit who descends from heaven [Luke 3:22].



Then, in Arms and Hearts, we get this, from Charlemagne:



To me he didn't seem all that holy,

But I guess he might have been that ghost

I'm not saying that he came off all that hot

He burned a hole in me eventually

I've been mostly living in the center of your most Holy Trinity



The "he" in the above is Gideon, the "I" is Charlemagne. (Again I'm assuming that most people already understand Gideon stabbing Charlemagne to be part of the story somehow, and that "he burned a hole in me eventually" [A&H] looks enough like that for me to be able to lean on it without further support, for now.) Gideon is the "ghost"; Charlemagne has his doubts, but the person he's talking to thinks he's the "holy" one. In fact, this other person has identified a full Trinity, the same one Jesse describes in Sketchy Metal. Charlemagne's doing his best to fill his spot in the center, as the Son.



This post is way too long already, but note for just a second that this metaphoric mapping of characters to Biblical persons is happening *within* the bounds of the story (that is, the person from A&H came up with the identification and shared it with the others, and Jesse and Charlemagne are running with it). There are places where one might argue that the identification is outside the story, that it's Craig who puts Gideon upstairs wherever he goes, but I don't think that's quite right; my sense is that that's a kind of constant that actually belongs to the mystical reality of the THS world.



Back to the end of Sketchy Metal:



"And he forgave me for my sins

He said, 'Let this famine end and let the 2-for-1s begin

And bless the beasts and the children and the water and the waiters.'

It's always so creative when you're hangin' out with our Creator



"And his son, our Savior

You get your picture in the paper if he lets you in his trailer

It's always so amazing

When you're finally coming down with entertainers"



Now we finally get the back story: Charlemagne met this kid, took one look at her, and decided to get her straightened out. She said that he forgave her for her sins: that is, he



- got her off the speed (so that she was "finally coming down")

- got her back on real food instead of sugar packets etc. ("let this famine end")

- gave her other things, alcohol etc., in lieu of the hard drugs ("let the 2-for-1s begin," a bartender's loaves and fishes miracle, and "water" into wine like the Wedding at Cana, too)

- blessed her ("Bless ... the children ... and the waiters")



In short, this is where Jesse's identification of Charlemagne with her father comes from; he really has assumed a kind of fatherly role in her life (a non-dealer Savior role, at that). And now she wants him ("You get your picture in the paper if he lets you in his trailer"). And she got him a job in the restaurant where she works, too. Which is awesome for him, because that way he can keep an eye on her, to make sure she doesn't get back into the hard stuff, *and* build his Business dealing the hard stuff from behind the bar at the same time! (Cf. "hard drugs are for the bartenders" [CSongs, CatCT]) Again, Charlemagne's not quite an idiot. But he's not the fountainhead of Good Ideas, either. (Still a lot more to be said about that.)



We're still just touching the edges of the story, but we're making inroads, and have a good deal more to work with now. I hope it's resonating. Thank you in any case for reading. As 2015 comes to an end and you're remembering old acquaintance, if you can add a "Gonna make it through this year" prayer for Still Alive Carl to the list, I would be really grateful.



