DB's Song of the Day (day 334): "WALTZ" (1991) Mekons

Another month bites the dust. The penultimate for 2014. Here come the final days.

Yesterday’s birthday girl, Sally Timms, is one of the key ingredients of the Mekons’ sound. Whether singing lead, as she does on today’s song, or back-up, Timms adds a distinctive soulfulness to the proceedings. She can sound ethereal, tough, wistful, resigned, lovelorn. On “Waltz” she delivers a particularly elliptical lyric with a cool ardor.

The song is second-to-last on The Curse of the Mekons. Curse is one of the band’s best, full of potshots at the state of affairs in the world at large, not least the recent “death of socialism” that came with the fall of the former Soviet Union. The album finds the Mekons contemplating their own errors as well as those of the times in general, and “Waltz” seems a kind of commentary on the moribund nature of something—whether a relationship or a career. “The graveyard scene looks fine / The skull has all the best lines” always appealed to me as a neat summation of a kind of “late in the day” look at where we are. The refrain “And you won’t ever come home now / You won’t ever come home”—sung with a sense of mournful resignation—seems to sum up an estrangement that will never be repaired.

Elsewhere are intriguing details like “The sea turns black with robot’s blood / A terrible beauty is born.” Echoing Yeats’ lines—“Things are changed, changed utterly / A terrible beauty is born”—about the Easter Rebellion in Dublin in 1916, the lines suggest some kind of uprising of robots against their masters, or perhaps a massacre of robots that are used for unnamed purposes. “A pair of giant’s hands / Sinks into the sand” recalls something like Ozymandias and a figure of supposed power now undone. “Tear out the family silver / To pay off the stooges we hired,” besides being comical in such a stately delivery, indicates a once proud lineage fallen on hard times, hiring stooges and having to pawn heirlooms to pay for illegal acts. And doesn’t that sound like a lot of things one could think of with regard to various governments, ransoming the future—legacy—for the sake of nefarious practices to maintain power in the present?

There’s also the interesting parallel that comes after the identical lines “Lovely assassin” (which plays into the hired hit man aspect of the song), in which someone—the assassin—is dressed as a lifeguard watching others drown, and dressed as a fireman starts a fire (which may recall the antithetical relation of fireman to fire in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451). Such matters seem an ironic commentary on those who we might expect to protect us from doom playing into the murderous atmosphere here. In other words, it’s a song that finds figures for the darkling feeling we might find ourselves experiencing as, initially, the old Cold War came to an end—and, with it, “history” in some formulations—and a brave new world got under way.

Today, the song stands as a tribute to Timms’ role in the Mekons—such sensitive vocals would no doubt elude other singers in the band—and as a grimly sardonic end to the second-to-last month of 2014.

DB's Song of the Day (day 309): "HELLO CRUEL WORLD" (1986) Mekons

Here we go again with one of my favorite bands, ever. Y’know it’s easy to plump for bands that everyone knows are or were great—those Brit Invasion worthies, the top dogs in prog, or the U.S. bands that won kudos for a distinctive brand of Americana—The Band, the Dead, CCR, R.E.M.—but when we come to punk and post-punk, it gets a bit more wobbly. One reason being that the whole outlook of punk was that the “great band biz” was just more capitalist crap, and, worse, media-events that meant nothing to what life was like in what were sociologically called “subcultures” but which were actually ways of life trying hard not to end up as niches. It was doomed, we all know, because the capitalist-media machine makes cogs of us all. Anyone who “produces” is in there somewhere, right?

And so the Mekons. The band that to my mind offered the best antidote to everything I detested about the Reagan-Thatcher era. Contrast them with U2 and see what I mean. Pomposity and bombast vs. DIY enthusiasm and bootstrap aesthetics. One is going straight to the top! The other is going to be around like roaches, forever. The Mekons were the roaches of rock? Yeah, something like that.

All of which is just a way of introducing today’s song. Because yesterday’s birthday boy is Tom Greenhalgh. And chances are you don’t know who he is (I mean, unless you’re in a very small circle of my peeps—or that you happened upon this post because you’re a Mekons fan). The “general public” has no clue. But Greenhalgh is one of my main men of the Eighties/Nineties. As I type this his vocal on “Prince of Darkness” is working its time-worn magic. In fact, I was very tempted to pick that song for today’s song because the album it’s from, Honky Tonkin’ (1987), is the first Mekons LP I had to have. And, though I’ve posted on my favorite Greenhalgh track, “Fletcher Christian” (1988), I haven’t posted on that earlier album. And the song references “the Catholic girls at Halloween,” which, well, let’s just say it stirs something in this boy’s memory banks. “He sees a red town and wants it painted black / For the Catholic girls at Halloween” is the full line. Do I have to explain how something like that is out to steal my cold, dark heart?

