The Mountain Goats' "Exegetic Chains": Things I Have Actually Liked About 2020, Part 1

This is the first of a series of essays discussing things I have actually liked about the year 2020. 

Back on April 8, I took a walk on an eerily quiet night, and then I wrote the following:

In years to come, there will be poems and movies and novels and songs about these weeks, but if they don’t at some point try to evoke that silence, they won’t be capturing the truth of this moment, which has not shocked us with explosions or rubble, but has pressed down like a smothering pillow.

It’s tempting in reading that to wish that I’d cut everything after “moment,” since violence and anger became the news of the day just a few weeks later. But I think I was right that the heavy silence of early April is as much a part of the truth of this year as the incendiary summer and ominous autumn that will probably dominate historical memory.

Surprisingly, though, it took only eight days for me to hear a new song that answered my hope for something that would “evoke that silence.”

The Mountain Goats’ album Songs for Pierre Chuvin, which came out in mid-April, is a big deal if you happen to be a fan of John Darnielle, who effectively is the band. For the first several years of the Mountain Goats’ existence, Darnielle recorded all of his material solo on a Panasonic boombox, culminating in the 2002 lo-fi masterpiece All Hail West Texas. After that album, though, the boombox got put away and Darnielle began recording with a full band. Plenty of the full-band material is good, and a little of it is great, but if you got into Darnielle’s songwriting through the scratchy, warts-and-all sound of those early albums, the Mountain Goats with a rhythm section and studio engineers wasn’t quite the same, even if Darnielle’s major themes remained constant: hope despite sadness; troubled grubby teenagers; spectacularly failed marriages; everyday beauty.

Like the rest of us, Darnielle had to stay home beginning in mid-March, and he used this as an opportunity to get out the old boombox. He wrote and recorded a song a day based on a book by the French historian Pierre Chuvin called A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, which according to its blurb at Harvard University Press is “a history of the triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire as told from the perspective of the defeated: the adherents of the mysteries, cults, and philosophies that dominated Greco-Roman culture.” Honestly, that’s about all you need to know to get the gist of the album. I’m sure there are nuances you could pick up by reading the book, but a couplet like “Me and my pagan crew/ We will deal with you,” or, in a very different register, “Return the peace you took from me/ Give me back my community” pretty well speaks for itself.

So, yeah, it’s a concept album. Moreover it’s a concept album about the last of the ancient Roman pagans. If this sounds Rush-level dorky it probably is, but Darnielle is able to use this concept to create something remarkably moving. These are small songs about enormous loss. They are quiet, meditative, and almost reticent in their accounts of state-sponsored violence being used to stifle a culture of inestimable richness. They are songs about powerful Christians ruining everything. They make a lot of sense in 2020.

My favorite song on the album, which is also my favorite song I’ve heard anywhere this year, is the closer “Exegetic Chains.”[1] “Favorite” isn’t exactly the right word—it’s more that I haven’t heard another song that does a better job of sounding the way that 2020 feels. It is muffled and repetitive, centered on a few spare chords. There’s a lot of “space” in the recording, as they say. Darnielle singing is restrained, almost sotto voce, like he wants to make sure he’s heard but not overheard.

The singing style fits the theme of hidden messages that fills the verses. Darnielle sings about echoes of old myths you can find “in the shadows on the ground beneath the trees”; secrets whispered in city squares; or the warmth inside the “panasonic hum” of the song itself. The title “Exegetic Chains” gives us some clue as to what he’s up to with all this cryptic evocation of things cryptic, since exegesis is the act of critical interpretation or explication—we’re being asked, in a sense, to parse mysteries.

But then there’s the second word in the title: what’s going on with these “chains”? One the one hand, a chain can be a series of connected links, even connected historical links, as in the European transition from paganism to Christianity. But chains are also restraints. Indeed, in rock music, chains are almost never good things, whether it be a “Chain Gang” or a “Chain of Fools” or “Battleship Chains” or the chain that keeps Fleetwood Mac together.

Here’s what Darnielle does with the chain image in his chorus:

Say your prayers to whomever you call out to in the night.
Keep the chains tight.
Make it through this year
If it kills us outright.

The line “keep the chains tight” comes right after a line about saying your prayers in the night, in a spot where you would expect the thing you hold tight to be a blanket or a loved one. One way to read this is as violence or threat—presumably you would keep the chains tight to control a prisoner, which is jarring in a song that otherwise feels a bit ethereal. It could also be read as a directive to “keep it together,” whether metaphorically as in keeping a family or community linked together or literally as in keeping a mechanism or tool functioning.

Then the last two lines of the chorus are a tip of the cap to Mountain Goats fans. Darnielle alludes to one of the band’s most popular songs, the rousing sing-along “This Year,” which is basically “I Won’t Back Down” for white Gen Xers with literature degrees. In that song, written fifteen years ago, the chorus is joyously defiant: “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.” Last summer, when I was in a good deal of pain and taking more vicodin than would be ideal, I listened to “This Year” a lot. But fast-forward to 2020, and in “Exegetic Chains” the same words slightly rearranged read more as stoic than joyous, and more cognizant of the possibility of absolute defeat.

“Exegetic Chains” is a song about fear, loneliness, and watching an era end in calamity, which is as relevant to the 21st century as it was to the 5th. But in the last line of the last verse, the speaker says that he is “headed somewhere better if I have to crawl there on all fours.” Here’s hoping.

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[1] That title, to be sure, transcends Rush-level dorkiness to achieve Yes-level dorkiness. Nevertheless, the song works.

