Wee Hairy Beasties: Animal Crackers – Review

No one has ever accused the Mekons of being an especially “family friendly” ensemble, but two longtime members of the Leftist Punk Band That Refuses To Die guitarist and singer Jon Langford and vocalist Sally Timms have decided to take a stab at the children’s music market, and the result is an unexpected delight. As the Wee Hairy Beasties, Langford and Timms team up with alt country chanteuse Kelly Hogan and the rollicking acoustic trio Devil in a Woodpile, and on Animal Crackers they’ve cooked up 14 tunes lively enough to please even the most fidgety youngster, and which are also witty, swinging and guaranteed to make the grownups in the room tap their toes. Most of the numbers deal with curious critters of one kind or another ants with attitude, dancing turtles, flies feasting on breakfast cereal and ducks with a taste for trad jazz and the wordplay is silly enough to make children giggle, but smart enough to still appeal to the more mature listener (especially the parade of clichés on “Animal Crackers,” the Muddy Waters lift on “I’m an A.N.T.” and the playfully ethereal “Toenail Moon”), though some parents may find themselves at a loss to explain the convoluted story of “Cyril the Karaoke Squirrel.” Continue reading

Wee Hairy Beasties

Wee Hairy Beasties
(Bloodshot BS 136)

Release date: Oct 24, 2006

SONGS:
1.Wee Hairy Beasties (3:00)
2.Flies on My Tears (1:39)
3.Animal Crackers (2:07)
4.Ragtime Duck (2:10)
5.Housefly Blues (3:08)
6.A Newt Called Tiny (0:16)
7.I’m an a.N.T. (2:40)
8.Road Safety Song (1:59)
9.Cuttlefish Bone (2:47)
10.Glow Worm (1:08)
11.Buzz Buzz Buzz (1:49)
12.Cyril the Karaoke Squirrel (4:43)
13.Toenail Moon (3:55)
14.Lightnin’ the Turtle (1:36)
15.Wee Hairy Beasties Reprise (0:29)
plus Enhanced CD Video “Toenail Moon”
Lineup:

Cyril the Karaoke Squirrel (Jon Langford): gt, perc, voc
Marjorie the Singing Bee (Kelly Hogan): voc
Monkey Double Dippey (Sally Timms): voc

and Devil in a Woodpile:
Rick Sherry: harm, washboard, voc, clarinet, drum, jug, kazoo
Joel Paterson: gt. lap steel, voc, kazoo, drums
Tom Ray: bass

Produced By Jon Langford with Ken Sluiter

Bloodshot says:

The young will thrill to the sing-a-long tunes about ducks, squirrels, flies, newts and turtles, while the music geek in all of us will marvel at the dexterous harmonica and National steel guitar playing and super excellent vocals. All will benefit from the important lessons about road safety, keeping flies off your supper and the perils of karoake.

The Wee Hairy Beasties theme song even has a special dance. Every time the Beasties go “Wee!,” you climb up on your Mom or Dad’s shoulders and kick your legs up as high as you can–but make sure you hold on tight and if Dad’s wearing a wig hold onto his ears!

“Kids’ hootenannies don’t get any more fun, or parent-friendly, than this rootsy collection. A-.” Chris Willman Entertainment Weekly

“14 tunes lively enough to please even the most fidgety youngster, and which are also witty, swinging and guaranteed to make the grown ups in the room tap their toes…the wordplay is silly enough to make children giggle, but smart enough to still appeal to the more mature listener…and all the musicians brought their A Game.” Mark Deming All Music Guide

“This troupe rewrites the rules of the animal kingdom, delivering a barrel-full of fun against a collection of highly toe-tapping music that rarely quits… kids of all ages can grow an appreciation for music that doesn’t require the the need of a net or a purple dinosaur.” Today’s Parent

“At our reviewers’ household, the album was an immediate hit: ‘My daughter starts dancing like crazy when you put it on.'” Chicago Magazine

“What it would sound like if Where The Wild Things Are came to life as a song.” Songs: Illinois

