Full Force Galesburg ^{1 2 3}

John describes that the couple whom he's singing about in Full Force Galesburg is different from those in Sweden and in other series, "a little angrier and a little less easy to sympathize with". The songs are at least loosely connected. VPRO session, February 17, 2000; KJHK interview, March 2, 1997, transcribed by Jon Nall, retrieved July 16, 2014.

Full Force Galesburg was written mostly in an off-campus apartment in Grinnell, Iowa, presumably while Lalitree was still a student there. Zoop, Farm Sanctuary, New York, June 17, 2007.

The cover image depicts Durga, a fierce version of Parvati, riding her tiger mount. Beneath her, two other Hindu deities, Hanuman and Krishna, are dancing. ↩

The title Full Force Galesburg alludes strongly to the Van Morrison song Full Force Gale, released in 1979 on his album Into the Music. The song uses the metaphor of being lifted upwards by a gale to describe a religious feeling of finding solace, hope, and rebirth in his faith in God.

Thanks to Johnp from the forums for pointing this reference out to me! ↩

As alluded to in Weekend in Western Illinois, Galesburg is a city in Western Illinois and the county seat of Knox County. John has confirmed that he's referring to the Illinois Galesburg. KJHK interview, March 2, 1997, transcribed by Jon Nall, retrieved July 16, 2014. ↩ ↩²

Hồ Chí Minh was a Vietnamese revolutionary communist leader who successfully led the Việt Minh independence movement against France and Japan in the 1940s, and later opposed the United States as the leader of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the Vietnam War through the 1960s until his death in 1969. In 1942, he was arrested in China on charges of being a spy. Prison Diary is a collection of the poems he wrote during his fourteen-month imprisonment.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find the edition that John used here. However, an astute reader found another which reveals this to be the third stanza of a poem reprinted in full below with the title Hard is the Road of Life (p. 135):

Having climbed over steep mountains and high peaks,
How should I expect on the plains to meet greater danger?
In the mountains, I met the tiger and came out unscathed,
On the plains, I encountered men, and was thrown into prison.

I was a representative of Viet-Nam
On my way to China to meet an important personage.
On the quiet road a sudden storm broke loose,
And I was thrust into jail as an honored guest.

I am a straightfoward man, with no crime on my conscience,
But I was accused of being a spy for China.
So life, you see, is never a very smooth business,
And now the present bristles with difficulties.

The poem is somewhat unusual in being so long; most poems in the book are four lines exactly, with some exceptions other than this.

Minh, Ho Chi (1967). Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected Writings, 1920–66. Bernard B. Fall, editor. New York: Signet.

Thank you to Steve Brinson for finding a copy of the same translation used here! ↩

De Smet and Van Diest was a Belgian gasoline company before being acquired by Total, a major international petroleum company. ↩

Vicksburg is the name of several American cities. Given the context here, my best guess is that this refers to Vicksburg, Mississippi, a large city located on the banks of the Mississippi River. ↩

Named after the famous work of Roman fiction, the Satyricon was a well-known alternative music nightclub in the Old Town district of Portland until its close in 2003. ↩

Paul Lukas is a baseball commentator and Mets fan. At the time of Full Force Galesburg, the 1997 season was underway, in which the Mets finished as third in the National League East, failing ultimately to secure a postseason spot. ↩

Jaime Tugwell was (and perhaps still is) an employee of Rough Trade Records in London; one of the first people outside the United States to stock Mountain Goats records. ↩

Richard Samuel Deese is a poet, professor of history at Boston University, and native of Claremont, California, where he most likely met John. ↩

The doubling of "all" instead of "on all counts" is the original text. ↩

Referring to Joel Huschle, for whom Song for Mark and Joel was written. Joel appears throughout the Mountain Goats canon in liner notes and songs. ↩

A music video for New Britain was made by some fans shortly after the release of Full Force Galesburg. Excited, John supported them, but John's casual dislike of the haircut of the lead hurt the feelings of the filmmakers and the film was never released. Webster Hall, New York, November 9, 2008. ↩

New Britain is part of the informal series of Biblical references. ↩

A reference to the album New Britain by the English band Whitehouse, released in 1982. Like their other albums, this set the stage for industrial music to come.

