There Will Be Loud: A Conversation with Jon Langford of the Waco Brothers
Hard-rocking renaissance man Jon Langford tears it up. Photo courtesy Bloodshot Records.
In a fairer, better world, Jon Langford would need no introduction; in a world that makes Kenny Chesney a country star, he probably does. (Unless, of course, you read our interview with Langford last fall.) So: Since founding the protean punk outfit the Mekons in Leeds, England, three decades or so ago, he's become that Godfather of the Chicago alt-country scene that flowered in the mid-to-late 1990s, as well as a celebrated painter. (That's his portrait of Buddy Guy on the wall at the Birchmere. You can see it, along with 214 of his other objets d'arte, in his 2006 book, Nashville Radio.)
Of his many bands, the Waco Brothers have proven second only to the Mekons in their staying power. The brash cow-punk outfit he assembled in the Windy City after emigrating there from Leeds in 1991 includes players from bands (past and present) as diverse as KMFDM, Jesus Jones, and the Rumour. Their fierce attack reminds you that the Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three of Johnny Cash at San Quentin was closer to a punk band than to most of what's called country nowadays, and there's an unsubtle, unapologetic leftist agitprop to their oft-hilarious lyrics -- think Billy Bragg without the pomposity. We've said it before: Country music sounds pretty good sung in a Leeds accent.
The Wacos have just released their first official live album, Waco Express: Live and Kickin' at Schuba's Tavern, recorded at the storied Chicago venue. They play the Rock and Roll Hotel tonight. DCist spoke with Langford in New York City on Tuesday morning.
The Wacos just got around to putting out a live album, after a dozen or so years of being called a quintessential bar band. Why wait so long to do a live record, and why now?
We write a lot of songs, so we’re always chomping at the bit to try and make a studio album. This time, we’ve kind of got a studio album in the can, but every time we put out a studio album it’s reviewed just like our first release. It usually says we don’t capture our live sound. [Laughs.]
Also, we were thinking of doing a best-of. And it seemed like, if we were going to do a best-of, why don’t we just do it live? That’s kind of our natural habitat.
PICTURED RIGHT: Waco Express: Live & Kicking at Schuba's Tavern, Chicago.
You do cover all of the Wacos’ studio albums in the set list of the live record.
Yeah. We noticed that when we went back to look at which [songs] work best. The Cowboy in Flames album was actually, basically recorded pretty much live. Even though we weren’t in front of a studio audience, it was recorded straight to two-track in a sweaty loft in Chicago.
We draw heavily on that one. It’s always been the basis of our live set. We’ve added things and taken things out as the years have gone by with new records, but some of [the Cowboy in Flames] songs are kind of core songs for what the Wacos sound like and try to express in our lyrics.
Are you surprised by how well Cowboy in Flames has held up, 11 years later? It really is one of the flagship albums of alt-country.
Yeah, I think it’s pretty solid. It’s the first one where we were kind of working out what we sounded like. [The Wacos had released one album previously, 1995’s To the Last Dead Cowboy.] We went into the studio and didn’t really know what we sounded like, because we hadn’t heard ourselves. With that one, we got a lot more gigs and were playing a lot more original material. Suddenly it popped into my head that there was a certain sound we had, and I think that was captured pretty well on that record.
PICTURED LEFT: 1997's Cowboy in Flames, "the basis of our live set," sez Langford.
Has anybody ever suggested you slip a ballad or two into the set, or is that just completely anathema to what you’re doing?
Well, we do “Girl at the End of the Bar”, a John Anderson song that George Jones had a hit with in the early 80s. “If You Don’t Change Your Mind” is a sort of a ballad that’s on [Waco Express]. We often do slow stuff. There’s a song called “Where the Mighty Fall” that we do quite a lot; I think it's on Electric Waco Chair. It’s pretty sad, and slow.
You can really hear some foreshadowing of what would come to be called alt-country, and of the Waco Brothers specifically, on those mid-80s Mekons albums Fear and Whiskey and Edge of the World. Do you see those albums as having been pivotal in what you and the Wacos do now?
