SONGS:
01 "Knoxville Girl," Brett Sparks of the Handsome Family lyrics
02 "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive," Rosie Flores lyrics
03 "Gary Gilmore's Eyes," Dean Schlabowske, Sally Timms, Kelly Hogan and
Tracey Dear / Soundclip
04 "The Snakes Crawl at Night," Janet Bean of Freakwater / Soundclip lyrics
05 "Tom Dooley," Steve Earle / Soundclip (no, it's no instrumental)
lyrics
06 "The Hangman's Song," Christa Meyer and Tom Kelley of Puerto Muerto
07 "Pardon Me, I've Got Someone to Kill," Lonesome Bob
08 "Poor Ellen Smith," Neko Case
09 "Miss Otis Regrets," Jenny Toomey lyrics
10 "Judgement Day," Johnny Dowd and Jon Langford / Soundclip
11 "The Great State of Texas," Chris Ligon
12 "Sing Me Back Home," Edith Frost lyrics
13 "Oh Death," Diane Izzo lyrics
14 "Hanged Man," Rick Sherry of Devil in the Woodpile
15 "The Plans We Made," Jon Langford and Sally Timms / Soundclip
16 "25 Minutes to Go," Frankie and Johnny Navin of the Aluminum Group
lyrics
17 "Idiot Whistle," Tony Fitzpatrick
18 "Walls of Time," Paul Burch lyrics
|
Musicians:
PVC are:
Steve Goulding:
drumkit
Tom Ray: double bass (ukelele on poor ellen
smith)
Jon Langford: guiotar & vocals
Drew Carson:
mandolin
Celine: guitars, banjo, fiddle, dobro, lap steel, bazooki
(mandolin on pardon me & judgement day)
with:
Dan
Massey: drums on tom dooley
Robert Lloyd: mandolin
Jon
Rauhouse: banjo on poor ellen smith
Amy Domingues: piano &
cello on miss otis regrets
Chris Scruggs: double bass
Chris
Dettloff: drums on I'll never get out of this world alive
Deanna
Varagona: harmony vocals on walls of time
Ken Sluiter: backing
vocals on don't look at the hanged man
All
songs recorded , mixed and mastered by ken sluiter at kingsize Sounds Labs,
Chicago IL
with instrumental overdubs at Phlosswwerx, Chicago IL
Paintings
by Jon Langford
The CD is dedicated to the life and work of Richard Cunningham
Lyrics:
Knoxville Girl
I met a little girl in Knoxville
A town we all know well
And every sunday evening
In her home I'd dwell
We went to take an evening walk
About a mile from town
I picked a stick up off the ground
And I knocked that fair girl down
She fell down on her bended knees
For mercy she did cry
"Oh Willy, dear, don't kill me yet
I'm unprepared to die"
She never spoke another word
I only beat her more
Until the ground around me
With her blood did flow
I took her by her golden curls
And I dragged her 'round and 'round
Throwing her into the river
That flows from Knoxville town
Go down, go down, you Knoxville girl
With your dark and roving eyes
Go down, go down, you Knoxville girl
You can never be my bride
I started back to Knoxville
Got there about midnight
My mother, she was worried
She woke up in a fright
Saying, "Dear son, what have you done
To bloody up your clothes?"
I told my anxious mother
That I was bleading in my nose
I called for me a candle
And I called for me a bed
And I called for me a handkerchief
To bind my aching head
I rolled and thrashed the whole night through
All horrors I did see
The devil stood at the foot of my bed
Pointing his finger at me
They carried me down to Knoxville
And put me in a cell
My friends all tried to get me out
But none could grow my bail
I'm here to waste my life away
Down in this dirty old jail
Because I murdered that Knoxville girl
The girl I loved so well
I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive
Recorded by Hank Williams
Written by Hank Williams and Fred Rose
Capo: 1st Fret Key: F# Play: F
Now you're [F] lookin' at a man that's gettin' kind-a mad
I had lot's of luck but it's all been bad
No [C7] matter how I struggle and strive
I'll never get out of this world a-[F] live.
My fishin' pole's broke the creek is full of sand
My woman run away with another man
No matter how I struggle and strive
I'll never get out of this world alive.
A [Bb] distant uncle passed away [Bb7] and [F] left me quite a batch [F7]
And [Bb] I was livin'g high until that fatal [Bb7] day
A lawyer [C7] proved I wasn't born
I was only hatched.---[F]
Ev'rything's agin' me and it's got me down
If I jumped in the river I would prob'ly drown
No matter how I struggle and strive
I'll never get out of this world alive.
These shabby shoes I'm wearin' all the time
Are full of holes and nails
And brother if I stepped on a worn out dime
I bet a nickel I could tell you if it was heads or tails.
I'm not gonna worry wrinkles in my brow
'Cause nothin's ever gonna be alright nohow
No matter how I struggle and strive
I'll never get out of this world alive.
(ADDITIONAL VERSES)
I could buy a Sunday suit and it would leave me broke
If it had two pair of pants I would burn the coat
No matter how I struggle and strive
I'll never get out of this world alive.
If it was rainin' gold I wouldn't stand a chance
I wouldn't have a pocket in my patched up pants
No matter how I struggle and strive
I'll never get out of this world alive.
SNAKES CRAWL AT NIGHT
by Charlie Pride
Chorus
Oh the snakes crawl at night,that's what they say
When the sun goes down.Oh the snakes will play
I watched that car pull right up into my driveway
Saw the shadow slip away from my house
So I hurried straight and looked into her room
And I found out that it was my loving spouse
repeat chorus
So I waited in the shadows until morning
And the gun that I held was trembling in my hand
No I did not mean to give them any warning
For the devil on my shoulder had command
repeat chorus
Oh the trial in a little while was over
And they sentenced me to die right away
But before I leave this courtroom please your honour
There is something more that I would like to say
Tom Dooley
Chorus
Hang your head, Tom Dooley
Hang your head and cry
Killed poor Laura Foster (note 1)
And you know you're bound to die
You took her on the hillside (note 2)
And begged to be excused
You took her on the hillside
Then hid her clothes and shoes
You dug her grave four feet wide
Dug it three feet deep
Rolled the cold clay over her
And tromped it with your feet
[chorus]
Took her on the hillside
Stabbed with a knife (note 3)
Took her on the hillside
And then you took her life
[chorus]
[chorus]
This time tomorrow morning
Where do you reckon I'll be
Down in some lonesome valley
Just swinging from a white oak tree
You can take down my old violin
And play it all you please
For at this time tomorrow morning
It'll be of no use to me
[chorus]
Miss Otis Regrets
(Cole Porter)
Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today, madam,
Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today.
She is sorry to be delayed,
but last evening down in Lover's Lane she strayed, madam,
Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today.
When she woke up and found that her dream of love was gone, madam,
She ran to the man who had led her so far astray,
And from under her velvet gown,
She drew a gun and shot her love down, madam,
Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today.
When the mob came and got her and dragged her from the jail, madam,
They strung her upon the old willow across the way,
And the moment before she died,
She lifted up her lovely head and cried, madam......
Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today
SING ME BACK HOME
Written by Merle Hagard
The warden led a prisoner down a hallway to his doom.
I stood up to say goodbye like all the rest.
And I heard him tell the warden, just before he reached my cell:
"Let my guitar playing friend do my request."
