“Never Been In A Riot”, a single by a pre-Mekons group Langford played in called Class Clowns Of ’77, was a mocking commentary on “White Riot”, one of the defining early songs of the Clash. The bigger the Clash got, commercially, the more the Mekons were thought of as the anti-Clash. Even so, “they always had nice things to say about us,” said Langford. “I think they felt a little guilty over the path they had taken and respected what we were trying to do. I didn’t actually meet Joe Strummer until the Waco Brothers opened for him in Chicago. I liked him quite a bit.”
Popular art and politics are tricky bedfellows. Some of the most powerful political music has been made by artists without ideological axes to grind — never mind Dylan’s “Masters Of War” or even “Hurricane”, which succumbed to a certain obviousness. Try listening to “Positively Fourth Street” without feeling the force of radicalism. And some of the weakest political music has been made by artists who flood the lyrics with topical references and heated rhetoric. Sorry, but did Bruce Cockburn’s “If I Had A Rocket Launcher” have any real long-term effect on your thinking about or understanding of the conflicts in Central America?
“Jon is very much motivated by his political views, but he avoids very obvious statements,” says his Mekons bandmate Sally Timms. “He has never felt that his views are necessarily the best, but that you’re welcome to embrace them. It’s very complex, to be critiquing something while you’re involved in it, like the music industry [which the Mekons have done their fair share of attacking, notably on their 1989 classic Rock ‘N’ Roll]. No one’s innocent. We’re all compromised, as enmeshed in the problem as the solution.”
Asked by an interviewer to sum himself up six years ago, Langford provided an unruly capsule description citing his “bloodymindedness,” “unwillingness to get a day job,” “scant regard for the material pleasures this world has to offer,” and “lack of a clue what else to do.”
For a guy who is poised so fervently against the system, Langford is one cheery, easygoing bloke, a man with many friends and more acquaintances who, in settling into his middle 40s, is clearly tickled by the opportunities he has to pursue dual careers while enjoying the life of a family man. In addition to his prolific musical pursuits, he’s also a successful visual artist who specializes in clever portraits of country legends. His works, which he has described as “ink drawings on paper that are stuck down to the hardboard then painted on with various pastels, acrylics and white-out pens — glazed with scrummy transparent nicotine varnishes, gouged, scratched scraped and torn,” are seen and sold at Yard Dog, a folk art gallery in Austin. (Business is brisk during the South By Southwest festival in March, and at least one of Langford’s bands usually plays at the gallery’s SXSW parties.)
On the homefront, his edges have been smoothed by the birth of two sons, ages 5 and 1. It was his wife Helen who led him to Chicago. He met her when she was studying architecture in Europe, and he followed her back to the midwest in 1992 when her studies took her there.
To hang with him in the unfinished basement of his modest house in the ethnically diverse Logan Square neighborhood is to appreciate the Americanization — and the American guy-ization — of this multifaceted Brit. It’s an invitingly bare and untidy compound of books, recordings, stereo equipment and recording gear, with a beer-stocked fridge in friendly proximity. A 10-inch album by one of his heroes, Bob Wills, occupies a humble place on the floor, leaning against a wall. Mekons reissues are tossed here and there, reflecting his rather relaxed mien as a businessman. A bathroom is adorned by autographed photos of country greats including Johnny Cash and Ray Price.
During a recent week, his mother was in town, bringing out the Jonboy in him. Having been impressed by the plants for sale outside an Osco drugstore near Wrigley Field, she sweetly claimed to have not just a green thumb, but green fingers. She is, it should be stated, not a coal miner’s daughter, as was claimed by number one Langford fan Robert Christgau, the Village Voice critic, in a recent column (and his father was an accountant, not a schoolteacher, and an ardent anti-Commie to boot). But her son has been such an impassioned advocate of miners’ rights, she might as well have been the offspring of one.
In fact, it was a benefit for striking miners during the Margaret Thatcher regime that prompted the Mekons to reunite in 1984, four years after they’d broken up. “Wales really got stiffed,” Langford recalls. “The Parliament was out to punish half the country and reward the other. Miners became their enemy. It was a good time for the band. We raised 400 quid [pounds] for the local miners’ association to buy food.”
That wasn’t much compared to the 20,000 quid that Bruce Springsteen donated to the miners’ wives from the receipts of a London concert on his Born In The U.S.A. Tour. “A lot of people were slagging Bruce at the time for making a pop album, but he put his money where his mouth was,” says Langford. “Mark Knopfler, too. You didn’t hear anything about what he was doing, he was quiet. But he was sending a shitload of money to the ANC [African National Congress].”
With this, Langford was off to the races on one of his favorite subjects: Bono, who has gone from being one of the kings of politicized rock to giving up on the music as a vehicle for influencing hearts and minds. Accompanied by movie stars Ashley Judd and Chris Tucker, he recently went on a much-publicized speaking and consciousness-raising tour through the Midwest to promote the dire need for AIDS relief in Africa and to get Third World debt erased, celebrating his rock-star status even as he presumed to shuck it. He also grabbed headlines by touring Africa with then-Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill.
“When he goes mincing around with these corrupt politicians,” Langford argues, “he only helps the right-wing bastards stay in power. He makes Bush look cool to the idiotic MTV generation. Bono and Sting think they can run up the Amazon and get mud all over themselves and be clear of corporate shit. You can’t tell everyone else what to do in these situations while you’re the head of a multinational corporation yourself.
“These flashes of liberal guilt he solicits — they’re about nothing sustainable. No one is questioning policies, engaging the real cause of all the problems. Why did the IRA attack London? What was 9-11 really about? The answers we get are all too easy. People like Bono give rock ‘n’ roll a nasty aftertaste.”
“The theory is that Bono is Jon’s dark matter — that they have far more in common than either of them realizes,” says Timms with a laugh. “But Bono’s involvement with issues is so tied to his ego, his need to be recognized and validated. Jon can’t help but want some of that — anyone who performs on a stage is geared to drawing attention. But obviously he approaches things differently.”
