By Duane Davis, Supreme Arbiter of Taste
The first Mekons record I heard was 1978’s, “Where Were You?”, a 7″ single on UK indie label, Fast Product. I was already late to the party as this was the band’s second single, their “Never Been In A Riot” 7″ having been released earlier in the same year.
That didn’t matter. “Where Were You”’ absolutely knocked me out: two and half minutes of clanging haphazardly tuned guitar stumbling around behind a vocal somehow gone catatonic with longing and disappointment: “When I was waiting in the bar, where were you? / When I was buying you a drink, where were you? / When I was crying home in bed, where were you?”
It sounded like it should have been a ‘she’s done gone and left me high and dry’ love song, except it wasn’t, not exactly. The next verse clarified the situation and made it much sadder, much more pathetic: “When I watched you from a distance, did you see me? / You were standing in the queue, did you see me? / You had yellow hair, did you see me?”; and, finally, “Could you ever be my wife, do you like me?”
This bloke was a wreck. He’s mooning on about someone he hasn’t even worked up enough nerve to say, ‘Hey, wanna get some fish ‘n’ chips and listen to me bang on about my new band?’
And what about that band? Originally there were six of them, UK Art School nerds all, and for “Where Were You?” that crowd managed to pool their combined musical knowledge and come up with a meager two chords for the whole song: A Major & E Major!?! The song’s melody and structure are not just rudimentary, they’re anorexic. Hearing it the first time, you start to think, ‘Whoa, this makes Link Wray’s ‘Rumble’ sound like the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra.
So, how do they make it work? Well, the UK music rag, Melody Maker, noted in 1979 that the band was a “strange combination of sophisticated theory and technical incompetence.” One way to think about the sound of the song is that it is a kind of Steve Reich minimalism scored for Chainsaw and Claw Hammers. Limited but brutally effective. The vocal, Jon Langford’s most likely, is edged with a kind of guarded menace, as though trying desperately to not give into obsession and dread.
If, as Greil Marcus once wrote of the band, ‘every song is an attempt to find someone to talk to’, the Mekons definitely speak to me. Almost five decades on from first hearing them, I’m still listening, still moved, challenged, brought near to tears, tickled, even, occasionally, awed. Through a number of personnel changes and stylistic/genre mutations, the Mekons have kept moving, kept playing, stopping only to entertain you, drink as much of your beer as they can hold, and remind you—sometimes gently, sometimes with a boot to the ribs—that bands don’t have to harden into institutions to survive. The Mekons endure because they remain unfinished, curious, cracked open to the world.
They are still looking for someone to talk to. Somehow, improbably, they always find me.
***
My review below originally appeared in a short-lived fanzine we put out erratically in the early and mid-1990s. Titled Wax Trax Fax, it was written, laid out, printed, folded, and stapled entirely in-house, usually late at night and often under the influence of too much beer purchased down the block at the infamous, Howerd’s Liquors – World’s Worst Liquor Store and whatever records we were obsessed with at the time.
Allegories of Catastrophe
[Originally published in Wax Trax Fax, September 1996]
The Mekons – “United” (Quarterstick Rec’s & Polk Museum of Art/US) CD & Book
The Mekons – “Edge of the World” (Quarterstick Rec’s/US) CD
Rico Bell – “Return of Rico Bell” (Bloodshot/US) CD
“To the panicked eye, observations that resist assimilation petrify into allegories of catastrophe; it sees through the illusion of the harmlessness of everyday life.”
— T. Adorno, PRISMS
“Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.”
— Michel de Certeau, THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Between these two realizations, between panic and poaching, we find all that is most fascinating about the production of pop culture, from fashion to art to books to music.
What Adorno and de Certeau are on about here has to do with the slipperiness of experience in an administered world — how is it, they ask, that society and its individuals, the culture and its particulars, the polis and its people, live out their contradictions without self-destructing in either revolution or suicide? — for it is certain that however powerful and pervasive the social reproduction of stupidity may be in our lives, a certain amount of contingent cunning leaks through: we are not all stupid all the time; we are not all fools and fooled all the time. Once in a while, we catch on.
‘Doubt and resentment
Bile in my stomach
Feelings of hate
And a pain behind my eyes
Looking at a world
That’s shaking slightly
My ears are filling
With rubbish
Can’t find it
And make it work
Hello Cruel World’
The World is not its Advertisements; and Capital is not its Goods. Peering into the smoke and mirrors surrounding us, the astonishing thing is not that we see so little but that we see anything at all. The impenetrability of the Social Ideal we live in requires a way of saying ‘No’ and then the Social Ideal will usually hear ‘Yes’. The Social Ideal is that indefinable, pervasive web of beliefs and values, conditioning, inducement and punishments that we are told to call education or getting along or doing well: it is what we are doing when we are acting out the dreams of our society — dreams in which it is often impossible to tell who is doing the dreaming and who the acting.
A way of saying ‘No’ can take many forms. Some will write it on their bodies; some will describe it in their sexuality; some will write it in blood, their own or others; some will transmute the ‘No’ into alcohol and drugs, into discipline or license: but all are required to live the ‘No’ in their everyday lives — and the manner in which they act that ‘No’ becomes an aesthetics of negation, a sublime in which truth must always be described by its absence.
Nothing is identical to what our knowing says it is — the world is always shaking slightly; it is always out of sorts, out of focus, blurred, burning.
And that is where the Mekons reside.
