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Presented By:

The Mountain Goats

$39.50 - $45
Presented By: MOKB Presents
The Vogue
Indianapolis, IN
Oct 16
Saturday
8:00 PM
Doors Open
Health Check: Vax or TestBuy Tickets
Learn More About This Show
Add to Calendar 10/16/2021 09:00 PM10/16/2021 11:30 PMThe Mountain GoatsMore Information: https://mokbpresents.com/event/the-mountain-goats/The Vogue
Learn More About This Show
Add to Calendar 10/16/2021 09:00 PM10/16/2021 11:30 PMThe Mountain GoatsMore Information: https://mokbpresents.com/event/the-mountain-goats/The Vogue

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ARTIST PROFILE | The Mountain Goats

AlternativeIndie

At last it can be told: the story of how, when the Mountain Goats got together in early March, 2020, it was to make not one album, but two. That’s how many keepers our superhumanly prolific frontman, John Darnielle, had come up with since we’d recorded In League With Dragons in Nashville back in 2018.

 

The idea this time around was to work with Matt Ross-Spang, the dashing Memphis wunderkind who’d engineered that album and charmed us all with his gentle wit and old-school savoir-faire. (It’s hard not to be won over when you go to record a part and the voice coming through the headphones drawls, “You ready, Bubba?”) Matt’s pitch was for us to spend a week at Sam Phillips Recording, his home base in Memphis, followed by another at the equally storied FAME Recording Studios down in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a plan that dovetailed nicely with John’s notion of corralling these songs into two complementary batches, a sort of yin and yang, one light, one dark. The Memphis album—Getting Into Knives, which came out last October—would be brighter, bolder, marked by rich and vibrant hues; the Muscle Shoals one—Dark in Here, set for release on June 25—quieter, smokier, but more deeply textured and intense. Something like that, anyway.

 

It’s funny looking back on it now. I remember driving down to Memphis on the last day of February and definitely being aware of this “coronavirus” story on the horizon. We’d been hearing about it for weeks. But the big thing I was thinking about? The possibly world-changing event on my radar? Don’t laugh. It was Super Tuesday. The Democratic primaries. Like, “Oh man, we’re gonna be in the studio working when Super Tuesday happens! How crazy will that be?”

 

Literally a year and a week ago as I write this. What children we all were!

 

By the time we got to Alabama, it was clear that the ground around us was quickly shifting, and that the world to which we’d be returning afterwards would be an unrecognizable one. But the studio, even during completely ordinary times, is a singularly immersive thing. You’re basically in a bubble with a handful of your closest friends, working 12 hours a day, so focused on the task at hand that most of the time you forget that the outside world even exists. So it wasn’t a huge leap to go from being—to borrow the Hold Steady’s phrase—sequestered in Memphis to finding ourselves effectively, in the moment’s suddenly ubiquitous parlance, quarantined in Muscle Shoals.

 

We were all, of course, well aware of the mythos surrounding FAME before we arrived. I’d recently rewatched the Muscle Shoals documentary, and heard Bono intoning profoundly about “the music in the river” and how the songs “came out of the mud,” and indeed when we went down to the shore of the majestic Tennessee across from where we were staying, there actually was a busted old reel of magnetic tape sitting there amongst the rocks. “Guys! Guys! I found one of the songs!”

 

What you don’t get from the movie is that while FAME might one day have been surrounded by cotton fields, it today sits between a CVS and a Pizza Hut. No matter. The second you step inside the building you enter a genuine time capsule, transporting you instantly if not to its early ’60s origins and heyday then to its louche mid-’70s after-party. The vibe is completely authentic and very, very palpable. The room we set up in is the room where Percy Sledge sang “When a Man Loves a Woman,” where Etta James tracked “Tell Mama,” where Aretha Franklin recorded “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).” The Wurlitzer with which Spooner Oldham opens the last? It’s sitting right there. It’s been sitting there since 1967.

 

Matt made sure that Spooner Oldham was there, too. Spooner is living musical history, having played with everyone from Bob Dylan and Neil Young to Linda Ronstadt and Liberace, for crying out loud. Seriously, look up his credits, they’re insane. People who’ve worked with Spooner invariably describe him as “a trip,” and when you meet him you see why. He’s affable, a little spacey, full of unbelievable stories, and he never plays the same part twice. Spooner is all over Dark in Here—any time you hear a bit of Hammond organ or electric piano chiming in without repeating a phrase, that’s probably him.

