This Is His Testimony: Jon Langford of the Mekons
This is his testimony. In 1991, Jon Langford and his mates from Leeds, the Mekons, had just missed their opportunity as rock-n-roll’s latest last best hope. After almost 15 years of lineup changes, a bunch of classic albums with lousy distribution, countless raucous alcohol-soaked tours and stylistic shifts from punk to country, dance and back, the Mekons were on the verge of saving rock music from big hair and empty heads when fights with A&M Records left their newest record without an outlet in the U.S., just as Nirvana opened up the radio to so-called “alternative rock.” They called that record “The Curse of the Mekons,” but their contract problems and bad luck didn’t piss them off as much as the fall of the Soviet Union and the media’s declaration of the “death of socialism.” “How can something really be dead when it hasn’t even happened,” long-time lefty Langford demands in the album’s highlight, “Funeral,” which concludes, “This funeral is for the wrong corpse!”
Last year marked the Mekons’ 25th anniversary, and Jon Langford has continued to be busier than ever. His Pine Valley Cosmonauts assembled an impressive line-up of underground country artists – including Neko Case and Steve Earle – released a well-received anti-death penalty benefit album, “The Executioner’s Last Songs,” early last year, and later in the year, he brought back many of the same artists to record, “The Bottle Let Me Down,” a tongue-in-cheek children’s album that parents could stomach. His alt.country band, the Waco Brothers, just wrapped up a tour on which Langford pulled double duty, playing in support of the Waco’s sixth disc, “New Deal,” as well as playing with tour openers the Sadies, with whom he just released a collaboration titled, “The Mayors of the Moon.” And, last fall, the Mekons marked their silver jubilee not with a compilation looking back on their career, but with an album of new material, “Out of Our Heads,” and a world club tour.
The Mekons Story
Langford spoke with The Socialist from his home in Chicago, on the eve of the Mekons’ tour. The Mekons, he says, were formed in punk’s first wave, with the idea that, “Your favorite band didn’t have to be people you never meet.” Indeed, the band got its start when schoolmates Langford, Tom Greenhaigh and Kevin Lycett borrowed their favorite band’s (and good friends), the Gang of Four’s, instruments to practice and record their new songs. The art school punk scene in Leeds, centered on the Mekons and Gang of Four, was more political, more intellectual and more danceable than London’s.
In the early days, Langford, Greenhaigh and Lycett released a string of 7″ singles, recorded on simple two track equipment, using borrowed instruments and whatever friends they could rope into the session to fill out the band. Their first single, “Never Been in a Riot,” was a piss-take on the Clash’s “White Riot.” Langford says he has always disliked the romantic outsider stance of punk and some of its thoughtless rhetoric. “When you say ‘smash the system,'” he asks, “what the fuck are you talking about? The national health system?” He found the same problem in parts of the organized left. “I was in the Socialist Workers Party for about half an hour,” quips Langford, who describes himself as a Welsh socialist and an “unaffiliated lefty.”
The Mekons’ early singles attracted the attention of Virgin Records, which released their first album in 1979. Its title, “The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen,” a reference to that old axiom about a thousand monkeys, a thousand typewriters and a work of Shakespeare, was also a commentary on the band’s limited aptitude and everybody-pick-an-instrument-and-play style. Another album followed, but the band fizzled as England’s gig scene grew violent and they became financially dependent on a record label that didn’t know what to do with them. They broke up in 1982, and moved on to new projects. Langford even sold his drums to the goth band Sisters of Mercy, who painted them black.
However, “even when the band thought we split up,” says Langford, “we hadn’t.” The band members continued to hang out and work on art projects together. They even did a few live shows as the Mekons to benefit the striking miners. In 1985, the Mekons made a startling comeback as a country band. They added talented new members, such as Steve Goulding on drums, Susie Honeymoon on fiddle, and singer Sally Timms and released “Fear and Whiskey” on their own independent record label. The album was Hank Williams distilled through punk rock. “Country music struck quite a few chords at that point in our lives,” he says, as a string of broken relationships and too much hard drinking resulted in songs that were stark and personal, but also warm – not to mention musically accomplished.
