Nick Cave's Weird Guys: An Appreciation
You wake up and there's a tall handsome man in a dusty black coat with a red right hand at the foot of your bed, wyd
I’m currently in my Nick Cave era — if you follow me on Twitter and/or Instagram, you are probably aware of this. Nick Cave is my “thing I’m obsessed with” right now and I’m currently working towards my MA in Nick Cave studies. Yes, my brain has been broken since I watched him perform “The Carny” and “From Her To Eternity” in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire this summer. But all jokes aside, it’s been genuinely rewarding to feel this passionate about and inspired by an artist with such an eclectic body of work that really *~speaks to me~* (and if you’re interested in reading me on Cave in a capacity that is slightly more nuanced, you can do so here).
One of my favorite things about Nick Cave as a songwriter so far — what has further drawn me to his music and something that I didn’t realize before I got into it— is how so many of his songs are about weird guys. Elaborate stories of ghouls, sadists, murderers, creeps, and various other mortal and supernatural deviants pop up in much of his work. With profuse utilization of biblical imagery, American myths, and ideas of good versus evil, his music has been coined “Old Testament by way of Southern gothic” (also, “sad scary cowboy bullshit”). Nick Cave’s songs created a “self-contained, coherent fictional world that both he and his followers can enter at will; a kind of exercise in collaborative mythmaking,” as described in this 2014 New York Times profile (in which Cave himself offers the explanation of “I just had a genetic disposition toward things that were horrible,” for this lifelong artistic fascination held with the macabre).
But after their album The Boatman’s Call, weird guys noticeably taper off in their appearances among Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ oeuvre until they otherwise disappear for good. So, for this list, I went through all of Nick Cave’s songs during these earlier times with the Bad Seeds and I picked out my favorite bunch of fuckin’ freaks. You know, a regular who’s who of monsters, demons, perverts, and villains. But Cave consistently created weird guys who were more than just their violent delights and body counts. We frequently understand what’s going on in their heads as they’re enacting or reflecting upon their sins. And as he often sings directly from their perspective, there is never much distance between Cave and his fiends — we are all closer to the dreaded Other than we’d like to think, after all.
10. The carny (from “The Carny” [Your Funeral … My Trial])
The first weird guy I’m picking isn’t actually in the song — and yet, he very much is. Despite what feels like obviousness in that Nick Cave would have a song about a carny, the story that “The Carny” centers on is about its namesake’s absence. Still, it isn’t anything short of despairing or grim in relation to the titular carnival worker. According to the track from the Bad Seeds’ fourth album Your Funeral… My Trial (1986), this missing performer had inexplicably vanished long before the rest of the fictional circus had begun its preparations to leave, forcing them to euthanize his abandoned and emaciated horse named Sorrow. Two dwarves are then given the task of burying the animal in a ditch.
A heavy rain floods a nearby river as the other carnies scramble to vacate, while the dead creature’s rotting flesh hangs over the circus like clouds that carry rainfall. After the carnival and its caravans have left for higher ground, the decomposing body of Sorrow rises up from its shallow grave and the missing carny’s caravan is swept away in the rising waters. In relation to the other songs I’ve picked, this is easily the most overtly tragic and probably the most difficult to write about, and me including it is likely influenced by having so recently seen it in Wings of Desire (the diegetic use of which parallels the plot arc of one of the lead characters). No jokes or little quips I can make about the absent carny and his dead horse.
But I like the song’s contrast against the other songs of this list in the way it depicts its central, strange subject. Whereas the rest of the guys I’ve chosen are, to whatever degree, active in the narratives that they’re presented in, the missing carny is nowhere and everywhere. “The Carny” is less about the carny who’s disappeared or the circus that he’s mysteriously forsaken than the desolate space he has created akin to an open wound — a vacancy readily exposed to infection, or imprinted upon by death and decay. The song was recorded by using a guitar pick to pluck the strings in “the guts of an old grand piano,” creating a strained, wooden atmosphere that is viscerally alienating and enchanting, like a carnival itself. Listening to “The Carny” is as enveloping as a deluge. It feels like being trapped in a hall of mirrors, or being drowned by floodwaters. “No one saw the carny go,” but the carny never left.
9. The captain (from “Cabin Fever!” [From Her To Eternity])
I’m pretty sure the second song off the Bad Seeds’ first album, From Her To Eternity (1984), is about Hell. Or, at least one man’s version of Hell. You know, that interpretation of Hell you see depicted from time to time in pop culture where one person is just reliving the same horrible thing from when they were alive over and over and over. Whatever, I’m sure someone has made this connection before — I am a mere 26 years old and Cave’s music is nearly double my age.
