When Franz Nicolay quit The Hold Steady after three-and-a-bit albums, he explained his choice by saying he felt like "a fox in a hedgehog band". For those unfamiliar with the analogy, foxes are pretty good at doing a bunch of different things. Hedgehogs absolutely excel at their one trick. Clearly this has worked for them, evolutionarily speaking - we can't really blame Mother Nature for not predicting cars. What keeps small mammals alive and what keeps New Hampshire jazz-accordions invested aren't likely to intersect, though.
Personally, I've never seen a problem hedgehog bands. My obsession with the Hold Steady themselves is proof enough of that. Then there's the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. You get two flavours with these loud lads: ska with rock, and rock with ska. The song will be about Boston.
It helps, of course, that both mixtures are great tastes that taste great together. Brass and bass, together at last since the 1970s. It also helps that Dickey Barrett has one of the most distinctive voices in music. Dude sounds like a chain-smoking badger who just found out his badger wife is cheating on him. And while I'm not really qualified to talk about Boston in general, the inciting incident that this song is based around is a perfect fit for one of the least ska-tinged rock-with-ska songs the band has ever done. The horns here are more seasoning than they are component, not even sounding until the track is almost a minute in. The song is predominantly carried by a propulsive, headlong guitar attack, Barrett's exhausted rage, and drums like a horrified heartbeat. Images flash by, each one more desperate than the last, like the view from a commuter train bound for hell.
On the 2nd October, 1973, 24 year-old Evelyn Wagner ran out of petrol in the Dorchester neighbourhood in Boston. She walked to the nearest gas station and bought herself a cannister of fuel. On the way back to her car, she was accosted by six teenagers, who forced her into an alley. There she was made to pour the petrol over herself, after which the teens set her on fire. She died in hospital four hours later.
"A Jackknife To A Swan" can be meant in two ways. There's the reference to moves made in diving, and the idea of violently killing something beautiful. It's clearly the latter which is meant here, but both meanings share the concepts of a rapid descent toward finality, w. Whether it be the diver entering the water, or a human being existing the world, the direction is always down. It still matters when the velocity changes.
The final moments of Walter, the song's protagonist, are drenched in the fear (ultimately realised) that he's about to die. He's watched the slow descent of his hometown for three decades, and suddenly he's terrified the final fall will come all at once. A lighter, flashing into a puff of smoke. This is a desperately bleak song about the moments of existential terror that punctuate the slow collapse of our lives. About a man whose only hope is that he's home from his night shift in time to see his family wake up in the morning, forced into a situation where he might not even get that. The fact he's ultimately killed by the same trains he's been riding to and from work his whole life twists the long-buried knife still deeper. A jackknife to a swan, and he was gone.
Various places on the internet site Evelyn's murder as indicative of the rising racial tensions of '70s Boston. The band deliberately ignores this angle (perhaps fortuitously, given their paeans to racial harmony tend to be well-meaning but clunky), focusing instead on the way anyone's life can be upended and ended in the time it takes to unfold a pocket knife.
I remember the first time I heard this song. It was early/mid 2002. I'd just said goodbye to a friend I no longer remember, and gotten off the bus to walk home. I stuck my newly-bought copy of "...To A Swan" into the portable CD player that would be stolen at my first real job two years later. It was the middle of the day, and home was barely five minutes walk away. My hometown sees fewer murders in a year than Boston does in a week.
This track still connected. Implausibly, even ridiculously, it drilled straight into whichever part of the human brain worries that something is going to get you as you make your way home. That there only needs to be one bad split-second, and that that bad split-second's coming around, waiting for you to walk into it.
A jackknife to a swan, and you'll be gone.
B side
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