Two more country albums followed, with better distribution in America, as did other sounds and influences. “Once we got past the first Year Zero days of punk,” he says, “we started to get into the idea of folk music, dance music, reggae.” Along with the new sounds came new members, who seemed to come and go at a rate that could populate several new bands a year, although Langford bristles at the idea that there have been that many personnel changes. “It’s kind of an open door policy, but there’s a core of people,” he says, although he likes the idea of adding younger members and having the band go on. “Here’s the Mekons,” he jokes, “with no one from the Mekons.”
The Curse of the Mekons
Their work in the 80’s made the Mekons critical darlings with a cult-like fan following, and brought them to A&M records. Their first album for A&M should have made them stars. “Destroy your safe and happy lives,” they demanded on the opening track of “The Mekons’ Rock and Roll.” The album was packed full of super-charged rock and rave-ups, but, ever the intellectuals, the band deconstructed their chosen art form throughout the album. One track offers a prostitution analogy for rock-n-roll; others use imperialism and consumerism. “The battles we fought were long and hard, just not to be consumed by rock and roll,” goes one refrain. Unfortunately, their second experience on a corporate record label proved to be more frustrating than the Virgin days. The album’s cover art, which incorporated a licensed image of Elvis Presley, tied the album up in lawsuits and delayed its release. When it finally hit record stores, it was poorly promoted.
More battles with A&M followed. The band wanted to release more albums. The label wanted fewer. Of course, the label also wanted more commercial material. A&M declined to release “Curse of the Mekons,” and it was available in America only as an import for a decade. The Mekons’ curse continued when they moved from A&M to Loud Records, a short-lived subsidiary of Warner Brothers, which tied them up in red tape for two years and never released a single note of music recorded by the band. When the Mekons were finally released from their contract, they immediately released the superb “I (Heart) Mekons” on the independent Touch and Go Records label and never looked back.
“I don’t work for major labels anymore,” Langford says today. Despite his own problems with the major labels over the years, he says he’s mostly uninvolved with the recent artists’ rebellion at the major labels. “There’s such a disparity between musicians,” he says, “that I don’t quite feel a part of that Don Henley struggle.” Still, he’s incredulous at the way the system is set up. “Somebody gives you some money,” he explains, “which you then owe them, to make something which they then own. I can understand why someone who sells three million records gets pissed off.”
Langford manages to eke out a living for himself through his art. “My wife will kill me if I do any more work for no money. For my next benefit album I have to do,” he jokes, “I promised her I’d embezzle all the money.” Working for indie labels, he says that he receives modest royalty checks about six months after a record is released, but that he would have to record about four or five records a year in order for that money to translate into a living wage. His biggest source of money recently was the use of two Waco Brothers songs in episodes of the HBO series “Sex and the City,” which, after repeats and DVD releases, translated in a “sizeable” royalty check.
Heaven and Back
These days, Langford, like the rest of the Mekons, no longer lives in Leeds. He moved to Chicago in 1992 to be with his then-girlfriend, Helen, who is now his wife. The couple has two children, 5-year-old Jimmy and newborn Tommy. He says that it’s because of his children that he finally became involved in U.S. political issues, most notably the campaign to end the death penalty. “I felt like it’s time I should step up,” he says, describing it as a “winnable fight.” On “The Executioner’s Last Songs,” Langford assembled over a dozen Chicago-area alternative country artists, along Nashville’s Steve Earle among others, to cover classic songs about murder and mayhem, with the proceeds benefiting the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty. Langford speaks very warmly of the Chicago music scene, which he feels has even more of a sense of community than the old punk days in Leeds.
“I’m a socialist because I believe in a sense of community,” he says. “I think a community needs to look after people, rather than rip them off. It’s as simple as that.” His sense of community is underscored by his strong identification with the three places he has called home over the years. “I feel like Chicago’s the only place I could live in America,” he says. Ten years in, Chicago (and America) are as much a part of his identity as Leeds and Wales, whose working class identity and “people got to work, people got to eat” ethos he credits for his socialist politics.