Unsurprisingly, “Cabin Fever!” — a stilted and abrasive gutter-punk screed — is about a captain. He’s a tattooed, peg-legged, hook-handed beast of a man heading the claustrophobic crew of a ship that’s been sailing the open ocean for what feels like forever. Yes, maybe it just feels like forever, though the tally marks of days gone by and the unending winters at sea bear no fruit other than a whittled down peg leg. Cave’s prose in this particular song is sort of difficult to parse, and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but my interpretation is that the captain lost a woman he loved at sea and is forcing himself and his crew to search for her (“Done is the Missing, now all that remain / Is to sail forever, upon the stain”; “O the rollin sea keeps rollin on / She’s everywhere now that she’s gone”).
But what leads me to believe that this captain’s quest is one of eternal damnation is the final stanza of the song, which includes the lines “Welcome to his table, Beloved-Unconscious” and “His arm now like coiled snakes / Whips all the bottles that he’s drunken / Like crystal – skittles about the cabin / Of a ship they’d been sailing / Five years sunken.” My interpretation of this is that the captain’s ship sank five years ago, and his soul has been damned to search for his lost lover forever. And maybe I’m totally off base (again, I find these lyrics somewhat inscrutable in parts), but I also just love the initial descriptions of the captain which paint him like something of an ogre. An ironic juxtaposition against the reality of his heartsick (and likely unending) journey.
8. Lady who’s got a dead man in her bed (from “Dead Man In My Bed”[Nocturama])
Maybe the last true weird guy to pop up in a Bad Seeds song, the woman who’s got a dead man in her bed comes from their twelfth studio album, Nocturama (2003). To put it lightly, it’s one of the Bad Seeds’ more underrated albums. But it is also notable for a handful of reasons, one of which being that it is Bad Seeds’ most divisive album. Still, “divisive” feels like it’s putting it lightly. It is divisive to the point that, among many Bad Seeds fans, the word “Nocturama” has become a synonym for “failure,” as Cave revealed in an issue of his Red Hand Files blog. But Cave has also expressed that he likes the album quite a bit, and that it may just be his favorite because of the very reason that it is such a thrilling marker for both artistic failure and a willingness to take risks.
And maybe it’s because I have no taste (which is true), but I like Nocturama, too. Not because of Cave’s reasons, however; I just think it sounds good! “Bring It On” is a dad-rock banger, and “Dead Man In My Bed” is too. It’s a song about a cool lady who’s hanging out with a corpse in her house. According to the woman — who is speaking to an unknown narrator — the dead man has been in her bed for a few days and he died with a smile on his face. This leads me to believe that the man died while the two of them were having sex, for reasons unrevealed. There is no murder implied, so it was probably accidental. Perhaps a heart attack? Who’s to say, but instead of getting rid of the body or alerting the authorities, the woman has seemingly gone mad and has been content to leave her dead lover in her bed where she continues to poke at his lifeless form with a stick.
But it’s a wryly sad song as well: “He used to be so good to me, now he smells so fucking bad,” the woman informs the narrator (Who is this narrator? The police? Another man lured to meet his own “accidental” end?), a line that is equal parts amusing and also indicative of a person who is clearly stricken with grief. It’s emblematic both of Nick Cave’s ability to weave pitch black humor into his otherwise morbid prose, and of his enduring inclination to empathize with the weirdos that he sings about.
7. John Finn and his wife (from “John Finn’s Wife” [Henry’s Dream])
John Finn and his wife saw you from across the bar and they hated your vibe. The ballad of covetous John Finn and his temptress wife could have easily fit onto Murder Ballads (1996); instead, it lives comfortably on the Bad Seeds’ seventh album, Henry’s Dream (1992). As told by the song’s narrator, his town’s notorious citizen “mad John Finn” had recently gone and gotten himself a new wife. While the narrator was hanging out at the dance hall at the edge of town one night, who should enter but said wife — a coarse, vampish woman described as being something akin to a switchblade siren: “with legs like scissors and butcher's knives / a tattooed breast and flaming eyes / and a crimson carnation in her teeth.”
John Finn’s wife cuts a path straight to the narrator, who gets decidedly handsy with the woman, when who should arrive but the mad John Finn himself. Described in a similarly vulgar manner to his bride, John Finn is a man with “filed-down teeth,” “quick black eyes,” and “fists full of pistols in his pockets”—the latter of which he points directly at both the narrator and his own wife. Only equipped with brass knuckles and a bolo knife, the narrator still manages to slice into John Finn’s neck, killing him. This subsequently allows the potential suitors in the dance hall to finally make their move on the highly desired, now-ex-wife of John Finn.
