In the beginning, there was pleasure, and it was good.
And four bars and seven drinks ago, in order to form a more perfect Las Vegas,
We, the weird, mushroom-gobbling army of insanity with one nation under Tito,
Do solemnly pledge:I pledge allegiance to Tom Jones, drinking and gambling, fornication, hallucination,
to visit the holy city at least once a year.
Lead us not to Wayne Newton and deliver us from Michael Bolton.
I do solemnly swear to go forth, skip work, sleep late, and make pleasure on the planet.Let the drinking begin!
– "The Pleasurelegiance" by Mojo Nixon
For every healthy music consumer, there comes a time when, no matter how rich, deep and diverse your CD collection or iTunes library is, everything you own sucks. No matter how many bootlegs and rare b-sides you've got, every artist you've ever followed feels like a dead end. You thrash around, buying random crap that you hope grows on you, but it can be months before you find a way out of a bad rut.
I've often dreamed during these times that I'd suddenly stumble upon an artist I'd never heard of before, who had a rich catalog of material that was all new to me, decades deep, in which I could submerge myself.
For three weeks last October, to promote a brand new collection of outtakes and rarities (reviewed on page 19), roots rock and roll recording artist Mojo Nixon released a new album and 10 others he'd released in the '80s and '90s—all for free on Amazon.com.
Though I was busy hoarding albums during the decades he was releasing them, I'd never heard of Mojo. He started showing up on MTV just after I'd left my family's cable box for a television-less college dorm room. Many friends I've asked also hadn't heard of him, or only had vague recollections of songs he sang about having sex with celebrities.
I downloaded a couple of tracks recommended on a blog ("Elvis is Everywhere," "Jesus at McDonald's" and "This Land is Your Land"), and after one listen, I got busy downloading the rest of the 150 free recordings. Mojo Nixon was my dream come true: I'd discovered a rich vein of valuable rock and roll rants—gonzo dissertations against the evils of 1980s political and social life. I've been listening to him almost exclusively since, working my way through his discography.
In Mojo, I've found the kind of energy, forward thinking and passion for life, liberty and pursuit of happiness I'd hoped to find in the political and social life of the Pioneer Valley, and think we can still aspire to.
*
As a teenager in the '80s, after the Clash fell apart, I stopped listening to current music for a long time and spent my time looking backwards, working my way back from punk through rock and then to folk.
While I wouldn't have described my tastes as such back then, I liked political music: angry, stick-it-to-the-man anthems that told it like it was. I liked songs that reminded me of what was important and charged me up with the energy and self-righteousness to reject authority and the status quo. I appreciated the likes of Phil Ochs and Pete Seeger, but I preferred my music electric, loud and fun—timely, but not necessarily addressing specific headlines. The Who's "Baba O'Reilly," Credence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son," and anything Patti Smith had done fit the bill perfectly.
Come the '80s, the rage and anger seemed to disappear from rock and roll; popular music had lost its bite, and instead we got saddled with Sting. Musicians like Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, Peter Gabriel, and David Byrne, who had shown such iconoclastic promise in the early part of the decade, started navigating the mainstream. They got polite. It became hypocritical for them to knock a status quo of which they were now a part. They're all artists I still enjoy following and seeing, but it's their early raw angst that I return to most often.
Of course, there were outspoken artists such as Ani Difranco who thrived in the '90s; a handful of anti-war songs popped up during the Bush years; and I'm told hip hop's always had a potent mix of politics and music. But for the white mainstream, melody and policy is a blend that has had an increasingly bitter taste.
Mojo Nixon's music combines rockabilly's edge with Jonathan Richman's wit and George Thoroughgood's swagger. His guitar playing is tremendously satisfying, even if it's not high on finesse, and while his songs don't dissect current issues with profound insight or detailed analysis, his performance captures all the anger and irritation of living in a world where priorities are so supremely fucked up. His song titles often sum up the sentiments perfectly: "Burn Down the Malls," "I Hate Banks," "I Ain't Gonna Piss in No Jar," "Destroy All Lawyers," "Burn Your Money," "I Like Marijuana," "Disney is the Enemy," and "Legalize It," for instance.