“Make no mistake, Animal Crackers is a kids’ album. But it’s made with love and enthusiasm and will engage kids while making the parents smile. And if you had any affinity for The Bottle Let Me Down, you shouldn’t hesitate at all to get this album. Definitely recommended. zooglobble.com

About Wee Hairy Beasties

Sponsored by WBUG, a radio station that only insects can hear, The Wee Hairy Beasties’ first concert was at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. The band was under the mistaken impression they would be playing to the animals, so all their songs were about animals. The children that showed up seemed to enjoy the show a great deal as well, so a CD was concocted. The resulting Beastie music on Animal Crackers is mostly for kids, but if used wisely, shouldn’t bug the adults either.

The Beasties, Cyril the Karaoke Squirrel Jon Langford—Mekons, Waco Brothers, Pine Valley Cosmonauts), Marjorie the Singing Bee (Kelly Hogan), Monkey Double Dippey (Sally Timms-Mekons) and Devil in a Woodpile believe that Kids music need not be unlistenable. Their dance-with-ants-in-your-pants blend of back porch blues, hoppity country and wiggly old timey swing is bound to please any animal, child or adult within earshot.

“The Beasties have an eclectic sound, and a remarkable chemistry among them. Musically, this ensemble is having way too much fun, but because they are such accomplished musicians, they are able to put forth a fun and relaxed, yet tight and technically strong album.” The Lovely Mrs. Davis

NASHVILLE RADIO

Beyond his work as a musician (Mekons, Waco Brothers, and solo), Jon Langford has attracted ever-growing attention as a visual artist in recent years. Nashville Radio is the first collection of his acclaimed art. It reproduces 215 paintings and etchings, along with song lyrics and autobiographical writings. The book also comes with an exclusive CD of Langford performing 18 of the printed songs.

Continue reading

Jon Langford: Gold Brick

Jon Langford:
Gold Brick
(ROIR – RUSCD 8296)

Release date: March 9th, 2006

SONGS:
Little bit of help
Workingman’s palace
Invisible man
Buy it now
All roads lead back to me
Anything can happen
Gold brick
Salty dog
Gorilla & the maiden
Dreams of leaving
Tall ships
Lineup:

John Rice (guitar, mandolin etc.)
Pat Brennan (keyboards)
Alan Doughty (bass & vocals)
Jean Cook (violin)
Dan Massey on drums

Produced By Jon Langford with Ken Sluiter

Devilishly crafted and scarily melodic GOLD BRICK is Langford’s third solo album and finds him back with R.O.I.R. the pioneering New York label that released The Mekons classic New York album in the late 80s. Collaborating with a band that includes Pine Valley Cosmonauts John Rice (guitar, mandolin etc.) & Pat Brennan (keyboards), Waco Brother Alan Doughty (bass & vocals), Jean Cook (violin) and Dan Massey on drums, this is probably Langford’s most consistent and coherent recording to date.
Continue reading

Gold Brick – Review

Devilishly crafted and scarily melodic GOLD BRICK is Langford’s third solo album and finds him back with R.O.I.R. the pioneering New York label that released The Mekons classic New York album in the late 80s. Collaborating with a band that includes Pine Valley Cosmonauts John Rice (guitar, mandolin etc.) & Pat Brennan (keyboards), Waco Brother Alan Doughty (bass & vocals), Jean Cook (violin) and Dan Massey on drums, this is probably Langford’s most consistent and coherent recording to date.