Other allusions in this title include the following. New Britain is an island in Papua New Guinea. However, given the West Country line (see footnote below) and other references throughout the album to southwestern England, it seems more likely that this is set in England and refers primarily to a newness related to or new incarnation of Great Britain, the island in northwestern Europe belonging to the United Kingdom which contains England, Scotland, and Wales.

New Britain is also the name of a melody which was eventually attached to the now-famous folk hymn Amazing Grace in 1835, the tune to which it is still sung today. New Britain itself was an amalgam of two melodies originally published in 1829 by Charles Spilman and Benjamin Shaw. ↩

The West Country is a rural region in southwestern England encompassing Cornwall at the southwestern end and continuing east through Devon and Somerset to Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, and Dorset. The dialect is influenced by the native speech of Cornish, a Celtic language, and has been stigmatized by the association with rural farming and simplicity. This region is referenced both in New Britain and West Country Dream. ↩ ↩²

The Mississippi River forms the western boundary of Illinois; this could refer to crossing that river almost anywhere along the Illinois border. ↩ ↩²

Snow Owl is part of the informal series of Biblical references. ↩

The snowy owl, Bubo scandiacus, is a species of large owls living in the Arctic tundra regions, whether in North America or Eurasia. Wingspans of adults range from four to five feet. Occasionally snowy owls come as far south as the lower 48 American states or southern Russia, but these sightings are rare. Like other owls, snowy owls are carnivores. ↩

"So, you are in love, you've been in love for what seems like the entirety of your real life, and what preceded it — it either didn't count or it happened to somebody else, and so — so, you're in love, but then, what happens, 'cause it's my song, it also all goes to hell. And so, what's left is a lot of fear. A godawful amount of fear." — Empty Bottle, Chicago, December 6, 1997. See also Cow Haus, Tallahassee, February 6, 1998.

John has specified that the people in this song live in Yorkshire. Crossing Border, Amsterdam, October 9, 1999. ↩

West Country Dream is part of the informal series of alternate versions. ↩

A live version of West Country Dream was released on the Yoyo a Go Go 1999 compilation. ↩

John has explained that this refers to the southern California town Ontario, which sits adjacent to Claremont and Pomona where he grew up. Slattery's, Dublin, November 22, 1996. ↩

Also sung, "And then the orange tree burst into white bloom the other day". WFUV session, December 17, 2012. ↩

Sometimes, these lines are mixed up or added to. For example, this has also been sung:

Day breaking
River beckoning
Hey, hey
Hey, hey
Sun falling
River calling
Hey, hey
La la la la la la la la la la la

WFUV session, December 17, 2012. ↩

Down Here is part of the informal series of Biblical references. ↩

Venus, the second planet from the sun, has a harsh atmosphere comprised almost entirely of carbon dioxide but containing clouds of sulfur dioxide, the combination of which leads to sulfuric acid droplets. As the ensuing severe greenhouse effect leads to an average surface temperature of over 460 °C, these droplets do indeed evaporate before landing, called virga.

Krasnopolsky VA, Parshev VA (1981). Chemical composition of the atmosphere of Venus. Nature, 292(5824), 610 – 613. ↩

The red-crowned or Japanese crane, or Grus japonensis, is a large endangered crane species native to Siberia, China, and parts of Japan, mythologized as a sign of luck. ↩

Nall initially transcribed this lyric as "japanese red clowns train by the water here" in an absolutely fantastic mishear of the lyric. Although he's corrected it, it remains on his site as an alternate lyric. It's been reported to me that subsequent to Nall's transcription, John has played this song and sung it with this lyric, however, I've never heard a recording of such. If you have, please get in touch. ↩

Lithuania is a northern European country located on the Baltic Sea. A Baltic state, it gained independence from the Soviet Union after World War I. ↩

This stanza uses an old, often-used snowclone that found its way into gravestones, folk songs, literature, and prayers, that fits the form:

X is my name
Y is my station
Heaven is my resting place
God is my salvation

with X taking the writer's name, Y their home, and with station occasionally being replaced with nation and salvation with expectation, among other modifications. Members of the Mudcat forums, associated with the Digital Tradition Folk Song Database, were able to collect many examples of this formulation, some dating to 1799.