As a self-described libertarian, Mojo's passionate and righteous music makes freedom seem like a whole lot of fun. He sneers at the idea that there might be boundaries to anyone's liberty, and he revels in being supremely blunt and crass—thinking of limits like Knievel thinks of school busses. He doesn't offer negotiation and deliberation: his lyrical solutions to the problems he faces are typically violent (in a Looney Toons sort of way) and ultimate. His rich, Elvis-meets-Falstaff growling rock and roll voice can sometimes take on an evangelistic tone, and he sometimes turns his song bridges into full-on sermons, but he's not looking for redemption. Just that people let each other do what they want, don't try to cheat one another and don't act like assholes.
In his rip-roaring rendition of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," Mojo offers this elaboration of his world view as the hallelujah mid-section of the song:
…each and every one of us on the planet, owns all the planet.
And what we've got to do—what we've got to do is have a plan.
I have a dream. I have a vision:
that everybody on the planet
is going to get together, and they're going to go to the amusement park of my mind:
MOJO WORLD
Where there's:
Waterslides
and loop-de-loops
and barbecue sauce in the waterslides
and go-kart tracks
going through the loop-de-loops of the waterslides
and there's DRIVE IN MOVIE THEATERS,
Showing Vanishing Point, Two Lane Blacktop, and Thunder Road every night
And you can always buy
Cheez-Whiz
Teeny-Weenies Old Grandpa made
And liquor stores are open 24 hours a day, every day
And there's no fool with a little badge saying, We ID under 25,
If they ID you and you're old enough to buy, you get it FREE
That's Mojo World!
And every Saturday night a tribute to a great American hero
It's Evel Knievel Saturday Night, there at Mojo World.
There's cheap beer,
Live music,
24-hour record stores,
You can buy Brunswick stew, hot dogs with coleslaw on them…
You brothers are all saying, "Mojo, How do I get to this place? I want to go."
Everybody wants to go to Mojo World.
Let me tell you what you gotta do:
Turn right at the light,
Go past the trailer park,
Sing, naked in the blazing sunlight of liberty,
You gotta sing, you gotta SING:This land is your land, this land is my land…
You might not share Mojo Nixon's utopian ideal, but I'd wager it's likely you're quibbling over details without having an alternate vision with anywhere near the same detail to challenge it with. Before the new millennium, there was talk of building a bridge to this bright new era, but now that we're here, politicians only seem to talk about trying to get us back to how it once was. In the Pioneer Valley and throughout New England, preserving the status quo and updating existing infrastructure is the glum reality that's replaced what was once the bright new future.
I'll take a trip down a barbecue-sauce-lubricated water slide any day. Go ahead, come up with something better.
*
Yes, Mojo Nixon sang about siring Debbie Gibson's two-headed lovechild, and he composed a ditty about stuffing Martha's muffin (an ode to MTV video disk jockey Martha Quinn). He's also got a song where he proclaims his love for your girlfriend and goes into some detail about how he'd like to express his affections. Most of his tunes inspire smiles at the very least and more often snorts of delinquent laughter. Still, I think it's a mistake to lump him in with the likes of Weird Al Yankovic or Jack Black and his faux band, Tenacious D.
Mojo Nixon's about doing the rock and roll thing first, and laughter second.
On most albums he's got a couple of finely crafted novelty songs about some of his favorite topics—UFOs, barbecue, NASCAR, Bigfoot, beer, dope, tally-whackers and Jesus—that might show up on a Doctor Demento collection of funny songs, but they're in the minority. Most of his catalog is made up of songs either celebrating some moment of debauched splendor you might expect from Hunter S. Thompson ("She's All Liquored Up," "Gin Guzzlin' Frenzy" and "Mushroom Maniac," to name a few), or giving the world a fat, juicy steaming piece of his mind on an issue that disturbs him.
In either case, the humor comes less from witty word-play (of which there's plenty—ever dance the Poontango?) and more from Mojo Nixon's using every tool in his rock and roll arsenal to deliver the song. Like Elvis, Mojo is a lot more than a voice and an instrument: his hillbilly, party-crashing, rage-until-dawn attitude is infectious and permeates every note. Elvis had his hips; Mojo has his primal hooting and hollering, rocking and rolling, tripped-out, satyr-like attitude. Even on instrumentals and his few straight-up and earnest songs ("Mamma Possums," "Death Row Blues"), the strength of his character and performance are as mesmerizing as the music.
"Political music" was never so far from boring.
*
"I've always known it was my genetic destiny to lead an armed insurrection of the suppressed and huddling masses, and since that hadn't happened yet, I thought I'd write a few songs in the meantime," Mojo Nixon said in a telephone interview with the Advocate last week, explaining his penchant for playing political foot stompers.