 

We tracked the album’s one outright banger, “The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower,” live with him, and “Mobile” and “Dark in Here” with Spooner and fellow ringer, the guitarist Will McFarlane—another local veteran, he played with Bonnie Raitt for years. We’ve been playing together as a band long enough to have developed a degree of musical telepathy, but listening to these two guys responding in real time to us and each other revealed another level of connectedness altogether, one bordering on the supernatural. We ran through most of these songs three times; I’m pretty sure the performances of “Mobile” and “Dark in Here” you’re hearing are both second takes. Crazy.

 

One of my quarantine projects after getting home was going back to Moby Dick and actually finishing it for once, and I was amused to encounter early on the retelling of the story of Jonah. If Melville gives it to us as a fiery 19th century New Bedford sermon, what “Mobile” offers might be understood as Father Mapple’s modern-day Gulf Coast flip side, the breeziness of McFarlane’s electric guitar and Matt Douglas’ accordion belying its protagonist’s guilty conscience. The sinister “Dark in Here” presents no such ambiguity, with Spooner’s Hammond and Will’s whammy-bar Telecaster inflating the narrator’s spider-hole revenge fantasy to widescreen spaghetti-western proportions.

 

We only had Spooner for two afternoons, though, and Will for just one, which accounts for one of the big differences between this album and the one we made in Memphis, where our core was rounded out with guitarist Chris Boerner and pianist Bram Gielen. Here it was just the four of us: John playing acoustic guitar and occasional piano, the rhythm section of drummer Jon Wurster and myself, and our jack-of-all-trades utility man Matt Douglas (master of woodwinds, as it happens) picking up everything else. The result is something more stripped down and intimate than the rather more lush arrangements of Getting Into Knives.

 

There was, of course, calamity unfolding all around us as we made the album. I don’t remember what day it was—maybe when they suddenly cancelled the NBA season? Like, the day after the guy jokingly wiped all the pressroom microphones with his hand?—but I vividly recall waking up one morning and texting my wife that we might want to think twice about any nonessential household spending, as it was looking increasingly unlikely that I’d be going on tour in May after all. Like I say, we were pretty insulated in the studio, but our phones still worked, and I think you can hear the mounting sense of ambient panic manifest in the unpremeditatedly unhinged outros of “Slow Parts” and especially “Lizard Suit.”

 

Album closer “Let Me Bathe in Demonic Light” was the last song we tracked, at the end of what had become an emotional couple of weeks. Like a lot of John’s lyrics, its mixture of specificity and ambiguity makes it easy to read one’s own story into it, and as we played I couldn’t help but hear its call to community—“Who’s coming with me?”—as describing us, and our “preordained place” being there, together, in that moment. Listening now, that coda strikes me as a giant exhale—all of the uncertainty and dread we’d individually been trying to keep a handle on released in one great collective heaving sigh. I drove back home on Sunday, March 15. There was no school or work for my wife or kid that Monday, and wouldn’t be again for a long while.

 

What does John say in the liner notes? “A moment in time.” Ha! That it was, my friend.

 

Half a million dead Americans later, I’m not sure what people will make of this album, to be honest. If it has an antecedent in the Mountain Goats catalog, I’d say it’s Get Lonely, the similarly restrained 2006 album that it took people a while to find their way into; producer Scott Solter memorably called it at the time “a root fire of a record.” One of the words that John used when we were talking about the direction for Dark in Here was “wild,” which I liked a lot. Not wild in the sense of abandon—these aren’t those kind of songs. But wild in the sense of something undomesticated, untamable. Wild like the immutability of nature, the way it will take back any piece of untended space as its own, whether amidst the AutoZones and Chick-fil-A’s of Muscle Shoals or among the ruins of a scientific outpost on the Kola Peninsula. Wild like the whale; like a powerful animal. Or a virus—the beast that awakes, emerges from a forest, and stops the world. You can fight the calamity all you want, but either way, it’s going to demand your surrender.

