“When it started, the whole purpose of this band was to get beer and money,” Waco Brothers ringleader Jon Langford says of the band’s $50-a-gig beginnings a couple years ago. In the bargain, club owners in the band’s hometown of Chicago got not only Langford, co-founder of underground British legends the Mekons, but also Jesus Jones bassist Alan Doughty and Poi Dog Pondering drummer Steve Goulding, late of the Graham Parker band and an alumnus of the Gang of Four.
“It was not until Nan said, ‘Make an album,’ which we thought was such a ridiculous prospect to just do a lot of really horrible cover versions, that we thought we’d better try and write some songs,” Langford continued. “Then the band sort of really turned into a band.”
“Nan” is Nan Warshaw of Bloodshot Records, whose 1994 compilation For A Life Of Sin served as a rallying-cry introduction to the insurgent-country community that had begun to coalesce in Chicago. A pre-Waco Brothers project, the disc included a track from Langford credited to “Jon Langford’s Hillbilly Lovechild”, and also sported his painting “Deck Of Cards” on its front cover.
“It’s important to note how magnanimous Jon has been to us,” says Eric Babcock, who co-founded Bloodshot with Warshaw. “He invited me over, offered me beer and then let me choose from his paintings what we wanted for the cover [of For a Life of Sin]. The Waco Brothers wouldn’t exist if the label hadn’t suggested an album, but the label wouldn’t exist if Jon Langford hadn’t lent his credibility.”
According to Babcock and Warshaw, this influence even extends to how Bloodshot’s business is organized. “Jon’s approach with the Mekons helped us realize possibilities in the different ways he looked at a band’s structure,” Babcock says of the famously collaborative punk icons who have miraculously survived 20 years of hard drinking and harder-held leftist principles.
Those Mekon politics carry over into Langford’s country-flavored incarnation as well. Rob Miller, the third partner of the Bloodshot triumvirate, just comes right out with it: “The Waco Brothers are fucking Limey socialists.” This summation of the band’s world view nicely illustrates a distinction between the character of Bloodshot’s country-punk stable and that of their counterparts in the alternative-country world.
As if to underscore Miller’s point, Langford bellows good-naturedly from the stage of the Lounge Ax: “Yeah, we like your milk and honey! We’ll take your milk and honey and spit it right back at you!” Langford has just been holding forth on the subject of capital punishment: “In Europe, we all think you’re barbaric!” Capital punishment is the focus of this night’s fund-raising concert, one of many the Wacos perform over the course of a year to support a wide range of progressive causes. The band then rips into “25 Minutes to Go” in a manner to raise the dead.
But Langford doesn’t need a forum tailored to a point of view to launch one. Earlier in the month at the Beat Kitchen, an exuberant burst of stagecraft put him in mind of another. Concluding a cover of “Baba O’Riley”, the Wacos took turns in the air, solo and in twos and threes. “Yes, we leap,” Jon Langford ranted in red-faced good cheer. “We’re not like you Americans who have to pay for your own health care if you fall down. We’re from Leeds and we leap.”
Those raucous Wacos pass through rooms with the energy of an 18-wheeler sporting polished chrome exhaust pipes and a major attitude. They’re pissed off about the human condition: the numbing dehumanization of common labor, the corrupting influence of wealth and fame, the hypocrisy of religion, and the perennial power of plain vice. Indeed, the anger in almost any Waco Brothers song could fuel that truck from Natchez to Poughkeepsie.
So how did it get to Chicago? Mostly for love. Three of the four real Brits married Chicago women. The fourth, mandolinist Tracy Dear, insists he came here to escape a woman. It’s Dear who sets the girls’ hearts palpitating when he removes his shirt mid-set to reveal a well-shaped muscle-T. And it’s Dear who sings the infectious, crowd-pleasing “Do As I Say, Don’t Do As I Do”, the emancipation proclamation of a love interest as seen from the flipside, the point of view of the aggrieved lout.
“Do As I Say…” is just one of 14 catchy ideological bottle-bombs delivered by the Waco Brothers for your dancing and drinking pleasure on their new Cowboy in Flames, a just-under-50-minute hard-country collection recorded at Chicago’s King Size Sound Labs. It’s Dear who seems to hold the band’s only romantic view of cowboys and the old west.
“I think people like Guy Clark, just by their philosophy and their songwriting — he’s an unbent man, very true to his word. It’s not about dressing up in a hat and all that. I think this is where it taps into the whole punk thing. It’s about morals, beliefs. We’re just trying to tap into the emotion of it.”