CHORUS:
"Let him sing me back home, with a song I used to hear.
"And make my old mem'ries come alive.
"And take me away and turn back the years.
"And sing me back home before I die."
I recall last Sunday morning, a choir from off the streets,
Came in to sing a few old gospel songs.
And I heard him tell the singers: "There's a song my Mama sang.
"Could I hear it once before you move along?"
(Chorus)
Oh Death
Oh death
Oh death
Won't you spare me over til another year
Well what is this that I can't see
With ice cold hands taking hold of me
Well I am death none can excel
I'll open the door to heaven or hell
Whoa death someone would pray
Could you wait to call me til another day
The children pray the preacher preached
Time and mercy is out of your reach
I'll fix your feet til you can't walk
I'll lock your jaw til you can't talk
I'll close your eyes so you can't see
This very hour come and go with me
In death I come to take the soul
Leave the body and leave it cold
To drop the flesh off of the frame
The earth and worms both have a claim
Oh death
Oh death
Won't you spare me over til another year
My mother came to my bed
Place a cold towel upon my head
My head is warm my feet are cold
Death is a movin upon my soul
Oh death how you're treatin me
You close my eyes so I can't see
Well you're hurtin my body you make me cold
You run my life right out of my soul
Oh death please consider my age
Please don't take me at this stage
My wealth is all at your command
If you'll remove your icy hands
Oh the young the rich or poor
All alike to me you know
No wealth no land no silver or gold
Nothin satisfies my but your soul
Oh death
Oh death
Won't you spare me over til another year
Won't you spare me over til another year
Won't you spare me over til another year
25 MINUTES TO GO (Shel Silverstein)
They're buildin' the gallows outside my cell.
I got 25 minutes to go.
And in 25 minutes I'll be in Hell.
I got 24 minutes to go.
Well, they give me some beans for my last meal.
23 minutes to go.
And you know... nobody asked me how I feel.
I got 22 minutes to go.
So, I wrote to the Gov'nor... the whole damned bunch.
Ahhh... 21 minutes to go.
And I call up the Mayor, and he's out to lunch.
I got 20 more minutes to go.
Well, the Sheriff says, "Boy, I wanna watch you die".
19 minutes to go.
I laugh in his face... and I spit in his eye.
I got 18 minutes to go.
Well...I call out to the Warden to hear my plea.
17 minute to go.
He says, "Call me back in a week or three.
You've got 16 minutes to go."
Well, my lawyer says he's sorry he missed my case.
Mmmm....15 minutes to go.
Yeah, well if you're so sorry, come up and take my place.
I got 14 minutes to go.
Well, now here comes the padre to save my soul
With 13 minutes to go.
And he's talkin' about burnin', but I'm so damned cold.
I got 12 more minutes to go.
Now they're testin' the trap. It chills my spine.
I got 11 minutes to go.
'Cuz the goddamned thing it works just fine.
I got 10 more minutes to go.
I'm waitin' for the pardon... gonna set me free
With 9 more minutes to go.
But this ain't the movies, so to hell with me.
I got 8 more minutes to go.
And now I'm climbin up the ladder with a scaffold peg
With 7 more minutes to go.
I've betta' watch my step or else I'll break my leg.
I got 6 more minutes to go.
Yeah... with my feet on the trap and my head in the noose...
5 more minutes to go.
Well, c'mon somethin' and cut me loose.
I got 4 more minutes to go.
I can see the mountains. I see the sky.
3 more minutes to go.
And it's too damned pretty for a man to die.
i got 2 more minutes to go
I can hear the buzzards... hear the crows.
1 more minute to go.
And now I'm swingin' and here I gooooooooo....
Walls Of Time
The wind is blowing 'cross the mountains
And down on the valley way below
It sweeps the grave of my darling
When I die that's where I want to go
Lord send the angels for my darling
And take her to that home on high
I'll wait my time out here on earth love
And come to you when I die
I hear a voice out in the darkness
It moans and whispers through the pines
I know it's my sweetheart a calling
I hear her through the walls of time
Our names are carved upon the tombstone
I promised you before you died
Our love will bloom forever darling
When we rest side
Reviews
Read about the 2000 concert and a letter from
Jon Langford
From Rolling
Stone:
Death Songs Vs. Death Penalty
Langford, Earle, Case fight capital punishment with murder ballads
The
Pine Valley Cosmonauts, who consist of Jon Langford and Steve Goulding of the
Mekons/Waco Brothers and former Bottle Rocket Tom Ray, will release their third
album, The Executioner's Last Songs, on March 19th on Bloodshot Records. As with
their previous tributes to Bob Wills and Johnny Cash, the Cosmonauts have
enlisted a rotating roster of guest vocalists, and this time out the material is
a collection of songs of murder, execution and mob justice. And it's delivered
with a wink, as partial proceeds will benefit Artists Against the Death Penalty
and the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty.
"I'm just really
horrified by it," the Welsh-born Chicago native Langford says of the death
penalty. "There was a big movement up here in Illinois, and it's one of the
first states to issue a moratorium. The inequities of the system were so
glaring. I have a son, a four-year-old boy, and finally felt I should exercise
my voice in American politics as much as I can. Previously, people have said to
me, 'You're not from here. You should shut your mouth.' I just feel like it's
quite compelling for me, because it's not something that exists in Europe."
Despite the moratorium issued by Governor George H. Ryan, the cause remains
urgent in Illinois, as his term ends next year. "He's made himself fairly
unpopular by following his conscience rather than his party's rules," Langford
says. Langford also credits a Chicago attorney named Dick Cunningham with being
a driving force behind the album. Cunningham, who was killed last year, was
largely responsible in the push for the moratorium and freed a number of wrongly
convicted men from Death Row. "I wanted to do something for him," Langford says.
"I've been involved in several kind of lefty causes, but I never really worked
with people who actually got things changed. This guy's a hero. He got in on the
inside and rolled his sleeves up and pushed for what he did. He's not a kind of
Weatherman [laughs], blowing a few things up in the Sixties and hiding for
twenty years. This is another way to look at political action. I think there's
so many unsung heroes who've given up on the romantic angle and have actually
enacted change."
For Langford, the project started as a one-off gig in
Chicago. "I fell afoul, when we did the original benefit, of some humorless
lefties who didn't really get it," he says. "But it was encouraging to me that
some of the guys who had been on Death Row came, and they totally got it
[laughs]. They thought it was hys
terical. It's gallows humor, I guess. But
it made sense to me and everybody else who played." Langford went into the
project with about a dozen songs he wanted to include, but for the most part, he
left selections up to the singers. The result is a range that leans heavily on
old Appalachian murder/death songs including traditional "Tom Dooley" (covered
by Steve Earle) and "Knoxville Girl" (the Handsome Family's Brett Sparks)
bluegrass father Bill Monroe's "Walls of Time" (Paul Burch) and the old-time
country of Hank Williams and Fred Rose's "I'll Never Get Out of This World
Alive" (Rosie Flores). The collection also taps Seventies country, including
covers of Charlie Pride's "The Snakes Crawl at Night," Johnny Paycheck's "Pardon
Me, I've Got Someone to Kill," and even art-punk, the Adverts' "Gary Gilmore's
Eyes," which was selected after the Cosmonauts decided to jettison Nick Cave's
"The Mercy Seat," after a definitive recent reading of the song by Johnny Cash.