A City of Fountains

A little over a year ago I had major foot surgery, and as a result, I spent most of last summer migrating back and forth between our guest room and the couch. Thank the Lord and his prophetess Megan Rapinoe that the Women’s World Cup was entertaining, because outside of that, my June ’19 was quite a bummer. As I named constellations in the ceiling tile and counted the hours to my next vicodin, I got through it all in part by imagining all the fun stuff I was going to do when Summer 2020 rolled around.

Sigh.

To be clear, I’m not complaining or woe-is-me-ing to any great degree. Given the state I was in a year ago, I’m one of the few people on earth for whom May 2020 was less challenging than May 2019, even if my dreams of busting out of the house for concert-going and sports-shouting haven’t panned out. There’s nowhere to go, but at least I can walk there.

One thing I have done to pass the time this summer is sit next to fountains. Oft can I be found next to fountains old and new, functional and not, public and private, urban and Kansan, cloistered and vista’d. Perhaps I do some reading; perhaps I plan a class; perhaps I just watch the water circulate. It’s a nice enough diversion, and I live in the right place for it, because Kansas City is bananas for fountains.

Plenty of articles recirculate the claim that the KC area has “more than 200 fountains,” though the original source of this statistic is not clear. Still, the number passes the sniff test, and if anyone did a census that included things like fountains in people’s yards or the little waterfalls framing the signage of office parks, the number would undoubtedly be far higher. A visitor to KC who did only the most basic tourist stuff—shop the Plaza, stroll the galleries at the Nelson, take in a Royals game—might notice that they’ve rarely been more than a couple blocks from a fountain during their trip. And the thing is, while the Plaza is almost comically dense with fountains, the rest of the metro area, even down to residential neighborhoods, has an uncommonly high number as well.

The map of KC fountains maintained by the City of Fountains Foundation is impressive. It chronicles fountains as far-flung as the “Kids at Heart” Fountain in Lee’s Summit and, 43 miles north, the abstract unfinished-billboard-esque monstrosity that welcomes travelers to KCI. But if you know KC in any detail, you realize pretty quickly that when you look at the map of fountains, what you are really looking at is a map of money. There are more fountains west of Troost than east; more in Johnson County than Wyandotte; more in northeast Johnson County than Olathe. Even where fountains exist on the East side of KCMO, many of them (especially along the Paseo) were built roughly a century ago when the neighborhoods that hold them were wealthy and white. So the map of KC fountains is not only a map of money, but also a map of the history of money.

The architect of KC’s fountain disparities—as he was of so many of KC’s disparities—was the early-twentieth-century real estate developer JC Nichols. Residential neighborhoods throughout the KC metro have fountains, but the neighborhoods that Nichols developed in the 1910’s and 1920’s are absolutely teeming with them.[1] For instance, a walk down a one-mile entirely-residential stretch of 69th Street from Ward Parkway to Rockhill takes one past four fountains. And that’s just on the Missouri side—Mission Hills is even more saturated with fountains.[2] As the architectural historian Sara Stevens writes, fountains were an essential part of Nichols’ development strategy:

Nichols’s landscape architects also used another kind of design—statuary fountains—to sell buyers a vision of high-end suburban living. The neighborhood’s traffic-directing street layouts created small, postage-stamp sized parks, islands surrounded by roads. These Nichols turned into selling points by filling them with fountains and sculptures. He collected the art on trips to Europe, adding to the general cachet of the endeavor, and held receptions to unveil new acquisitions. More than mere ornaments in the landscape, Nichols believed these objets d’art established an aesthetic tone that reflected the street design, and helped build a long-term vision for the quality and financial stability of the area.

Fountains were not, however, the most important driver of Nichols’ economic success. That, without question, was the use of racially restrictive deeds to create exclusively white neighborhoods. Advertising signs for Nichols’ neighborhoods referred to them as “Protected Residence Property.” It doesn’t take much intuition to guess from whom the developer promised to protect the buyer. That coded language, which was printed on billboards in a larger typeface even than the phrase “Attractive Prices,” makes clear that the exclusion of African-Americans was a core selling point—perhaps the core selling point—of southwestern Kansas City during the city’s interwar boom. Nichols laid out the racial and economic divides that still shape Kansas City a century later, and tragically, his influence extended far wider. As Stevens points out, he was the founding president of the National Association of Home Builders, and his restrictive deeds the model that the Federal Housing Administration recommended to developers in the 1940’s.

Photo credit: State Historical Society of Missouri

I live in one of the neighborhoods that Nichols developed, and in spite of the fact that the restrictive deeds he used were finally made fully illegal 52 years ago, it is uncommon for me to see any African-Americans when I walk around my neighborhood. My neighborhood has a variety of public spaces scattered among its private residences, and more than anywhere else I have ever lived, people actually use those public spaces. But when Nichols designed those public spaces, he did so in a way that aggressively policed who gets to count as part of “the public,” and that legacy is still visible today. And yes, one could state truthfully that anyone is allowed to walk down the street and sit on a bench in my neighborhood. But the blunt fact is that only someone who looks more or less like me is likely to feel fully comfortable doing so. The restrictions Nichols designed, and which generations of white Kansas Citians bought up with enthusiasm, still define the daily lived experience of this city.

The most famous and photographed fountain in Kansas City was named to honor JC Nichols. It sits off of Main Street at the entry to the Plaza, and features statues of four horses which are meant to symbolize “the four mighty rivers of the world,” all of which are located in Europe or North America. The Nichols Memorial Fountain is featured in countless Kansas City postcards, it is virtually guaranteed to make an appearance when any Chiefs game comes back from commercial, and I suspect that most Kansas Citians have a picture of themselves standing near or in front of it. I didn’t even realize that I had one until I went scrolling through my facebook photos, but there I am, eleven years ago. 

