What happens at the end of Nick Cave song ‘Stagger Lee’?
“During my more gloomy moments, I sometimes wonder if anyone actually listens to my lyrics, and whether the enormous amount of work I put into them may, in fact, go unheeded,” Nick Cave told the audience of his Red Hand Files. A lot of work really does seem to go into his songs, especially the rolling and wild narratives of his early work. Expecting the listeners to not only enjoy the music but follow and embrace the story of the song, we’re expected to go on a journey from start to often chaotic end.
Cave’s early music was especially hard work. Pairing narrative lyrics with outright musical carnage, the Bad Seeds of the late 1990s were firing on all cylinders. Murder Ballads was the height of it as the band told bloody and brutal tales of raging punk instrumentals and jarring details.
Jarring is exactly the word to describe ‘Stagger Lee’, one of Cave’s most well-known but weirdest tracks. It tells the real-life story of Lee Shelton, or Stagger Lee, an American murderer from the 1890s.
Throughout the verses, Cave paints the picture of “that bad motherfucker called Stagger Lee”. The figure was a violent gambler and a pimp but of a different, more dramatic type. “Lee Shelton belonged to a group of pimps known in St. Louis as the ‘Macks,” Cecil Brown wrote, “The Macks were not just ‘urban strollers;’ they presented themselves as objects to be observed.” Already a melodramatic character, he provided a perfect source of inspiration for Cave’s carnage.
The story of the song sees Stagger Lee on a rampage. It’s like Mary and Joseph looking for a manger, if they were violent pimps. He tries to get in one bar but is told, “Never ever come back no more.” He goes to another and shoots the bartender. He’s then propositioned by a sex worker who says he’ll have to be done before her own pimp comes to get her; “You’ll have to be gone before my man Billy Dilly comes in.”
This then seems to feel like a challenge to Stagger Lee, who seems determined to stand his ground as the baddest and meanest around. When Billy Dilly walks in, the protagonist puts it plainly; “you better get down on your knees / And suck my dick, because If you don’t, you’re gonna be dead,” to which the pimp seems to oblige.
But all of this leads to one lingering question, which a Red Hand Files fan wrote in no uncertain terms; “Is the screeching at the end of ‘Stagger Lee’ due to the fact that when Stag filled Billy Dilly full of lead, he blew his own dick off in the process? After all, Billy Dilly was presumably still slobbering on his head when Stag opened fire,” adding politely, “thanks for taking the time to consider this question.”
In the final line of the song, Cave sings, “Billy dropped down and slobbered on his head / And Stag filled him full of lead,” before a chorus of screeching rages in. The final minute of the track is nothing but screams and wails as the whole band breaks down. But where does that leave the story?
“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,” Nick responded, rewriting the perceived death at the end.
Of the violent screaming coming from Blixa Bargeld, Cave offered the suggestion that “Blixa’s terrifying and inhuman screeching at the end [is] orgasmic in nature.”
To Cave, his version of Stagger Lee doesn’t end with Billy Dilly’s murder at all, despite the real-life story that inspires it. Instead, the scene gets more pornographic than bloody.