Langford and a number of the vocalists will perform some of the songs at
Austin's South by Southwest Music Conference in March. And having whittled
thirty tracks down to eighteen for The Executioner's Last Songs, he already has
a head start on a second volume, which he does plan to release. Mark Eitzel and
Lambchop's Kurt Wagner are among those on board for the next one. "I don't want
to say anyone who hasn't done their bit yet in case they don't," Langford says.
"Suddenly they'll have a blinding vision that the death penalty is marvelous and
they don't want anything to do with it [laughs]. But, essentially, I tried to
think of this one as a bluegrassy, country sort of thing and then the next
volume will be a bit darker a bit more electric."
ANDREW DANSBY
(January
29, 2002)
March 13,
2002
Musicians Against the Death Penalty
The Executioner's Last
Songs
By Jeffrey St. Clair
That pipsqueak Bono announced to the world
(everything he says these days seems to have the weight of a Papal Encyclical)
in a recent interview in Time magazine that he's given up on music as a
political force. From here on out Bono says he's going to use the persuasive
aura of his own personality to wipe out Third World debt. After all his are the
lips that smooched Jesse Helms and the hands that caressed Orin Hatch. Is it too
soon to say good luck and good riddance?
Bono's self-directed exit (was he
ever really there to begin with?) leaves the field open to artists who still
believe that music has the ability not only to stir the soul but change the
heart and minds of people willing to listen. One such artist is Jon Langford,
who has been around longer than Bono and has never given up on the power of
popular music to reach people and inspire them toward social change.
Langford
is a leader of the great British punk band The Mekons, a group of Leeds
University leftist and anarchists, who, along with The Clash, The Sex Pistols
and Gang of Four, produced some of the most politically-charged music of the
late seventies and 1980s. In fact, I'm not sure I could have survived the
eighties without the knowledge that a new record by the Mekons could be expected
every six months or so. The Mekons made records that sounded just as pissed off
as I felt about the Thatcherites and Reaganites and the liberal wimps who stood
by as the rightwing goons turned the government into a thermo-nuclear subsidiary
of the transnational corporations. And, of course, the Mekons were a raucous
counterpunch to the kind of musical fare we were being spoon-fed through the
eighties (led by the narcissistic sputum of Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Duran
Duran), as the corporatization of rock was in full-bloom.
The Mekons may
never have acquired the international following of the other bands, but they
never sold out either. The Mekons made music their way: confrontational,
experimental and uncompromising. They were versed in Marx, Tzara and Debord, but
they also knew their Bob Wills, Bill Monroe and T-Bone Walker. Some of their
records were odd, some truly bad, and some, such as Rock n' Roll, stand with the
best music made in those dreadful decades.
While many other punk-influenced
bands imploded, died off, retired, or, like U2, morphed into pop autmatons for
the big music conglomerates that rule the soundwaves, the Mekons, in their
various guises (such as the Waco Boys and Pine Valley Cosmonauts), kept on
making their own kind of music. Often a species of punk-country. Usually out of
Chicago, once the city that electrified the blues, now an emerging center for
neo-roots music.
There is, of course, no more potent symbol of the ultimate
authority of the state than the death penalty. And it's prevalence here offers a
peephole into the true character of the American political system, where the
execution of prisoners often serves as a kind of obscene offering to the
electoral gods. Remember Rickey Ray Rector, the black, brain-damaged inmate
Clinton rushed home to put to death in the heat of the 1992 campaign? Thus, it's
scarcely surprising that upon relocating to the US Langford and his cohorts
would soon begin to agitate, both musically and politically, for its
abolition.
And it's also apt that when the time came to make a full-blown
musical manifesto against the death penalty Langford chose to burrow into the
American past to reinterpret old-time music, the music that came out of what
Greil Marcus calls the Weird America, the Invisible Republic of cotton field
workers and hillbillies, juke joints and charismatic churches.
There was a
time when American music was filled with stories of everyday violence, the
cruelties of prison life, vigilantism, mob violence and the horrors of
execution. The old dialectic of freedom and confinement was at the core of the
lyrical content of the regional music that gave birth to rock n' roll. The
blues, bluegrass, mountain ballads, Ur-country-roots music, as the labels market
it today--all dealt frequently--even obessively--with these themes that were so
much a part of being poor and/or black in America. To a large extent this
tradition of American music is only being carried on these days by
hip-hop.
So now Langford and his Pine Valley Cosmonauts give us:
Executioner's Last Songs, a collection of 18 songs "of murder, mob law, and
cruel, cruel punishment." The title of this release, from Chicago indie label
Bloodshot Records, is at once a play on Norman Mailer's account of the 1977
killing by the State of Utah of Gary Gilmore (the first execution since the
Supreme Court reinstituted the death penalty) and a prophesy of sorts. The band,
with help of an amazing collection of like-minded artists, reworks music from
the Louvin Brothers, Charley Pride, Johnny Paycheck, Cole Porter, Merle Haggard,
the Stanley Brothers and Johnny Cash with the intent, according to Langford, "of
consigning them to the realm of myth, memory and history."
The proceeds from
the album will go to the Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium Project, which has
done unyielding work on behalf of death row inmates over the past few years. In
the outside world, this toil is largely thankless, but in 2001 17 people in the
state of Illinois alone walked off Death Row, in part due to the project's
tireless efforts.
But let's be clear. The real movement against the death
penalty isn't about only keeping innocent people from being killed by the state.
What rational person (WARNING: Antonin Scalia is NOT a rational person) would
not be opposed to the killing of innocents? No. This is about abolition,
period.
The rising tide of executions (there have been 763 killings since
Gilmore, with more than half of those having been carried out in the last five
years) is America's equivalent of Argentina's so-called dirty war, where
hundreds of souls are carted off to their doom with little hope of appeal. Call
them America's disappeared.
There are now more than 3,700 prisoners on death
row, with a new one being added nearly every other day. States, led by the
killing machines of Texas and Florida, are putting women, children, the sick and
the mentally-ill. Meanwhile, constitutional rights to effective counsel, a jury
of your peers (people who oppose the death penalty are not permitted to serve on
juries in death penalty cases) and habeas corpus have been
gutted.
Executioners' Last Songs isn't a No Nukes or We Are the World type of
endeavor. It's a genuine oppositional undertaking. The death penalty remains
sickly popular in America and resistance to it is scarely a ticket to career
enhancement. Artists who take on this cause in a serious way-such as
Springsteen, Steve Earle, and Langford and company-do so at some risk to their
livelihood. It's one thing to attach yourself to a cause like saving the
Amazonian rainforest and quite another matter entirely, in this nation at least,
to demand that the state should not have the legal or moral right to kill
prisoners, even if they have committed unspeakable crimes.
But though the
issue is almost unbearably grim, there's nothing solemn or preachy in this
offering, no pious sermonizing or Bono-like preening for the cameras. There is,
however, a blistering rant-in all the best senses of that word-by Tony
Fitzpatrick. With a nod to Dylan, Fitzpatrick titles his call-to-arms Idiot
Whistle: "Politicians love the death penalty because it makes a bunch of
candy-asses look like tough guys."