The Mekons in the '90s — we went through a period where we weren’t touring. We were involved with a bunch of really arty projects with performance artists and writers, doing all this weird stuff to keep it interesting after being on the road all the time. In the 80s, I always had the counterbalance between the Mekons and the Three Johns. The Three Johns were a flat-out, high-energy, noisy rock band. So for me, maybe the Wacos kind of took up the slack there a bit. I obviously have the need to go out on a Friday night and make a lot of noise.
At times, the Mekons have been like that, in the Rock and Roll period. After the Three Johns had kind of bitten the dust, the Mekons got a bit loud for a while, again. But now in the Mekons, we’ve been touring pretty much acoustically, which has been really refreshing. We keep changing things all the time.
But with the Waco Brothers, we don’t really want to change it. It’s not something that I think has to evolve. It actually does what it does pretty well. I’ve never been afraid to take the Waco Brothers anywhere. With the Mekons, it’s always like, “Shit, what are people gonna think?” With the Mekons, for people who don’t know the history, it’s hard to explain what we do. It’s all wrapped up in its own mix; its own continuity — or lack of it. But with the Wacos, it’s a pretty uncomplicated package to present.
Well, the sound definitely travels, but there are plenty of places in this country where the lyrics to a song like, say, “Plenty Tuff Union Made” might not go over.
We try to just play the centers of the liberal elite. We check a political map of America to make sure a place is firmly Democratic, then we play there. We skip over the rest of the country, where the real Americans live, apparently. Because we’re from Chicago, we’re not real Americans. We’re tainted by our good taste and progressive views.
Okay. Here’s one that came from an editor the last time you and I spoke: Define “insurgent country.”
Don’t ask me. I didn’t make that one up. [Laughs.]
That was the Bloodshot Records marketing arm?
I don’t know. It’s kind of grand, like something The Clash would have said. I just think there were a lot of people who seemed to be of a like mind in the early '90s, [who believed] American country and western music and roots music was very interesting, but that it’d been hijacked by some kind of musical version of Wal-Mart. Everything we liked about it wasn’t there any more. But those things were easily accessible, and you could play around with the bits you liked outside of that corporate structure.
PICTURED LEFT: Langford's Johnny Cash, mixed media on wood.
You wrote a great, and very funny, song about that called “The Death of Country Music”. But you also used that as the title for a series of your slightly macabre paintings of country-music royalty like Hank Williams and Buck Owens, Patsy Cline . . .
I’ve done a lot of paintings based on songs and lyrics from the Waco Brothers, or in the stance of the Waco Brothers. The songs have gone hand-in-hand with the paintings that I’ve made, and may have even come out of those images, I think. It’s a very blurry line between those two things. What the Mekons do doesn’t seem to infect the visual art that much, but the Wacos has been kind of core to it.
That’s counter-intuitive in a way, given that the Mekons are so much more musically eclectic than the Wacos are.
With the Mekons, there are so many different fingers in the pie, as it were. People can step in and step out as they feel like it. In the Wacos, it’s been pretty consistent.
And you all share songwriting credit, but there are two other singers in the band. Do people generally sing what they write?
There are loads of exceptions to that, but in general people sings the songs that they wrote. It’s not the kind of collective songwriting that goes on in the Mekons, really. There aren’t many ego problems in the Waco Brothers. People are quite comfortable turning up with a fully-fledged song and saying, “What do you think of this?” And being honest about whether it works or not. I think it’s quite healthy.
It must help that all of you are involved in other bands and projects, and that you just reconvene every so often.
Yeah. We’ve never been very ambitious for the Waco Brothers. We’re quite happy to play in Chicago once a month! But people are always saying, “You gotta go on tour, you gotta do this, you gotta do that.” And we recognize that if we don’t do those things, then maybe it will stop growing and turn into some kind of mummified thing. So it’s fun to come out on the road like this and play seven nights in a row.
The Waco Bros. play the Rock and Roll Hotel tonight. Doors open 7 p.m. Chris Mills, The Starlingtons, and The Highballers open. Tickets are $14 at the door or $12 here.