Jon Langford will continue to be an activist in the U.S. on his own terms, and despite his own ambivalence about the organized left. “A lot of people on the left seem to fear musicians and artists, for some reason, as being free spirits, or kinda sneer at them for not being intellectually rigorous,” he says. “Music reflects social change,” he explains. “I don’t think it instigates social change, but you can be a morale builder.”
This article was originally published in the March-April 2003 issue of “The Socialist.”
The Elusive Third Party of the People
The Green Party failed to regain ballot status in New York on Tuesday. With its superior budget and no threat to the two-party system, the Working Families Party easily retained its ballot line. We have a new, independent socialist Senator in Vermont, although his Progressive Party studiously avoided incurring the wrath of the Democrats by not contesting any major elections.
This is a disappointing time for supporters of an independent people’s party. The Green Party is clearly on the wane, with ballot status in a few dozen states and the mighty Nader campaign of 2000 a fading memory. Not to be too pessimistic, but I have been predicting it for six years now. The Greens will join a crowded graveyard of similar efforts to establish a third party, a party of the people, to supplant the Democrats. They come along every few election cycles. There’s Bob LaFollette’s 1920’s Farmer-Labor Party, Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party in 1948, the 1960’s Peace and Freedom Party of Eldridge Cleaver, the 1970’s People’s Party of Benjamin Spock, the 1980’s Citizen’s Party of Barry Commoner and the Green Party of Ralph Nader. There is no such party on the horizon, just the detritus of past efforts, which exist here and there scattered among the states.
I was not a supporter of the Greens at their height. In 2000, I managed the Socialist Party’s presidential campaign of David McReynolds. I drafted the candidate to run, raised about $20,000, put him on the ballot in seven states (including Florida, where his 622 votes eclipsed the 537 votes by which Bush officially triumphed; fuck you very much), got him in front of dozens of college audiences and garnered some pretty fantastic press coverage for a tiny little party.
Was I wrong in 2000 not to support Nader’s candidacy, one of the most energetic, high profile threats to the two party system in the late 20th century? The answer to that question is complicated. Certainly in a year when the burning question among liberal circles was whether a vote for Nader was, in effect, a vote for Bush, it was a tad awkward to explain to people that, no, I wouldn’t be voting for Nader or Gore but for someone they’d likely never heard of. It struck most listeners as typical sectarianism of the socialist left, and, indeed, it was.
In the Socialist Party’s defense, our crystal ball was just as clouded as the Green Party’s. Ralph Nader ran lackluster, quiet semi-campaigns in 1992 and 1996 (the former in the Democratic New Hampshire primary, the latter as the Greens’ drafted standard bearer), and there was no telling in late 1999 (when the SP had to choose to run or not) that Nader would, in fact, campaign seriously, energetically and in the face of such opposition from his liberal former allies. Had I known then that he would do so, I would likely have still supported running a Socialist Party candidate, but I’d have been wrong. But even that is complicated. As exciting as the 2000 Nader campaign was, as much of a blow to the two-party system that it had been and as many activists that it created, as many voters it ripped away from the Democrats and as many progressives it split away from the shrill, bankrupt liberals, a few short months later, only the barest hint of the Nader movement was left as many of its supporters were scared back into the Democratic fold. Meanwhile, the attention that the Socialist Party got for its campaign (we delighted in media attention; I got David on “Politically Incorrect” and “the Daily Show” and my sarcastic voicemail in response to the Florida vote controversy was quoted in the “Washington Post.”) increased our tiny membership by about 30%.
But that’s a sectarian justification. As little as there was, in the end, to show for the Green Party effort, the right policy would have been to support it, to strike a blow at the two-party system and gain the long-term loyalty of as many voters as possible for an eventual mass party of the people. The problem with an organization like the Socialist Party, that makes the running of candidates under its banner – even if done in only a handful of instances a year – its raison d’etre is that it inevitably leads to the priority of party building over movement building.