Today’s song also beat-out what I think would be Kajsa’s choice: “Lyric” from Curse of the Mekons (1991), a song that my old friend Tim once said reminded him—in its final verse—of my poetry, and how’s that for a major compliment to say nothing of an understanding of what the attraction to Greenhalgh might consist of?  (Indeed, K and T are two people who I know know who Greenhalgh is!). I’m not ready, though, to try to unpack “Lyric”—those cribs from Moby-Dick and all that. Then too, the more I think about it, the more I think that The Curse of the Mekons, as an album, deserves a full work-up. Maybe I should write a proposal to 33 1/3? It’s the Mekons album that deserves to be gone into at some length. Remember, 1991 was the year of Achtung Baby, Out of Time, Nevermind, Ten, and Perspex Islands.  And I say Curse was the best of the lot.

But I’m going back to 1986 and the first Mekons LP I ever heard: The Edge of the World. And its lead-off track, thus the first Mekons track I heard. Even there I was tempted to go with “King Arthur,” if only because it captures so well the battered beauty of fall and for the line “Down in the streets empty as a vote.” And that statement isn’t even particularly jaded. What I liked about the Mekons right from the start was what we might call their sense of the reality principle. They were writing songs about trying to cope with the world as it was. I wouldn’t say they were even trying to “change it” because that would make them more prescriptive than they are. They were just trying to comment on it, to keep the gray matter functional when, as today’s song says, “my ears are filling with rubbish / Can’t find it, can’t make it work.”

Hello cruel world

And I think the song won out because when I put on the CD this morning, I found myself embraced by that classic Mekons sound: Greenhalgh’s voice, with Sally Timm on backup vocals, the long distorted guitar intro, the accordion in the break. It’s so folky, but with a weathered punk wizened wisdom. Hard tunes for hard times. And on this morning as the Repub-a-dub-dubs take over Congress, let’s just say a foul whiff of bygone Reaganite years was on the wind.

Doubt and resentment / Bile in my stomach / Feelings of hate / And a pain behind my eyes

Just put it out there, Tom. And thanks to Sally and fiddler Susie Honeyman this isn’t a boy’s only club like The Clash were. Which was important because Sally added a moody layer to the whole, complementing the songs Tom or Jon Langford sang. A three-pronged attack! And I speak in the past tense because I’m recalling my earliest impressions. The band is enjoying a flurry of attention at the moment thanks to The Revenge of the Mekons, an interesting documentary about them that’s going the rounds. (I saw it and commented on it a bit last fall.)

Anyway, “Hello Cruel World” is in many ways the Mekons “hit” from back then. It should’ve saturated the airwaves. If I were a DJ then, I probably would’ve played it as my opening theme song. It has a sound like what it is: the song of someone trying to go on, living the played-out life, living the hard scrabble existence, trying to face the unforgiving world that doesn’t “give a tinker’s curse for the starving artist, you non-creative garbage, you whining, hypocritical toadies” (as John Cleese put it so well). Yeah, but the singer of “Cruel World” isn’t going for the jugular. He’s just trying not to wallow in a debilitating condition. It’s “the malaise” writ large. While there are many more savvy Mekons songs—I was also tempted by “Authority” on Curse—this one shows their heart is in the right place, I believe. Bowed but unbroken. Beat up, not beaten. Don’t think of this as blood / I know it is / Just pretend it doesn’t hurt.

The Mekons put themselves on the line in their music like few bands ever seem to, in my view. Not that I know any of them. This is one of the peculiarities of this entire project. I’m never writing about someone I’ve met or know personally. Some of them I’ve seen perform live (I saw the Mekons live in 2000 in DC), but even that doesn’t mean much to me. This series is “song of the day,” not artist of the day. What I’m going on is what the song does for me. Whatever the song did for its writer and performers is their business.

I heard you singing, you sounded brave.  Yeah, that.

