From: Globe and Mail: Thursday, January 31, 2002 – Print
Edition, Page R4
A rare sight of a cult legend
By CARL WILSON
More a legend than a band. It defines any number of
groups in history: Strays in the scratchy dawn of
recording.
Barroom heroes known only by rumour. One-hit wonders
whose hooks still resurface. Cult oddities like the
Shaggs.
Post-facto eminences like the Velvet Underground, or the
Flatlanders (Texas teens Joe Ely, Butch Hancock and
Jimmie
Dale Gilmore) who grew up to solo renown and eventually
reissued their debut as, yes, More a Legend than a Band
(now due for a sequel, 30 years late).
But then there's the Mekons, now in their 25th year, yet
still
name-dropped far more than heard. Born in Leeds in the
first
toilet-flush of punk rock, they brought reggae,
socialism, sea
shanties, new-historicism, funk, country music and epic
poetry to a Clash-like pub-chant sound in ways that
would
influence indie-rock (and "alt-country") worldwide, like
some
half-forgotten dream.
Twenty albums on, not to mention books, art shows and
side projects, there will always be a Mekons, it seems,
no
matter how many continents apart its half-dozen core
members live, no matter how much they are fired, sued
and
bruised by the biz -- a pattern long ago dubbed "the
curse of
the Mekons." They're British collectivists, not Texan
loners,
and that has made all the difference.
Meanwhile, Jon Langford, the group's unofficial front
man,
now hangs out in Chicago, painting desecrated portraits
of
Hank Williams, making records with various groups,
boozing
and generally behaving as though his world remained one
big
Mekonian artistic-communal oyster. He makes a rare
appearance Saturday in Toronto (Horseshoe Tavern, 370
Queen St. West, 11 p.m., $8) backed by locals the
Sadies.
There's no saying what he'll play, though I guarantee
salty
repartee at the expense of G. W. Bush, and other
clowning
around. (Like Billy Bragg, whose stuffed-up singing
sounds a
bit like Jonboy's, the Mekons have always known it takes
a
spoonful of goofing to make the socialized medicine go
down.)
I'd like to request See Willy Fly By, the Waco Brothers
number that swiped a line from Appalachian ballad The
Cuckoo and bent it into the one great anti-Clinton
anthem
ever written, a study in class betrayal: "He's the
exception
that proves the rule,/ All your dreams are a lie,/ How
much
will you swallow/ When Willy flies by?"
No doubt he'll feature his new Pine Valley Cosmonauts
project, The Executioner's Last Songs, on which Steve
Earle, Neko Case, Richard Buckner and various Mekons
take
the perverse tack of singing old murder ballads to
oppose the
death penalty.
And what about Tina, Langford's crudely catchy tune on
the
last Mekons album, Journey to the End of the Night? "It
looks like an accident/ Caused by the government," it
begins,
but we never find out what -- something about
road-building
poisoning the water? The punch comes later: "And I want
nothing/ It's what I'm trained to believe in." The
accident, the
state's cruelest stroke, as Langford sees it, is to
foster
popular despair.
Yet the Mekons can, too. They used to call themselves "a
dance band at the edge of time," and most of their songs
invoke collapse, enacting it in herky-jerk rhythms,
avalanches
of historical reference, images of floods, riots, ghosts
and
betrayal. Langford, though, strikes a more stubbornly
optimistic note than fellow-travellers Tom Greenhalgh
and
Sally Timms, and often gets surprisingly more from
generalizations than they do from more-precise
mythopoeia.
It's probably too much to hope for -- though in
Langford's
book there's no such thing -- but what I most long to
hear
live are the words that launch the best Mekons album,
1989's
Rock and Roll: "Destroy your safe and happy lives/
Before it
is too late/ The battles we fought were long and hard/
Just
not to be consumed by rock 'n' roll." Now, that is
bombast
in the best rock anti-tradition -- and it's what becomes
a
legend most.