‘Walking through the barbed wire
Sinking in the mud
I heard you singing
You sounded brave
Stepping over broken bodies
Ignore my trembling hands
Don’t think of this as blood
I know it is
Just pretend it doesn’t hurt
Hello Cruel World’
Some will say ‘No’ by singing a song that always describes a ‘Yes’: yes, it hurts; yes, this is wrong; yes, I’m drunk again; yes, I used to love you; yes, we failed again and yes, we will try again tomorrow and yes, tomorrow is already gone.
Panic and Poaching. Must we always be afraid and must we always be thieving? Provisionally, it is safest to say yes, we must. As the old joke points out, anyone not panicking now is just not seeing the situation for what it is; and what we thieve is the life taken from us before we began.
In the Mekons, panic does indeed yield allegories of catastrophe. Everywhere they see and hear the evidence of a world which we learn to endure only through bad faith, through a diminishment of the spirit. As is often the case, we are taught to mistake the replication of the Social Ideal for a successful life: Junior, behave yourself…
Their songs are awkward, ugly, bumbling, foolish. They take up with trembling hands and trembling voices the unassimilable grit of lived experience, the shared reality of our lives that refuses the false needs imposed on us from above, from outside, our own lives.
And they are poachers. Their albums are full of stolen melodies, purloined lines — they are thieves breaking into the stores of our culture. For the Mekons, Hank Williams is not a patron saint of Nashville, he is not an air brushed icon with straight teeth, dazzling smile, good posture and clean pants. The Mekons’ Hank Williams is himself another allegory of catastrophe, a figure of such compelling power and veracity in regard to the misery and impoverishment of everyday life that his masters had no choice but to take him up and tame him, turning him into a staple of the Country Music industry. In the Mekons’ iconography, Hank is returned to his life and the songs are returned to the harrowing celebration of life they were meant to be.
Their thefts are open and aggressive, as though the band realized that nothing given to them is valid, that what is offered by the culture is tainted with instrumentality and received wisdom. The Mekons’ thefts constantly undermine the advantages of dogma, the appeal of the merely safe — theirs is not simple borrowing, it is not a matter of influence or parody or pastiche. Their effort is not that of assimilation — in their music we are constantly confronted with the radical unassimilability of the Other’s experience: a confrontation, that at least in one of its moments, is meant to point out the solidity of our own experiencing consciousness, for no song we hear is adequate to our being, nor will borrowed words ever speak for us. Every theft is originary and all the spoils provisional — & thus art conveys immortality only in its disappearance, for what lives on is the need, not the object of that need.
As the Mekons noted a long time ago, ‘it’s hard to be human again,’ especially when every day we are called upon to think anew what it means to be human.
The Mekons’ ‘United’ takes two steps backward for every one forward. The very title is a terminal irony — never has the band been less united or more fragmented and diverse. Yet we cannot say they are not ‘united’; after all, they managed to get this book and CD out, an imposing and demanding task.
The book is a wonder. Letters, articles, notes, journals, essays, polemics, theory, lyrics and even part of a novel the band has been writing over the years. Throughout is a profusion of beautifully reproduced prints of the Mekons collective’s artwork, paintings, collages, photographs and computer generated images detailing their obsessions with music and history, with the ghostly images of the men and women whose songs and lives resonate for the band far beyond the local boundaries of commercial success. Again, anything worth having is worth stealing: the band simply takes what it needs — history does not belong to the books, to those who write them or those who teach them; it belongs to those brave enough to pry open the doors or break the windows and steal away with what was always ours to begin with — our very lives.
The book is messy and the CD not less so. Chaotic, rattled, fuzzed and buzzed, the sound is harsher than recent releases, the voices crackle and fry, the lines start and stop and start again, only to decay into noise. Beginnings and endings seem arbitrary, mere rolls of the dice, operations of chance and dream. The Mekons have never sounded less united, united as they are here in their effort to not display the false totality of the well made album — a band still in full retreat from Memphis.
Long out of print, 1986’s ‘Edge of the World’ finally receives its due with this CD re-issue. Originally released on Sophie Bourbon’s Sin Recordings, the two vinyl copies I’ve owned both sounded like crap from the first times I played them. This is a good album, only slightly less fine than ‘Fear & Whiskey’ and ‘Honky Tonkin’, both of which it resembles in the eclectic and often jarring mix of styles and genres the band appropriates for their Situationist takes on the fragmentation of everyday life in the Thatcher/Reagan decade of the Eighties. Whiskey soaked boogie, DT blues and wobbly country fit uneasily with amphetamine rants and burnt circuit rock n’ roll. If it was up to me, I’d say you ought to get a copy.
Rico Bell joined the Mekons on ‘Edge of the World’, playing accordion and bringing a fine, tremulous tenor to the country vocals he was tapped for on ‘Edge’ and subsequent lp’s. Having dropped out of the ever-revolving collective at some point around ‘Curse of the Mekons’, this is, well, Rico’s return.
Twelve songs — six covers and six originals, all penned with Mekons’ mainstay Jon Langford who also plays guitar. Bell’s voice is his strength and if you don’t like it you’ll find little on the album to recommend. Thicker and less flexible than before, Bell’s voice may not be able to reach the high notes he stretched for and got on the Mekon’s albums, but it is still an affecting instrument. What I like is the simple authority which he commands, the feel and grain of experience of the voice, a voice soaked in wine, sorrow and song. Bell’s melancholic wheeze is wonderfully supported by his late-night-bistro accordion and Langford’s fierce guitar.
Country in spirit, not in twang, the album has the feel of a man who has lived in these songs a long, long time — & that he sings them not just because he wants you to hear them, but also because he simply cannot stop singing them.
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