Let's dig into Sketchy Metal a little bit.The song is sung from the point of view of the Narrator. We haven't said a lot about him yet but everyone knows the essentials: he's a Twin Cities kid who happens to resemble Craig insofar as he (a) was down with the Youth of Today, 7 Seconds, Shelter etc. back in high school in 1988-89 [CSTLN, SPositive, BBreathing] (b) went away to school that fall to acquire firsthand knowledge of Lynn, MA [HM, PP] (c) came back to start a band, of course [PP]. But that's as far as it goes; he's a fictional character. Like the other characters in the story, the Narrator is fully developed in his own right.Sketchy Metal opens with a couple of verses of the Narrator talking about Jesse:She only pays attention to the prices of cigarettesShe says she hopes they'll get cheaperCompare "She says she always smoked cigarettes. / Ever since she was seven. / She always likes the big ones best. / You get more for your money" [BCig]. We've already established that this is Jesse.She only takes the pick-me-uppersTo counteract all the put-me-to-sleepersCompare "Some nights she's a pharmacist. / She's got some pills some in her purse. / One to wake you up / One if you're nervous" [BCig]. Again, Jesse.She used to be a receiverWent out deep for guys that looked like Johnny FeverJesse loves the music boys [40B] (the musicians, and all the boys who "talk about the music born into every single tune" [JaJ]), like DJ Johnny Fever. She used to go out deep for them; but that was before she met Charlemagne. This song is an "origin story" of sorts, and we don't yet see any sign of her getting stormy or angry with him for not reciprocating. But even later (as in 40 Bucks), she's not really going out deep for them, it's just that the threat of getting with the music boys and the boys in the harbor bars is the main stick she's got to provoke Charlemagne with. (I haven't established yet that there's a connection between the harbor bars and the music scene, but let me ask for that on credit, we'll get there.)Last winterI swear I thought she might be our saviorThe Hold Steady Wiki notes that "savior" ( link ) in the THS universe is one of Craig's ambiguities (like "sweet," "bash," "crush," etc.), and this is right. In contexts where the characters' primary preoccupation is getting or staying high, saviors are drug dealers [Swish, SM, MM, HaRRF, SV, Oaks]. But, as Oaks makes abundantly clear, that kind of getting "saved" [Oaks] has long-term complications. For the other kind, the difficult business of getting out of those complications and shit generally [CSTLN, FN, CSummer], it's "We are our only saviors" [CSummer].Here, the Narrator means "savior" in the former sense: in the "last winter" episode alluded to, Jesse did just what she does later on in 40 Bucks, that is, she hooked up with the Narrator's band (he's somewhere on the addiction spectrum at this point, see "I guess I went through a hundred dollars a day") and brought "party stuff," saying, "Guys let me cover this" [40B]. More details about this meeting follow a few verses further on.We talked about songs that jump from context to context, and this is one. In the next four verses ("Went through a skater phase ... hanging out with entertainers"), the Narrator makes a sudden rewind to describe the events of a specific period following his return to the Twin Cities. This isn't just general bad drug scenery, there's a concrete history being reviewed here, one that serves to set up an uneasy dismount in the last verse of the song (and links in the title). But it took me quite a while to sort that out. We'll give it its own treatment later.For the remaining five verses the Narrator comes back to Jesse. First, he comes back to "last winter," and talks about how he met her:[She] Went through the publicistTo try to get through to the rhythm guitaristWe got so high that the audience, they looked just like ants[-I] Woke up with the backstage pass in my pantsJesse's "bio-dad played bass guitar" [40B] and she's got "daddy issues" [Magazines], suggesting a motivation for her targeting the rhythm guitarist to begin with. The publicist obliged her request (she's "gorgeous" [BCig]) for a backstage pass. The Narrator was high out of his mind and doesn't remember how it happened. But one way or another, he woke up with the pass in his pants, and with her. (This is alluded to later on in Charlemagne's remark "She used to fool around with some friends of mine" [BCig]; the Narrator and Charlemagne are friends).The remainder of the song is all a direct quotation from Jesse; the Narrator is telling the rest of the story in her words. Included in that quotation are a couple of lines in which she directly quotes Charlemagne in turn. (I've shown all this by adding double and single quotes below.) The timeframe in which Jesse is speaking is the same one in which the Narrator initially began, before he went back to the how-they-met episode from last winter, which itself was interrupted by his retrospective of the early times back in the Twin Cities. (This is why I took a detour to talk about Craig's writing yesterday ... It's not just Sketchy Metal, the early albums are full of this kind of thing.)Like the Narrator, Jesse starts by recalling the events of last winter:She said, "I used to be a speed shooterI went out deep for guys that looked like Alice CooperAnd last winterThey had my heart all hooked up to computers.Last winter, she *was* going out deep for the music boys, and *was* fooling around with the hard drugs (speed) that Charlemagne is later at pains to keep her away from [CSongs, HJ]. Things with the boys weren't working out any better than they do in 40 Bucks; she was in a perpetual cycle of euphoria and heartbreak, which she describes metaphorically as having her "heart all hooked up to computers." But now the metaphors really get going, and this was my next big aha-moment:"We didn't see the Holy GhostBut the Father and the Son they seemed like regular folksJesus rolled his eyes when his dad made Jesus jokesAfter the backstage pass incident, the Narrator invited Jesse to a benefit show [BCig, Magazines, JaJ] where she met Charlemagne, an experience she describes in the terms of a literal epiphany. Per her metaphor,- The Narrator is the Creator, that is, the creative musician; and thus the Father.