If the attack had gone as planned, this is what would have happened: On Monday morning, en route to their restricted parking spaces, the usual herds of SUVs would stampede Music Row. As bizzers reached their offices, however, they’d find a macabre surprise. On each of the money-green strips of lawn outside Nashville’s biggest labels, someone would have placed an impromptu bit of landscaping.
A tombstone.
The prank made perfect sense to Jon Langford, who for years has accused Nashville of trying to bury its hillbilly tradition. “The bones of country music lie there in their casket/Beneath the towers of Nashville in a deep black pool of neglect,” Langford snarled two years ago in “The Death of Country Music,” a track he wrote for his ferocious Chicago-based honky-punk band, the Waco Brothers. This summer, he got some friendly tombstone manufacturers to help him sandblast a series of backhanded commemorative stones. “They get bored just doing praying hands and ivy,” he says.
The graves were already there on Music Row; Langford just wanted to give them their markers. Unfortunately, the plan was nixed a few weeks ago. “My Nashville advisors told me not to,” Langford explained dryly in a telephone interview from his Chicago studio. “[I was told] they wouldn’t last a minute.” However, that still doesn’t let Nashville off the hook. Starting Saturday, Langford will display his gravestones along with related etchings and paintings in “The Death of Country Music,” an exhibit running through Sept. 25 at the American Pop Culture Gallery.
Saturday’s gallery opening, and the solo Sutler gig that follows it, are merely the latest salvos in Langford’s two-decade battle with the oligarchies that control popular media. A Welshman who relocated to Chicago six years ago, Langford is best known for his work with the Mekons, the ever-evolving band he cofounded in 1977 as an art student at the University of Leeds. Between stints with the Mekons and numerous side projects, he’s also forged side careers as a producer, painter, writer, and comic-strip artist. His themes remain consistent: the exploitation of artists by corporate product-peddlers, and the inequities of talent, money, and power. Undercutting all this seriousness, though, is a sardonic sense of humor that acknowledges the futility of railing at the immovable forces of commerce.
Nowhere are these concerns addressed more mordantly than in “Hank Williams Signs His Contract,” one of the 13 tombstones in Langford’s exhibit. On a field of stone, with pen in hand, the late country legend is captured not at the microphone but at the negotiating table. The desk itself is cluttered with a whiskey bottle, assorted bric-a-brac, and a blank, broken skull. In Nashville, the stone implies, Williams’ lasting epitaph isn’t “Cold, Cold Heart” but cold, hard cash. In granite, forever signing, he’s frozen in eternal bureaucracy which suggests he died a long time before he passed out in his Cadillac.
“It represents the end of the courtship, and the beginning of the exploitation,” says Langford, who bemoans the dire state of modern country music throughout the exhibit. Another slab of granite depicts Williams as St. Sebastian, his gaunt, pill-ridden frame pierced with arrows. Still another features the skeleton of a honky-tonk hopeful strumming an acoustic guitar labeled “neglect.” Subtle they ain’t, but the pieces have brazen wit, conceptual audacity, and stone-cold fury to compensate. Besides, how better to critique Music Row’s two-faced lip service to tradition? This is the town that just dropped George Jones yet again.
The theme is made even more explicit on The Gravestone, a limited-edition EP that Langford is releasing on Bloodshot Records the day of the gallery opening. On an 11-minute track called “Nashville Radio,” Langford becomes the dying Williams, his voice a withered husk above a reggaefied, sitar-driven “Rocky Top” melody. “Gave my life to country music/I took my pills and lost,” sings the strung-out hillbilly sacrifice. “Now they don’t play my songs on the radio/It’s like I never was.”
Langford says he conceived the tombstones to show “the way musicians are treated these days as foot soldiers.” He admits he’s channeling his own miserable fortunes with the record industry, which are legend among underground-rock fans. After the Mekons released the stunning The Mekons Rock ’n’ Roll LP in 1990 which critic Jimmy Guterman chose as one of the best rock records ever made the band’s label, A&M, effectively buried the record, chided the group for its seriousness, and refused to put out their next LP. (That record, the aptly titled The Curse of the Mekons, was never issued domestically.) Small wonder Langford describes the record industry as “clumsy, incompetent, and totalitarian.”
Even so, he’s much more acerbic on the subject of country radio. “I’ve heard radio all over the country, and it all sounds the fuckin’ same,” he argues. On records like 1985’s Fear and Whiskey, a visionary alt-country precursor, the Mekons positioned drunken, shambling, ragged-but-right country as a line of defense against fascism. Listening to country radio today, Langford isn’t sure the battle is lost. “Living here today is what I would imagine living in the Soviet bloc was like,” he observes, “except here everything’s bright and shiny.”
Langford’s hardliner stance on country is born less of bitterness than tough love. In concert, he performs lusty takes on the likes of John Anderson’s “Wild and Blue,” and his amazing Waco Brothers barrel through country-folk tunes with a delight verging on mania. In his studio, he listens to bluegrass greats Jim & Jesse and Nashville singer-songwriters Tom House and Lonesome Bob. (Expect to see his buddy “Loney” and fellow Music City tunesmith/guitarist Tim Carroll backing him at the Sutler gig.) If anything, Langford regards Hank Williams, Bob Wills, and Patsy Cline not as irrelevant elders but as artists with still-vital bodies of work. He refuses to handle country music with care.
That’s one of the things that appealed to him about working in granite it’s not delicate. “You can leave the pieces out in the rain, let birds shit on ’em,” Langford says with a full-chested laugh. “That’s happened.” Especially on Music Row.
Jon Langford hosts a gallery opening 6 to 9 p.m. Saturday at American Pop Culture Gallery. He performs 10 p.m. Saturday with Lonesome Bob at The Sutler.
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