Rock n Roll review

ROBERT CHRISTGAU'S linernotes to the 2002 issue on Collector's Choice

Believe it or not, major labels were still a way of life back in 1989, when the Mekons' Rock 'n' Roll was first released. Of course there were indies--many more than in the rock 'n' roll '50s, not to mention the proudly "revolutionary" yet blatantly corporate '60s. But with a few noisy exceptions, bands who came up with well-received indie albums made no bones about seeking the pot of iron pyrite at the end of the neon rainbow: the "deal." Rememember Bruce Springsteen shouting, "The record company, Rosie, just gave me a big advance"? One reason he did this every fucking night was that the money didn't go that far, not with the improved production the majors afforded and demanded coming out of it. So in the end the big attraction was that once the record was done there'd be exposure, getting the music "out there" or "to the people": the legendary "airplay" (promotional costs, bribes included, eventually deducted from you know where), clips for an MTV that still played entire videos (and didn't target only the under-18 demo) (production costs ditto), and of course distribution, which in their Sisyphean trek toward monopoly the majors had a pretty good lock on. It helped if their field men (and women, ha ha) liked you.

In 1989, the great early success of this system, R.E.M., had just left quasi-indie I.R.S., which was distributed by A&M, for Warners. Husker Du was just breaking up, as a band and with the self-same Warners. The Replacements were winding down at Warner-distributed Sire without ever having gotten their scads of great songs to the people. Noisy underground ideologues Sonic Youth were hooking up with David Geffen's Warner-distributed DGC, which at their suggestion would soon lure the unknown Nirvana from Sub Pop. But no one knew what that portended. R.E.M. was the model--a quality band that went kinda mega by dint of base-building roadwork, college radio adulation, and actual hit singles. At A&M, which craved more underground poontang, a&r phenom Steve Ralbovsky cherished similar dreams for Soul Asylum and Soundgarden, who would eventually ride Nirvana's riptide, and the Feelies and Kitchens of Distinction, who wouldn't. And recalling the R.E.M.-I.R.S. interface, he hooked A&M up with a label called Twin/Tone, one attraction of which was its contract with the Mekons.

The Mekons had been around longer than any of the above-named, and were also more staunchly anticapitalist than any of them--more staunchly anticapitalist than any American band except the deceased Minutemen, which didn't stop them from signing a deal with Virgin in 1979. Funk-influenced intellectuals like their Leeds compadres the Gang of 4, the Mekons' The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen remained permanently import-only in an America intensely suspicious of English "punk," and their ambiguously entitled follow-up album was on the left-identified U.K. indie Red Rhino. Personnel shifted wildly--the Mekons brand name had concealed some 20 enemies of the state as of 1985. They recorded for many tiny labels, including CNT, where the 1982 worktapes extravaganza The Mekons Story invented lo-fi, and the Sophie Bourbon-backed Sin, where the 1985 Fear and Whiskey invented alt-country. More albums in this general vein followed, more labels too--including their first American one, Minneapolis-based Twin/Tone, childhood home of the Replacements and Soul Asylum, and London-based Blast First, international home of Sonic Youth. Note, however, that none of these bands ever augmented a lyric sheet with a bibliography, a special feature of the sardonically named Honky Tonkin'. Dashiell Hammett and Angela Carter were by all accounts flattered. T.W. Adorno and Ludwig Wittgenstein weren't so sure. Frederick Engels was just glad to get his name out there--to the people, as it were.

There are those who say Rock 'n' Roll was barely that musical beast at all, and those who say that anyway, such a claim wasn't the cleverest of commercial ploys by 1989. These people miss the point. So what if Susie Honeyman's screeching fiddle drenches the record in white noise? So what if the nearest thing to a rock anthem to make #1 Billboard in 1989 was Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire"? Forgive my oversimplifications in advance, and admit that compared to the dirges and two-steps of 1987's Honky Tonkin', or even the skanks and reels of 1988's more rockin' (and retrospectively much stronger) So Good It Hurts, Rock 'n' Roll was an all-out assault on both the sensation-craving perpetual-adolescent sensorium and the Hot 100. It was loud, fast, and tuneful. It was the Mekons' U.S. major-label debut. It still sounds killer. They never made another record like it.