Photo Credit: Anne Twitty

Unlike the smaller fountains in residential neighborhoods, the Nichols Fountain is a public space used by all sorts of people, and it has long been a key location for political protests, including the recent Black Lives Matter protests. More than anyplace else in the city, the Nichols Fountain is Kansas City’s town square.

The news came out today that the Parks Board is going to remove Nichols’ name from the fountain. Good. And I’m sure that someone will argue that this constitutes “erasing history,” but that’s ridiculous. Nichols’ influence is so wide-ranging and profound that to erase his history, you would have to erase Kansas City itself. We live our lives along geographical lines he quite literally drew, and it will take a lot more than altering the name of an equine fountain to erase that. But Kansas City cannot continue to honor him. Taking his name off a fountain is of course entirely symbolic, but it is a symbolic action this city has to take if we want our next 100 years to be defined by something other than the sins of the past 100 years.   

Further reading: If you're interested in knowing more about the history of Nichols' role in Kansas City, the article I cite by Sara Stevens is well worth your time. Whitney Terrell's novel The King of King's County deals with a fictionalized version of the Nichols family, and Evan Connell's Mrs. Bridge, probably the most important novel ever written about Kansas City, depicts life in Nichols' Country Club District in the 1930's.

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[1] I was going to say “overflowing,” but I have too much respect for you, dear reader.

[2] Sorry—couldn’t help that one.

Forced and Erroneous: 16 Notes on the 16-Year-Old Movie "Wimbledon"

Last night, as I contemplated falling asleep, I instead stumbled upon the movie Wimbledon. Then I woke up and wrote the following, which I believe constitutes the most time anyone has spent thinking about Wimbledon since it came out sixteen years ago.

Spoiler alert: In the text below, I discuss many “plot points” from the “film” Wimbledon.

1. The meet-cute in the 2004 romantic comedy Wimbledon happens the day before Wimbledon begins, when our male lead, the never-quite-made-it-big British tennis player Peter Colt (Paul Bettany), is assigned the wrong hotel room, and accidentally walks in on rising American tennis star Lizzie Bradbury (Kirsten Dunst) while she is the shower. Lizzie is surprisingly chill about this situation—she never for a second seems even vaguely surprised or worried. I get that the screenwriters are trying to suggest that she’s cool as a cucumber and doesn’t have hang-ups about her body or whatever, and later it’s revealed that she knows who Peter is because she’s seen one of his matches. But I have to think that even a super-sex-positive, tennis-aware woman with icewater in her veins is going to display at least a moment’s shock when a tall male stranger walks into her hotel room. Regardless, the audience reaction to a meet-cute probably shouldn’t be “why the hell isn’t this woman calling security?”

2. Lizzie Bradbury would be a much better name for a girl detective than a women’s tennis player. 

3. A young Jaime Lannister appears in the movie in the “wisecracking buddy” role. He’s supposed to be German, but I initially thought he was trying and failing to sound Irish. Just let the man be pretty and English—that’s why God put him on the Earth.  

4. Any sports movie is going to face the problem that Hollywood actors aren’t actually built like athletes, but sometimes it’s at least plausible—Kevin Costner as a minor-league catcher; Denzel Washington as a aging playground hoops legend; Geena Davis as a line-drive hitter—these are concepts you can believe if you squint. As for Wimbledon...yeesh. Paul Bettany is tall, so that’s good, but he’s more than a little doughy if you mentally compare him to Rafa Nadal. And Dunst, God love her, was far too much the ingénue circa 2004 to be believable as an elite athlete, particularly in a sport that requires the raw explosiveness of 21st-century tennis.

5. And then there’s the problem of Dunst’s tennis form, which is terrible. During the tournament montages, they mostly mask this problem with clever editing, but there’s a scene where Dunst and Bettany play flirtatious pantomime tennis in the park, and when she fake-serves it looks like the Elaine Benes dance from Seinfeld.  

6. There’s a whole plotline about how we know that Peter is a good guy because he looks worried when ballboys get hit by errant serves. That seems a low bar to clear.

7. Peter and Lizzie spend a lot of time driving around England on picturesque dates. To be clear, they are doing this in the middle of the Wimbledon tournament. I know that players have off days, but I really doubt that Roger Federer is taking romantic strolls through the countryside the day before the quarterfinals.

8. In real life, ten out of the eleven tournaments staged between 2000 and 2010 featured at least one Williams sister in the Wimbledon final. On four occasions Venus and Serena played each other in the final round, including the two years immediately before this film came out. I bring this up because I cannot recall a single black person appearing in the movie Wimbledon.

9. It’s a romantic comedy, so there is of course an airport scene early in the third act (Lizzie and her father are flying home while Peter plays in the men’s final). Bear in mind that this is an airport scene in 2004, depicting two people waiting to board an international flight from Europe to the US. Now consider that Lizzie and her father just straight-up abandon their bags in the terminal. I was genuinely more interested in knowing how long Heathrow got shut down for the bomb-sniffing dogs than I was in who won the match, but alas, my questions were never addressed.

10. Late in the second act, Lizzie tells Peter that she does not want to continue seeing him because tennis needs to be her first priority. After some hijinks involving trellis-climbing, he breaks into her apartment the night before a big match and she seems...surprisingly okay with it. Being down with having her privacy violated appears to be a core trait of Lizzie Bradbury’s character. Anyway, the next day she plays badly and gets knocked out of the tournament, at which point she breaks things off with Peter and leaves town. Later, Peter gives her a big public apology, but the apology is quite vague, and it could easily be read as him apologizing not for breaking into her apartment, but for rocking her world so thoroughly that it made her bad at tennis.