The music moves through its own stages of
grieving and lamentation, puzzlement, revulsion, querulousness and outrage: from
the lovely and gifted Neko Case's elegaic Poor Ellen Smith and the Faulknerian
black comedy of Jenny Toomey's Miss Otis Regrets to The Aluminum Group's 25
Minutes to Go (a bracing countdown to an execution) and Rick Sherry's
full-throttle version of Don't Look at the Hanged Man.
The Advert's 1977 punk
classic Gary Gilmore's Eyes is countryfied by Deano from the Waco Boys' with
help of Sally Timms from the Mekons. The inimitable LA alt-country phenom Rosie
Flores sings, with a voice somewhere between Melba Montgomery and Iris Dement,
Hank Williams' I'll Never Get Out of this Place Alive. Steve Earle breathes new
life into Tom Dooley, making that old story sound urgent, new and familiar all
at the same time. To my mind, Earle is the most compelling American rocker out
there today. He's certainly the most interesting, producing music that just
keeps getting better and deeper. Earle's got a voice that can chill your spine
and a guitar-style as raw and accomplished as anything hatched by the great
westside Chicago bluesman Hounddog Taylor.
Remember George Bush and Karla
Faye Tucker? Lanford and Johnny Dowd do in their song Judgement Day: "God gave
her life, but the mighty state of Texas took it away. She's dead. Gone. To a
better place. The governor's so ashamed he won't even show his face.Just one
thing I want to say: She ain't the only one facing the Lord on Judgement
Day."
Chicagoan Diane Izzo contributes a defiant version of the sinister
ballad, Oh Death. Her exquisitely eroded voice reclaims the old Dock Boggs song
from the malign purposes it was put to in the Coen Brothers' offensive
minstrelsy-show of a film, Oh, Brother Where Art Thou, where Ralph Stanley's
resigned voice is outrageously rerouted through the mouth of a Klansman.
Last
phone calls. Last letters. Last kisses. Last meals. Last songs. Dreams of
escape, freedom and commutation. Last prayers to Jesus, Allah, Elvis. Final
goodbyes. It's all here in the songs; the unspeakably cruel circumstances of
everyday life on America's death row.
The CD closes with Paul Burch's assured
version of Walls of Time, a beautiful bluegrass tune penned by Peter Rowan,
which became a signature song for Bill Monroe. It's a kind of ghost story,
really, a ghost story that ends on a quavering note of love, reunion and
redemption. Executioners' Last Songs provides an eerie kind of testimony to just
how wrong Bono is. The songs are haunting, angry, and, often, funny--the kind of
gallows humor that only works when it's done by those who know what's really at
stake. So take those ridiculous U2 cds down to the used record store, trade them
in and recycle the money into something that matters: Executioners Last Songs.
And feel good about it. You can make a difference. Music isn't going to lead the
way to radical change (that's going to take lawyers, organizers, activists,
politicians and judges with courage), but it sure as hell can provide the
marching tunes. Langford and friends have given us an unexpected message of hope
amidst the bleakest of circumstances. Hope through struggle, that is.
By me (Nobby):
Brett Sparks of the Handsome Family sings about the
Knoxville Girl, 'we all know so well'. He picks up a stick and beats her to
death. The song is about hard work: beating, throwing her around and at the end
drowing her. The guy has no reason except that he doesn't want to marry the girl
"that he loves so well". Is this an increase in brutality compared to that guy
in Reno? Unlike that one he doesn't complain when they lead him into prison.
Flames of hell are all he can see.
Too me these mountain songs have the
strangest lyrics. They are bloody, they show no reason, violence is all around.
Are these the right songs to fill a record against death penalty? Maybe you
haven't noticed, but I'm talking about:
Jon Langford and the Pine Valley
Cosmonauts: The Executioner's Last Songs - Songs of murder, cruelty, and mob-law
done to benefit Artists against the Death Penalty for the Illinois Death Penalty
Moratorium Project. While already the first PVC record alreday explored 'the
dark and lonely world of Johnny Cash', this new one is a much deeper
exploration.
Murder is bloody violent, may it be done by a privat person or
by the state of Texas. And since the installment of GW Bush as president death
penalty has become an issue even more than before, noticed all around the world.
I can't hear the record without argueing from my european point of view. Is
this, the state run murder the core of US justice, is it part of the picture or
an expression of fundamentalist madness Europe has overcome by now?
I must
confess I was surprsed by an email I got a while ago. I had written a review of
a Steve Earle show, where he talked about his activities against death penalty.
A woman told me that she loves Earle, sees him as a great artist, but on the
other hand was strictly opposed to his view on this question. How can one devide
a person from everything this person stands for? So maybe it's these strange
contradictions, these black holes in perception that make me wonder about the
USA.
So my approach to the record was centered about the lyrics and I have
the feeling of hearing about a foreign and strange country still occupied with
medieval myths and obsessions.
A few days before I heard the record
first I had listened to the first PVC record mentioned above. Not only in
comparison to this one from 1995 I hold this to be a major step in the
development of Jon Langford's musical cosmos and recorded work. There's no flop
but several tracks stand out:
'Oh Death' is quite diferent to Stanley's
version on the 'Oh Brother'-compilation, but in no way less impressive. It's
done by Diane Izzo. Steve Earle's performance of 'Tom Dooley' builds a link
between the old mountain tune and the present: mandolin and fuzzy guitar side by
side. 'The hangman's song' by Puerto Muerto was kind of a surprise to me, a
group I had not heard before. It's a crime to ignore them: they truly deserve
deeper investigation and listening. And maybe that's the strongest point in
favor of this record: (To me) unknown artists stand alongside with more popular
names and it's not that the heavier names deserve all the credits and the rest
goes along as fillers. So for me personally the record brought some new names
along for whom I will look out for in the future.
Jon Langford and Sally
Timms' song is the sweet 'The plans we made'. It's another Lonesome Bob tune but
much more impressive than his own 'Pardon Me'. Jonboy's rolling Welsh 'r' and
the haunted voice of Sally Timms is quite similar to Sally Timms latest solo
record and to their collaboration almost 2 years ago. I don't know how these
accents work out for US ears but I dig them more each year.
The songs are
often haunting, some are funny and most of them are accompanied by an
incarnation of the Pine Valley Cosmonauts that sounds to be the finest ever. So
for all who already thought that the Bob Wills cd was great music: let me tell
you that this is one step beyond. And the most promising thing is: there'll be a
vol. 2.
greil marcus wrote:
>From his so-called "real life top 10":
2)
"The Executioner's Last Songs: Jon Langford and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts
Consign Songs of Murder, Mob-Law & Cruel, Cruel Punishment to the Realm of
Myth, Memory & History to Benefit the Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium
Project, Volume 1" (Bloodshot)
Aren't tribute albums terrible? Even when
they're for a good cause? Could it be that the finer the cause -- and the
Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium Project is not only a good cause, it has
shocked the state and the nation with its success, which is to say with its
proof of the inherent corruption of capital punishment -- the worse the tribute
album? Steve Earle's florid "Tom Dooley" is par for his course, but with Neko
Case, Jon Langford and Sally Timms, Brett Sparks of the Handsome Family and Dean
Schlabowske of the Waco Brothers, how else explain why such imaginative and
inventive performers fall so short of the likes of "Knoxville Girl," "Poor Ellen
Smith" and "Gary Gilmore's Eyes" -- songs that are in their blood?