The first cut, "Memphis, Egypt," which anyone not examining the package thinks of as "Rock 'n' Roll," confronts the beast and calls it a beast--"the Devil," to be precise, "Capitalismos, favourite boy child," his "foul breath" like "fine perfume." Was it really that parlous, that soul-consuming, that bad? Nah, but that's how it felt, and so Steve Goulding keeps pounding and Jon Langford keeps declaiming and the feedback keeps yowling till it swallows Tom Greenhalgh's recitation and everything else in its wake. Segue to Sally Timms reminiscing about a more literal prostitution in "Club Mekon," and then to Greenhalgh, who seems to give it up to the forces of evil with "Only Darkness Has the Power"--which is in fact the nakedest love song the Mekons ever recorded, one of the nakedest love songs anyone ever recorded, candid and vulnerable and romantic and doomed.

If I say the album never gets any better, don't be too hard on the Mekons, who we know have never made a fetish of consistency--those are three of their best tracks ever, yet Rock 'n' Roll is so strong it nearly matches them anyway. My nominations would be the closing "When Darkness Falls," a grim answer song to "Only Darkness Has the Power"; "Amnesia," where a slave ship "takes rock 'n' roll to America"; the nihilistically devil-may-care "Blow Your Tuneless Trumpet"; and the Greenhalgh-shouted live staple "Heaven and Back," left off the U.S. major-label debut by the arbiters of taste at A&M but included on the Blast First version and this one. Lesser songs nip at the beast's heels in an exuberantly embittered celebration/critique of capitalism's big beat--cf. "Someone," where "the studio's empty but the beat goes on"; "Learning to Live on Your Own," with Timms throwing "rock 'n' roll songs on the fire" in her existential rue; and the failed liberation scenarios of "Cocaine Lil" (drugs) and "Empire of the Senseless" (culture). If the Mekons were going to serve the false god of rock 'n' roll, they were going to give him what for in the bargain.

Unfortunately--or fortunately, if you fear for their purity, always a highly sporadic concern on their end--their service, such as it was, proved short-lived. Rock 'n' Roll's release was held up while A&M's lawyers fretted over the unauthorized Elvis pic cunningly concealed on the cover, and U.S. sales topped out at under 25,000. Had you asked the Mekons' camp back then, you would have heard the sad old stories of paltry tour support, nonexistent ads, fans who couldn't find the thing in the shops. The Mekons declined to ingratiate themselves with label honchos in L.A., instead finishing up their U.S. dates there and returning to their European fan base. A&M refused further tour support, and when they told Ralbovsky they wanted to cut another album right away, he suggested they have some fun with an EP instead. Honoring this request to the letter, they dubbed the fourth EP of their oddly configured career F.U.N. '90: Band cover, Kevin Coyne cover, ghost vocal from early fan Lester Bangs, and an Anglodisco-style pulse that came as a shock after Rock 'n' Roll's Clashlike aggression, especially to Americans unaware that in 1989 the revolution had occurred, and its name was, er, acid house.

Soon if not quite right away, they cut another album: The Curse of the Mekons. A&M said no thanks, chums. And major labels were no longer the Mekons' way of life.

From: The best Rock'n Roll Records of All Time: A Fan's Guide to the Stuff You Love. New York, Citadel Press 1992:

Number 90:

Mekons: The Mekons Rock 'n Roll

The Sex Pistols trashed as many of rock's traditions as thev could, but they also forged a few. The one that lasted longest was ambivalence about stardom. When punk turned into new wave (which then turned into the Knack), it was easy for the original punks to say they wanted to shun the brass ring. But eventually they got tired of playing to the same eight hundred people every time they came to a town. The great ones, like the Clash, found a way to keep the feeling but broaden their base. The rest jettisoned punk as being anything but a fashion move; thev turned into business people. The Mekons were the only original punk unit to make it into the form's second decade with their ideals intact and their vision clear. With The Mekons Rock 'n Roll, they tried for a mass audience after years spent torturing themselves with their inabilitv to secure one.