- Charlemagne is the Savior, that is, the drug dealer; and thus the Son.- And Gideon, who at this point in the story is absent because he's "living up in Bay City, Michigan" [SPayne, Ambassador], is the Holy Ghost.Everyone knows that there's some identification of Charlemagne with Christ going on in the story (the explicit crucifixion theme, etc.), so that point won't be controversial. And there's nothing particularly difficult about the Narrator=musician=Creator=Father equation, either. The "Jesus jokes" the Narrator made started with the introduction, "this is Charlemagne; he's our Savior"; Charlemagne "rolled his eyes" just like we see him do whenever Jesse wants to start a fight with him ("Then you'll roll your eyes and then you'll probably fight" [Magazines]). They're regular folks all right.It's worth taking a second look at what we have here: a couple of lines that are simultaneously (a) funny as shit, (b) narratively fully functional, and (c) tipping off the listener how to get past the metaphor. And Craig has more than one of these scattered around. This is not writing that you see every day.The identification of Gideon with the Holy Ghost is more complicated because we don't have enough to see the narrative justification for it yet, but here's a couple pieces of superficial evidence.We noted earlier that Gideon is always seen living upstairs [HM, SN, SS], and now we know "why": he's the Ghost in the attic, and the Spirit who descends from heaven [Luke 3:22].Then, in Arms and Hearts, we get this, from Charlemagne:To me he didn't seem all that holy,But I guess he might have been that ghostI'm not saying that he came off all that hotHe burned a hole in me eventuallyI've been mostly living in the center of your most Holy TrinityThe "he" in the above is Gideon, the "I" is Charlemagne. (Again I'm assuming that most people already understand Gideon stabbing Charlemagne to be part of the story somehow, and that "he burned a hole in me eventually" [A&H] looks enough like that for me to be able to lean on it without further support, for now.) Gideon is the "ghost"; Charlemagne has his doubts, but the person he's talking to thinks he's the "holy" one. In fact, this other person has identified a full Trinity, the same one Jesse describes in Sketchy Metal. Charlemagne's doing his best to fill his spot in the center, as the Son.This post is way too long already, but note for just a second that this metaphoric mapping of characters to Biblical persons is happening *within* the bounds of the story (that is, the person from A&H came up with the identification and shared it with the others, and Jesse and Charlemagne are running with it). There are places where one might argue that the identification is outside the story, that it's Craig who puts Gideon upstairs wherever he goes, but I don't think that's quite right; my sense is that that's a kind of constant that actually belongs to the mystical reality of the THS world.Back to the end of Sketchy Metal:"And he forgave me for my sinsHe said, 'Let this famine end and let the 2-for-1s beginAnd bless the beasts and the children and the water and the waiters.'It's always so creative when you're hangin' out with our Creator"And his son, our SaviorYou get your picture in the paper if he lets you in his trailerIt's always so amazingWhen you're finally coming down with entertainers"Now we finally get the back story: Charlemagne met this kid, took one look at her, and decided to get her straightened out. She said that he forgave her for her sins: that is, he- got her off the speed (so that she was "finally coming down")- got her back on real food instead of sugar packets etc. ("let this famine end")- gave her other things, alcohol etc., in lieu of the hard drugs ("let the 2-for-1s begin," a bartender's loaves and fishes miracle, and "water" into wine like the Wedding at Cana, too)- blessed her ("Bless ... the children ... and the waiters")In short, this is where Jesse's identification of Charlemagne with her father comes from; he really has assumed a kind of fatherly role in her life (a non-dealer Savior role, at that). And now she wants him ("You get your picture in the paper if he lets you in his trailer"). And she got him a job in the restaurant where she works, too. Which is awesome for him, because that way he can keep an eye on her, to make sure she doesn't get back into the hard stuff, *and* build his Business dealing the hard stuff from behind the bar at the same time! (Cf. "hard drugs are for the bartenders" [CSongs, CatCT]) Again, Charlemagne's not quite an idiot. But he's not the fountainhead of Good Ideas, either. (Still a lot more to be said about that.)We're still just touching the edges of the story, but we're making inroads, and have a good deal more to work with now. I hope it's resonating. Thank you in any case for reading. As 2015 comes to an end and you're remembering old acquaintance, if you can add a "Gonna make it through this year" prayer for Still Alive Carl to the list, I would be really grateful.

