ONLY YOU AND YOUR GHOST WILL KNOW: Missing the Mekes at the
Troubadour
Number of mekons tracks in my
iTunes library:
188
Approximate value of concert tickets I've eaten since moving to California 3.5 years ago: $200
Number of bands I want to see play live more than I want to see the mekons: 0
I hope this means I'm a good boyfriend . . .
Approximate value of concert tickets I've eaten since moving to California 3.5 years ago: $200
Number of bands I want to see play live more than I want to see the mekons: 0
I hope this means I'm a good boyfriend . . .
Check out my brand-new bookmark! I got two
of 'em for $49.45, including TicketMaster fees. (Yep, two tickets with a face
price of $15.00 apiece -- $30.00 total -- cost $49.45 from TicketMaster. That's
not what I'm writing about today, but
damn.)
Briefly, I elected to skip the show because Autumn had been stuck in a crappy motel in Phoenix the prior night after America West cancelled her connecting flight to Santa Barbara. She'd been visiting her med school housemate in Denver for the weekend. So instead of getting in to SB at 9 p.m. Sunday, she landed at LAX at 3 p.m. Monday afternoon. After driving down to L.A. to collect her and then fighting evening rush hour traffic all the way home, I didn't feel like turning around and making another 130-mile round trip to Hollywood. She'd been gone for five nights. I wanted to be home with her.
Yeah, I know. I'm freakin' Lloyd Dobbler over here.
So: Who exactly are the mekons?
Well, they're Jon Langford, mostly. More about him in a minute.
The mekes are my latest musical obsession. Like their infinitely more commercial contemporaries The Police, they started out around the time I was born as a punk outfit, but evolved into much more. Actually, that's a poor reference: The Police were never really punks, because they didn't start playing instruments in public until they could. Of course, the mekons had the decency to refrain from having any No. 1 hits, which is why I now have the opportunity to see them -- or not see them, saintly Dobbler-league live-in boyfriend that I am -- in a cozy little room like the glorious Troubadour.
According to their AMG bio, the mekes came into their own as a creative force about a decade into their career, when founding members/dual frontmen Jon Langford and Tom Greenhalgh were joined by singer Sally Timms and violinist Susie Honeyman. Timms's ethereal vocals and Honeyman's, um, ethereal strings became essential components of the mekons' sound. The first mekes record to include Timms and Honeyman in the lineup, 1985's Fear and Whiskey, is frequently cited as the first alt-country album. Many of the bands I've "discovered" over the last few years (the way Columbus discovered America and U2 discovered irony) seem to have descended directly from Fear and Whiskey (I'd put the Old 97's and wilco in this category), while others (like X and the Replacements) were contemporaries of the F&W-era mekes, and were clearly channeling much of the same energy.
R.I.P Sin Record Company
How was the landmark Fear and Whiskey LP received by the world? So raptuously that it only came back into print a couple of years ago after being unavailable for something like a decade. The long-defunct label that originally released the album, Sin Records, had a cool take-off of the famous Sun Records logo . . .
My relationship with the mekes is still a young one, but it's turned the corner that divides a fling from a full-blown love affair. I love the rage and sensitivity and weariness and absurdity of their music, but more than that, the mekons seem to embody an ethos that I love, too -- an approach to work and life that I would seek to emulate. All of the songwriters and bands dearest to me share this characteristic to some degree. But it's much more poignant and real coming from the mekons, because they're not rich and famous the way Bruce is rich and famous, or even the way Milli Vanilli are -- well, famous, anyway. I would bet my bank balance the word mekons -- the name references a British sci-fi comic strip from the 70s -- has never tumbled from the lips of a VH-1 veejay. For all their critical adoration, the mekes are a working band, steadily touring and making records without letting the routine dull the edges of their art. As a fan of many bands that habitually take three or four years to come up with a dozen release-worthy new songs, I appreciate the mekes' work ethic. As a deeply lazy man, I appreciate it more.
