Vulgarity and violence: unpacking Nick Cave’s ‘Stagger Lee’
A guitar chugs like metal scrapping. A discordant piano smacks down on something close to a chord. The drums sound more like doors being kicked down or glasses being smashed. Then, as Nick Cave’s voice kicks off, he barely sings a note. From start to finish, on every level and in every texture, ‘Stagger Lee’ isn’t interested in being a song. Every element serves the story, building a world for this one despicable figure, “that bad motherfucker called Stagger Lee”.
Cave’s early works were always immersed in storytelling. In fact, it seemed that as a writer, he was utterly uninterested in writing about himself or dealing with relatable emotions. Instead, the Bad Seeds’ first records were more a collection of tales, dropping in like vignettes on a series of twisted tales. There’s the spiralling psyche captured on ‘The Mercy Seat’ as his protagonist walks to his death, moving between denial and confession. There is the swaggering gangster on ‘Red Right Hand’. Across Murder Ballads, a cast of characters come up like Henry Lee, Kylie Minogue’s Eliza Day, or the drinkers at O’Malley’s Bar. But none of them has ever taken on quite as thorough of a form as ‘Stagger Lee’ or has captured Cave’s fans in quite the same way.
No matter what type of tour Cave is on, whether it’s a full Bad Seeds outing or a more intimate piano date, there are always calls out for ‘Stagger Lee’. The wild punk tale from Murder Ballads has become an unlikely anthem for the band. It’s unlikely because there are moments where the song is almost unlistenable as the instrumental gives way to a bloodcurdling scream, nestled amongst a full band climax as all members play with a slight off-key uncanniness. The song has no interest in being catchy or traditionally likeable, but as it descends into a full tale, complete with twists and turns, it hooks people in like all good stories do. ‘Stagger Lee’ has emerged as one of the protagonists in Cave’s discography, remaining his most fucked up and conflicting creation.
The scene opens. The chugging guitar sounds like footsteps, walking Stagger Lee into the scene with Cave as the narrator. Placing us “back in ’32”, the figure is drawn up with “rat-drawn shoes and an old stetson hat”, walking into a new bar after already being thrown out of one. Instantly, the repetition of “Stagger Lee” sets it up that this is a known name, a man about town. Then, as the music continues to hang in tension with a slight air of danger, it’s clear that he’s a man to fear.
When he enters “the Bucket Of Blood”, that’s where it all begins to kick off. As the barkeep dares to talk back to the figure, violence bubbles, ready to burst. “And I kick motherfucking asses like you every day,” the barman spits back before Stagger Lee kills him, kickstarting the body count of the song.
But then in walks Nellie Brown, a sex worker who was “known to make more money than any bitch in town”. Anyone might expect this to become a typical scene; the bad guy on a killing spree, raping and pillaging the town. As Nellie Brown warns Stagger Lee about her pimp, “Billy Dilly”, the expected response would probably be that he would kill the other man and take the woman. But instead, Cave’s character is even wilder than that.
Stagger Lee casts off the classically villainous cowboy character he seems to have taken so far. “I’ll crawl over 50 good pussies just to get to one fat boy’s asshole,” he yells at the woman in what is definitely the most jarring and aggressive line in the track. As the story descends down a different path, the character becomes sexually violent but in a wildly vulgar, homoerotic way, destroying any heteronormative, well-known figure anyone might dare try and slot “Mr Stagger Lee” into.
When Billy Dilly then arrives, the danger and violence crescendo but in an altogether more unexpected way. “You better get down on your knees / And suck my dick, because if you don’t, you’re sure to be dead”, Stagger Lee screams at the man who was poised to be his enemy. Instead, his opponent obliges.
However, the ending of the song has been debated over and over. The fate of Stagger Lee is disputed, with even Nick Cave still contemplating the finale. In the final words, he says, “And Stag filled him full of lead.” Then, the band’s guitarist, Blixa Bargeld, screams bloody murder for the rest of the song. Typically, fans assume this combination means that Stagger Lee shot the man, perhaps screaming as he actually shot his own dick off in the process. But Cave offered up a different reading. “It did occur to me one night, as I performed Stagger Lee in full priapic flight, that Stagger Lee does not shoot Billy Dilly with an actual gun at all, but that his being ‘filled full of lead. Bang! Bang! Bang!’ was simply a metaphor for the force of Stag’s ejaculation,” he wrote in his newsletter.
In this reading, the roaring ending is simply a wild climax, finishing off a track fueled by the violent carnage of one man’s desire. Whether sexually or fuelled by a lust for death, something or someone gets shot, by something or another, either way.