11. Indeed, to that last point, the question of how sex the night before a match impacts one’s tennis performance is discussed frequently in the movie. The film suggests emphatically that sex makes men better at tennis, but it makes women worse.

12. At least that’s its opinion regarding hetero relationships. The film has gay and lesbian characters, but they are all queer quippy sexless sidekicks of the sort that future film historians will be led to believe were omnipresent from 1998 to 2005.

13. Peter wins the Wimbledon final. His opponent is portrayed as a bad guy, though his bad guy bona fides are that he is cocky, he is slightly less concerned than Peter is when ballboys get hit in the face, and he makes a pass at Lizzie at one point (though unlike Peter he stops pursuing her when she says she’s not interested). He also has really good hair. He is, to put it mildly, a poorly realized villain.

14. I would not have guessed at the time that the actor in Wimbledon who would have the most Hollywood success over the next sixteen years would be Jon Favreau. But then, who could have foreseen Baby Yoda? I also don’t think I would have guessed that Kirsten Dunst would end up engaged to Landry from Friday Night Lights. Crucifictorious forever!

15. Both our leads have “wacky families.” There is the inevitable wisecracking sibling, and an overprotective yet wise father. Also, Peter’s parents are in the middle of a madcap marital dispute that has led to Peter’s father living in a treehouse—that’s like ten percent of the film. The movie would have been much better if most of the family stuff had been removed, in no small part because then it only would have been about forty minutes long.

16. The sports movie/rom-com hybrid is truly a mutant hellbeast, combining as it does two of the most formulaic movie genres. Bull Durham is the only example I can think of that is especially good. So is Wimbledon more successful as a rom-com or sports movie? It’s honestly a tough call. What it has to say about romance is more offensive, but the way it imagines sports is considerably dumber. Guess we’ll just have to score it a deuce.

April 8, 2020

Right around midnight, I took a walk through my neighborhood in the middle of the 38th-largest city in the United States, and I’ve never heard anything so quiet in my life. There’s no wind, and there’s no traffic. It’s 70 degrees out, so there isn’t even the hum and clank of climate control. I was alone with the rabbits and the neighbor’s cat, and when I stepped on a twig I suspect it was audible 200 yards away.

In years to come, there will be poems and movies and novels and songs about these weeks, but if they don’t at some point try to evoke that silence, they won’t be capturing all the truth of this moment, which has not shocked us with explosions or rubble, but has pressed down like a smothering pillow.

And yet, it is so, so beautiful tonight. The moon is full and the trees are balls of pink perfume. We Missourians only get so many perfect nights a year, and this is the first. I’m a professor of modern poetry, which means that I’m obligated every now and then to ask twenty-year-olds what it means to say that April is the cruelest month. The truth is that I myself never had an answer I didn’t get out of a textbook until tonight.

Beauty that doesn’t seem like that it ought to be there; incongruous loveliness; new life that reads as a tawdry joke—that is what can make April feel cruel.

Soon the wind will kick up, and someday the people will stir and the cars will roll, and I might live fifty more years and never again hear the silence I heard tonight. But right now it’s hard to hear anything else.

Davey's Uptown Ramblers Club at 34th and Main, 1950-2020

The destruction by fire early this morning of Davey’s Uptown Ramblers Club is, simply put, a tragedy. The bar had operated continuously in its current location on Main Street in Kansas City for 70 years (and in a different location for 25 years before that). It has long been a vital performance space for the local music scene. The shows I attended there tended toward the alt-country/Americana end of spectrum, but it was also a key venue for punk and metal. You could drink cheap; you could play pinball; you could smoke in the side room long after that became illegal. When I was there, I always ran into a friend I hadn’t planned to see. Mokie, who ran the back bar, is the Platonic form of a bartender. There were framed photos of Royals long-retired, and the price of a pour was written in sharpie on the whiskey bottles. The city around it shed several skins as the decades passed, but the neon at Davey’s kept glowing.

And now Davey’s is gone, and it’s irreplaceable.

A few months ago, when I listed my ten favorite shows of the 2010’s, I hadn’t even noticed that Davey’s was the only venue I listed twice. My #1 show of the 2010’s was the tribute show Rex Hobart put on the night that George Jones died. This obviously hadn’t been planned in advance, but word spread quickly enough that there were 100 or so people there. The room sounded great, Rex sang the shit out of songs he cared about deeply, and I say with all sincerity that if you care about American popular music and you weren’t there, I wish you had been. It was beautiful. Perhaps the best thing you can say about Davey’s is that George Jones would have been honored to know that people raised a glass to sing “The King is Gone” in a bar like that.

Also in my top ten was a show by the Iron Question, a “supergroup” composed of several local musicians who mostly play in other bands but get together once a year between Christmas and New Year’s to cover various punk obscurities (full disclosure, they're friends of mine, but that too is the point of Davey’s). In some ways, it was the opposite of the George Jones show—the mix was not amazing; a couple songs went sideways; one musician did indeed get in a fight with the sound guy. But there were also a lot of songs that sounded really damn good. In its silliness and anger and sparks of beauty, that show felt like family at the holidays, and Davey’s, more than anywhere else in town, was where you wanted to be for a show that felt like family.

My literal family has also played at Davey’s—my brother and my future sister-in-law brought their band through town a few years back for a show that was a lot of fun. It was a night that ended at Buzzard’s Beach, so...yeah.