"But," you interrupt, "there are lots of road-warrior bands out there. What makes these clowns any more special than, say, AC/DC?"
"Anarchy," says I. "Creative anarchy," I clarify as you roll your eyes. Or at least the appearance thereof. Sure, Langford writes unabashedly left-leaning lyrics like all the good punk bands, but I'm talking more about the spirit of creative chaos that appears to dwell within the mekons. Two nights ago, the night before the Troubadour show I missed, they did a show at McCabe's that was apparently half music and half readings. That's cool. Of course the potential for tedium and pretension will always accompany any such enterprise, but I suspect that if any member of this outfit were to succumb to these forces, another band member would shut them up before the audience could. Having often lamented the lack of spontaneity at many rock shows, I find the carnival atmosphere of the mekons' live show -- by which of course I mean their live shows that I've read about -- tremendously appealing.
This brings us to the mekons's leader, Jon Langford. Like many people I admire, he appears to be a confirmed workaholic. "Give Jon Langford four hours with nothing to do and chances are good he'll create another side project," wrote Mark Deming in the AMG. Deming was reviewing the debut album of the Waco Brothers, Langford's other major band. The Wacos are a more explicitly country outfit that Langford put together after he moved from Leeds to Chicago, the town that Billy Sunday couldn't shut down. After the mekons returned to "pure" rock and roll with a sterling 1989 album craftily titled Mekons Rock and Roll, Langford had to find another outlet for the twangy numbers he was writing, and the Wacos were it, and they're well worth checking out, too.
Indeed, it was one of Langford's other extracurricular activities in Chicago that brought him to my attention. He shows up from time to time on This American Life, providing original songs and music to accompany the stories featured in that excellent radio magazine. He even starred in a memorable TAL story called Everyone Speaks Elton John, wherein he used the classified ads section of the Chicago Reader to assemble a band of musicians who had never met, and to have the band rehearse and cut a song together -- a cover of "Rocket Man" -- all in one day. Finally, the guy draws, too. Here's an album cover he did for a Bloodshot Records compilation back in 2000:
I don't care what Thomas Jefferson says; all men cannot be created equal when talent and inspiration are distributed so unequally.
It would sound really defeatist to say that multi-talented people make me cranky. But hey -- it's my 'blog and I'll cry if I want to.
And if I ever do get to see the mekes play, you'll find my review here.
Briefly, I elected to skip the show because Autumn had been stuck in a crappy motel in Phoenix the prior night after America West cancelled her connecting flight to Santa Barbara. She'd been visiting her med school housemate in Denver for the weekend. So instead of getting in to SB at 9 p.m. Sunday, she landed at LAX at 3 p.m. Monday afternoon. After driving down to L.A. to collect her and then fighting evening rush hour traffic all the way home, I didn't feel like turning around and making another 130-mile round trip to Hollywood. She'd been gone for five nights. I wanted to be home with her.
Yeah, I know. I'm freakin' Lloyd Dobbler over here.
So: Who exactly are the mekons?
Well, they're Jon Langford, mostly. More about him in a minute.
The mekes are my latest musical obsession. Like their infinitely more commercial contemporaries The Police, they started out around the time I was born as a punk outfit, but evolved into much more. Actually, that's a poor reference: The Police were never really punks, because they didn't start playing instruments in public until they could. Of course, the mekons had the decency to refrain from having any No. 1 hits, which is why I now have the opportunity to see them -- or not see them, saintly Dobbler-league live-in boyfriend that I am -- in a cozy little room like the glorious Troubadour.
According to their AMG bio, the mekes came into their own as a creative force about a decade into their career, when founding members/dual frontmen Jon Langford and Tom Greenhalgh were joined by singer Sally Timms and violinist Susie Honeyman. Timms's ethereal vocals and Honeyman's, um, ethereal strings became essential components of the mekons' sound. The first mekes record to include Timms and Honeyman in the lineup, 1985's Fear and Whiskey, is frequently cited as the first alt-country album. Many of the bands I've "discovered" over the last few years (the way Columbus discovered America and U2 discovered irony) seem to have descended directly from Fear and Whiskey (I'd put the Old 97's and wilco in this category), while others (like X and the Replacements) were contemporaries of the F&W-era mekes, and were clearly channeling much of the same energy.