From: Village
Voice:
Rock&Roll&
by Robert Christgau
Working Professionals Defeat Doom on Two Benefit Comps
Musically,
benefit compilations are doomed at conception. Up against the same triple threat
as every other collection of new material by multiple contributors—the
organizers have to sweet-talk the artists, pray they'll do their best, and make
the inevitable mishmash cohere—do-good comps then have to break through the pall
of sanctimony, although most activists are too caught up in their own cause to
realize it. Sanctimony is what Chuck Berry was put on earth to save us from.
Sanctimony and rock and roll don't mix. I'm not so sure sanctimony and gospel
music mix either.
So when I learned that September 11 had moved the Voice to
revive an old management dream, a CD of "love songs to New York" to launch the
Village Voice Media oligopoly into music production, I was real glad I'm not
music editor. Sure I helped and kibitzed, but to small effect. Baaba Maal's
track on Wish You Were Here: Love Songs for New York (Village Voice), all
profits earmarked for the September 11 Fund, began with a call I made, and that
was about it. Along with 15 or 20 colleagues, I spent a few hours helping music
editor and co-producer Chuck Eddy sort out marginal submissions. Although most
of these weren't even submarginal, two ended up on the CD, and neither knocked
me out at the time; I was wrong. Later I lobbied for a Maggie and Suzzie Roche
song that didn't fly; I was right but it doesn't matter. Wish You Were Here
flows so powerfully it's even impressed Greil Marcus, whose low sanctimony
tolerance has put him off almost every such compilation ever issued, including
yet another new benefit record that beats the odds—his friend Jon Langford's
Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium Project CD, The Executioner's Last Songs
(Bloodshot).
Although these records don't provide a template, much less
establish a trend, each works in the same unexpected way. I would have assumed
the relevant model to be the tribute album, a closely related subgenre also
threatened by piety and inconsistency pitfalls only overcome, if at all, by
piling on the talent and going from there. The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers and the
greatest tribute or benefit comp record ever, Red Hot + Blue: A Tribute to Cole
Porter, succeed by loosing first-rate artists on first-rate songwriters and
adding motivation and concept—Dylan reconfiguring the folk idea with the
Rodgers, AIDS consciousness tweaked by a happy confluence of gay camp and
postpunk irony with the Porter. Motivation, or is it luck, is essential—see the
star-spangled yet soggy Hank Williams: Timeless. But neither Wish You Were Here
nor The Executioner's Last Songs has many big names at its disposal. With all
respect to Cornershop and Andrew W.K., the major draw on the Voice record is
Moby, while the ubiquitous Steve Earle headlines on the death penalty disc, the
latest credit for Langford's all-purpose backing band, the Pine Valley
Cosmonauts. Yet in each case anonymity is a virtue. Populated by working
professionals outdoing themselves rather than luminaries exercising their droit
de seigneur, both records leave extra room for their occasions.
In crucial
respects, the occasions are dissimilar. The campaign against capital punishment
is made to order for rock's feel-good p.c.—not as squooshy as world hunger or
saving the whales, but, like gun control, all too compatible with a sentimental
distaste for violence. Like gun control, it makes more sense as policy than as
path to enlightenment; even those of us who can readily imagine a polity with
the moral right to dispense with sociopaths or a revolutionary situation in
which the good guys would need firearms will agree that we're woefully far from
either, hence better off just shielding the poor from switch-pullers and
triggermen. But while September 11 also scares up a distaste for violence—I
expect that many contributors to Wish You Were Here, specifically Senegal's
Baaba Maal and Egypt's Hakim, were moved by something of the sort—it evokes much
else as well: patriotism and, for New Yorkers, chauvinism, plus such primal
stuff as hatred, dread, revenge, and grief. Except for the grief, none of this
meshes with feel-good p.c. But it meshes fine with rock and roll, which has gone
for the primal since 1955. And the way The Executioner's Last Songs plays
capital punishment renders its rock-inflected take on country music just as good
a match.
So the first last song is Brett Sparks intoning the coldest murder
ballad in the old-timey canon, "Knoxville Girl," which ends with the vile killer
"wast[ing] his life away" in jail—but not executed. Sentimentalists exit to the
rear unless you're down with sparing such creeps. Then Rosie Flores pulls out
the everyday existential despair of Hank Williams's "I'll Never Get Out of This
World Alive," and Waco Brother Dean Schlabowske transforms the Adverts' "Gary
Gilmore's Eyes" from what Marcus once declared a "pure punk notion" into a
formally realistic horror story. Some of the covers are more obvious—"Oh Death,"
"Tom Dooley," "Sing Me Back Home"—and not one is definitive, but laid in a row
by these irascible postneotraditionalists they say far more about rage, guilt,
remorse, retribution, and human orneriness than the inevitable sermon at the end
(which has its uses even so). In its own class is "25 Minutes to Go," the
gallows-humor farewell Shel Silverstein wrote for Johnny Cash, swung till it
levitates by two guys from the Aluminum Group. Tragically absent is Tom T.
Hall's "Turn It On, Turn It On, Turn It On," in which a World War II
noncombatant shoots up the town that called him a coward and greatly enjoys the
fried chicken and baby squash at his last supper.
Yet the standouts aren't
covers—they're two original topical songs by people I'd never heard of. Chris
Ligon's disingenuous ditty about a nice guy on death row feels like a one-off.
Christa Meyer and Tim Kelley's grisly, understated, apocalyptic, klezmerish
"Hangman's Song," however, has the mark of committed songwriting—when Meyer
lilts "Oh, oh, woe is me/The state has put a date on me," it's hard to believe
other singers won't follow. If "Hangman's Song" isn't "Turn It On, Turn It On,
Turn It On," here it tops "Sing Me Back Home" and "25 Minutes to Go," and the
occasion, first as inspiration and then as context, is why. Stuck between the
wicked murder of "Tom Dooley" and the hopeless murder of "Pardon Me (I've Got
Someone to Kill)," its categorical rejection of ultimate punishment signifies
like Brecht-Weill.
None of the occasional songs on Wish You Were Here have
that much aesthetic reach. In fact, having figured half the 18 tracks for direct
responses to the disaster, I was surprised to learn that only two completely new
songs made the cut: Joseph Arthur's "Build Back Up" and Loudon Wainwright III's
"No Sure Way." Instead, people scrambled and recontextualized. On two of the
strongest entries, Moe Tucker and Peter Stampfel set new lyrics to old tunes.
Ari Upp changed the Cookies' "Don't Say Nothing Bad About My Baby" into "Don't
Say Nothing Bad About NY," Afrikaa Bambaataa funked up Melanie's "Candles in the
Rain," Uri Caine low-bridged Kander-Ebb's "New York, New York." And often
artists just rummaged through their catalogs for something suitable: actual love
songs to New York from outlanders the Mekons and Andrew W.K., a Romanes title
from Ukrainian Americans Gogol Bordello that translates "Strong City," a
Cornershop outtake fortuitously entitled "Returning From the Wreckage," Hakim
mournful and Sheila Chandra mystical and Baaba Maal pleading for peace, and
Matthew Shipp's 1998 recording of "Amazing Grace," along with Moby's "Memory
Gospel" the only previous U.S. release. I'd replace the Chandra with the Roches'
"song for the heroes," and although I love Slug I can't hear how the Atmosphere
track fits even with Chuck Eddy whispering in my ear. But though you may suspect
such a miscellany can only add up to a mess, the occasion, augmented by Chuck's
knack for the segue, holds it together.