While 2004’s ALL THE FAME OF LOFTY DEEDS (Bloodshot) took about a week to record and was described asContinue reading

Sir Dark Invader Vs The Fanglord

Jon Langford & Richard Buckner: Sir Dark Invader Vs The Fanglord
Release date: 2016
SONGS:

 

Lineup:

Jon Langford
Richard Buckner

Reviews

Miles Of Music says:

So, everything good that you could expect from the pairing of Richard Buckner with Jon Langford comes to fruition on Sir Dark Invader vs. The Fanglord. These two distinct voices, with their now familiar styles, arent so much fighting each other as they are playing nice, deflating the conflict the LPs title suggests. Yet, its easy to revel in the fusion of their dark and light personalities, Jons rocking tendencies with Richards organic roots vibe, as they harmonize and duet from song to song. The legend of how these two met is delightfully questionable. According to an inside source, the two met at “the security booth at Buck Owen`s Crystal Palace in Bakersfield, CA where they had been chained together for their own protection. Mouths taped shut with duct tape, they communicated via primitive Morse code messages tapped out on each other`s foreheads with fish bones.” Recorded at Sally Timms` apartment, Chicago late summer 2002, Buckner and Langford play nearly all the instruments, with John Rice (mandolin, guitar) and Lil Willy Goulding (drum kit)

Stylus Magazine:

So which one’s The Fanglord and which one’s Sir Dark Invader? Continue reading

Richard Buckner & Jon Langford Sir Dark Invader Vs The Fanglord

Release date: 2016

Buried Treasure Records – BURT4

  1. Rolling Of The Eyes (Buckner/Langford)
  2. Nothing To Show (Langford)
  3. Sweet Anybody (Buckner)
  4. From Attic to Basement (Langford)
  5. Torn Apart (Langford)
  6. Stayed (Buckner)
  7. The Inca Princess (Buckner/Langford/Rice/Odom)
  8. No Tears Tonight (Buckner/Langford)
  9. Do You Wanna Go Somewhere? (Buckner)
    Recorded at Sally Timms’ apartment, Chicago late summer 2002 and mixed with Ken Sluiter at Western Sound Lab except track 9 recorded in Brooklyn, NY and mixed by John Marshall Smith.

All instruments Buckner/Langford with John Rice – mandolin and guitar and digital Willy Goulding on some drum kit.

From an interview with Sally Timms (via the “Doubters” mail list):

And as he’s not here, can you shed any light on what Jon’s been up to with Richard Buckner?

ST: “You don’t want to know. He and Richard came round to my house weirdly enough. They set up their home studio system in my back room and I left them to it. I came back and found two very drunken men, all red and sweaty, and I have no idea what they were doing. They said they were making a record.

“They’ve made an EP, I think, for this bloke Howard who¹s going to put it out. He works with Bertina at Thrill Jockey. They instantly bonded when they met, and they’ve been off like a pair of chubby school kids doing things ever since. I think we’re going to go on tour together. God help everyone.

“I’d go round to Jon’s and Richard would be swanning around with a hangover at about two in the afternoon. It was like having Lord Byron living in your attic. Cos he’s very romantic. He just wanders from here to there, not really living anywhere, just making music and breaking girls’ hearts.”

Reviews


Miles Of Music says:

So, everything good that you could expect from the pairing of Richard Buckner with Jon Langford comes to fruition on Sir Dark Invader vs. The Fanglord. These two distinct voices, with their now familiar styles, arent so much fighting each other as they are playing nice, deflating the conflict the LPs title suggests. Yet, its easy to revel in the fusion of their dark and light personalities, Jons rocking tendencies with Richards organic roots vibe, as they harmonize and duet from song to song. The legend of how these two met is delightfully questionable. According to an inside source, the two met at “the security booth at Buck Owens Crystal Palace in Bakersfield, CA where they had been chained together for their own protection. Mouths taped shut with duct tape, they communicated via primitive Morse code messages tapped out on each others foreheads with fish bones.” Recorded at Sally Timms` apartment, Chicago late summer 2002, Buckner and Langford play nearly all the instruments, with John Rice (mandolin, guitar) and Lil Willy Goulding (drum kit)

Stylus Magazine:

So which one’s The Fanglord and which one’s Sir Dark Invader?

