Album: Boys And Girls in America
Year: 2006
It seems to me that “Chillout Tent” is one of the more divisive songs in the Hold Steady canon.
After all, the story it tells is a combination of meet-cute and meet-gross, featuring a pair of singers — Dave Pirner and Elizabeth Elmore — voicing the thoughts of the characters in the songs, and the music is filled with dramatic piano flourishes and mariachi horns.
Oh and did I mention that it is almost unbearably poignant? All about that one-off make-out session that could have only happened under the exact right circumstances. Or in this case, the exact wrong circumstances. To wit:
There was a stage and a PA
Up in western Massachusetts
The kids came from miles around
To get messed up on the music
She drove down from Bowden
With a carload of girlfriends
To meet some boys
And maybe eat some mushrooms
And, of course, she did. Too many, as a matter of fact, and ended up in the titular tent. Where she met this dude, who looked a lot like my man Izzy Stradlin, and was having his own problem with the misdosing of the substances.
His friend gave him four
But he said only take one
But then he got bored
And he ended up taking all four
So now my man he ain’t that bored, anyways
The paramedics found him
He was shaking on the side of the stage
And so, there they both are. A bit dazed, and wondering how they got there, as first Pirner and then Elmore sing:
Everything was spinning
And then I came to in the chillout tent
They gave me oranges and cigarettes
I got really hot
And then I came to in the chillout tent
They gave us oranges and cigarettes
At this point, Tad Kubler’s guitar is spinning in circles, like a camera doing a 360 around the center of scene, so we can clearly see what’s going to happen next, as they start talking about poetry and stuff.
They started kissing
When the nurses took off their IVs
It was kind of of sexy
But it was kind of creepy
Their mouths were fizzy with the cherry cola
They had the privacy of bedsheets
And all the other kids were mostly in comas
And with the piano dancing on the mariachi horns, they both reflect on what was clearly a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
He was kind of cute
We kind of kicked it in the chillout tent
And I never saw that boy again
She was pretty cool
We kind of kicked it in the chillout tent
And I never saw that girl again
There’s also a great musical joke/tribute in the last chorus, where they double-track Dave Pirner’s vocals, just like it was double-tracked in so many Soul Asylum songs.
There is an extra level of wistfulness in “Chillout Tent” that I don’t find in any other Hold Steady songs. Maybe because the characters themselves are singing, maybe because Finn-as-narrator is always going to have the narrator’s distance in his songs, even the ones where he’s a participant.
Maybe it’s those fucking horns, which simultaneously signify both joy and sadness of what was both a completely unique experience and completely lost opportunity. Like, maybe if they had met under different circumstances, it would have been different.
Fan-made video for “Chillout Tent”
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