R.I.P Sin Record Company
How was the landmark Fear and Whiskey LP received by the world? So raptuously that it only came back into print a couple of years ago after being unavailable for something like a decade. The long-defunct label that originally released the album, Sin Records, had a cool take-off of the famous Sun Records logo . . .
My relationship with the mekes is still a young one, but it's turned the corner that divides a fling from a full-blown love affair. I love the rage and sensitivity and weariness and absurdity of their music, but more than that, the mekons seem to embody an ethos that I love, too -- an approach to work and life that I would seek to emulate. All of the songwriters and bands dearest to me share this characteristic to some degree. But it's much more poignant and real coming from the mekons, because they're not rich and famous the way Bruce is rich and famous, or even the way Milli Vanilli are -- well, famous, anyway. I would bet my bank balance the word mekons -- the name references a British sci-fi comic strip from the 70s -- has never tumbled from the lips of a VH-1 veejay. For all their critical adoration, the mekes are a working band, steadily touring and making records without letting the routine dull the edges of their art. As a fan of many bands that habitually take three or four years to come up with a dozen release-worthy new songs, I appreciate the mekes' work ethic. As a deeply lazy man, I appreciate it more.
"But," you interrupt, "there are lots of road-warrior bands out there. What makes these clowns any more special than, say, AC/DC?"
"Anarchy," says I. "Creative anarchy," I clarify as you roll your eyes. Or at least the appearance thereof. Sure, Langford writes unabashedly left-leaning lyrics like all the good punk bands, but I'm talking more about the spirit of creative chaos that appears to dwell within the mekons. Two nights ago, the night before the Troubadour show I missed, they did a show at McCabe's that was apparently half music and half readings. That's cool. Of course the potential for tedium and pretension will always accompany any such enterprise, but I suspect that if any member of this outfit were to succumb to these forces, another band member would shut them up before the audience could. Having often lamented the lack of spontaneity at many rock shows, I find the carnival atmosphere of the mekons' live show -- by which of course I mean their live shows that I've read about -- tremendously appealing.
This brings us to the mekons's leader, Jon Langford. Like many people I admire, he appears to be a confirmed workaholic. "Give Jon Langford four hours with nothing to do and chances are good he'll create another side project," wrote Mark Deming in the AMG. Deming was reviewing the debut album of the Waco Brothers, Langford's other major band. The Wacos are a more explicitly country outfit that Langford put together after he moved from Leeds to Chicago, the town that Billy Sunday couldn't shut down. After the mekons returned to "pure" rock and roll with a sterling 1989 album craftily titled Mekons Rock and Roll, Langford had to find another outlet for the twangy numbers he was writing, and the Wacos were it, and they're well worth checking out, too.
Indeed, it was one of Langford's other extracurricular activities in Chicago that brought him to my attention. He shows up from time to time on This American Life, providing original songs and music to accompany the stories featured in that excellent radio magazine. He even starred in a memorable TAL story called Everyone Speaks Elton John, wherein he used the classified ads section of the Chicago Reader to assemble a band of musicians who had never met, and to have the band rehearse and cut a song together -- a cover of "Rocket Man" -- all in one day. Finally, the guy draws, too. Here's an album cover he did for a Bloodshot Records compilation back in 2000:
I don't care what Thomas Jefferson says; all men cannot be created equal when talent and inspiration are distributed so unequally.
It would sound really defeatist to say that multi-talented people make me cranky. But hey -- it's my 'blog and I'll cry if I want to.
And if I ever do get to see the mekes play, you'll find my review here.
Posted: Tue - March 23, 2004 at 12:21 PM
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Published On: Oct 05, 2004 08:31 PM