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Stuck in My Head: The Mountain Goats, "The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix's Life" (on Ghana, 2002)

You know the song - the one that gets stuck in your head for a week, the one that you keep hitting the back button on your iPod to listen to over and over and over again, the one that you want to stop someone in the street and say "Listen to this!" That's what this blog series is about - a short review of a single song that I enjoy so much that I need to tell someone about it while, at the same time, avoiding assault charges. It may be old or new, indie or "classic," cool or not so cool. Sometimes my argument might be as simple as "It's got a good beat, and I can dance to it"; other times it might be a detailed lyrical analysis -- whatever it takes to undercover the essential goodness of the track. In all cases, it will be a song worth finding and listening to.

My first track is a follow-up, of sorts, to my review of The Mountain Goat's Heretic Pride. While writing that review, I kept going back to their older material, and this is one such song: "The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix's Life" from the album Ghana, released in 2002.

Jimi Hendrix was found dead in the early morning of September 18, 1970 after a night of drinking red wine with his girlfriend and taking a handful of sleeping pills. The cause of death was asphyxiation; in other words, he drowned in his own vomit sometime during the night. So, it's fitting that the Mountain Goats song "The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix's Life" (an early song later compiled on Ghana, 2002) fixates on water. Jimi Hendrix wakes up on September 17, takes a shower and has a drink of water, and that's pretty much it. Through this short narrative, John Darnielle creates one of his most compelling and emotionally powerful songs. For most songwriters, a song called "The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix's Life" would be epic, but John Darnielle does just the opposite and creates a quiet, understated song that focuses, like many Mountain Goats' songs, on the mundane details of everyday life.

We see the rock demi-god finding subtle joy in the tasks that we ourselves do. He gets up, walks down the hall, and adjusts the shower until the temperature is just how he likes it, "hot but not too hot." He then goes to the kitchen and pours himself a glass of water with ice. The song ends with Darnielle singing the line "There is nothing like cool water." He begins to repeat the line, but then thinks better of it, and leaves us with just "There is nothing ...." On the one hand, it's as if Darnielle decided that if he were to repeat the line, the song would loose it's quiet understatment; on the other other, he leaves us with simply that there is nothing more to say. Jimi Hendrix's last day was a day like any other. Death was waiting for him in the middle of the coming night, but Hendrix had no idea of this. If he had known, would he have done things differently? Would he have picked up his guitar and played a final show? Or at least recorded one more song? But death as an unknown that can strike at anytime is Darnielle's point in this song. Death could be waiting for us tonight, but we would never know. Darnielle is not saying that the last day of Hendrix's life was a waste. Getting your shower adjusted just the way you like it and drinking a glass of cold water are small, everyday joys that we appreciate without realizing it. There is a real sense of joy in Hendrix's experience of these events, which are only amplified (not simply because of) our knowledge of his imminent death.

This theme occurs elsewhere in Darnielle's songwriting, most notably perhaps in "Hand Ball," another early track that appeared on Protein Source of the Future... Now. (also from 2002). The song vaguely references someone dying on the hand-ball court, at least that's the way I've always interpreted it. Here again, we see the idea of death coming when least expected.  Darnielle builds up the song with phrases that death may say as he's coming, ending with an omnious "I am evil forest, kill a man on the day that his life seems sweetest to him." But then he adds one more phrase, "I did not come to play hand ball," an otherwise forgettable line, but here, thanks to the build up, we understand it as another way death can announce its presence. Here and in "The Last Days of Jimi Hendrix's Life," it is the weight given these simply lines that shows the power of his songwriting, and in them, we see the key to Darnielle's writing: his use of specific details of everyday events to create new ways of representing beauty and the universality of human emotion. It's what everyone is trying to do; Darnielle just does it better than most.