Ben Summers (who’s in the Iron Question) also played that night, and I’ve seen him play at Davey’s as part of The Grisly Hand more times than I recall. And since I ought to have a clip of something to play us out, here’s The Grisly Hand, one of KC’s great bands, playing at Davey’s nearly a decade ago:

Street Legalese: Robbie Fulks' 16

A couple years ago, alt-country stalwart Robbie Fulks announced that he was going to release a track-for-track cover of Bob Dylan’s 1978 album Street Legal. My immediate reaction was: “But Street Legal sucks. Its songs are rambling and pointless. It kicks off Dylan’s infamous lost decade(s). It sucks.” Then I thought for a moment, looked up the track listing, and realized that I had never actually listened to Street Legal. I’d heard a couple songs here and there, but I’d read of the terribleness of the album so many times that I’d never bothered to listen to the whole thing.

 And seriously, critics savaged Street Legal. Robert Christgau, in a C+ Village Voice review, wrote “This divorcee sounds overripe, too in love with his own self-generated misery to break through the leaden tempos that oppress his melodies, devoid not just of humor but of lightness--unless, that is, he intends his Neil Diamond masquerade as a joke." Meanwhile, over in Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus was even nastier, saying of the song “Is Your Love in Vain?” that “The man speaks to the woman like a sultan checking out a promising servant girl for VD, and his tone is enough to make her fake the pox if that’s what it takes to get away clean.” Also delightful is this bit of faint praise from Marcus: “While most of the singing on Street Legal...falls short of creepiness, it’s simply impossible to pay attention to it for more than a couple of minutes at a time.” Indeed, Marcus’ review is so scathing that Jann Wenner, who never encountered a celebrity ass he could leave unkissed, issued a corrective positive review a month later.[1]

Listening to Street Legal now, those reviews seem a bit harsh. I don’t think anyone would mistake it for a top-shelf Dylan album, and if you’ve never delved into Dylan this sure as shit isn’t the place to start. But it’s honestly pretty good. He makes you wade through the whole thing to get to the best two songs, but the penultimate “We Better Talk This Over” would be a solid Drive-By Truckers album cut, and the closer “Where Are You Tonight (Journey Through Dark Heat)” is almost good enough to justify its ridiculous title. Certainly it’s quintessential Dylan: the organ cascades; there are some great turns of phrase; and Bob sings like he decided to give a shit that day. What else you want? And there is plenty of enjoyable stuff elsewhere on the album. “Changing of the Guards” is a much better impersonation of mid-60’s Dylan than most performers ever achieve; “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” is one of the more successful of Dylan’s various attempts over the years at frontier atmospherics; and on “True Love Tends to Forget” he tries to sound like Van Morrison, and it isn’t nearly the disaster that it should be.

That said, it isn’t hard to hear what Christgau and Marcus were reacting against. The album is very, very busy. Virtually every track slathers on horns, keyboards, noodly guitar solos, and choruses of bluesy ladies upon choruses of bluesy ladies. Jeremy Winograd claims that a big part of the problem was that the mix on the original Street Legal vinyl pressing was incredibly muddy, and assuming that he’s right, I can see how that would wreck the whole thing—on a twenty-first century digital remaster, the band sounds pretty tight, and there’s a lot of band to hear, so I’d hate to lose that.[2]

Even when it sounds good, though, Street Legal has some core issues with lyrical silliness that a remaster isn’t going to fix. On “No Time to Think,” a substantial portion of the lyrics boil down to everyone in the studio singing nouns as loudly as they possibly can. “China Doll!/ Alcohol!/ Duality!/ Mortality!” A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature wrote that shit. Also, he wrote “Socialism!/ Hypnotism!/ Patriotism!/ Materialism!” I can keep going if you’d like, because Dylan kept going for eight minutes and twenty seconds. There’s also a lot of tortured feminine rhyme (e.g., “travel on” rhymed with “Babylon”—woof), and the rhyme schemes tend to be a tad fussy by rock standards (there’s a lot of aabccb). It was 1978, the triumphant moment of punk’s minimalist reaction to the bloat of corporate rock, and here comes Dylan with a dog-eared rhyming dictionary and a 27-piece band. It’s no wonder Christgau and Marcus hated it.  

*****

Given the album’s less-than-stellar critical and popular legacy, Robbie Fulks’ decision to cover the entirety of Street Legal in a vinyl-only limited edition produced by Steve Albini can only be construed as a passion project of absolute and possibly ludicrous purity. It is one of the more uncareerist moves of an uncareerist career, which has, since the mid-90’s, moved from a honky-tonk phase to a countrypolitan phase to an austere folk phase. The “Oh Brother” phase a picker as accomplished as Fulks could have embraced around 2001 was decidedly eschewed, as he instead put out a self-released album of frequently-keyboard-driven narrative experiments called Couples in Trouble (which alienated many of his several fans, and is also, by the way, goddamn brilliant). Fulks has acquired a small group of very devoted listeners, and doesn’t seem to be adding many more—when he plays KC, it’s always the same 2/3-filled indoor Knuckleheads space, and I’m pretty sure it’s always the same people (it appears he’s playing there June 18, btw, so if anyone wants to hang out that night, that’s where I’ll be). The Venn diagram overlap of “Robbie Fulks die-hards” and “people who are down for some late-70’s Dylan” is no doubt a small group of bookish white midwesterners with indifferent hair. We should stage a meet-up in a conference room at a Days Inn outside St. Louis sometime—it would probably be fun.