There are many questions this story leaves open for consideration: Why exactly was John Finn mad? How many ex-wives had he gone through, and why did these marriages tend to not work out? Notwithstanding any other neuroses to grant him the title of “mad John Finn,” John Finn seems to have unresolved issues with anger, jealousy, and likely feelings of inadequacy, too. He should have worked on those before getting himself another wife, and this is most likely what led his wife to pursue illicit affairs with other men. But the two of them do make a wonderfully ill-fated couple. In the end, John Finn’s own desire for his wife is what leads him to his demise. Down bad John Finn.
6. Loverman (from “Loverman” [Let Love In])
One of three singles from the Bad Seeds’ eighth studio album Let Love In (1994) was, according to Cave, initially a very uninspired song dealing with simple themes of desire that instead turned into an aching, lovelorn plea from a sniveling wretch who is simultaneously pathetic and dangerous. Or, at least, he wants to be seen as dangerous — a deplorable reject who believes himself to be capable of immense brutality but is really nothing more than a scared, horny, desperate child. The moody track guided by Cave’s voice, which alternates between whisper, howl, and cavernous roar, is crooned from this man’s perspective in which he details his plans to pursue a woman he’d do anything for. He describes himself as a devil, as “weak with evil and broken by world,” and as a cortège of self-deprecating adjectives that secrete from his lips like a string of drool, including: old, stupid, hungry, sore, blind, lame, dirty, poor.
The Loverman is a narcissist who hates himself. He hates himself more than anything else, but he is yearning for a woman to love him and to save him. Yet, he has the most juvenile and perverted perception of what love is. He harbors violence but promises he will not act on it, while conversely imploring that this imaginary woman can do whatever cruelty to him that she pleases because his self-loathing is so overpowering. “I'll be your Loverman, Till the bitter end,” Cave yowls, “While empires burn down / Forever and ever and ever and ever Amen / I'm your Loverman / So help me, baby, So help me / Cause I am what I am what I am.” His grand proclamations of devotion and pleas to accept him as he is (“If you can’t handle me at my worst… something something something”) are like listening to two marbles scratch against one another.
In the end, the Loverman has but one master plan: “to take off your dress and be your man.” It solidifies his romantic goals as entirely superficial and lecherous. He is a miserable cretin incapable of love or of being loved, and any woman who takes pity on him has misplaced her sympathy. But he’s begging you to let him in. He’s clawing at your door. He’s screaming in pain, he’s hurting. Just let him in, why don’t you? What’s the harm it could do? Uwu? “There's a devil lying by your side / You might think he's asleep, but take a look at his eyes / He wants you, darling, to be his bride.” When you think about it, “Loverman” is kind of a song about an ince— [gunshot].
5. Lottie (from “The Curse of Millhaven” [Murder Ballads])
Most of the Bad Seeds’ best weird guys appear on a little album called Murder Ballads. It’s why three songs off of it are included in this list of weirdos because it’s an album defined by an eclectic gaggle of violent freaks. Cave had even felt strongly at one point that material from Murder Ballads could be used for a film, which ultimately never came to pass. But it’s true that Murder Ballads is a distinctly cinematic work, in no small part due to the fact that — as explained plainly via the album’s title — every song included is a grisly narrative about death and/or murder.
The narrator of the album’s sixth track, “The Curse of Millhaven,” is a 15-year-old girl named Loretta (or Lottie, as she prefers). Through Cave’s gravelly inflection, Lottie describes to the listener the small, gossipy town she lives in called Millhaven, which has been plagued by a string of recent morbid deaths. A small boy was stoned to death and left to drown in a river, a high school teacher’s dog was nailed to his front door; the local handyman’s decapitated head was found in the fountain on the mayor’s residence. But it’s about halfway through the tale that the botched stabbing of Mrs. Colgate forces Lottie to admit that it is she who is the dreaded curse of Millhaven.
Yet Lottie is more than happy to attest to her crimes. In fact, Lottie is quite proud of herself for the work that she’s done. She admits to all the previously noted murders and some past “accidents” as well, including the deaths of 20 children. However, she reveals she had nothing to do with the death of the teacher’s dog, Biko, as she wouldn’t want to take credit where credit isn’t due. The wicked teenager goes on to explain that she’s been evil from birth and that the town had had its suspicions about her since she was small. There’s even an implication that she might not be entirely human, either. Regardless, Lottie simply had a hankering for death and destruction for her entire life, an unquenchable thirst surrendered only to her court-appointed asylum admittance and a cocktail of drugs to sedate her. They hate to see a girlboss winni— [louder gunshot].