The specific example of Johnson Johnson used here seems to originate with the folk song The Two Brothers or The Twa Brothers, one of the ballads collected by Francis James Child (as Child Ballad 49). While many versions lack this final stanza, some later versions add it in. See for example Brave Boys: New England Traditions in Folk Music, released by New World Records, which includes such a recording made in 1964. The song itself depicts the murder of a boy by his brother. ↩

"There are two people in this song — or three, if you count the highway, which I generally do. They look a lot like me and the woman who would later become my wife, driving from Chicago to northern Iowa on a summer day. Only I don't think that ever happened. I know we never had any '50s road movie conversations like the one that opens the song. We weren't, at the point in time when this song would have had to've taken place for it to be true, using overnight bags. We had suitcases. And there wasn't enough backstory between us for buildings to appear as 'monument[s] of desperation.'

"But the picture I get in my head, or got in my head when I was writing it in a Grinnell apartment circa 1996, was of my girlfriend and I heading a little ways west and digging in for a long life together. I think it's almost a symbolic scene for me in that way. On one tour we opened the set with it quite a few times, and I enjoyed it more and more each night. The characters in this song aren't keeping secrets from you; anything they don't tell you just isn't any of your business." — My Five Favorite Mountain Goats Characters, eMusic Magazine, February 15, 2008. Archived by the Internet Archive on February 22, 2008, retrieved July 16, 2014. See also Canopy Club, Urbana, October 12, 2005.

"This is the first real love song I ever wrote for my wife." — Bowery Ballroom, New York, October 29, 2005. See also Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, October 23, 2002; Bottom of the Hill, May 26, 2004. John often introduces 02-75 as being the first love song written for his wife; it's not clear to me which came first.

More than the other songs, Twin Human Highway Flares seems to represent the explanation of the album given in the liner notes, "All that was left later was the vision of the two of us crossing the parking lot toward the blazing room off the interstate half an hour past Iowa over on the other side of the Mississippi. These songs are about what made that moment either possible or inevitable, depending on how you look at it." ↩

Twin Human Highway Flares is part of the informal series of Biblical references. ↩

John has described Weekend in Western Illinois and It's All Here in Brownsville as being linked, both describing border towns: one on the Iowa-Illinois border, the other on the Texas-Mexico border. KJHK interview, March 2, 1997, transcribed by Jon Nall, retrieved July 16, 2014. ↩

Illinois is a state in the American midwest bordering Lake Michigan to the northeast and the Mississippi River to the west. The preceding song, Twin Human Highway Flares, similarly is located in western Illinois. ↩

Sometimes sung, "... where the tall corn grows". Zoop, Farm Sanctuary, New York, June 17, 2007. ↩

Song for the Julian Calendar is part of the Song for ... series. ↩

The Julian calendar was a Roman calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE and lasting until the introduction of the currently-used Gregorian calendar in 1582, which changed the accounting of leap years to more accurately reflect astronomic reality. Prior to the Julian calendar, Romans used a 12-month calendar of 355 days, with a intercalary month of 27 days occasionally inserted between February and March to correct the calendar, and often manipulated for political ends; the Julian calendar ended this practice and had timekeeping rely solely on the sun. Some churches continue to use the Julian calendar today for their religious ceremonies. ↩

This is very similar to the closing line of the chorus (sometimes, the opening verse) to the eight-bar blues standard Trouble in Mind, originally recorded by singer Thelma La Vizzo with writer Richard M. Jones on piano in 1924:

Trouble in mind, I'm blue
But I won't be blue always
'Cause I know the sun's gonna shine
In my back door someday

The song has been recorded in various forms by dozens of artists over the years, including Nina Simone, Dinah Washington, Aretha Franklin, Lightnin' Hopkins, Hank Williams Jr., and many others.

Thank you to Evan Perez for noticing this! ↩

This is a confusing title. While I freely admit to being unsure of its meaning, my best guess is that it refers to an Mayan religious practice surrounding sacrifices. In these, a maize stalk would be placed on a stela, upon which the priest would drip blood. This practice could, however, be unrelated entirely to this song and be only a coincidence.

Megged, Amos (2010). Social Memory in Ancient and Colonial Mesoamerica. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-11227-7 ↩

John has confirmed that this is actually "shinnied", meaning to climb a tree, rather than "shimmied", as Nall reports.