One of the industrial-punk outfits to leap out of Leeds, the Mekons dissolved in the early eighties after the audience for their jagged sounds dwindled to the band itself. After a reunion EP's worth of experimentation, they reemerged reinvogorated with Fear And Whiskey, a magnificent, expectation-shattering album that owed more to the trepidation and resignation of honky-tonk weepers and Childe Ballads than to any punk forebearer. They sang of being disenchanted and dislocated a typical song title was ''Hard to Be Human Again''with uncommon ferocity and speeificity. On the slew of fine recordings they did after that (many of them, as well as all of Fear and Whiskey, preserved on the CD-only Original Sin), they refined their updated attack and developed their own underdog mythology. They knew they were playillg for no one by rockindustry standards sales hovered around ten thousand copies and they drew strength from their permanent underdog status.

The Mekons Rock 'n' Roll was not merely the group's most clearheaded recording. Their belated first major-label album, it was a hand held out to the mainstream rock audience. Yet this rapprochement came with conditions. The record's cover art shook down to depieting a defaced Elvis Presley, which perfectly expressed the Mekons' ambivalence. They loved rock and roll, but they hated the means by which the music was disseminated, so they filled their most mainstream album with unremitting rants against the pop-music industry. The record started with the bracing thrash of "Memphis, Egypt,'' a terrific, energized tune filled with ideas like ''The battles we fought were long and hard/Just not to be consumed by rock and roll.'' The Mekons' best songs were more obsessed with the group's inexplicable lack of commercial success than even those of the Replacements. On the rollicking country-rock "Club Mekons," led by Susie Honeymoon's fiddle, singer Sally Timms (one of three lead vocalists, along with guitarists Tom Greenhalgh and Jon Langford) equated rock and roll with cheap sex and neerophilia. When Timms sang ''I saw a world where the dead are worshipped/The world belongs to them/Now they can keep it," she shied away from that world at the same time she demanded entry.

This desire to have it both ways was made explicit between the cascading riffs and rhythms of the blaring "Blow Your Tuneless Trumpet," a down-home scorcher that suggested the Clash merging with Fairport Convention. For all that they said they hated rock and roll, the Mekons were awfully familiar and comfortable with the form. Even without the challenging rhetoric that suffused all twelve cuts, The Mekons Rock 'n Roll was grand, stirring stuff; the music on ''Empire of the Senseless'' and ''Amnesia" stood tall and anthem-like without the overlay of oratory. "Only Darkness Has the Power'' was a romp with the thrust of earlyeighties power pop, with more of an edge; ''Learning to Live on Your Own" gave Timms a chance to glide through a post-punk flip side to Petula Clark's wide-eyed "Downtown''; and "Someone'' spiraled out from its stuttering guitar and drums introduction, sustaining listeners through repeated onslaughts. Indeed, the uneneumbered drumming of ex-Rumour stick man Steven Goulding was the Mekons' secret weapon.

The year 1989 was a good one for grizzled rock veterans. From the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan to Lou Reed and Neil Young, old guys offered records notches above what anyone expected at that late date. By 1989, the Mekons had tumbled into the category of older performers finding new ways to get a Hearing while staying true to their innocent punk origins. They succeeded, ready to be heard on the usual rock-biz terms, but by then there was no one left to hear them. By their next album, the fine Curse of the Mekons, they were once again recording for an independent label, dancing furiously on the margins of the music industry.