4. Poor guy who was doomed from the start (from “Up Jumped The Devil” [Tender Prey])
I love “Up Jumped The Devil.” It’s probably one of my favorite Bad Seeds songs because of its awkward, Mischief Night jaunt; how its lyrics come out of the gate and knock the bile out of you; and because it’s about a fucked up guy who just can’t catch a break. Who else can relate haha am I right? In the second track off the Bad Seeds’ fifth studio album, Tender Prey (1988), the narrator details how he was dealt a raw deal from from the moment he entered the world — “O My, O My / What a wretched life / I was born on the day / That my poor mother died / I was cut from her belly / With a stanley knife / My daddy did a jig / With the drunk midwife,” Cave intones with a snarling menace. This is the first verse of the song, and things only get worse from here!
Since the guy was born into such squalid circumstances, he believes himself fated for a life of utter degeneracy. Perhaps if he’d simply had more of a can-do attitude and a better outlook on himself then things wouldn’t have gotten so bad, but, alas. Didn’t he ever hear the phrase “life is what you make it”? But he feels that he was “doomed to play the villain’s part” and so he does, proclaiming his blood to be “blacker than the chambers of a dead nun’s heart.” So, the Devil has been waiting and watching this one particular guy for his whole life, hovering on the periphery like a phantom. A predator stalking its weak, vulnerable prey.
After committing malfeasance and finding wanted posters of his face plastered upon the courthouse, our doomed anti-hero crafts a plan to hitch a one-way ticket to Mexico. But a drunken night at a brothel leads to his capture by the authorities and soon enough, he’s descending with the Devil down into Hell, the very place he’d been unknowingly working towards his whole life, while his soul watches his body swing to and fro from the gallows. Though the miserable creature of “Up Jumped The Devil” is damned to the abyss, his story is only a tragic one. And his song is really catchy, too.
3. The killer who walks into O’Malley’s Bar (from “O’Malley’s Bar” [Murder Ballads])
The 15-minute long epic “O’Malley’s Bar” was the first song written for Murder Ballads before Murder Ballads was even conceived as an album. “O’Malley’s Bar” came about during the recording of Henry’s Dream. When the band felt that the song didn’t have a place on their other albums, the impetus for Murder Ballads was formed so that other material similar to “O’Malley’s Bar” could exist, as Cave had explained during a 1995 interview for Australian publication Triple J Magazine.
The shooter of the patrons in the humble O’Malley’s bar ranks up there with the very worst of Nick Cave’s weirdos; a guy who becomes physically aroused at the idea of committing mass violence towards the people of the town he’s lived in for thirty years. And that’s exactly what happens, as this murderous patron recounts the day he entered O’Malley’s bar with intent to do away with all who purveyed the establishment. He starts off with the owner, O’Malley himself, then moves on to O’Malley’s wife, then their daughter Siobhan, and then the nine other customers, before the arrival of the police affords the shooter a quick flirtation with suicide that he passes over in favor of simply turning himself in.
It’s hard to say what exactly motivated the O’Malley’s bar killer to kill in the first place, but there is the sense that he has something of an (and I am deeply sorry for using this word again) “incel” mentality. I glean this from the exchange that he shares with Vincent West right before killing him: “‘Did you know I lived in your street?’ I said / And he looked at me as though I were crazy / ‘O’, he said, ‘I had no idea’ / And he grew as quiet as a mouse.” The killer also ruminates on how he isn’t a stranger to these people, yet he feels the need to introduce himself. So, perhaps this guy was tired of feeling invisible and unappreciated in a town which he’d resided in for three decades.
But he’s not an unrepentant killer — he acknowledges when he enters the bar that his convictions waver, and at one point during his killing spree he even feels remorse. He’s a brute but he’s conflicted and he feels guilt, and he often behaves as if his pursuit is one of necessity that he feels some reluctance to embark on. He even remarks out loud at two separate points that he has no free will. So maybe he’s possessed, or maybe he believes he’s been sent on a mission from God (he does evoke some divine ideations). Either way, Cave writes the O’Malley’s bar killer as less of a nutcase than a man tormented by unseen demons. And, well, you know what the Joker says about what you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash.
2. Stagger Lee (from “Stagger Lee” [Murder Ballads])
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were far from the first or only band to sing a variation on the American folktale of Stagger Lee — a late 19th-century Black pimp (full name “Stag” Lee Shelton) who killed a man named Billy Lyons after a dispute in a bar over a white Stetson hat, on Christmas 1895 in St Louis, Missouri. The story was immortalized into myth — which has deep roots in Black American culture — and led to various incarnations as a recurrent folk song since just before the 20th century. Since then, there have been over 400 musical takes on the story, including original variations or covers recorded by names like Bob Dylan, Huey Lewis & the News, Duke Ellington, Ike and Tina Turner, The Clash, Neil Diamond, The Grateful Dead, and The Black Keys.