 

Peter Hughes

Rochester, March 2021

READ MORE »READ LESS »
CONNECT:

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About the The Vogue | Indianapolis, IN

The Vogue, located in the Broad Ripple neighborhood of Indianapolis, is one of the most popular and storied (21+ only) music venues in the Midwest. The Vogue originally opened as a movie theater on June 18, 1938, and today is considered the top destination for live music in Indianapolis, winning countless awards and earning the accolades of local musicians, industry leading DJ’s, and nationally touring artists.

Box Office: (317) 259-7029
info@thevogue.com
Main: (317) 259-7029

Getting Around the Venue

6259 N. College Ave,
Indianapolis, IN 46220
Tue. thru Fri. 12pm to 5pm
1 hour prior to published door time

Frequently Asked Questions About The Vogue | Indianapolis, IN

What are the age restrictions at this venue?

The Vogue is strictly a 21+ only venue. No exceptions.

Can I upgrade my to VIP seating?

Yes. For premium upgrades and seating, visit this page. Purchase tickets for your show and watch for your premium invitation.

What items are permitted or prohibited at this venue?

Visit the venue’s FAQ page for more information on permitted items for shows at The Vogue

Can I bring a bag into the show?

The Vogue allows small bags/purses only. No backpacks or larger bags are permitted unless they are required for medical purposes.

What’s the parking situation like?

Paid parking is available in the parking lot behind The Vogue off Carrollton Ave, adjacent to The Vogue on Broad Ripple Ave, or across the street from The Vogue on College Ave.

What is the camera/photo policy for this venue?

No professional cameras. Contact The Vogue if you are interested in securing media credentials for the show.

Is there food and drink at this venue?

There are chips available for purchase but do not sell any other type of food at the venue. There are several great local restaurants within walking distance of The Vogue in the Broad Ripple neighborhood.

View seating maps for this venue

Yes! VIP seating is offered as an upgrade to your GA Ticket through the premium ugrades program. After you purchase a ticket you will receive an email inviting you to upgrade to premium seating. You can also reach out to info@thevogue.com or call (317) 259-7029 to receive assistance with upgrading your ticket.

Can I leave and re-enter the venue?

No. Re-entry is not permitted at this venue with the exception of the external smoking area.

Do you offer ADA, handicap or special needs options?

Yes, there is limited ADA seating available on a first-come, first-served basis. To guarantee ADA seating, call (317) 259-7029, or email info@thevogue.com.

Where is the box office located?

Tickets can be purchased to any shows at The Vogue via the venue’s website. You can also avoid the fees and purchase tickets in person at the box office which is located at the front entrance of the venue on College Ave. The box office is open Tuesday – Friday from 12pm – 5pm and during all events.

I lost something at the show. Who do I contact?

For information on any lost and found items please contact info@thevogue.com.

What is your refund policy?

For information on refunds for postponed or cancelled shows, please contact info@thevogue.com.

Beware of counterfeit tickets. How do I tell if my ticket is valid?

The Vogue uses OpenDate as its exclusive ticketing provider. All valid tickets will be issued through OpenDate. Customers are discouraged against purchasing tickets from the secondary ticket market and should do so at your own risk. If you would like to check the validity of a ticket please contact info@thevogue.com

Can I purchase tickets in person without fees?

Yes, you can avoid service fees and purchase tickets in person at the box office which is located at the front entrance of the venue on College Ave. The box office is open Tuesday – Friday from 12pm – 5pm and during all events.

Health Check: Vax or Test
Oct 16

The Mountain Goats

The Vogue
$39.50 - $45
Presented By: MOKB Presents
Doors: 8:00 PM
Start Time: 9:00 pm

HEALTH CHECK REQUIRED: Proof of full COVID-19 vaccination or negative COVID-19 PCR test within 72 hours or negative Antigen test within 6 hours. Face coverings are strongly encouraged for all attendees.

Download the Bindle Mobile Health App and verify your vaccination status to expedite entry to the venue.