It’s interesting to compare Fulks’ Street Legal cover album (which is called 16—more on that later) with the recent Old Crow Medicine Show cover of Blonde on Blonde (which is called 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde, which is what you’d call it if you wanted someone to buy it). The Old Crow album, to be clear, is good. It’s a group of talented Americana musicians covering the arguably-greatest album of rock’s probably-greatest songwriter, and they take the task seriously and have a lot of fun with it. It’s also a very savvy move: Old Crow is from Nashville, Dylan recorded Blonde on Blonde in Nashville, and there’s a lot of new yuppie money running around Nashville, so why not book the Ryman and scoop up some of that sweet nostalgia cheddar?

Fulks’ 16 is a considerably weirder record, and is perhaps inevitably less fun, inasmuch as nothing on Street Legal is a cover-band layup like “Rainy Day Women” or “Absolutely Sweet Marie.” But the Fulks album is much more interesting, and not just because of the degree of difficulty. The opener, “Changing of the Guards,” is one of the most beautiful, restrained recordings of Fulks’ career, as Dylan’s horns and backup singers are replaced with an incredibly spare arrangement. Making Dylan’s lyrics easier to understand is arguably not to the song’s benefit—it seems to be about exotic bazaars and virgin sacrifices or something? I don’t have the patience to go the full Christopher Ricks on it, but Fulks’ recording is so pretty that it doesn’t really matter.

Another highlight on 16 is “Baby, Stop Crying,” which was one of the songs most frequently lambasted in the 1978 reviews of Street Legal. The key difference is that Fulks is capable of delivering the line “Baby, please stop crying” in a way that sounds like he cares about the addressee and would like to help them be less sad, whereas when Dylan sings it, he just sounds annoyed that someone is bothering him with their stupid fucking feelings.[3] Or, to be less harsh, Dylan wrote an excellent blue-eyed-soul song that he is not well-suited to as a singer, but it happens to be right in Fulks’ wheelhouse. It’s not like it’s the first time a cover of a Dylan song has trumped the original.

Fulks gets weirder elsewhere, notably on “Where Are You Tonight,” but for the most part he tilts toward arrangements that are either stripped to meditative quiet, or built on larger ensembles that owe a fair amount to the originals. The quiet ones are definitely the highlights—they mine something out of the songs that Dylan didn’t, and they’re also the most in line with what Fulks’ own best material has sounded like over the past decade.

******

Fulks calls his album 16, which on its face is kind of odd, though there are a couple interpretations that come to mind. The first word of the first song on Street Legal is “sixteen,” so it could be that simple. More significantly, Fulks was fifteen when Street Legal came out, which means that he may well have been sixteen when he really got to know it, or, if you want to get technical, Street Legal came out in Fulks’ sixteenth year.  

On the back of the album sleeve for 16, Fulks writes the following about his listening habits in the Seventies:

I had an intense relationship with the records. Like a lot of teenagers, I’d save my money, travel a great distance to a store that had perhaps 2000 records, choose a couple, and go home and play them until memorized. Scarcity and mystery...and the artists played into them. Certain ones seemed to invite you to connect with them, spiritually. They adopted interesting masks; their recordings were replete with quirks, mistakes, eccentricities, holes you could fill in yourself. Eventually, you owned the music, since you were one of its creators.

That’s lovely. I think I understand what Fulks is getting at, or at least I can remember that kind of intensive relationship to works of art, which admittedly in my case was the relationship of an eventual scholar and critic rather than an eventual artist. Still, obsessive attention is obsessive attention.

By the time I was a teenager in the early Nineties, the economics of music listening had not changed much. CD’s were the coin of the realm rather than vinyl, but that just meant that the local record store maybe had 4,000 of them rather than 2,000. You still had to save up, and the decision to buy something was still fraught with risk. You went home and dug deep into the weirdness of whatever you bought, because the alternative was leaving your room. My own Street Legal—which is to say a middling album by a great artist that I swam into neck deep—was Lou Reed’s Magic and Loss, which happened to come out when I was fifteen. This is not one of the Lou Reed albums esteemed by history. Allmusic.com’s ratings put it well outside Reed’s top ten, as does the Rolling Stone Album Guide, and Christgau’s review consists entirely of a frowny-face emoji (and this at least a decade before Americans used the word “emoji”). However, I had picked up the idea from somewhere that an aspiring rock snob should know of Lou Reed, and Magic and Loss was the album that was on sale at the Best Buy in Springfield in 1992, so I grabbed a copy.

And the thing is, when you’re fifteen and growing up on a tree-lined street in southern Missouri, even mediocre Lou Reed sounds like it’s being beamed in from another planet. It sounds like mean streets and weird nights and big feelings shrugged off with a snarl of casual irony. Even Magic and Loss—an album that deals mostly with chemotherapy—sounds like that if you never happen to have heard Transformer. So I think I get where Fulks is coming from in his fixation on a Dylan album that you could only be obsessed with if it entered your life at the ideal moment for such obsessions. At the very least, I know what it’s like to be a hick teenager unaware of his own drawl parsing the musical ramblings of a middle-aged northern Jew in an attempt to figure out whatever the big something was that I very much suspected they weren’t telling me about in school.

Thankfully, sixteen isn’t the last time a person can have a musical revelation. There were many more to come for me, including the time in college when I went to an alt-country festival primarily to see the Old 97’s but stumbled upon a set performed by a gangly, verbose, Buck Owens-obsessed smartass and thought, “This, apparently, is the thing for which I did not know I had been waiting.” It’s wild to think that at this point I’ve been listening to Robbie Fulks for more than half my life. He and I don’t seem all that old, at least not to me, but there you have it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Fulks is my favorite singer/songwriter of the last 25 years (though he’s up there), but he is the only singer/songwriter I can think of who has gone that long without ever boring me. And being interesting for 25 years is a hell of an accomplishment.

