“The air is hot, the crowd is stout / when the young man learns that luck’s his only friend.”
“Tiger’s Mouth,” the spaghetti westernized closing track from the newly-released posthumous Luke Bell collection The King is Back, presents a motorcycle daredevil on the lip of a dangerous stunt. Recorded in late summer 2016, this previously unreleased track could be among the last songs Bell put to tape before increasingly severe mental illness dominated his last years. He died in 2022, aged 32. In the song’s lyrics, in its immediacy, Bell seemed to comprehend the severity of his trials.
“Cinch your helmet down, son / and do the best you can,” Bell sang of the daredevil, of himself. “The clock has struck the hour to test / the fate of a gambling man.”
That the daredevil misses the jump does not make him less brave.