Not that it’s some big riddle that must be solved in order to enjoy this steady set of country inflected rock tunes. But it does get one thinking. Over the last few years Richard Buckner’s work has lacked a certain punch. I don’t want to say that he’s phoning it in, it’s more like he’s trying too hard to recreate a legend to which he feels obligated. Dents And Shells was a minor success, but if you’re like me, it didn’t really stick to the ribs the way you were hoping. It got listened to a number of times and then somehow found its way to the bottom of the stack. Buckner seemed to be very conscious of being Richard Buckner on that record, if that makes sense. His reputation as a highly literate lyricist who can translate the immediacy of a broken heart into a thousand kaleidoscopic pieces each reflecting a different aspect of hurt, betrayal, recrimination, and abandonment, seemed to weigh heavily on that record. Buckner’s vocabulary, usually an amalgam of syllabic oddities anyway, was unusually unapproachable even for him. Instead of creating a tone that reflected his internal struggles, always his greatest strength, Dents And Shells was a carefully constructed wall between him and the listener. I found myself thinking, lighten up just a bit, give me something to grasp on to and let me into these songs. Dents And Shells inapproachability makes Buckner’s project with The Mekon’s Jon Langford all the more precious.

Recorded in 2002 at Mekon Sally Timm’s apartment in Chicago, Sir Dark Invader vs. The Fanglord clearly shows Buckner benefiting from working with The Mekons’ Jon Langford. The disc’s nine songs are evenly split: three written by Langford, three by Buckner, and three collaboratively. As might be expected from a project involving Langford things are played loose and fast. There isn’t a weepy ballad in the bunch. Instead Buckner and Langford concentrate on getting songs on to tape (or hard drive) without too much fuss. The two play all the instruments with a touch of help from John Rice of the Pine Valley Cosmonauts on mandolin and guitar.

Album opener “Rolling of the Eyes,” one of the jointly written numbers, is a rousing rock song full of sizzling electric guitar work and a thumping fuzzed out bass line. It’s a take no prisoners stomp that sets the tone of the record as one of unabashed (if sloppy) fun. You can almost hear the beer bottles falling off the amps.

”Nothing To Show” is a sweet duet between Langford and Buckner. As they trade off direct, plainspoken verses it’s clear that Langford was the lyricist on this one. The remarkable thing about the song is not how well these two gruff voices fit together (and that’s pretty remarkable), but how expressive Buckner’s voice is when he’s not forcing the words through a filter so intensely personal that we can’t even recognize the landscape, much less identify with it. Being forced to walk through someone else’s lyrical musings frees his voice to dance through his verses without a trace of self-consciousness.

A twinkling mandolin anchors Buckner’s “Sweet Anybody.” The lyrics are classic lost love Buckner as he chases a “sweet anybody” through the song, hiding in sound, searching the night, before discovering the windows that pop up in so many of his best songs “finally gone.” It’s everything that Buckner does right. It may be too easy to read into, but it must be assumed that Langord to some degrees is responsible for prying out such beautiful insight from Buckner.

While this project is certainly a collaborative effort, it’s Buckner who seems to dominate the proceedings. His deeply affecting voice easily muscles Langford’s reedier strains to the side. It’s also clear that Langford’s presence throughout Sir Dark Invader vs. The Fanglord is what enables Buckner to play things far looser than he has on his recent solo work. The collaborative “The Inca Princess,” for instance, ends with Buckner and Langford laughing into the song’s decay. It’s a refreshing bit of humanity and typical of the album’s feel.

Buckner’s closing song, “Do You Wanna Go Somewhere,” had it appeared on Dents And Shells would have been an album highlight. It’s warm and steady and too short at two minutes and forty-one seconds. But it’s a reminder that Sir Dark Invader with all his baggage and idiosyncratic habits can make us believe in his weeping and may yet again.

Pitchfork Media remarks:

In one corner you have Richard Buckner, aka Sir Dark Invader, the Devotion + Doubt Demolisher, the Alt-Country Annihilator. And in the opposing corner is Jon Langford, aka the Fanglord, aka the Mekons Menace, the Waco Brothers Brawler. It’s a match made not in heaven, but in Sally Timms’s Chicago apartment, where in 2002 Buckner and Langford recorded eight of the nine songs on this one-off collaboration album, released on Langford’s Buried Treasure Records. The title suggests there may have been some friendly competition involved, which seems almost inevitable given their distinct styles. Sir Dark Invader vs. the Fanglord pits Buckner’s melting drawl against Langford’s grainy vocals; Buckner’s abstracted, introspective songwriting against Langford’s demonstrative, outward-looking lyrics; Buckner’s ragged beard against Langford’s trimmed mustache.