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[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/love-in-vain-dylan-and-the-stones-in-the-seventies-68036/

[2] https://spectrumculture.com/2016/08/22/revisit-bob-dylan-street-legal/

[3] I’m not sure who I’m kidding with the pronoun game here. When Dylan is being an asshole in the 70’s, the addressee is definitely a woman.

My Ten Favorite Moments from Three Championship Runs: Sporting '13, Royals '15, Chiefs '19-20

I’m fairly certain I have not seen this fact written anywhere, but here goes: Kansas City is the only city that has won championships in three of the five largest North American team pro sports leagues since 2013 (those five being NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, and MLS). This is particularly impressive since Kansas City only has teams in three of those five leagues--every KC team has brought home a title within the last seven seasons. Even if you list total combined championships won by a city since 2013, KC looks impressive:

MOST COMBINED CHAMPIONSHIPS SINCE 2013 IN THE BIG 5 LEAGUES

Boston 4 (3 Patriots, 1 Red Sox)

Bay Area 4 (3 Warriors, 1 SF Giants)

KC 3 (1 Chiefs, 1 Royals, 1 Sporting)

Seattle 3 (2 Sounders, 1 Seahawks)

Chicago 3 (2 Blackhawks, 1 Cubs)

Or to come at it another way, all three of Kansas City’s teams have won a championship since the last time the greater New York City area got a title from any of its eleven total teams across the five leagues (the last one was the Giants’ Super Bowl win eight years ago). So the next time a New Yorker puffs their chest in your general direction about the bagel water, remind them that the Yankees suck (recently).

As recently as October of 2013, the Royals were a permanent farce, the Chiefs were a five-act tragedy, and Sporting was the team with a shiny new stadium where they had previously lost their biggest playoff games. And now we’re titletown, thanks to three crazy playoff runs, every single one of which involved bonkers comebacks from highly-likely defeat. It was the greatest decade in KC sports history. We were privileged to watch a team precisely engineered to be good every year (Sporting), a team that caught lightning in a bottle (the Royals), and a team that drafted the most talented player of his generation (the Chiefs). I can’t imagine we’ll see the likes of it again. 

And so, while the giddiness is fresh, here is my celebration of my ten favorite moments from the playoff runs of Sporting in 2013, the Royals in 2015, and the Chiefs in 2019-20. I’m defining “moment” a touch loosely, but these are the ten that stick with me. It was not easy to narrow it down.

#10: Mahomes to Hill, 3rd and 15, 4th Quarter, Super Bowl

I’m grabbing this stat from ESPN, but it’s the craziest damn thing. On 3rd and 15 in the regular season and playoffs, Patrick Mahomes was 13 for 17 for 299 yards, 3 TD’s, and 0 INT’s. That’s an average of 17.6 yards per attempt. He averaged a first down completion on 3rd and 15. That shouldn’t be possible. 

I’ll freely admit that around 9 minutes to go in the Super Bowl, I was approaching the acceptance phase. The 49ers were leveraging every obvious advantage they had, and KC had no answers. But all year, the Chiefs have converted crazy 3rd-and-longs, and on this one, with the season on the line, Mahomes took a shotgun snap and then dropped back an additional 8 yards (because why not make it 3rd and 28?) and then he threw the ball 60 yards downfield to a wide open Hill. It was still a 20-10 lead for San Francisco, but if you had watched KC all season you knew that for the first time all night the Chiefs looked like the Chiefs.

#9: Feilhaber steal and assist to Bieler, Extra Time, Eastern Conference Semifinals

Benny Feilhaber was exactly what Sporting Kansas City needed when they signed him in 2013. They had a good core, with Matt Besler, Graham Zusi, and CJ Sapong, among others, but they had a good core of Boy Scouts. They needed a magnificent bastard, and that bastard was Benny Feilhaber, the platonic form of the guy who sits in the high school parking lot in a sports car from his dad’s dealership, waiting to make a pass at your girlfriend. In this case, he stole a pass from the New England goalkeeper in the 113th minute of the second leg of a cup tie, and then fed a perfect pass to Claudio Bieler, who had his one great KC moment and scored a goal that broke a 3-3 aggregate draw and sent Sporting on to the Conference finals. I was there, I was freezing, I lost my shit.

#8: Colon drives in go-ahead run, 12th Inning, Game 5 of World Series

I’ve written about this one elsewhere. Suffice it to say that when the RBI that turns out to be the decisive run of a World Series is #8 on this list, it’s been a fun time to be a sports fan in KC.

#7: Cain scores from first on a single, 8th Inning, Game 6 of ALCS

This was an objectively huge run--it ended up being the pennant-winner against the Blue Jays--but the craziest thing about it is that Lorenzo Cain going first-to-home on a single was not a crazy decision. In fact, he made it by a mile. Cain running the bases was one of my favorite things to watch in KC sports this decade. He moved with remarkable grace for such a large man. As my own feet got progressively worse as the decade progressed (to the point where I eventually needed surgery) it was a joy to watch a runner who seemed to be able to fly.