DB's Song of the Day (day 284): "MEMPHIS, EGYPT" (1989) Mekons

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

The opening lines of today’s song, sung by today’s birthday boy, Jon Langford, put the case quite succinctly. By 1989 one might well ask what the point of rock’n’roll, in the present, was. It had a grand tradition by then, but, as with most great traditions, it was a case of—as Macbeth says—“the greatest is behind.” The heroes had lived, and some of them had died, and those who didn’t—per Neil Young’s question a decade before “Memphis, Egypt”—suggested “it’s better to burn out than it is to rust.” So even the burnouts could look far more glorious than those who stayed the course through the decades that turned rock’n’roll into rock and then into something even more processed and market-driven. A good ol’ rock’n’roll band wasn’t likely to be making the cover of Rolling Stone very often by 1989. One of the best that could advance in that category was Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers—and they were hardly at their best by 1989. Things were looking for a revitalization or a “good night, sweet prince.”

The Mekons song jumps out at you and goes for your throat—“just like rock’n’roll.” The album is called “rock’n’roll” or “The Mekons rock’n’roll”—to indicate, ironically, that they’re going to do it this time—rock! The band’s best previous album was 1987’s Honkytonkin’ which owed much to the Chicago bluegrass they had spent some time engaged with. It’s a strong alternative to the ersatz rock of the airwaves, to say nothing of the ersatz Country. The following year brought what is perhaps their best album, sonically speaking. So Good It Hurts shows better than usual recording chops and boasts a collection of real songs, fully fleshed-out, so to speak. "The Mekons rock’n’roll" is even better, and is on a major label (A&M) and looks like it’s going to break them into the big time. Which didn’t happen. No, we might say, with Joe Strummer of The Clash: “if you been trying for years, we already heard your song.”

That might be true, but if we heard the Mekons already it was as the acolytes of The Clash and as the band that kept that particular home-fire burning—sometimes, as in “Learning to Live on Your Own,” by “throw[ing] another rock’n’roll song on the fire.” The point of all this was that The Clash and their ilk had reformulated the challenge of rock’n’roll in the late Seventies, and by the late Eighties who still believed? The Mekons.

So the battle not to be consumed by rock’n’roll is to not succumb to the popularized, sanitized, digitized version—all you wimps who want your MTV (cf. egregious, but not unironic, video for today's song)—and to not succumb to the fabulous museumed Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame tradition, with its potted history for assorted wankers (i.e., music critics) to crow about what the what of rock is. The Mekons see it differently. Rock, in their view, was never about having a “safe and happy life”—feted, televised, turned into pablum for the people. And so the line “Capitalismus’ favorite boychild” puts it out there. Rock can’t be revolutionary if it’s an industry. Rock makes money, rock is for Fat Cats of all persuasions. It’s always been a story of managers and agents and record deals, hasn’t it? It’s always been about “product.” How can you save the kids’ souls unless you sell yours?

Then there’s the great lines, so very apropos, while we’re on the subject of what was called—unironically—“late capitalism” in the late Eighties: “East Berlin can’t buy a thing / There’s nothing they can sell me / I walk through the Wall / No pain at all / I’m born inside the belly / Of rock’n’roll.” The Wall came down in 1989, and it was capitalismus über alles thereafter, where the buying and selling is what makes the world go ’round. This little glance at the “socialist experiment” before it hits the dustbin of history is the sort of thing no rockers had their eye on—except the Mekons.

But all’s not dark: “It’s something to sell your labour for / When hair sprouts out below.” The point of rock’n’roll, what fed its charge, was precisely that: the great hormonal surge of the early teens. The moment at which sex becomes “a thing.” The moment at which image becomes “a thing.” The moment at which choosing the bandwagon to jump on becomes a life or death matter. To buy the latest from your mostest, you’ll sell your labor, you’ll join the queue, you’ll be there where the sound is going down—“that secret place were we all want to go—it’s rock’n’roll.”

So, ultimately, “Memphis, Egypt” (it’s title cleverly winking at Memphis—“home of Elvis”—and the one in Egypt, where Alexander the Great was first buried), is beating the bushes to stir up some of the spirit of rock’n’roll in the era of the apotheosis of Reagan and Thatcher and the business of business is business Steinian logic of the times. If you can’t beat ’em, if you don’t join ’em, then you remain the eternal outcasts—the Mekons.

And how’s this for a little “sympathy for the devil” (spoken lines in the bridge with harmonica behind): We know the devil and we have shaken him by the hand, embraced him, and thought his foul, stinking breath was fine perfume—just like rock’n’roll.

Happy birthday, Jon.  God save the Mekons.