Steve Terrell: Mekonmania
> The Santa Fe New Mexican
(Copyright 2001 Santa Fe New Mexican) Magic, fear and superstition. This is the curse of The Mekons ...
Well thats how The Mekons tell it. But anyone familiar with this divine gaggle of rag-tag underdog Brits, lunatic punks, honky-tonk heretics, noise-mongering visionaries, die-hard socialists and drunken louts realize that the curse of this band actually is one of their own making. Simply put, they refuse to play the music industry game they dont compromise, they dont play ball even though their strange musical instincts ensure that they will never widen their audience beyond critics, like myself, who think we recognize a kernel of that elusive Rock n Roll Truth in Jon Langfords snarl and Sally Timms sweet coo, and an illuminated few who believe Tom Greenhalgh when he proclaims, Ive been to Heaven and back!
Unlike the mythical Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Mekons dont keep going in and out of style. They just keep going further out of style. Clunky punky guitars clash with fiddle and accordion, giving a Salvation Army street band sheen to the music even when they veer off into dub reggae and acid-house experiments. And yet The Mekons are determined to muddle on, releasing album after album even though members are scattered over two continents.
Some Mekonian scholars believe the bands most creative period was in the late 80s and early 90s, a time in which The Mekons actually danced with the Great Satan of major labeldom. Their two albums of this period, The Mekons Rock n Roll (1989) and The Curse of The Mekons (1991) recently were re-released on Collectors Choice Music (www.collectorschoicemusic.com). This marks the first time ever that Curse ever has been released in the U.S.
In the re-issues liner notes, dean-of-rock-critics Robert Christgau points out the irony of the Mekons losing their contract with A&M Records in 1991, the year that Nirvanas Nevermind shook the music industry, paving the way for what was once called alternativeo music. Such is the curse of the Mekons.
Listening to the glorious The Mekons Rock n Roll, it makes you wonder why the brain trust at A&M didnt promote this album like crazy. Its undoubtedly the most accessible and upbeat (at least until you start listening to the lyrics) album the band ever made. They could have scooped Nevermind by two years. All across Alternative Nation Gen-X kids would have been hopping around chirping the chorus of Only Darkness Has the Power,o the screech of Susie Honeymans fiddle piercing the airwaves before we ever heard Kurt Cobains feedbacking guitar. Yep, the money would have rolled in and the self- disgust level of Greenhalgh, Langford and Timms would have reached dangerous highs. Of course the album was the most delicious indictments of the music industry since Elvis Costellos Radio Radio. The album was stuffed full of lyrics attacking The Biz. 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... are the opening lines of Memphis, Egypt. nd thats just the first song. In the next cut Club Mekon Timms directly compares rock n roll with prostitution. Of course, shes celebrating both.
By Amnesiao the Mekons have put the birth of rock n roll not in some happy archetypal Mississippi roadhouse or New Orleans whorehouse but aboard a damned slave ship. And Langford rages at contemporary imperialistic, militaristic implications of rock: any old army high on drugs fighting that rock n roll war/truth justice and Led Zeppelin heavy metal marine corps. Happily this new version of Rock n Roll includes two songs the anthemic Heaven and Backo and the almost folkish Ring O Roses that were inexplicably cut by A&M in the original American version. The fact that something as brilliant as The Curse of The Mekons couldnt find a home on an American label for 10 years only adds to the loathing of the industry felt by anyone with a heart or brain. Slightly more relaxed and definitely less bombastic than Rock n Roll, Curse contains some essential Mekon material, such as Langfords commentary on the fall of communism, Funeral,o in which he spits at those dancing on the grave of socialism. How can something really be dead when it hasnt really happened? Theres a crazed march Authorityo and yes, those are bagpipes you hear in the mix and Brutalo a musical history of the drug war, going back to the Opium War in China, sung by Timms over a mutated reggae soundscape.
Sally shines even more than usual on this album with the song Secretso (featuring a spoken segment in German), Waltzo (one of the prettiest melodies the Mekons ever recorded, featuring a sweet acoustic guitar) and an understated cover of John Andersons country hit Wild and Blue.o This re-issue contains the complete F.U.N. 90 4-song EP, which was the last Mekon product ever released by A&M. Theres a sad version of The Bands Makes No Differenceo (the original is much better) and the lo-fi acid-house weirdness of One-Horse Towno featuring a tape of the late critic Lester Bangs stumbling through Hank Williams Rambling Man.
If youve ever been tempted to join the cult of the Mekons, these two CDs would be as good a place as any to start. My advice is to destroy your safe and happy lives before it is too late. Such is the blessing of the Mekons.