#6: Williams’ clinching TD run, 4th Quarter, Super Bowl

Speaking of my post-surgical feet, I was somewhat surprised by how rapidly I moved after Damien Williams ran 38 yards to put the Chiefs ahead 31-20 late in the Super Bowl. I vaguely recall that, after Williams scored, I said something about needing to “take it to the streets” and I grabbed my cousin’s Chiefs flag and shot out to door to run around for a while while the people up the block set off fireworks (my cousin soon followed behind me with his much larger house flag). It was the fastest I’ve moved in quite a while. I felt it a bit the next day, but still, it was lovely.

#5: Sinovic’s game-tying goal, 2nd Half, Eastern Conference Semifinals

What’s more exciting as a fan: the score that breaks a tie to put your team in the lead, or the score that brings your team back to life after a period of near-certain doom? I would submit that it is the latter (indeed, the rest of these rankings exemplify that belief). Heading into November 6, 2013, Sporting was developing a reputation as a team that choked. Each of the past two seasons, they had lost to lower seeds in the playoffs, and they had lost their first match of the 2013 playoffs 2-1 in New England. They had one more game against New England back in KC, but very late in the match, Sporting was trailing 3-2 on aggregate goals.

And then, local boy Seth Sinovic, a professional athlete who is so Kansas City that his aunt lives across the street from me, a defensive player who is one of the worst shooters I’ve ever seen, cracked an absolute laser beam on a loose ball to save Sporting from impending elimination. Going into that match, I genuinely did not believe that good things could happen in the playoffs to Kansas City teams. That narrative started to change at exactly 78:02 in the second leg of the conference semis, when a kid from Rockhurst made the shot of his life. 

#4: Mahomes’ Mad Dash, 2nd Quarter, AFC Divisional Playoffs

Assuming that we don’t all burn up or drown before then, sometime around the turn of the 22nd century an old man will be sitting in a Kansas City nursing home rambling on to his reluctantly-visiting great-grandchildren about how back when he was in elementary school he saw Patrick Mahomes play in the Super Bowl, and these whippersnappers you see on the field today aren’t half as good as ol’ Patrick Mahomes. Ol’ Mahomes could throw it without looking; he could sling it with both hands; he could stare down a grizzly bear and not rattle even a little. Hell, he could run through a whole damn defense if he set his mind to it. 

The great-grandkids will roll their eyes and check their watches (which will be inside their brains, because it’ll be the future) to see how much longer they need to wait before they can leave without being rude. They won’t have any idea that great-grandad is absolutely right.

#3: Gordon’s game-tying HR, 9th Inning, Game 1 of the World Series

I once saw a young Alex Gordon hit a home run in the minors against the AA Springfield Cardinals. Based on a bit of box score perusal, I’m pretty sure it was in 2006, though he hit a couple in Springfield that year, so I can’t pin down the date. Gordon hit it a long way, too--it landed on top of that building out past the right field fence.  

It was a fun moment, inasmuch as I got to stand up and cheer in front of the Cardinal fans, but we all knew what the deal was: they rooted for the team that won championships, and I rooted for the team that occasionally had a prospect who was decent enough that the Royals could develop him and then give him away for pennies on the dollar before he hit free agency. 

Instead, Gordon made a career of it with the Royals, and nine years later, with his team trailing in the bottom of the ninth of Game One of the World Series, he hit it even farther than he did on that night in Springfield. The Royals were about to go down 1-0 and lose home field advantage; instead, KC rallied to win, and they set up a rent-free residence inside the Mets’ heads that would continue through late innings for the rest of the series. 

#2: Palmer’s missed PK, Penalty Shootout, MLS Cup Final

While the Royals and Chiefs both won their championships in very exciting games (12 innings; fourth-quarter comeback), the actual championship-concluding play was not especially tense (strike out the side with five run lead; throw an incomplete pass to run out the clock).

For Sporting, though, it was tense right down to the end. And beyond the end. And even beyond the reasonable end of the tiebreaker penalty shootout. The shootout is supposed to take five kicks per team, but KC and Salt Lake needed ten to decide a winner (it’s still the longest championship game in MLS history).

There’s a case to be made that I should pick other moments from the MLS Cup Final--Collin’s game-tying goal in the 76th minute; Nielsen’s do-or-die save of Salt Lake’s 8th penalty--but I’ve never experienced anything in sports quite like the millisecond shift between wondering if this tie will ever be broken to realizing that it’s over, and KC has a champion, and that sitting out in the 25-degree weather for three hours was worth it after all. If all the beer hadn’t been frozen, I might have thrown it in the air to celebrate.

#1: Hosmer’s Mad Dash, 9th Inning, Game 5 of World Series

If anything defines KC sports in the 2010’s, it’s irrational confidence being rewarded. Renaming your soccer team after a club from Portugal and then hoping that people in the midwest are gonna buy into it still seems like a crazy idea almost ten years after it worked. The Chiefs, an organization long synonymous with choking, hired a coach long synonymous with choking, and then went all-in on a raw QB prospect who went 5-7 in his last season in college. And Eric Hosmer, who is not a notably fast man, decided that the ninth inning of a World Series game would be a great time to see if he could score from third on a delayed break on a groundout. 

I’m sure everyone thought that the first person to eat a burnt end was crazy too. 

Anyway, Hosmer scored. There was much rejoicing. It was my favorite unbelievable sports moment of a decade I still can’t quite believe happened.

Honorable Mentions: Dwyer’s goal in Eastern Conference Final; Collin’s MLS Cup goal; Davis’ Game 6 ALCS relief pitching appearance; Correa’s error in 8th inning of Game 4 of the ALDS; Mahomes’ TD pass to Watkins in 4th quarter of AFC title game; Mahomes’ 1st down pass to Watkins in 4th quarter of Super Bowl; Fuller’s interception in 4th quarter of Super Bowl