This amiable musical friction enlivens every song: pounding drums and punchy basslines jab at welterweight guitar melodies, and over the melee, Buckner and Langford move easily between lead and backing vocals and trade off instruments and solos almost on a whim. As a result, songs like the opener “The Rolling of the Eyes” and “The Inca Princess” generate brawling momentum– the kind seldom associated with Buckner’s solo material– while tracks like “Nothing to Show” and the closer “Do You Wanna Go Somewhere?” sound battered and worn, but not necessarily defeated.

The album is a volley of contradictions, a tossed-off collaboration (shelved for almost three years) that never sounds haphazard. The lighthearted aspects of the project– songs like “The Inca Princess”, the comic-book aliases, the photo-booth snapshots of both men that decorate the pixilated packaging– disguise the gravity of the songs. “Nothing to show for the things that I’ve done,” Langford sings on the ruminative “Nothing to Show”, “There were places to go, and I had to choose this one.” Buckner takes over for the second verse, expressing an equally world-weary remorse. If they’re pugilists on other songs, here they sound like hard-timers: singing “We’ll be lucky to leave/ Lucky to leave with our lives”, they sound like they’re holding each other up, two drunks stumbling home from another long night at the bar.

This feeling bridges the two-minute intermission, “From Attic to Basement”, and continues on the standout “Torn Apart” and the raucous “Inca Princess”. The former’s tense rhythms echo the restlessness of its lyrics, as Buckner and Langfird share a rueful back-and-forth, singing the title over and over as the song winds down. “The Inca Princess” kicks up a barnstorming momentum as Langford describes a bar so tough that “drinkin’ and drivin’ was almost mandat’ry.”

By contrast, the conflicted lullaby “No Tears Tonight” and the abruptly abandoned “Do You Wanna Go Somewhere?” parse the isolation and the inspiration of a life devoted to music. “I wanna wrap you up in music,” Langford sings, then admits, “But we both know that I got nothing/ Spent too much time playing in bands.” Taken together, these two tracks comprise a twist ending of sorts, revealing that Sir Dark Invader and the Fanglord have been fighting on the same side all along, battling the spectre of loneliness. The mix of celebration and commiseration on the album suggests a draw.

-Stephen M. Deusner, July 13, 2005

FROM : Groove (Norway):

Frå loft til kjellar

Å tenke seg den sordinerte og introverte Richard Buckner kollaborere med den meir støyande og geskjeftige Jon Langford høyrer kanskje ikkje med til dei mest opplagte av tankar. Buckner har sidan midten av 90-talet levert sine nedstemte funderingar kring det problematiske kjærleikslivet. Når han er på sitt beste, med låtar som Pull og 4am frå Devotion + Doubt (1997), skapar han tonepoesi av det riktig så utsøkte slaget. Nå har han vel etter den tid sjeldan vore oppe på det nivået. Ja, kanskje kan vi skulda han for å ha hatt ein litt vel einspora innfallsvinkel både tematisk og musikalsk. Likevel har det aldri vore bortkasta tid å søke selskap med ei Buckner-plate.

Jon Langford har ein musikalsk historie tilbake til 70-talet. Då var han med å starta det høgoktane og stadig sjangerskiftande bandet Mekons, saman med nokre medstudentar på universitetet i Leeds. Etter at han flytta til Chicago på 90-talet har den rufsete countryrock-gjengen Waco Brothers vore eit stadig tilbakevendande prosjekt. I tillegg til musikken har han også skapt seg eit namn som ein habil biletkunstnar. Han er ein produktiv fyr, så musikk, bilete og teiknestrips med Langford sin signatur kjem tett. Men kvantiteten er vel kanskje meir imponerande enn kvaliteten. Sjølv om han saktens har skapt ein del saker av fascinerande karakter også.