Chuck was an early fan of rock en
español, which I've accused of "kitchen-sink stop-and-go," and that attraction
to the disjunct helps him comprehend the incomprehensible event at hand.
Mourning and rage, chauvinism and internationalism, sleepless fear and fierce
determination—in this leftish workplace, as in much of the city, all coexisted
in the wake of the attack, and Wish You Were Here proves that they're
contradictions only on the surface. "Memory Gospel," which passed me by on Play:
The B Sides, strikes the perfect note of pomo reverence before sliding into
Cornershop's unbowed synth-rock, which sets up the faster rockers that
follow—defiant, celebratory, and both. Bambaataa provides the link to an
emotionally polyglot global grouping, and Caine leads off a quietly disquieted
final section. My favorite touch is pure Chuck—one-upping "Amazing Grace," an
obvious capper, with an industrial assault by local DJ Lenny Dee that had me
holding my ears at our listening session. Called "Extreme Terror," it sticks
sanctimony where the sun don't shine.
Sanctimony is in the ear of the
behearer, and no doubt there are fools who will try to reduce the unmeasurablep
man-hours and critical acumen that went into this red-white-and-blue cake to the
corporate self-service it may or may not accomplish. I say that in all its noise
and beauty, its conflicting emotions and culture clash, it represents the New
York I've loved since the coming of Willie Mays. To quote English heiress, white
Rasta, Johnny Rotten in-law, and NY immigrant Ari Upp: "Don't say nothing bad
about my city." And right now, you'd better watch it when you talk about my
paper, too.
From the Boston
Phoenix:
Crime and punishment
Country stars Steve Earle and Jon Langford speak out
BY JONATHAN PERRY
As a banjo strikes the first notes of a Louvin
Brothers–popularized standard, "Knoxville Girl," the song opens waltz-time
pretty, like music playing at a country-fair dance in summer. "I met a little
girl in Knoxville/A town we all know well/And every Sunday evening/Out in her
home I ’d dwell," sings the Handsome Family’s Brett Sparks, his sturdy baritone
carefully embracing words of courtship before turning cemetery-solemn. "We went
to take an evening walk about a mile from town/I picked a stick up off the
ground and knocked that fair girl down/She fell down on her bended knee, for
mercy she did cry. . . . Don’t kill me here, I’m unprepared to die."
It
becomes grimly apparent — by the next verse, actually — that the narrator has no
intention of listening to his bride-to-be’s desperate pleas. Instead, he beats
her to death, eventually gets caught, and is left to languish in prison
contemplating his awful crime and wasted life. The song’s grim story line — and
implicit life-without-parole message — makes it the perfect choice to open The
Executioner’s Last Songs (Bloodshot), a benefit CD compiled by the Pine Valley
Cosmonauts and the first volume in a series of discs aimed at raising money for
the Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium Project (volume two is scheduled for early
next year).
The disc features murder-ballad covers of songs by the likes of
Hank Williams, Johnny Paycheck, the Adverts, and Merle Haggard clustered around
the twin themes of violence and vengeance. A veritable who’s who of the
underground roots scene — Steve Earle, Freakwater’s Janet Bean, Neko Case, Paul
Burch, among others — swap stories and songs as guest singers while the Jon
Langford–led Pine Valley Cosmonauts make like a trad-country house-band version
of Booker T. & the MG’s. From the manic howl and freight-train rumble of
"Gary Gilmore’s Eyes," as sung by the Waco Brothers’ Dean Schlabowski, to Jenny
Toomey’s languorous reading of Cole Porter’s "Miss Otis Regrets," The
Executioner’s Last Songs brims with effortless vitality, gallows humor, and a
sense of unforced camaraderie among its performers. In short, it’s got loads of
personality (and personalities), yet it never comes across as overbearing or
self-righteous — a danger whenever rock musicians approach a subject as
politically charged as the death penalty.
Long-time Mekon leader Jon Langford
conceived and spearheaded the project, and he says that reaching out to
like-minded friends in the underground music community rather than pop
superstars was the key to striking the right balance between making a point and
making a mess. "This is a bunch of friends, really — and it’s a group," he
emphasizes over the phone from his studio in Chicago, where he’s readying plans
for a 25th-anniversary Mekons tour to support a September release and fielding
submissions for a follow-up to The Executioner’s Last Songs. "I hate the sound
of tribute albums where country superstars deliver sanitized, slowed-down
digital ballads of Hank Williams songs. You listen to a record like that and
it’s just an incoherent, unfocused, obese load of crap. But people buy ’em by
the droves and somebody makes a lot of money. I wanted to make a coherent album
— and I think this album stands up against anything else I’ve
recorded."
Langford and the Chicago-based Bloodshot label estimate that the
disc has so far raised between $40,000 and $50,000 for the Moratorium Project,
which itself is meeting with success: a recent string of exonerations of
innocent men sitting on death row has, until further notice, halted executions
in the State of Illinois. "We’re not trying to feed Africa or save the rain
forest," Langford points out. "We’re trying to civilize America."
A British
expat who’s adopted Chicago as his home town, Langford first began mulling the
moral ramifications of the death penalty when he moved to Illinois from the West
Yorkshire city of Leeds in the early 1990s, around the time mass murderer John
Wayne Gacy was executed by the state. "I didn’t really have to think about it
before because I lived in Europe — I lived in the rest of the world. I was
shocked when Gacy was executed and there was no debate and no protest. The Gacy
incident would have been a great time for people to stand up and say no. Why do
we have to be monsters just because this guy’s a monster? I’m not saying killers
should be part of society. They should be locked up. and there should be a big
wall, and you should pay people to ensure that they don’t get out
again."
Steve Earle, who turns in a lean, harrowing reading of the
traditional folk song "Tom Dooley" on The Executioner’s Last Songs, has for
years worked with various anti-death-penalty organizations. An alternate version
of one of several songs he’s written on the subject, "Ellis Unit One," makes an
appearance on Sidetracks (E-Squared/Artemis), his recently released collection
of odds and ends that gathers together some of his most stylistically diverse
work and most surprising covers. Alongside a rocked-up cover of the Chambers
Brothers’ psych-soul classic "Time Has Come Today" — a duet with Sheryl Crow —
sits a faithfully serrated take on Nirvana’s "Breed." Most startling, though, is
his genre-hopping foray into reggae territory on the Slickers’ Jamaican anthem
"Johnny Too Bad." Although none of these selections comes close to surpassing
the originals, Sidetracks offers a unique glimpse of Earle’s extracurricular
activities.
The chilling "Ellis Unit One," a song he originally wrote for the
Dead Man Walking soundtrack, stands out as the disc’s most affecting track. For
sheer pathos and naked portent, it almost matches "Over Yonder (Jonathan’s
Song)," a meditation on capital punishment told from the perspective of a
death-row inmate that Earle, who himself has spent some time in jail on drug
charges, included on 2000’s Transcendental Blues (E-Squared/Artemis). This one
is the death-penalty song that cuts Earle the deepest and is the most personal.
" ‘Jonathan’s Song’ is the result of me witnessing an execution, so it can be a
little hard on me. It’s not a lot of fun to sing."