If these requirements prevent you from attending, contact our Box Office for refund options prior to the show.
Learn More About This Show
Add to Calendar 10/16/2021 09:00 PM10/16/2021 11:30 PMThe Mountain GoatsMore Information: https://mokbpresents.com/event/the-mountain-goats/The Vogue

Buy Tickets

ARTIST PROFILE | The Mountain Goats

AlternativeIndie

At last it can be told: the story of how, when the Mountain Goats got together in early March, 2020, it was to make not one album, but two. That’s how many keepers our superhumanly prolific frontman, John Darnielle, had come up with since we’d recorded In League With Dragons in Nashville back in 2018.

 

The idea this time around was to work with Matt Ross-Spang, the dashing Memphis wunderkind who’d engineered that album and charmed us all with his gentle wit and old-school savoir-faire. (It’s hard not to be won over when you go to record a part and the voice coming through the headphones drawls, “You ready, Bubba?”) Matt’s pitch was for us to spend a week at Sam Phillips Recording, his home base in Memphis, followed by another at the equally storied FAME Recording Studios down in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a plan that dovetailed nicely with John’s notion of corralling these songs into two complementary batches, a sort of yin and yang, one light, one dark. The Memphis album—Getting Into Knives, which came out last October—would be brighter, bolder, marked by rich and vibrant hues; the Muscle Shoals one—Dark in Here, set for release on June 25—quieter, smokier, but more deeply textured and intense. Something like that, anyway.

 

It’s funny looking back on it now. I remember driving down to Memphis on the last day of February and definitely being aware of this “coronavirus” story on the horizon. We’d been hearing about it for weeks. But the big thing I was thinking about? The possibly world-changing event on my radar? Don’t laugh. It was Super Tuesday. The Democratic primaries. Like, “Oh man, we’re gonna be in the studio working when Super Tuesday happens! How crazy will that be?”

 

Literally a year and a week ago as I write this. What children we all were!

 

By the time we got to Alabama, it was clear that the ground around us was quickly shifting, and that the world to which we’d be returning afterwards would be an unrecognizable one. But the studio, even during completely ordinary times, is a singularly immersive thing. You’re basically in a bubble with a handful of your closest friends, working 12 hours a day, so focused on the task at hand that most of the time you forget that the outside world even exists. So it wasn’t a huge leap to go from being—to borrow the Hold Steady’s phrase—sequestered in Memphis to finding ourselves effectively, in the moment’s suddenly ubiquitous parlance, quarantined in Muscle Shoals.

 

We were all, of course, well aware of the mythos surrounding FAME before we arrived. I’d recently rewatched the Muscle Shoals documentary, and heard Bono intoning profoundly about “the music in the river” and how the songs “came out of the mud,” and indeed when we went down to the shore of the majestic Tennessee across from where we were staying, there actually was a busted old reel of magnetic tape sitting there amongst the rocks. “Guys! Guys! I found one of the songs!”

 

What you don’t get from the movie is that while FAME might one day have been surrounded by cotton fields, it today sits between a CVS and a Pizza Hut. No matter. The second you step inside the building you enter a genuine time capsule, transporting you instantly if not to its early ’60s origins and heyday then to its louche mid-’70s after-party. The vibe is completely authentic and very, very palpable. The room we set up in is the room where Percy Sledge sang “When a Man Loves a Woman,” where Etta James tracked “Tell Mama,” where Aretha Franklin recorded “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).” The Wurlitzer with which Spooner Oldham opens the last? It’s sitting right there. It’s been sitting there since 1967.

 

Matt made sure that Spooner Oldham was there, too. Spooner is living musical history, having played with everyone from Bob Dylan and Neil Young to Linda Ronstadt and Liberace, for crying out loud. Seriously, look up his credits, they’re insane. People who’ve worked with Spooner invariably describe him as “a trip,” and when you meet him you see why. He’s affable, a little spacey, full of unbelievable stories, and he never plays the same part twice. Spooner is all over Dark in Here—any time you hear a bit of Hammond organ or electric piano chiming in without repeating a phrase, that’s probably him.

 

We tracked the album’s one outright banger, “The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower,” live with him, and “Mobile” and “Dark in Here” with Spooner and fellow ringer, the guitarist Will McFarlane—another local veteran, he played with Bonnie Raitt for years. We’ve been playing together as a band long enough to have developed a degree of musical telepathy, but listening to these two guys responding in real time to us and each other revealed another level of connectedness altogether, one bordering on the supernatural. We ran through most of these songs three times; I’m pretty sure the performances of “Mobile” and “Dark in Here” you’re hearing are both second takes. Crazy.