Seinsommaren 2002 hamna desse to karane på mystisk vis opp i kåken til Sally Timms (ei dame som har sunge med The Mekons). Her presenterte dei nokre eigenkomponerte songar for kvarandre, fant fram innspelingsutstyr, litt instrumenter og hanka tak eit par medhjelparar. Etterkvart skreiv dei til og med eit par-tre låtar saman. Når seansen var vel overstått vart det innspelte materiale liggande å samle støv. Heilt til Langford no har funne det passande å gje det ut på sin eigen label, Buried Treasure.

Med Langford-illustrert cover presenteras opplegget som Sir Dark Invader vs Fanglord. Så kan ein jo gjette kven som er kven. Vel, eg vil tru at oddsen er skrøpelig på å linke Buckner mot den svartsynte mørkemannen og Langford mot riddaren på den kvite hesten. Sjølvironien er avgjort til stades i rikt monn, og det er ein ledig og upretensiøs innstilling. Det som manglar er vel litt substans, samt dei verkelig store låtane. Dei har nok ikkje, slik plateselskapsnamnet skulle tyde på, akkurat vore på skattejakt i dei mest dyrebare delane av eige låtkammer.

Best er faktisk eit par av spora dei har komponert i fellesskap. Den strengefine og vagt vemodsfulle No Tears Tonight, der karane er rett så sjølvransakande i høve til sine prioriteringar og spesielt sin entusiasme for musikken; “but we both know that I got nothing, spent too much time playing in bands”. Og ikkje minst den friske countryrockabilly-låta The Inca Princess. Her får ein verkeleg ei kjensle av at dei er på eit felles oppdrag med fokus på å skape noko minneverdig.

Det går sikkert an å hevde at begge har latt den andre parten sin karma få komme inn og røre litt ved sine vante vendingar. Til dømes så er Buckner si røyst og hans elegiske vesen ein sentral part av den tålsame Langford-låta Nothing to Show. Og Langford kan på si side kanskje ha inspirert Buckner til å dra fram ei såpass oppstemt (til han å vere) låt som Sweet Anybody. Men hovudinntrykket er nok likevel at Buckner sine låtar er skodd over Buckner-lesten og blir gjort på Buckner-vis, og Langford vice versa.

Det er neppe ei plate å oppsøke for nykomarar i Buckner og Langford sine sirklar. Då er det nok meir fornuftig å få fingrane i før nemnte Devotion + Doubt, og kanskje Mekons-albumet Rock n’Roll. For kjentfolk derimot er det sikkert eit album som kan vere kjekt å ha.

Oddmund Berge, 05.12.2005

Kevin Coyne with Jon Langford & the Pine Valley Cosmonauts One Day In Chicago

Kevin Coyne
with Jon Langford
& the Pine Valley Cosmonauts
One Day In Chicago

(BURT 3)

SONGS:

1. Monkeyheart (K. Coyne)
2. Britischer Cowboy (K. Coyne)
3. Over Land & Sea (K. Coyne/R. Coyne)
4. Money Like Water (K. Coyne/Langford)
5. The Way Of The World (K. Coyne/Langford/Brennan/Rice/R. Coyne)
6. Happy Island Girl (K. Coyne)
7. Scene Of The Crime (K. Coyne/Langford)
8. She’s Not There (K. Coyne/Rice)
9. You You You (K. Coyne/Langford/Brennan/Rice/R. Coyne)
10. Angel (K. Coyne/R. Coyne)

LIVE BONUS TRACKS:
11. Saviour (K. Coyne/A. Legget/G. Smith)
12. Blame It On The Night (K. Coyne)
13. Fat Girl (K. Coyne)
14. Money Like Water (K. Coyne/Langford)
15. Karate King (K. Coyne)

Tracks 1-11 recorded at Western Sound Lab, Chicago, IL December 2002 by Ken Sluiter.
Tracks 12 -14 recorded live at the Old Town School Of Folk Music, Chicago, December 15th 2002.
Produced by Jon Langford

