Originally published at: If "This Year" was written by Bob Dylan | Boing Boing
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well, i’m convinced. no wonder i like the Mountain Goats so much.
Anyone remember Dylan Hears a Who? It was fantastic and pulled from the internet in a couple of hours after a polite request from the estate of Theodor Geisel.
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two great tastes that taste great together!
If you like The Mountain Goats and dislike comparisons that are a little too on the nose, you’ll probably appreciate Darnielle’s “101 Things to Which You Can Compare Interpol Besides Joy Division”
Summary
- John Cale
- Warren Zevon
- Pink Floyd’s Animals
- your favorite animals
- The Animals
- The Anti-Nowhere League
- Robert Fripp’s League of Gentlemen
- Marilyn Monroe
- Saccharine Trust with a different singer
- a very depressed Dire Straits
- Nico’s The Marble Index
- Nico in general
- the first Cure album
- the second Cure album
- early Bauhaus
- late Bauhaus
- Peter Murphy’s “Cuts You Up” screwed & chopped
- Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters
- the Strokes
- “Rainy Days and Sundays”
- the Sundays
- “If I Was a Carpenter”
- Graham Greene
- a goth Aztec Camera
- the Steve Miller Band
- Sebadoh
- the Wedding Present
- weddings in general
- Generalissimo Francisco Franco
- the Lemon Pipers
- a really obscure two-piece from southern California who nobody remembers called Supercollider, who were really good and screened old NASA footage while they played, and I really wanted to see them a bunch of times but I actually only saw them that one time and it was really great
- the Beatles
- Beat Happening
- What’s Happening!!!
- the remake of the What’s Happening!!! remake that’ll hit screens circa 2135 and will only be seen by androids
- Christian Death’s Catastrophe Ballet
- the Virgin Prunes
- a really mellow Sex Gang Children
- the cover of an album I have by a band called We Are Childhood Equals
- Rothko if he’d lived to see fluoxetine
- Jackson Pollock if he’d never been born
- water
- air
- a late-morning alone in an old-growth forest
- S.E. Hinton novels
- the Andrea True Connection
- the feeling you get from guys who are into conspiracy theory & pyrmaids & shit like that
- the suspicion you have that some of these guys could have been you if you’d made just one wrong mental turn at just the wrong moment
- “Suspicious Minds”
- framed photographs of Elvis
- framed photographs of Elvis in a dentist’s office
- framed photographs of Elvis in a dentist’s office on a distant planet
- Edward Elgar
- Sonic Youth minus the noise fixation
- an imaginary band named “Youth Sonique”
- old-time hockey
- breakfast in Paris
- the sun setting after the monsoon rains
- the Manic Street Preachers
- Nirvana
- the credits to a French movie playing in a theater in S.E. Portland on a rainy day
- Sarah Records
- Blanco y Negro
- David Bowie’s early singles on Pye
- “Downtown”
- Susan Amway-era Magnetic Fields
- lack of water
- lack of air
- fluorescent light
- a balcony in Adelaide, Sunday, August17th, 2003, 7:00 a.m.
- the modern sense of duty
- the postmodern suspicion of same
- the truth not lying somewhere in between, contrary to what you might expect, but squarely in one of the two camps
- Lee Hazlewood’s Cowboy in Sweden
- Roxy Music with an attitude problem
- the Microphones
- an old PSA for dental hygiene where the voiceover, a child, introduces the spot by saying “Happy Tooth discovers the real toothache!”
- Radiohead
- Criswell
- the Stranglers
- attempting to quit drinking without any help from anybody
- shut up, fuck you, I can do it myself
- thanks
- Strawberry Switchblade’s “Since Yesterday”
- Tanita Tikaram’s band’s secret practice tapes
- bedrooms whose walls are covered in band fliers
- a mountain of skulls in the jungle
- Suede
- Pulp
- Spandau Ballet
- This Kind of Punishment
- Mighty Joe Young
- the C.B. craze-related TV show Movin’ On , but not B.J. and the Bear
- Sinead O’Connor if things had worked out differently
- the band that Sinead’s third son will start in 2024
- the year 2024 itself, faintly visible there on the horizon
- the horizon itself
- our own mysterious attraction toward horizons in general
- mysterious attractions in general
Not until now, but a few of the tracks have been re-uploaded. It’s really well done.
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Maybe they are more comparable to Lou Reed? I’ve always thought that Lou Reed/VU had a bigger influence on modern music than Dylan, honestly. Although certainly Lou was influenced by Dylan… he just took that sort of narrative songwriting to a different place than Dylan did. Dylan tended to be more inhabiting different personas, while Reed was always… unabashedly himself, writing about those around him? I get that more of that from the Mountain Goats, especially that album. Which is far and away my fave.
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According to Brian Eno - “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band”
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It’s more that: if someone is a Lou Reed fan or a Bob Dylan fan, I’m not necessarily going to assume that they will appreciate the Mountain Goats, and vice versa. You can certainly link them sonically and by influence, but the type of person who would listen to any of those artists might overlap, or might not.
Granted, I’m not always that discerning when I force people to listen to the Goats. But I only excitedly recommend them when that person is really into English lit and/or Dungeons & Dragons and/or used to like punk/metal but has softened to folkier things.
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I thought it was 30,000?
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True enough… I do think there is something to the argument that Lou Reed and VU are the beginning of the modern era of rock, that gave us punk/postppunk music. As @Mercenary_Garage said, their first album was a flop, but everyone who bought it started a band.
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The great irony is the John Darnielle has said on a number of occasions he does not really like Dylan’s music.
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I thought it was ten!
Brian Eno seems to think it was ten thousand.
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I strongly suspect that whatever number Eno said, was simply one he made up for the anecdote.
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It could be. I swear a ran across a citation that said it was 30,000, but I can’t remember where it was now?
Let’s see if it’s on the wikipedia…
Seems to be…
This one days it was only 1000:
But it’s not cited, so…
Now THIS person, knew VU and worked with Lou Reed, and they say pre-1984 sales of all their albums might have been 50,000 AT MOST according to their lawyer. But then he manages to track down a copy of Nico’s royalty statement, which gives the the number of over 58,000 for the first album…
Agreed. Eno’s still correct that many people were inspired to start a band by their music. But then again, many people were inspired to go out and form a band after they heard the Beatles or Stones, too. I’d argue that nature of the bands inspired by VU were of a different nature entirely, though.
anyways! yay, history!
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History is a Superpower!
You’re awesome!
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