The mass people’s party that we need will not be able to meet the stringent ideological requirements of sectarian socialists. It cannot be Marxian, although it must be free of corporate money and influence. We need a party that will push for universal health care, oppose militarism, democratize the broadcast media, promote equal rights for gays and affirmative action for blacks, that will be feminist in its internal decision-making, promote unions rights, expand Social Security, tax the rich, fully fund our schools, open up our ballots and push for fairer systems of elections. We socialists should take our place within such a party as activists and allies of the major streams of progressivism, only splitting after major reforms have been introduced and we can take a sizable following that demands to go further with us out of the party. It would be far better to be left opposition to powerful social democrats than weak liberals.
Should such a party form, it is likely to happen only when a large number of the furthest-left liberal elements of the Democrats – including many officeholders – are willing to finally break with the Siamese twins of capitalism, and might perhaps be cobbled together by the patchwork of state ballot lines and parties – the detritus at past efforts to create a national people’s party – that have gained substantial followings. Which means that the “correct” electoral policy for a socialist to follow largely depends on the state in which you live. In California, it means being active in the Peace and Freedom party, or even the Green Party. In Vermont, it probably means Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Party. In New York, it might mean a policy of boring from within the Working Families Party and forcing primary elections against the worst of the Democrats in the best of the districts.
Should I join another socialist organization, it will certainly not be one that considers itself a “party.” I’ve spent too much of my life trying to recreate the conditions of Eugene Debs’ long-gone era. We need greater flexibility of tactics and openness to our natural allies, and less nostalgia and sectarianism.
2006 Endorsements: Bring Back the Greens
Election time is around the corner, and I’m sure you’re dying to read my endorsements. This election, in truth, offers a rare opportunity to alter the political landscape for a progressive change.
No, I’m not talking about the increasing likelihood of a Democratic sweep in New York. That is a foregone conclusion since the Republican party has collapsed under the weight of Pataki’s bland presidential ambitions and the national GOP’s right-wing extremism. The Republicans have put up scarecrows against the Spitzer and Clinton steamrollers, and are poised to lose members of their Congressional delegation and perhaps even control of the state Senate, ushering in what could become a generation of Democratic dominance in New York State. Don’t get too excited. Spitzer and the Democrats will govern from the center, and much of the tax-cutting, welfare-slashing, tuition-hiking agenda that Pataki carried out over three terms is now accepted as status quo.
What potential change this election provides is the opportunity to reshuffle ballot lines – an opportunity that only comes up every four years and only in the gubernatorial election. Any party that garners 50,001 votes for Governor remains on the ballot for the next four years. Aside from the big two, there are three other parties seeking to retain their ballot lines and four more looking to gain a new line. Only two of these are of interest. One is the Working Families Party, the progressive fusion party that has disappointed for eight years. When the WFP was founded, many of its early activists invoked the hallowed name of the American Labor Party, which for a few decades around the Depression was a progressive force in New York state politics. That party helped elect scores of Socialists, Communists and Laborites to office, while cross-endorsing the “good” Democrats and punishing Democrats who were too friendly with business and Jim Crow by running spoiler candidates against them and splitting the vote.
For the past eight years, the WFP has only endorsed Democrats, and not just the good ones. There can be no clearer case of a Democrat who votes against the interest of working people in New York than Hillary Clinton and yet the WFP is endorsing her for a second time! I got an e-mail from Pete Seeger the other day that a vote for the war-monger Clinton is actually a vote to bring the troops home. Only a longtime fellow traveller of the CP could embrace such confounding wisdom. If the WFP won’t withdraw support from Hillary, then it is clear that they will never oppose bad Democrats with their own independent candidates, and all the WFP is is a tool to deliver progressive and union votes to the Democratic machine.