skepticatfirst

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Member Back to Top Post by skepticatfirst on Having the Narrator-Charlemagne-Gideon as Trinity metaphor in front of us is really helpful, for a few reasons.



One, it helps us to elaborate this idea that Craig isn't all that into names. It's not only that names are just another identifying attribute to him, to be repeated or not as he sees fit. He's also willing to slap names on things that aren't names as such at all, but metaphors. This is a pretty aggressive style of narration.



Two, it's not obvious what a magician and the Holy Ghost have in common, and if it's not obvious, it can't very well be part of a metaphoric overlap. Yet Gideon is apparently both. Which means that Craig is not only being aggressive with his metaphors, he's stacking them.



It's not like I formulated these statements in these terms early on (though I think they're accurate). But seeing the Trinity metaphor made me more a lot more comfortable with the idea that Craig could be saying "X" but talking about "Q," or saying "Y" but again talking about "Q," or saying "Z" but hey wait I wonder if this is "Q" again. It makes you reweight your listening in favor of apparently throwaway lines ("they seemed like regular folks" [SM]), and it gives you a chance to get help from Occam's razor.



Three, it gives an indication of the boundaries of the universe. If Jesse and apparently a second girl (one who, unlike Jesse, won't go out with Charlemagne [A&H]; see yesterday's discussion) both think that there are three guys at the center of the universe, it raises the likelihood that there aren't any other male POV characters. In real life, the old Sherlock Holmes line "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" is a crock --- possibilities are infinite; nobody gives you a numbered checklist. But the THS story isn't a real-life grab bag, it's a carefully architected work of art. If you think you can eliminate any two of the Narrator/Charlemagne/Gideon as candidates for an apparently male POV character, it gives you some confidence to start listening to the song as if it were coming from the third. And that helps set you up to hear things, or to make connections when the right pieces are in front of you.



Working out the set of female POV characters is much more difficult because of the Sapphire problem. But one thing at a time.



There are two named persons who aren't (yet?) POV characters: Shepard and Sarah.



Sarah [Oaks] looks like the girl the Narrator brought back to the Twin Cities for Christmas in I Hope This Whole Thing Didn't Frighten You. I don't think we know anything more about her within the THS universe; I know Craig has written more about a Sarah in his solo stuff, unfortunately I can't listen to that because of the vow thing. It feels like she marks the beginning of a new volume in the story, but one that's hardly gotten going yet.



Shepard [IHTWTDFY, SS] is the leader of the Cityscape Skins [IHTWTDFY], and apparently the guy in Look Alive of whom the Narrator says "Everything about him seemed ready to snap" [LA] (see "He said he only showed up cause he was hoping for a shoot 'em up" [LA], "Shepard showed up then somebody took a couple shots" [SS]). The name is a nod to Tim Shepard, leader of the Shepard gang in the Outsiders, references to which are scattered throughout the songs:



- "the greaser guys" [JaJ]

- "Diane Lane kept me sane through the spring / I was flirting with her films" [ABlues]: a reference to the Outsiders and Rumble Fish films. We need space to get into this, but the similarity of Cherry (Diane Lane's character) in the Outsiders to the girl in One for the Cutters is probably obvious enough to mention without further support for now.

- "I came with chipped teeth and some bleached blond hair" [YGD]: a reference to Steve Randle and Ponyboy from the Outsiders, meaning that the Narrator was mixing with a rough crowd & got what he bargained for, packaged up effortlessly by Craig in the overarching that's-your-date-for-the-dance metaphor. This is leap to your feet and clap your ass off writing, people.



Happy New Year to everyone, and if you're liking this, and can remember Still Alive Carl as you're liking it, thank you.





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Charlemagne is the POV character in the song. Another girl (we'll get to that when we take on the second half) is accusing him of getting with Jesse; he responds by denying that he's ever been with her "little hoodrat friend."



Your little hoodrat friend makes me sick

But after I get sick I just get sad

'Cause it burns being broke, hurts to be heartbroken

And always being both must be a drag



Charlemagne, getting an earful, starts off denying everything, but overdoes it (dude protests too much): "Your little hoodrat friend makes me sick." Then, realizing he's overacting, he changes tack and downshifts: "But after I get sick I just get sad" ...



He gets sad because she's always broke, poor thing. Jesse's a waitress [HJ], who skips work now and again ("she didn't go to work again" [40B]); what money she has mostly gets spent on cigs ("mostly goes to cigarettes" [40B, see also SM, BCig]), and what's left over gets spent on boys, either because she spends it on them ("Guys let me cover this" [40B]) or because they take it ("Two twenties from her dresser while she slept" [40B]). There's more to this picture, but I didn't figure it out until later, and this will do for now.



Note by the way that, if we take being "broke" at face value, this can't be Holly (who was making money turning tricks when she took off, leaving Charlemagne without a source of funds; see "left me fifty bucks" [MINTS]), nor the precog girl, who had $900 on hand even before her horse came in six lengths ahead [CA]. If the girl he's talking about isn't Jesse, it's going to take some work to find another candidate, or another interpretation.