The idea for The
Executioner’s Last Songs took root when Langford performed with Earle and Tony
Fitzpatrick at a concert in 1999, which is where he met Dick Cunningham, a
defense attorney active in the anti-death-penalty movement who had helped free a
handful of inmates on death row in Illinois. (Since 1989, 13 innocent men have
been exonerated and released from death row in that state; according to Amnesty
International, more than 100 persons have been exonerated nationwide after
wrongful convictions during the past 26 years; and 60 Minutes recently reran its
story on the alarmingly high number of death-row inmates whose convictions have
been overturned in recent years.) That’s when Langford says he first became
convinced that the anti-death-penalty campaign was a "winnable" fight.
Earle,
who stands to attract some strong criticism when Jerusalem (E-Squared/Artemis)
hits stores on September 24 with a song about the American Taliban convert
titled "John Walker’s Blues," points to a moratorium now also in place in
Maryland as a sign of increased skepticism surrounding capital punishment — and
an increased willingness by each side to talk and work together. "What that
means is that even people who still fundamentally support the death penalty are
willing to admit that the system is flawed, and that is encouraging to me.
Rather than yelling and insisting that we’re right, we have to trust that we’re
right and trust that capital-punishment supporters are not bad people, that they
believe what they believe because they’ve been lied to. Without the help of a
lot of people who believe the death penalty is just and fair in certain
situations, there would not be a moratorium in Illinois right now."
Still,
there has been resistance. "Somebody said we’re all a ‘murderer lovers’ club in
some right-wing paper," Langford allows, his voice thorny with sarcasm. "Yeah,
we want to see murderers roaming the streets. I come from a country that has
many murders a year and there’s, like, 100 times as many here where you have the
death penalty, which is meant to get rid of it. It doesn’t work, and anyone who
thinks it does is just kidding themselves and lying, basically. The main
catalyst for me is having kids that I know are going to grow up in the States
and I don’t want to have to explain it to them. As I see it, when somebody dies
like that, the blood is on all of our hands."
Yet one wonders whether a
relatively modest, independently released album like The Executioner’s Last
Songs — or any one song, album, or piece of art — can make a substantial
difference. Are semi-underground artists like Langford and Earle merely
preaching to the choir? How do you reach people on the opposite side of such a
volatile issue?
"The vast majority of the time we are preaching to the
choir," Earle concedes. "But there’s been a slow change, and, you know, not all
of my fans oppose the death penalty. But I know of some who have changed their
minds because of some of the songs I’ve written, and that is one thing art can
do. I don’t think artists have a responsibility to do anything other than create
art, but if what you’re doing is art and not entertainment, I think it is
inherently political. I don’t think you have to go out of your way to make
political art."
Langford takes a pragmatic view. "We’ve raised some money for
the people who are working thanklessly within the campaign . . . so it’s a
success as far as I’m concerned. It’s just one little tool. I don’t know how to
go out and change the minds of the great majority who really don’t think about
much, and probably don’t like music very much, and now who obviously don’t think
about voting very much. Why the hell are they going to listen to me? I’m not
Bono, you know."
Issue Date: August 29 - September 5, 2002
From: www.fufkin.com
The Pine Valley Cosmonauts – The Executioner's Last Songs (Bloodshot):
An ambitious compilation from the group led by Jon (Mekons, The Waco Brothers)
Langford. The proceeds from this disc go to the Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium
Project, who are fighting the death penalty in a state where, since the reinstitution
of the death penalty, more men on Death Row have been exonerated than executed.
What makes this ambitious is that rather than a series of political rants on
why the death penalty is wrong, the Cosmonauts, aided by a bevy of alt-country
all-stars, take on many songs dealing with "murder, mob-law & cruel, cruel punishment"
as the liner notes state. Certainly, classic songs like the murder ballad "Knoxville
Girl" (done by Brett Sparks of The Handsome Family), "Gary Gilmore's Eyes" (Dean
Schlabowski of The Wacos twanging up The Adverts' punk rock peak), and Lonesome
Bob's version of the Johnny Paycheck standard "Pardon Me (I've Got Someone to
Kill)" will not immediately elicit sympathy for the cause. But they provide
context – a death penalty abolitionist who fails to acknowledge the sting of
murder is rhetorically shooting himself in the foot. No one seriously engaged
in this issue denies that unjustified killing is unimportant. Once that is off
the table, the actual reasons can be put on the table (in this case, visual
artist Tony Fitzpatrick, the guy who does Steve Earle's album art, gets up on
his soapbox on "Idiot Whistle"). So the album succeeds at the conceptual level.
Other songs do deal with the specific issue, such as Janet (Freakwater, Eleventh
Dream Day) Bean's take on "The Snakes Crawl at Night" and Rick Cookin' Sherry
on "Hanged Man". Putting aside the politics, the performances are almost uniformly
outstanding, particularly Diane Izzo ("Oh Death"), Johnny Dowd and Jon Langford
("Judgement Day"), Steve Earle ("Tom Dooley"), Jenny (ex-Tsunami) Toomey (Cole
Porter's "Miss Otis Regrets") and the standout, Rosie Flores nailing Hank Williams'
"I'll Never Get Out of this World Alive".
Mike Bennett
Musicians Against the Death Penalty
The Executioner's Last Songs
by Jeffrey St. Clair
from: Counterpunch
That motormouth Bono announced to the world (everything he says these days
seems to have the weight of a Papal Encyclical) in a recent interview in Time
magazine that he's given up on music as a political force. From here on out
Bono says he's going to use the persuasive aura of his own personality to wipe
out Third World debt. After all his are the lips that smooched Jesse Helms and
the hands that caressed Orin Hatch. Is it too soon to say good luck and good
riddance?
Bono's self-directed exit (was he ever really there to begin with?) leaves
the field open to artists who still believe that music has the ability not only
to stir the soul but change the heart and minds of people willing to listen.
One such artist is Jon Langford, who has been around longer than Bono and has
never given up on the power of popular music to reach people and inspire them
toward social change.
Langford is a leader of the great British punk band The Mekons, a group of
Leeds University leftist and anarchists, who, along with The Clash, The Sex
Pistols and Gang of Four, produced some of the most politically-charged music
of the late seventies and 1980s. In fact, I'm not sure I could have survived
the eighties without the knowledge that a new record by the Mekons could be
expected every six months or so. The Mekons made records that sounded just as
pissed off as I felt about the Thatcherites and Reaganites and the liberal wimps
who stood by as the rightwing goons turned the government into a thermo-nuclear
subsidiary of the transnational corporations. And, of course, the Mekons were
a raucous counterpunch to the kind of musical fare we were being spoon-fed through
the eighties (led by the narcissistic sputum of Madonna, Michael Jackson, and
Duran Duran), as the corporatization of rock was in full-bloom.
The Mekons may never have acquired the international following of the other
bands, but they never sold out either. The Mekons made music their way: confrontational,
experimental and uncompromising. They were versed in Marx, Tzara and Debord,
but they also knew their Bob Wills, Bill Monroe and T-Bone Walker. Some of their
records were odd, some truly bad, and some, such as Rock n' Roll, stand with
the best music made in those dreadful decades.