I remain a registered voter in the Working Families party, holding out hope for a rank and file rebellion. Under New York’s slow as molasses system, only a registered voter of a given ballot line can petition or contest a party primary, and a change in enrollment must be made before the previous election day. For example, if Jonathan Tasini had decided to run his insurgent campaign against Hillary Clinton within the Working Families party, I could have collected petitions among fellow WFP registrants to force a primary – one that Tasini could have won, giving Hillary a public rebuke and continuing the anti-war campaign into the general election. But, Tasini would have had to have changed his party enrollment to WFP before last year’s mayoral election. And, thus, I remain registered in the WFP in case somebody decides to try to force a primary next year. But I won’t be voting for Eilliot Spitzer on the Working Families ballot line, and neither should you.
I will be voting for the Green Party, and so should you. The Greens had a ballot line from 1998 until 2002, and in that time ran hundreds of candidates for federal, state and local office – garnering hundreds of thousands of votes on a platform of peace, environmentalism and economic justice. Remember that Mayor of New Paltz who initiated a political crisis by marrying same sex couples? Jason West was elected on the Green Party ballot line. We need more rabble rousing in our elections, as only the Green Party can currently deliver.
Vote for Malachy McCourt for Governor on the Green Party ballot line. Malachy is a semi-famous author who recruited to run for whatever name recognition he has (such celebrity-seeking is a frustrating tendency among certain segments of the Greens). Nevertheless, only a vote for McCourt can give the Greens a ballot line for the next four years.
Vote for Howie Hawkins for U.S. Senate on the Green Party line. Howie is a long-time environmental and trade union activist, and was working hard for election reform long before you ever heard about “hanging chads.” He’s campaigning for an immediate end to the war, money for renewable energy and universal health care.
Vote for the Socialist Workers Party candidate for Comptroller. The SWP is a laughable Trotsky-Castro cult by now, but it’s important to give a little love for the “S” word. Also, unfortunately, the Greens’ candidate, Julia Willebrand, is representative of the party’s worst sectarian trend that has held it back as a more welcoming party of the broader left.
Vote for Rachel Trechler for Attorney General on the Green Party line. At least she’s an attorney, while the SWP candidate is typically unqualified. If you must vote for Cuomo, do so on the WFP line.
In Queens, I recommend write-in votes for most of the remaining contests. The judges are, as usual, all endorsed by the Democrats and Republicans and running unopposed. Write in your favorite lawbreakers as a protest. In my Congressional district, Greg Meeks is running unopposed, significantly without the Working Families Party’s support. Write in your own name. Whoever you are, you could do a better job than him.
Frank Zeidler, Greatest Living American, Is Dead
Frank Zeidler, former Mayor of Milwaukee and Chairman Emeritus of the Socialist Party USA, died last night at the age of 93. Frank occupies a unique place in history as the last bona-fide Socialist mayor of a major American city, serving three terms between 1948 and 1960. To the rest of the country, Milwaukee in the 1950’s seems so bland, so middle-American and middle-class that it was the setting of the tv sitcom “Happy Days.” The most political that “Happy Days” ever got was that Richie Cunningham voted for Adlai Stevenson while his father supported Ike. Meanwhile, their Socialist mayor was holding regular press conferences on the steps of City Hall to denounce the state’ red-baiting Senator, Joseph McCarthy.
The Socialists were a major political party in Milwaukee in the first half of the 20th century, electing numerous state legislators, city council members, a Congressman and two mayors before Frank. The first Mayor, Emil Seidel, served a brief term in 1910 focused on cleaning the city up, closing brothels and gambling parlors, establishing a fire department and improving sanitation and plumbing. The revolutionists of the era, and the “scientific” Marxists of today, scoff at this “sewer socialism,” but it did inspire voter loyalty and keep the party in power.
The Democrats and Republicans teamed up to vote Seidel out of office, but the Socialists returned to office in 1916 with Dan Hoan, who served a staggering 24 years as Mayor. Hoan focused on running an honest government and improving electricity, transportation and sewage. He did succeed in building the first public housing in the country in 1923, but otherwise the more progressive elements of his political agenda were frustrated by a moderate city council until the changed political climate of the 1930’s gave him room to experiment with jobs programs and public ownership.