Review

The phone rings in the mixing room at North Branch Studio in Chicago and my wife breaks the news that Kevin died this morning. We’re busy finishing off an album he started with my band the Pine Valley Cosmonauts on his last visit to the states. It’s the last day of mixing and I’d been excited to send him the final product. I talk to his wife Helmi in Nuremberg and she tells me he died at home in her arms. This is the only good news; Kevin’s been slogging around Europe with an oxygen tank and breathing tubes in tow for the last few months playing blinding shows but living in constant terror of dropping dead in some hotel room all alone. Continue reading

Progressive 2004

From: Progressive:
(FROM PUNK TO COUNTRY
THE EVOLUTION OF JON LANGFORD
by Jon M. Gilbertson

At a time when the most public face of country music can politely be called “conservative,” Mekons frontman and alternative-country voyager Jon Langford unearths the older, more weather-beaten face that gazes sympathetically on the problems and celebrations of working-class people. The expatriate Welshman and punk rocker admits he once had trouble seeing that face as a younger man.

“I thought country was rightwing, cornball shtick,” Langford says during an interview between stops on a tour. “I ended up getting a tape called Honky-Tonk Classics. It was fantastic. I thought Johnny Cash was like Elvis, this presence and superhero. Suddenly, there was this world that opened up.”

Not content to explore this world just within the context of the Mekons-the unorthodox punk rock group he helped to establish in 1977-Langford gradually organized the Waco Brothers and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts. Begun as larks after Langford moved from Leeds, England, to Chicago in 1991, these two loose collectives now form a distinct part of his back catalog and his current efforts.

The Waco Brothers started as, and largely remain, a band meant to enliven a night of drinking and dancing at the corner tavern, though over the course of six albums-from 1995’s To the Last Dead Cowboy to 2002’s New Deal-they’ve developed a style that gleefully pairs the attitude of Joe Strummer with the sturdiness of George Jones.

With the Cosmonauts, Langford has found a way not only to pay tribute to his heroes-with Misery Loves Company: Songs of Johnny Cash in 1995 and Salute the Majesty of Bob Wills in 1998-but also to engage in a fight against the death penalty. Through Tony Fitzpatrick, a Chicago-based artist best known for his Steve Earle album covers, Langford encountered members of the Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium Project and was inspired by their largely thankless work.

“I had met a lot of posturing lefties with a lot of romantic notions, and these anti-death penalty people seemed infinitely more heroic,” Langford says. “They were just fucking bashing away behind the scenes to save lives and get innocent people off death row. I like the idea that social change comes from people not doing it for some kind of pie-in-the-sky glory. I thought the role of the musician would be to get some money together and give it to people who needed it.”

Langford called upon a network of friends and associates within the burgeoning alternative-country scene in Chicago, who in turn spread the word. The response was swift and positive. In 2002, The Executioner’s Last Songs, Vol. 1, came out on Bloodshot Records, a Chicago alt-country label that handles Langford’s non-Mekons output. With a theme of old-time country death songs, the musical backing of the Cosmonauts, and an impressive guest list, including Earle on the traditional folk tune “Tom Dooley,” this first volume generated tens of thousands of dollars for the Moratorium Project. (Around the time of that release, then-Illinois Governor George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions in his state.)

There was such an overflow of people who wanted to participate, in fact, that Langford and the Cosmonauts assembled another twenty-seven songs for volumes two and three of Last Songs, released in 2003. While a few of the artists, like American Music Club’s Mark Eitzel, wrote their own contributions, most of the participants performed classic murder ballads ranging from Hank Williams’s “Angel of Death” to Roger Miller’s “Pardon This Coffin.” It was not a fussily recorded Nashville product. “Modern country is fantasy music, this vision of family values and patriotism in a place that never even existed,” Langford says. “The underground is kind of free to explore much more interesting things.”

Going against the grain is not new for Langford. The Mekons, after all, formed at the very apex of punk rock, when bands were constantly attempting to express their politics through their music. The Mekons took a different tactic.