While many other punk-influenced bands imploded, died off, retired, or, like
U2, morphed into pop autmatons for the big music conglomerates that rule the
soundwaves, the Mekons, in their various guises (such as the Waco Boys and Pine
Valley Cosmonauts), kept on making their own kind of music. Often a species
of punk-country. Usually out of Chicago, once the city that electrified the
blues, now an emerging center for neo-roots music.
There is, of course, no more potent symbol of the ultimate authority of the
state than the death penalty. And it's prevalence here offers a peephole into
the true character of the American political system, where the execution of
prisoners often serves as a kind of obscene offering to the electoral gods.
Remember Rickey Ray Rector, the black, brain-damaged inmate Clinton rushed home
to put to death in the heat of the 1992 campaign? Thus, it's scarcely surprising
that upon relocating to the US Langford and his cohorts would soon begin to
agitate, both musically and politically, for its abolition.
And it's also apt that when the time came to make a full-blown musical manifesto
against the death penalty Langford chose to burrow into the American past to
reinterpret old-time music, the music that came out of what Greil Marcus calls
the Weird America, the Invisible Republic of cotton field workers and hillbillies,
juke joints and charismatic churches.
There was a time when American music was filled with stories of everyday violence,
the cruelties of prison life, vigilantism, mob violence and the horrors of execution.
The old dialectic of freedom and confinement was at the core of the lyrical
content of the regional music that gave birth to rock n' roll. The blues, bluegrass,
mountain ballads, Ur-country-roots music, as the labels market it today--all
dealt frequently--even obessively--with these themes that were so much a part
of being poor and/or black in America. To a large extent this tradition of American
music is only being carried on these days by hip-hop.
So now Langford and his Pine Valley Cosmonauts give us: Executioner's Last
Songs, a collection of 18 songs "of murder, mob law, and cruel, cruel punishment."
The title of this release, from Chicago indie label Bloodshot Records, is at
once a play on Norman Mailer's account of the 1977 killing by the State of Utah
of Gary Gilmore (the first execution since the Supreme Court reinstituted the
death penalty) and a prophesy of sorts. The band, with help of an amazing collection
of like-minded artists, reworks music from the Louvin Brothers, Charley Pride,
Johnny Paycheck, Cole Porter, Merle Haggard, the Stanley Brothers and Johnny
Cash with the intent, according to Langford, "of consigning them to the
realm of myth, memory and history."
The proceeds from the album will go to the Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium
Project, which has done unyielding work on behalf of death row inmates over
the past few years. In the outside world, this toil is largely thankless, but
in 2001 17 people in the state of Illinois alone walked off Death Row, in part
due to the project's tireless efforts.
But let's be clear. The real movement against the death penalty isn't about
only keeping innocent people from being killed by the state. What rational person
(WARNING: Antonin Scalia is NOT a rational person) would not be opposed to the
killing of innocents? No. This is about abolition, period.
The rising tide of executions (there have been 763 killings since Gilmore,
with more than half of those having been carried out in the last five years)
is America's equivalent of Argentina's so-called dirty war, where hundreds of
souls are carted off to their doom with little hope of appeal. Call them America's
disappeared.
There are now more than 3,700 prisoners on death row, with a new one being
added nearly every other day. States, led by the killing machines of Texas and
Florida, are putting women, children, the sick and the mentally-ill. Meanwhile,
constitutional rights to effective counsel, a jury of your peers (people who
oppose the death penalty are not permitted to serve on juries in death penalty
cases) and habeas corpus have been gutted.
Executioners' Last Songs isn't a No Nukes or We Are the World type of endeavor.
It's a genuine oppositional undertaking. The death penalty remains sickly popular
in America and resistance to it is scarely a ticket to career enhancement. Artists
who take on this cause in a serious way-such as Springsteen, Steve Earle, and
Langford and company-do so at some risk to their livelihood. It's one thing
to attach yourself to a cause like saving the Amazonian rainforest and quite
another matter entirely, in this nation at least, to demand that the state should
not have the legal or moral right to kill prisoners, even if they have committed
unspeakable crimes.
But though the issue is almost unbearably grim, there's nothing solemn or preachy
in this offering, no pious sermonizing or Bono-like preening for the cameras.
There is, however, a blistering rant-in all the best senses of that word-by
Tony Fitzpatrick. With a nod to Dylan, Fitzpatrick titles his call-to-arms Idiot
Whistle: "Politicians love the death penalty because it makes a bunch of
candy-asses look like tough guys."
The music moves through its own stages of grieving and lamentation, puzzlement,
revulsion, querulousness and outrage: from the lovely and gifted Neko Case's
elegaic Poor Ellen Smith and the Faulknerian black comedy of Jenny Toomey's
Miss Otis Regrets to The Aluminum Group's 25 Minutes to Go (a bracing countdown
to an execution) and Rick Sherry's full-throttle version of Don't Look at the
Hanged Man.
The Advert's 1977 punk classic Gary Gilmore's Eyes is countryfied by Deano
from the Waco Boys' with help of Sally Timms from the Mekons. The inimitable
LA alt-country phenom Rosie Flores sings, with a voice somewhere between Melba
Montgomery and Iris Dement, Hank Williams' I'll Never Get Out of this Place
Alive. Steve Earle breathes new life into Tom Dooley, making that old story
sound urgent, new and familiar all at the same time. To my mind, Earle is the
most compelling American rocker out there today. He's certainly the most interesting,
producing music that just keeps getting better and deeper. Earle's got a voice
that can chill your spine and a guitar-style as raw and accomplished as anything
hatched by the great westside Chicago bluesman Hounddog Taylor.
Remember George Bush and Karla Faye Tucker? Lanford and Johnny Dowd do in their
song Judgement Day: "God gave her life, but the mighty state of Texas took
it away. She's dead. Gone. To a better place. The governor's so ashamed he won't
even show his face.Just one thing I want to say: She ain't the only one facing
the Lord on Judgement Day."
Chicagoan Diane Izzo contributes a defiant version of the sinister ballad,
Oh Death. Her exquisitely eroded voice reclaims the old Dock Boggs song from
the malign purposes it was put to in the Coen Brothers' offensive minstrelsy-show
of a film, Oh, Brother Where Art Thou, where Ralph Stanley's resigned voice
is outrageously rerouted through the mouth of a Klansman.
Last phone calls. Last letters. Last kisses. Last meals. Last songs. Dreams
of escape, freedom and commutation. Last prayers to Jesus, Allah, Elvis. Final
goodbyes. It's all here in the songs; the unspeakably cruel circumstances of
everyday life on America's death row.
The CD closes with Paul Burch's assured version of Walls of Time, a beautiful
bluegrass tune penned by Peter Rowan, which became a signature song for Bill
Monroe. It's a kind of ghost story, really, a ghost story that ends on a quavering
note of love, reunion and redemption.
Executioners' Last Songs provides an eerie kind of testimony to just how wrong
Bono is. The songs are haunting, angry, and, often, funny--the kind of gallows
humor that only works when it's done by those who know what's really at stake.
So take those ridiculous U2 cds down to the used record store, trade them in
and recycle the money into something that matters: Executioners Last Songs.
And feel good about it. You can make a difference. Music isn't going to lead
the way to radical change (that's going to take lawyers, organizers, activists,
politicians and judges with courage), but it sure as hell can provide the marching
tunes. Langford and friends have given us an unexpected message of hope amidst
the bleakest of circumstances. Hope through struggle, that is.
