The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle on Beat the Champ
As The Mountain Goats return to UK shores to promote wrestling-themed concept album Beat The Champ, John Darnielle tells us about morality and inspiration
As muses go, John Darnielle’s seems to wander more than most. Over the past six years alone, he’s dealt with subjects ranging from mental illness to tarot to a variety of takes on Christianity. He’s also successfully negotiated a journey across musical horizons, beginning in a somewhat lo-fi manner (from 1991’s cassette-only Taboo IV: The Homecoming until 2002’s All Hail West Texas, The Mountain Goats often amounted to little more than Darnielle, a guitar and a portastudio) before finally arriving at the rather more intricate explorations of American music that he now crafts with a full band.
As if to confound us further, his latest record is about a relatively unlikely subject. It’s called Beat The Champ and, as the sleevenotes proudly declare, it is “an album about professional wrestling.” It’s also quite beautiful.
Even from the other end of a crackling phone line, the 48-year-old Darnielle’s presence positively shimmers. He’s warm and fascinating – much like his music, applying some truth to the old notion that a writer can’t help but put themselves into their work. We plump for the obvious question first: what inspired him to write an album about such unusual subject matter?
“It’s funny,” he begins. “When they teach you about literature, you come away with the impression that writers wake up one morning and go, ‘What shall my theme be?’ But it’s not like that for me. I just start working and see where my ideas go. So I’m at the piano, just playing a little something, then I adlib a line of whatever comes into my mind until I get a good idea. Then I start following the images wherever they go.
“The first one I wrote was [album opener] Southwestern Territory – it follows this idea of a wrestler working for small pay around the country. When I was a kid, wrestlers seemed very glamorous… you grow up and you think, ‘Oh wow, that didn’t pay very well at all.’ They had to work five days a week like everybody else, and fly where the work was. So I had this loose idea, telling the story, and when I went to write another song, I had a similar story in mind. I thought it would be pretty unusual for a record to have just two songs that were about wrestling, so I kept going.”
'A moral position'
As ever with The Mountain Goats, it’s the detail that makes this album so absorbing. The aforementioned sleevenotes reminisce about being taken as a child to watch matches at LA’s Grand Olympic Auditorium (“I would not cheer the heels,” they declare solemnly), while The Legend Of Chavo Guerrero – the album’s most glistening slice of bright-eyed pop – sees a young Darnielle mapping out the life of his hero, and cursing the villains (“I would pray nightly for their death”). There’s great significance placed on good triumphing over evil; almost a morality structure.
“When I was a kid I had a real strong desire for good to win out,” he explains. “I remember the first time that we went through The Lord of the Rings when I was 11 or 12, and the idea of this dark power wanting to ruin and darken an entire land was offensive to me. Same with the witch in The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe. I was horrified by these evil people who – as in wrestling – do evil for the sake of evil. That to me was outrageous. It was very much a moral position for me as a child.”
This innate sense of right and wrong may lie at the root of his fandom, but Darnielle’s fascination with wrestling extends far beyond the battles fought in the ring. Indeed, and perhaps inevitably for a born raconteur with a keen eye for minutiae, he proves quite a historian of the sport.
“I was following it during a time called ‘the days of the territory’, when there was no overarching wrestling federation, just these small regional scenes. Very minor operations, run by ambitious businessmen – sort of like carnies, putting on this show that was half hoodwinkery to make as much money as possible.
“In the 80s, [WWE founders] the McMahon family bought up the smaller territories and made a single one, which of course was good for the wrestlers – they made a lot more money – but the charm of the regional territories was very much the charm of the local [music] scene: if you have good small bands around, and a good scene gets going, nobody who’s not from where you’re from will ever understand how cool that was. That makes it kind of special, like a family, and wrestling was like that when I was a kid. It was a secret, almost.”
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Once Darnielle gets going, there’s almost no stopping him, and soon our questions lead to enthusiastic, scene-setting explanations of the sport’s context:
“There was a tradition in wrestling for many years called ‘kayfabe’,” he continues. “That meant that you did not tell people who weren’t in the business that it wasn’t all real. Under kayfabe, a masked wrestler would never be seen without his mask. [Iconic Mexican luchador] El Santo, legendarily, nobody saw him without his mask on – nobody, who didn’t already know him from family connections.
“Now everybody’s in on the joke – that’s cool too, but it’s very different. Everybody knew that it was to some degree staged and planned, but it was much more like theatre in that everybody pretended it was real in order to have a true cathartic experience.”
Do you ever lament the passing of that era?
“I try not to lament the passing of anything. I really think it’s a bad habit to get into, ‘cause that’s how you get old.” He laughs. “But like I say, the wrestlers back in those days were not getting paid very well at all. There are few athletes who sacrifice more of their bodies for sport, you know? Their backs and knees are all messed up by the time they turn 40.
"I’m really glad these artists are making a good living, I’m glad more people are able to enjoy it. But at the same time, it’s like when a band you like gets successful and you go, ‘Well, it was cooler when it was smaller.’ I’m sure it was, but it’s cooler for the band that they don’t have to sleep on people’s couches.”
An Album About Mortality
Beyond the wrestling veneer, however, the album also explores darker themes, as Darnielle explains:
“It’s the most explicitly death-obsessed record of mine in a long time. There’s Stabbed To Death Outside San Juan, Luna and The Ballad of Bull Ramos – plenty of death. And then there’s a lot of imagined death in Fire Editorial. So I think in a way this is an album about mortality, and the sort of fantasies we can preoccupy ourselves with on the way to our eventual end.”
Do you still manage to immerse yourself in anything that offers that sense of escape?
“You know, it’s funny… I don’t know if it’s just maturity or the busyness of life, but it does get harder. For example, when I was a kid, there was this legendary surgeon’s photograph of the Loch Ness monster – you could really immerse yourself in that concept because the information was so scant. Well, now you can go watch as many YouTubes as you like of people telling the story of the photograph, and the way the hoax was concocted. Practically all mystery, you can go online and dispel for yourself.”
Is the absence of that mystery one of the reasons why you write?
“In writing, you can get lost enough that you sort of get unmoored, and you don’t know where you are, and you’re not sure where you’re going. That’s an exciting and mysterious place.”
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It’s precisely this delight in the unknown that makes Darnielle’s writing so consistently surprising – and one of the many reasons why Beat The Champ is such an excellent record. It also makes it difficult to spot an overall theme to his work, however. Not that this concerns him too much:
“I always assume that if anybody is writing a bunch of songs during a period of their life, there’s going to be an overarching theme, but I don’t know if it’s there for the writer to know. There’s a sense in which you never know exactly what you’re writing about – this actually goes back to the first question.
“Maybe there are some people, and this is how I always imagine British writers of the 19th century, going, ‘I shall address the theme of nobility and man, and for these purposes I will invent a character who strives to be noble from mean origins,’ or whatever. But I just tell a story, and then I tell 11 more, and then I have an album. And then I think it’s for other people to tell me what I did, or what I wound up writing about. It has to remain a little mysterious to me.”
The Mountain Goats play Leeds Brudenell Club on 12 Nov; Glasgow Art School on 13 Nov and Manchester Gorilla on 15 Nov. Beat The Champ is out now via Merge