The Mekons have flirted with commercial success, having signed with a couple of major labels over the years — only to get dumped for underachieving at the box office. During a contractual conflict with one label, the Mekons were unable to record for a protracted period. The music community’s loss was the art world’s gain; it was during that period that Langford concentrated on his visual art. “I couldn’t make art in art college; my critical muscles were all flexed up,” he explains. “But I was able to now.”
Though Langford says he won’t be on a major label again, for artistic as well as practical reasons, he isn’t against a band hooking up with a big company if it’s going to get the albums in stores that a small indie label can’t. On all fronts, he has little use for those who believe in some kind of rock purity — those who rail against musicians for brushing up against corrupting corporate interests, as critic Dave Marsh did during a South By Southwest panel he was on with Langford.
“I’ve never seen what the big deal is about endorsing a product,” Langford says. “I couldn’t believe it when Timbuk 3 — you know, the future was so bright they had to wear shades? — got $3 million from McDonald’s but then had a change of heart and refused to take the money. Why not take the money and do something good with it? They’re just gonna give it to somebody else.
“Look, Bob Wills was out selling flour, Playboy Flour, driving all around Oklahoma selling it from his car. It’s the only reason he existed. That didn’t stop him from making this great avant-garde American music. He invented rock ‘n’ roll with ‘Tiffany Transfusions’ in 1933, 25 years before Elvis.”
When a couple of ad men proposed that the Pine Valley Cosmonauts do a commercial for Bud Lite, Langford was amused by the possibilities — and more amused still when Cosmonaut Tom Ray, who is from rural southern Illinois, came up with the tag line, “Yuck, I love it,” and the concept of Bud Lite being a hillbilly Weiss beer. The blokes from the ad agency said if they ran it, they would, um, alienate half their customers. Needless to say, the spot never flew.
The Mekons — who, during their 25th anniversary tour last year, presented a multiple-evening overview of their history, devoting each night to a given period — also have left fans behind in shifting styles as systematically as Miles Davis. They’ve veered from punk to violins and accordions to hard rock to alt-country (their 1985 disc Fear And Whiskey was a forerunner of the form) to synth textures to the trippy religiosity of their most recent effort, OOOH! They even did an opera with the late avant-garde fiction writer Kathy Acker. “We shoved that down a lot of throats,” Langford gloats.
The divergence from their punkish origins has divided their audience. “In Boston, half the audience wanted to kill us; a bunch of disillusioned punk rockers kept telling us to fuck off the whole show. We were so drunk, we didn’t care.”
But with all his bands and projects — have I mentioned his recent album with Canada’s Sadies, or the new songs he recently recorded with Richard Buckner for a genre-crossing box set to feature various artists, or his touring with National Public Radio’s “This American Life” revue as its Paul Shaffer? — Langford’s music is as much a moving target as he is.
“It’s natural to make different music from one album to the next, from one group to the next,” he says. “These are conversations between a lot of people. Things have changed, circumstances have changed; we’re not immune to trends. We’re not living in the past, but in the present, and the music reflects that.”
Whatever he does these days, though, you can bet that country music is going to be at its center. “It has made a lot of sense to us because it’s an attempt to deal with reality,” he says. “It’s all based around people’s daily experiences.” Frequently, as on the Waco Brothers song “Fast Train Down” (about warehouse workers seeking escape from their humdrum lives), he strives to elevate the working man by illuminating those experiences. That’s political, all right, but not with a capital P.
Capital punishment was on his mind long before he made plans for The Executioner’s Last Songs. In his art studio, a second-floor space in a T-shirt factory — it reminds you of a finished basement that has long lost its finish — sits the objet d’ kitchen kitsch that is pictured on the cover of the Waco Brothers’ superb 2000 album, Electric Waco Chair. “It was a really sick joke,” said Langford, explaining how the image was inspired by an ad in Texas Monthly magazine for a comfy leather item called a Waco Chair. A little arty neon lighting and set design and, voila!, an ordinary chair becomes a symbol of social policy.
“The death penalty is a good issue,” he said. “People think they know about it, but the truth is filtered so heavily. To live under threat of death for fifteen years when you haven’t done anything is just unimaginable.”
“Jon is almost anachronistic in thinking that statements like this can make a difference,” says Bloodshot’s Rob Miller of Langford’s efforts with The Executioner’s Last Songs. “We have to beg him to take some money for all the work he put in on the album. He wants it all to go to organizations. If there’s one thing he has taught me, it’s that you can stay true to your convictions without compromising other aspects of life.”
Langford figures we’re 40 or 50 years away from abolishing capital punishment for good — which means he and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts have plenty of time and plenty of volumes to get all kinds of other people involved. Could be that once Bono gets tired of letting politicians try on his glasses, he’ll come on board. If he can croon “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” with Sinatra, he certainly could get under the skin of the death penalty crowd with Langford. Talk about singing to the death.
Lloyd Sachs hasn’t written any anti-war songs, either, as pop culture columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.