 

One of my quarantine projects after getting home was going back to Moby Dick and actually finishing it for once, and I was amused to encounter early on the retelling of the story of Jonah. If Melville gives it to us as a fiery 19th century New Bedford sermon, what “Mobile” offers might be understood as Father Mapple’s modern-day Gulf Coast flip side, the breeziness of McFarlane’s electric guitar and Matt Douglas’ accordion belying its protagonist’s guilty conscience. The sinister “Dark in Here” presents no such ambiguity, with Spooner’s Hammond and Will’s whammy-bar Telecaster inflating the narrator’s spider-hole revenge fantasy to widescreen spaghetti-western proportions.

 

We only had Spooner for two afternoons, though, and Will for just one, which accounts for one of the big differences between this album and the one we made in Memphis, where our core was rounded out with guitarist Chris Boerner and pianist Bram Gielen. Here it was just the four of us: John playing acoustic guitar and occasional piano, the rhythm section of drummer Jon Wurster and myself, and our jack-of-all-trades utility man Matt Douglas (master of woodwinds, as it happens) picking up everything else. The result is something more stripped down and intimate than the rather more lush arrangements of Getting Into Knives.

 

There was, of course, calamity unfolding all around us as we made the album. I don’t remember what day it was—maybe when they suddenly cancelled the NBA season? Like, the day after the guy jokingly wiped all the pressroom microphones with his hand?—but I vividly recall waking up one morning and texting my wife that we might want to think twice about any nonessential household spending, as it was looking increasingly unlikely that I’d be going on tour in May after all. Like I say, we were pretty insulated in the studio, but our phones still worked, and I think you can hear the mounting sense of ambient panic manifest in the unpremeditatedly unhinged outros of “Slow Parts” and especially “Lizard Suit.”

 

Album closer “Let Me Bathe in Demonic Light” was the last song we tracked, at the end of what had become an emotional couple of weeks. Like a lot of John’s lyrics, its mixture of specificity and ambiguity makes it easy to read one’s own story into it, and as we played I couldn’t help but hear its call to community—“Who’s coming with me?”—as describing us, and our “preordained place” being there, together, in that moment. Listening now, that coda strikes me as a giant exhale—all of the uncertainty and dread we’d individually been trying to keep a handle on released in one great collective heaving sigh. I drove back home on Sunday, March 15. There was no school or work for my wife or kid that Monday, and wouldn’t be again for a long while.

 

What does John say in the liner notes? “A moment in time.” Ha! That it was, my friend.

 

Half a million dead Americans later, I’m not sure what people will make of this album, to be honest. If it has an antecedent in the Mountain Goats catalog, I’d say it’s Get Lonely, the similarly restrained 2006 album that it took people a while to find their way into; producer Scott Solter memorably called it at the time “a root fire of a record.” One of the words that John used when we were talking about the direction for Dark in Here was “wild,” which I liked a lot. Not wild in the sense of abandon—these aren’t those kind of songs. But wild in the sense of something undomesticated, untamable. Wild like the immutability of nature, the way it will take back any piece of untended space as its own, whether amidst the AutoZones and Chick-fil-A’s of Muscle Shoals or among the ruins of a scientific outpost on the Kola Peninsula. Wild like the whale; like a powerful animal. Or a virus—the beast that awakes, emerges from a forest, and stops the world. You can fight the calamity all you want, but either way, it’s going to demand your surrender.

 

Peter Hughes

Rochester, March 2021

READ MORE »READ LESS »
CONNECT:

Supporting Acts

About the Venue

The Vogue, located in the Broad Ripple neighborhood of Indianapolis, is one of the most popular and storied (21+ only) music venues in the Midwest. The Vogue originally opened as a movie theater on June 18, 1938, and today is considered the top destination for live music in Indianapolis, winning countless awards and earning the accolades of local musicians, industry leading DJ’s, and nationally touring artists.
Amenities: 21+ Bar, Premium dedicated seating, Dedicated server, express entry.

Upgrades: To upgrade your experience please visit this link.


Parking: Street Parking, Garage Parking
6259 N. College Ave Indianapolis, IN 46220

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