Mountain Goats forums, WANTED: Most impressive tMG rhymes, August 6, 2008, retrieved June 16, 2015. ↩

Black walnut, or Juglans nigra, is a species of walnut tree native to North America and predominating through the central to eastern United States and southern Canada. ↩

Named Stalingrad after Joseph Stalin in 1925, eventually being renamed to its current name of Volgograd in 1961 as part of Khrushchev's de-Stalinization programs, this is a large city in Volgograd Oblast, western Russia. Originally, the city was named Tsaritsyn. ↩

Chechnya is a republic in southwestern Russia, which fought for independence after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and was eventually crushed by Russia in 1999. Depending on the year in which this song takes place, Chechnya could be independent (1917 – 1921 and 1991 – 1999), part of the Soviet Union (1921 – 1991), or part of Russia (after 1999), making such a vacation either extremely dangerous or indicative of some political or military relationship, or a simple trip south with no such overtones. ↩

A stolypin car is a type of Russian railroad carriage designed to transport people and livestock to implement the Stolypin agricultural reforms in the 1900s. Such reforms aimed to eliminate collective agriculture and force a capitalist schema of farming. The cars were later used for passenger transportation and then by Soviet security forces for prisoners. ↩

"It's a song about that point in the relationship, you've all been there, where you've been drunk for weeks, and you look across the table at the person you used to know, and you say, 'I used to know you, don't you live here?'" — 40 Watt Club, Athens, Georgia, August 3, 2001

"This is a love song... it's about a couple of people plotting harm." — Opalis, Norman, Oklahoma, November 13, 2002 ↩

Minnesota is a midwestern American state bordering Canada to the north and Lake Superior to the east. It is one state away from Illinois. ↩

Holland is a province in the western Netherlands, a densely-populated Dutch-speaking country in Western Europe bordering the North Sea. Outside of the Netherlands, Holland is commonly used to refer to the country as a whole. ↩

These two lines are derived from Sonnet 70 of the English poet Edmund Spenser's sonnet cycle Amoretti, published in 1595. The sonnets describe his love for his eventual wife, Elizabeth Boyle, whom he had married by the time of the poems' publication. The full sonnet is as follows:

SONNET. LXX.

Fresh spring the herald of loues mighty king,
In whose cote armour richly are displayed
all sorts of flowers the which on earth do spring
in goodly colours gloriously arrayd:

Goe to my loue, where she is careless layd,
yet in her winters bowre not well awake:
tell her the ioyous time wil not be staid
vnlesse she doe him by the forelock take.

Bid her therefore her selfe soone ready make,
to wayt on lue amongst his louely crew:
where euery one that misseth then her make
shall be by him amearst with penance dew.

Make hast therefore sweet loue, whilest it is prime,
for none can call againe the passed time.

Larsen, Kenneth J. (1997). Edmund Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion: A Critical Edition. Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. ↩

When asked if John was alluding to another work in this line, John indicated that to the best of his knowledge, he'd written it himself, although the line is common enough to be found elsewhere. Where does the phrase "the sky gone crazy with stars" come from?, William Caxton Fan Club, retrieved July 16, 2014. ↩

Sometimes sung, "There's something waiting for us in the hot, wet air, I can smell it". El Rey, Los Angeles, June 23, 2011. ↩

This title comes from the Thomas Hardy poem The Voice, written after the death of his estranged wife in 1912:

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever consigned to existlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward
And the woman calling.

Hardy, Thomas. The Voice. Poetry Foundation, retrieved July 16, 2014. ↩

Cassius Clay was the birth name of Muhammad Ali, the famous heavyweight boxing champion. Ali changed his name after winning the heavyweight title from Sonny Liston in a 1964 upset; the use of Clay instead of Ali in this song implies a fight of Ali's prior to his name change, perhaps this famous fight (also alluded to in Love Love Love). ↩

John has described Weekend in Western Illinois and It's All Here in Brownsville as being linked, both describing border towns: one on the Iowa-Illinois border, the other on the Texas-Mexico border. KJHK interview, March 2, 1997, transcribed by Jon Nall, retrieved July 16, 2014. ↩

Many American cities and districts are named Brownsville. However, given the reference to the Mexican border, I belive this refers to Brownsville, Texas, a large city at the southernmost tip of Texas, directly across the border from Matamoros. ↩