He also gets sad because she's always heartbroken. This too is Jesse; we've seen the cycle of euphoria and heartbreak presented in 40 Bucks, and described in those very terms in Wait a While ("euphoric ... Once they hear you've got a broken heart ..." [WaW]). We've heard her talk about a particular episode of heartbreak in Sketchy Metal: "they had my heart all hooked up to computers" [SM]. We haven't shown yet that Spinners is about Jesse, but (for what it's worth prior to any actual discussion) it is; there too we have "Heartbreak hurts but you can dance it off" [Spinners].



The words "burns" and "drag" also point to Jesse the cigarette girl (see "burns on her skirt" [BCig]). When I first noticed this many months ago, I thought it was a cute coincidence. Now, having been around all 86 songs more dozens of times than I can count, I'm certain it's deliberate. Craig is absolutely capable of this level of control.



She's been calling me again

She's been calling me again



Your little hoodrat friend's been calling me again

And I can't stand all the things that she sticks into her skin

Like sharpened ballpoint pens and steel guitar strings

She says it hurts, but it's worth it



More protests: *she's* the one who's been calling, not me. More important for the purposes of this discussion, she sticks things into her skin, which also identifies her as Jesse ("She pokes around with a paper clip" [BCig]). The steel guitar strings suggest the music boys of her acquaintance; as a waitress, she's got ballpoint pens on hand.



I think the point of the "hurts, but it's worth it" line is something different than a link to the issues for which Jesse's in therapy [BCig]; I don't know much about psychology but I don't see any necessary connection between self-harm and "daddy issues" [Magazines]. There seems to be another, more complicated reason for him to bring this up. But for that we have to get into the context of the argument, and we're not there yet.



Tiny little text etched into her neck

It said "Jesus lived and died for all your sins"

She's got blue black ink and it's scratched into her lower back

Says "Damn right, He'll rise again" Yeah, damn right, you'll rise again



Damn right, you'll rise again



We know now that Charlemagne is Jesse's Jesus, and that she loves him in the first place because "he forgave me for my sins" [SM]; here her "Jesus lived and died for all your sins" has an extra charge of sexual innuendo as a lead-in to "Damn right He'll rise again."



In a silent aside, Charlemagne responds to this with an acknowledgment that, yes, he is her Jesus, and yes, despite having "lived and died," she always gets him hard again. But even to himself, he won't acknowledge his agency in the relationship: in his mind, it's she who's doing him ("Some nights she's a scientist. / She pulls me into experiments. / Squeezes hard and / Charts the forward progress" [BCig]), and the whole thing goes on in spite of him ("This little tryst is hard to quit" [BCig]). Charlemagne has issues of his own.



And I've been dusted in the dark up in penetration park

And I've been plastered

I've been shaking hard and searching in a dirty storefront church

And I've been plowed



But I ain't never been with your little hoodrat friend

I ain't never been with your little hoodrat friend

I ain't never been with your little hoodrat friend

What makes you think I'm getting with your little hoodrat friend?



Now Charlemagne comes to the pitch of his denial. He'll admit having been beaten half to death in "penetration park" (for this sense of "dusted" see



I love this song for so many reasons. (Even my daughter knows it's special; she calls it "The Moon Rat's Friend.") I remember, not too long ago, seeing Still Alive Carl at a local bar for the first time after he'd handed me Separation Sunday. I was just standing there reciting lines from the song while he nodded with a shit-eating grin on his face. Since then the bar's had a fire and closed, and he's got cancer. But this is more than that-time-my-life music; this is all-time music, the music of the future. Anyway, I'm still looking for a miracle here. Anyone who can pitch in a thought for that, bless you.