Hoan was finally defeated for office in 1940 by the Democrat Carl Zeidler, who was Frank’s brother. Carl died “in office” while fighting in the war in Europe. Frank ran to fill out his term and came in fourth in the election.
Frank Zeidler joined the Socialist Party in 1922, when he was 20. Starting in the late 1930’s, he had been running as the party’s candidate for offices as varied as state treasurer, Congress and Governor of Wisconsin – winning a seat on the Milwaukee school board and the position of county surveyor. In 1948, the Socialist Party again asked Frank Zeidler to be its candidate for Mayor. The combination of the Zeidler family name and the Socialists’ still-impressive street organization resulted in Frank’s victory over a field of four candidates, including Dan Hoan who had abandoned the SP for the Democrats.
Zeidler’s administration was challenged to respond to post-war urban development, particularly “white flight” from the city. Zeidler’s masterstroke was the annexation of Milwaukee’s outlying areas, doubling the city’s size and shoring up its tax base to ensure that the city remain solvent and continue to provide services to all its residents. Zeidler was proud of the 3200 units of public housing he built, and the great expansion of the library and parks systems. “The most difficult problem,” Zeidler noted of his administration in a 1997 interview, “was defending the right of individuals of whatever race or ethnic stock to have equal opportunity in this city.” Faced with a reactionary coalition that planned a race-baiting campaign against a fourth Zeidler term, Frank sought to avoid such divisiveness and chose not to run again, citing health reasons.
He actually was in poor health. Frank was always in poor health. He actually dropped out of college because of heart problems. He had a quadruple bypass in 1997 that gave him a new lease on life, but he still maintained a dark, fatalistic humor about his health. If you invited him to any event, he would usually reply that he’d be glad to go if he was still alive.
Frank Zeidler remained a constant presence around Milwaukee, constantly lecturing and attending meetings and always available to the press for a quote. Kinda like Ed Koch, but pleasant. The Socialist Party’s street organization, though a shadow of its former self, remains and that, combined with the legacy of the Zeidler and Hoan administrations, makes the party still a contender in Milwaukee politics as in 2001 when its candidate, Wendell Harris, polled 20%, forcing a run-off. The press treated that election like a fluke that was more a vindication of Frank Zeidler (who remained a party stalwart despite declining fortunes) than of the idea of socialism. So beloved in Milwaukee was Frank that when I was doing publicity for the party’s 100th anniversary conference, a reporter from the Journal-Sentinel asked me what most party members thought of him and I replied that we all think that Frank is a really great man. That somehow was quoted as “the greatest living American,” which flattered and embarrassed Frank.
Frank remained a stalwart of the party. He rallied the party loyalists into a reorganization in 1973 when most of the “scientific” intellectuals marched into the Democratic and Republican parties. He ran for President in 1976 with the mission of saving the party. That campaign recruited the people who would staff the organization for the next three decades. He chaired the party for a number of years before stepping back to the more honorary position of Chairman Emeritus. Ever the Jimmy Higgins, he could often be found sweeping the floors at the party’s office on Old World Third Street.
Frank’s memoir of his years in office, “A Socialist in City Government,” was finally published last year. Bizarrely, the publishers retitled it “A Liberal in City Government,” wagering that readers would find the thought of a liberal in power so unique and fascinating that it would sell more. Go figure.
That book is still sitting on my “to read” pile, under all my school books. Maggie Phair had forwarded it to me a few months ago, during my brief tenure as editor of “Socialist” magazine, suggesting it as good source material for an obituary (which we didn’t think would be so urgently needed). Frank’s epitaph should be his socialist convictions. Speaking on the 100th anniversary of the Wisconsin party, he said, “The basic concept of socialism…still remains and illuminates a dark world. That concept is of a world of commonwealths cooperating with each other for the betterment of all peoples.”