The circumstances of what happened on the infamous night of Billy Lyons’ murder changes from iteration to iteration and song to song, typically taking “huge liberties with location, motive, blame and political point-scoring, deploying a revolving cast of pimps, saloon lowlifes and corrupt police.” And the spelling of the name of Stagger Lee varies just as frequently as the events of that fateful Christmas night. Nick Cave’s own interpretation of the folktale, unsurprisingly, paints a decidedly darker, alternate picture of the situation and places Lee in 1932, many years after he had historically died in prison. Cave’s “Stagger Lee” is a musical transcription of a spoken word “prison toast,” which gives Stagger Lee far more ruthless persona.
Cave’s version of Stagger Lee enters a pub fittingly named “The Bucket of Blood.” Lee promptly gets off on the wrong foot with the bartender, expecting him to know who Lee is (“that bad motherfucker Stagger Lee,” he refers to himself as). When the bartender acknowledges that he does know Lee’s name, he carries on unimpressed — big mistake. Lee takes the opportunity to turn the bartender’s insolence into a dead body. Immediately following this first murder, Lee is propositioned by a sex worker named Nellie Brown. She offers herself to Lee free of charge on the condition that he be gone before her lover, Billy (a Billy who may or may not be the original story’s Billy Lyons set in a different time period, or a man who just happened to share his name) catches them. Stagger Lee refuses this advance and instead proclaims that he will stay at the bar until Billy comes in, at which point he will, quote, “fuck Billy in his motherfucking ass.” And in the typical fashion of this especially perverse and bloodlustful Stagger Lee, he threatens to murder Billy upon his arrival unless he sucks Stagger Lee’s dick, which Billy does.
Billy ultimately dies regardless of him fulfilling Lee’s perverted wishes, but it is not a result of a bullet hole which causes Billy’s death. It is the sheer force of Stagger Lee’s ejaculate (as revealed by Cave on his blog) that kills Billy. Guitarist Blixa Bargeld’s shrieking at the end of the song is thereby evocative of an orgasm. It makes Cave’s Stagger Lee not only an unyielding, hot-tempered killing machine, but a uniquely sadomasochistic and superhuman one. Beyond Lee being a premier Nick Cave Weird Guy, “Stagger Lee” is probably Cave’s foremost illustration of “fucking around and finding out.”
1. The tall handsome man in a dusty black coat with a red right hand (from “Red Right Hand” [Let Love In])
The man/god/ghost/guru at the center of one of the three singles off Let Love In — and arguably the Bad Seeds’ most recognizable track — comes from a line in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, which references a “red right hand” in the form of vengeance and the wrath of God. The original passage goes like this: “What if the breath that kindled those grim fires, / Awaked, should blow them into sevenfold rage, / And plunge us in the flames; or from above / Should intermitted vengeance arm again / His red right hand to plague us?” And the appearance of this hellish limb pops up in a later song off of Murder Ballads as well — “Song of Joy” —which plays on the hand’s explicit origins.
“Red Right Hand,” however, is a sultry, sinister ballad, equal parts atmospheric and haunted house carnival music, about an unnamed figure whose existence flirts between human, inhuman, and something else entirely. The man is marked by his handsome visage concealing a menacing red right hand, and is described as being like a monkey’s paw-type genie who grants wishes that come with a great price. While writing “Red Right Hand,” Cave created an entire world for this titular character: he “filled an entire notebook with descriptions of the imaginary town the song was set in, including maps and sketches of prominent buildings, virtually none of which made it into the lyrics.” Still, the image of the tall handsome man in a dusty black coat with a red right hand traversing the land and manipulating all those unfortunate enough to come across his path is vivid and also undeniably sexy, just like the song itself.
Thus, the red right hand guy is my favorite of Nick Cave’s weird guys — not just because he’s terrifying, but also because he’s hot. No, like, he’s literally described as being hot in the song. If the red right hand guy approached me while walking on the edge of town in his black duster with his bag of tricks, I would probably buckle at the knees. I’m easily impressed and weak in both mind and spirit when it comes to hot guys, and this guy in particular has the ability to get me money, a cool car, and self-respect—three things that I’m in desperate need of. And at the end of the day, I’m an open-minded person. I wouldn’t be bothered by a guy’s red right hand.*