"In 1979, when I'd just graduated from college, first thing I did was pack my bags and head to England to join the Clash," he said. "I wasn't invited or nothing, but I knew I'd fit in. I never got a chance—I ended up squatting in some flat and playing Dion and Jerry Lee Lewis in the underground for money. Years later I met Joe Strummer, and he said I wouldn't have gotten in, you know, 'cause they were already full up. But he also said I wasn't alone in trying to join."
He met Strummer through the Pogues, a band Mojo toured with and Strummer later fronted. Mojo spoke highly of his time with the Irish folk/punk band, and said his style and theirs had a lot in common. "All I've ever been doing is taking folk music and punking it up," he said. "It's like taking a folk song, handing it to Jerry Lee Lewis and telling him to go a hundred miles per hour with it."
When asked if he sees himself as the last of a dying breed, Mojo dismissed the notion. "Nah, it's still around. It's just not the stuff that gets played on the radio," he said. "You have to work to hear it. There was the Dixie Chicks, and they took a stand that Bush was full of it and the whole invasion of Iraq was bullshit. Thing that pissed me off was that they took it back and apologized for it. You've got to take a stand. But there's other people playing political music. Steve Earle, for instance. Radio's not going to play their political stuff, though, so you've got to find it yourself."
Being political, blunt and crass often met with resistance, and he didn't always get past his producers. One song initially dropped from an album out of fear of an anticipated response was his song about the top record-producing mogul of the era:
Who killed rock and roll?
Who killed rock and roll?I don't know. I've been told.
I've been told,
And now, I'm going to tell you, too:Bring me the head of David Geffen
Bring me the head of David Geffen
Bring me the head of David Geffen
Bring me the head of David GeffenWoodstock '94 brought to you by Pepsi-Cola
Lord, oh mercy, don't you know!
Budweiser, RollingStone,
Throw the corporate dog a bone,
Even Keith Richards be a ho.He's just selling one great big lie:
Bring me the head of David Geffen
"Another time," Mojo Nixon said, "They had me cut out lyrics that said McDonald's put stuff in their food to make your sperm weak and affect your offspring. In "The Ballad of Country Dick," I sang about this bastard, Mike Curb, who was a big music producer, and the chickenhearts at the label told me to mumble when I said his name. It came out Mike Perv.
"People are scared, you know. Record producers, record label execs, all those chicken-hearted sons of bitches get scared and don't want to stick their necks out," Mojo said. "Me? I'm not scared. Like Lightning Hopkins used to say, 'I ain't scared of nothing but Hitler and snakes.'"
*
These days Mojo Nixon performs rarely and considers himself a retired musician. Still, his bravery is on full display on satellite radio now, with a daily music program and weekly political talk show, Lying Cocksuckers.
Still, I wasn't the only one downloading his full catalog for free on Amazon.com in October. To promote what he called his "Cockamamie Scheme," he released the following explanation:
"Can't wait for Washington to fix the economy. We must take bold action now. If I make the new album free and my entire catalog free it will stimulate the economy. It might even over-stimulate the economy. History has shown that when people listen to my music, money tends to flow to bartenders, race tracks, late night greasy spoons, bail bondsmen, go kart tracks, tractor pulls, football games, peep shows and several black market vices. My music causes itches that it usually takes some money to scratch. In fact, it has been concluded by a team of top economists [that] for each of my albums downloaded free, nearly $100 will flow into the underbelly, grass roots, dive bar economy. Mojo Nixon overstimulus sensation sweeping the nation."
The response was stronger than anticipated: "A million point six downloads," he told the Advocate. To news.moneycentral.msn.com, he elaborated on his reaction:
"Great googley moogley. I'm almost speechless. A million Mojo songs stirring up trouble across this great land. I'm a cult artist and apparently I've grown the cult and made the cult happy. A little blast of joy in these dark and desperate times. A retired lunatic with no Facebook, no Twitter, no MySpace or tour. Not even an e-mail list. Never underestimate the power of the Mojosity. The true sound of the American nutjob is forever. You can't kill rock 'n' roll. The question is—did I lose a million dollars or gain a million fans?"
Probably both, but it's never too late to recoup some of the losses.
If you feel like you're one of the suppressed and huddled masses this holiday season, or you know someone else who is, give Mojo a try and see if he doesn't inspire you to test the bounds of your freedom. Though he's no longer giving them away, his albums are "specially priced." He's not everyone's taste, but if you like him, chances are you're going to want to fill your plate.