We've got just about everything we need for the first half of Your Little Hoodrat Friend, so let's do it. (The second half of the song is completely off the hook by every yardstick you can throw at it, we need a lot more before we can start taking that apart. But the first half is plenty satisfying to begin with.)Charlemagne is the POV character in the song. Another girl (we'll get to that when we take on the second half) is accusing him of getting with Jesse; he responds by denying that he's ever been with her "little hoodrat friend."Your little hoodrat friend makes me sickBut after I get sick I just get sad'Cause it burns being broke, hurts to be heartbrokenAnd always being both must be a dragCharlemagne, getting an earful, starts off denying everything, but overdoes it (dude protests too much): "Your little hoodrat friend makes me sick." Then, realizing he's overacting, he changes tack and downshifts: "But after I get sick I just get sad" ...He gets sad because she's always broke, poor thing. Jesse's a waitress [HJ], who skips work now and again ("she didn't go to work again" [40B]); what money she has mostly gets spent on cigs ("mostly goes to cigarettes" [40B, see also SM, BCig]), and what's left over gets spent on boys, either because she spends it on them ("Guys let me cover this" [40B]) or because they take it ("Two twenties from her dresser while she slept" [40B]). There's more to this picture, but I didn't figure it out until later, and this will do for now.Note by the way that, if we take being "broke" at face value, this can't be Holly (who was making money turning tricks when she took off, leaving Charlemagne without a source of funds; see "left me fifty bucks" [MINTS]), nor the precog girl, who had $900 on hand even before her horse came in six lengths ahead [CA]. If the girl he's talking about isn't Jesse, it's going to take some work to find another candidate, or another interpretation.He also gets sad because she's always heartbroken. This too is Jesse; we've seen the cycle of euphoria and heartbreak presented in 40 Bucks, and described in those very terms in Wait a While ("euphoric ... Once they hear you've got a broken heart ..." [WaW]). We've heard her talk about a particular episode of heartbreak in Sketchy Metal: "they had my heart all hooked up to computers" [SM]. We haven't shown yet that Spinners is about Jesse, but (for what it's worth prior to any actual discussion) it is; there too we have "Heartbreak hurts but you can dance it off" [Spinners].The words "burns" and "drag" also point to Jesse the cigarette girl (see "burns on her skirt" [BCig]). When I first noticed this many months ago, I thought it was a cute coincidence. Now, having been around all 86 songs more dozens of times than I can count, I'm certain it's deliberate. Craig is absolutely capable of this level of control.She's been calling me againShe's been calling me againYour little hoodrat friend's been calling me againAnd I can't stand all the things that she sticks into her skinLike sharpened ballpoint pens and steel guitar stringsShe says it hurts, but it's worth itMore protests: *she's* the one who's been calling, not me. More important for the purposes of this discussion, she sticks things into her skin, which also identifies her as Jesse ("She pokes around with a paper clip" [BCig]). The steel guitar strings suggest the music boys of her acquaintance; as a waitress, she's got ballpoint pens on hand.I think the point of the "hurts, but it's worth it" line is something different than a link to the issues for which Jesse's in therapy [BCig]; I don't know much about psychology but I don't see any necessary connection between self-harm and "daddy issues" [Magazines]. There seems to be another, more complicated reason for him to bring this up. But for that we have to get into the context of the argument, and we're not there yet.Tiny little text etched into her neckIt said "Jesus lived and died for all your sins"She's got blue black ink and it's scratched into her lower backSays "Damn right, He'll rise again" Yeah, damn right, you'll rise againDamn right, you'll rise againWe know now that Charlemagne is Jesse's Jesus, and that she loves him in the first place because "he forgave me for my sins" [SM]; here her "Jesus lived and died for all your sins" has an extra charge of sexual innuendo as a lead-in to "Damn right He'll rise again."In a silent aside, Charlemagne responds to this with an acknowledgment that, yes, he is her Jesus, and yes, despite having "lived and died," she always gets him hard again. But even to himself, he won't acknowledge his agency in the relationship: in his mind, it's she who's doing him ("Some nights she's a scientist. / She pulls me into experiments. / Squeezes hard and / Charts the forward progress" [BCig]), and the whole thing goes on in spite of him ("This little tryst is hard to quit" [BCig]). Charlemagne has issues of his own.And I've been dusted in the dark up in penetration parkAnd I've been plasteredI've been shaking hard and searching in a dirty storefront churchAnd I've been plowedBut I ain't never been with your little hoodrat friendI ain't never been with your little hoodrat friendI ain't never been with your little hoodrat friendWhat makes you think I'm getting with your little hoodrat friend?Now Charlemagne comes to the pitch of his denial. He'll admit having been beaten half to death in "penetration park" (for this sense of "dusted" see urbandictionary , confirmed by "they whaled on him till they killed him up in penetration park" [BCamp]). He'll admit to having been drunk (or maybe the meaning of "plastered" is again "beaten" or "defeated"; it can easily be both). He'll admit to having been shaking hard ("Charlemagne shakes in the streets" [FN]) and searching ("we all know what you were looking for" [CF]). He'll admit to having been stabbed ("plowed"), again with reference to the 