“It was never about writing songs that were political with a capital P,” Langford says. ‘A lot of people thought if you got a hit, you could destroy the government. We were much more concerned about how we worked and what we did rather than any smash-the-system lyrics. A lot of that was pretty stupid. Our stuff has a bit more humor in it.”

As the Mekons developed a larger audience, they eventually moved from the do-it-yourself ethos to various major labels. While this period in the 1980s generated some of their greatest albums, including 1985’s Fear and Whiskey and 1989’s The Mekons Rock ‘n’ Roll, it also nearly crushed them in a matrix of business concerns and executive decisions. By the early 1990s, they were at loose ends.

“We kind of ran out of gas,” Langford says. “In ’93, we were working as intensely as possible, as if hard work was a way to sort ourselves out, but we didn’t really do that until we stopped for a couple years.”

Currently signed to the Quarterstick imprint of Touch and Go, a Chicago indie that has released most of their records in the last decade, the Mekons have capped their revitalization with Punk Rock, the album they put out earlier this year. Essentially a live recording, Punk Rock documents the band’s new perspective on material they’d written from 1977 to 1981. Songs like “Never Been in a Riot” and “The Building” have lost none of their primitive vigor.

Langford has recently extended his explorations. In 2003, he collaborated with the Sadies, a quintet of Canadian alt-country stalwarts, on the slick Mayors of the Moon. This April he released his second solo album, All the Fame of Lofty Deeds, which utilizes the fictional Deeds as a phantom stand-in for both the country singers of the mid-twentieth century and Langford himself. From the ragged croak of “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” to the gallows grin of Bob Wills’s “Trouble in Mind,” Lofty Deeds tells a story of exploitation that would have been as familiar to Hank Williams as it is to Langford. Bloodshot Records co-founder Rob Miller certainly thinks so.

“I look at the record as a cautionary tale of how the mass culture will just use people for their purposes and then spit them out,” Miller says. “The most archetypal country music was all made by outsiders in their times, like Bob Wills and Johnny Cash, who wouldn’t play by the rules, and the industry was turning its back on them. Jon fits into that tradition. He has been through the major-label grinder.”

Not content with being a forty-six-year-old man with a workload that would stun most people half his age, Langford is also putting together an artist-based record label of his own and trying out material with Ship and Pilot, yet another band with drummer Steve Goulding.

On top of that, Langford is a painter and illustrator who does the covers for most of his own music and sells his art commercially to support that music.

Then there is the matter of his family: his wife, the woman he followed to Chicago in the first place; and two kids, the main reasons he puts in all the effort for music and activism.

“I would feel bad later to have them ask me, ‘Did they have the death penalty when you were a kid?’ and say, ‘Yeah, we did,”‘ Langford says. “I feel compelled to do things that I think are going to make the world slightly better.”

Executioner’s MediaShow

A world premiere commissioned by Alverno Presents, Walker Art Center and the National Performance Network. “Possessed by the demon of rock’n’roll, haunted by the ghosts of old country music.” Paul Verna, Billboard The 2004/2005 season concludes with Alverno Presents first commissioning of a new work from protean artist Jon Langford. Best known as the fiery frontman for the Mekons, one of the most resilient pop-punk bands to emerge from Britain in the late ’70s, Jon has also been involved in numerous side projects, including the Waco Brothers and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts. Langford fell in love with American country music when he was a kid, and he’s played his permutation of it ever since. When Langford met anti-death penalty lawyer Dick Cunningham in 1999, he became involved with the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty and decided to use his music to make an anti-death penalty statement to benefit this cause. “Murder. It’s as American as apple pie, lynching, trial by the press, life imprisonment and other cruel and unusual punishments. Songs of murder, revenge, infanticide and other bloody minded pursuits have a long history in both Britain and the United States, so when head Cosmonaut Jon Langford got involved with the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty, he decided to use music to make his contribution.” (J. Poet, “Pulse”, April 2001.) Continue reading