Duk Koo Kim

well said matie. I bought this album when it came out in Sept. 2003. I listened to back to back 3 times...with headphones on. I have never done that in my life. I believe that album -"Ghosts of the Great Highway"- takes you somewhere you have never been...between the past and present...between warmly smile with friends and crying all alone. Never has an albums made me feel as such. Kudos to the whole band...and what a great production. I recommend the headphones!

Ben Hecht said of Cole Porter's songs, "They are more than tunes. They are little houses in which our hearts once lived. When we hear them we go visiting."

I say this about Mark Kozelek, and about 'Duk Koo Kim'.

This is, for me, the greatest rock song ever written.

a friend of mine just turned me on to this album...and i can't stop listening to it!..it's warm and soothing , pensive and moody like good autumn music should be...this is great dreary rainy day music and i love it...thank you mark k. for wonderful escape-ism music....this song especially helps me to drone out the day and romanticize my pain...there is a group from glascow,scottland by the name of "the blue nile"...if you love sun kil moon's moody tone of dreary rainy days...check out the blue nile's album titled "hats"...

This song is a tribute to the South Korean boxer named Duk Koo Kim. In 1982 he fought Ray Mancini, who at the time was the world lightweight champion. In the fourteenth round of the fight (this song is fourteen minutes long) Duk Koo Kim was knocked down and the fight was stopped. Within minutes he fell into a coma, and within the week he died. Within roughly a year's time both the referee of the match and Kim's mother commited suicide. The fight had been on national television and led to many changes in the sport.

No shit, which is why I mentioned 'for me', implying that my comment is based on what I've heard. Besides, you boiled it down to the specific events of the Mancini - Duk Koo Kim fight, which leads me to believe you've got a very limited understanding as to what the song's more than probably trying to achieve.

This song is up there with "shine on you crazy diamond" and "comfortably numb" in my opinion. it's a beautiful fusion of some of floyd's most hallucinatory work, and drake's darkest material. i think one can best understand this song just by the imagery of the lyrics. i don't know exactly what it's about, but there's themes of unrequited love, death, apocalyptic images, fever-induced nightmares and hallucinations in the middle of the night. personally, from about the 8 minute mark and on, probably some of the most tragic, beautiful music i've ever heard.

I recently saw Mark play in Boston and he ended the show with this song. I can't remember if it was immediately preceding this song or earlier in the show, but he commented that he lives a "strange" life, always on the road, traveling in the car with Phil all day, not talking to each other, only to arrive in a new city, new venue, and get up and perform in front of 500 strangers. You got the sense, as I always have, that he sees himself as a Duk Koo Kim-like figure, taking blow after blow in those last few rounds but refusing to go down. Anyway, his anecdote about driving made the meaning of the song all the more clear to me, and I thought it was beautifully performed.

this is what this song means to me (incredibly simplified...I am no Mark Kozalek hehe):

you never know when your time is up. an angel can come down to save you...or she may not, as in duk koo kim's case. and knowing that life can be so fleeting makes you want to be with the one you love.

this song is so beautiful.

I've read that Koz like to write songs while sitting in his San Francisco apartment looking out upon the Pacific ocean as storms approach. As one listens to this beautiful song that songwriting method is easy to imagine.