Mekons wow and delight previously tortured fans

By Phil Christman
Asst. Editor, Arts & Entertainment

Sometimes good things come to he who waits. I spent Friday night getting utterly lost on 131, running out of gas, arriving in Kalamazoo forty-five minutes late and out of breath and so broke I had to hit up my friend Kirsten for the price of a small Coke at the Eastown Deli, then herding several of my friends to the Intersection at eight, where (as I’d been promising them for weeks) their hopes, dreams, views and underclothing would be permanently changed by (drumroll, please) The Mekons, whom everyone that reads this space regularly knows represent my only real hopes for Western civilization, were comin’ to town. Of course, my ticket said they’d be playing early in the evening, and of course, they didn’t go on ‘til the clock had ticked midnight and four of the worst bands of all time had ruined our flying spirits with hours of depressingly drunk, unoriginal, posturing nihilistic crap-rock. The highlight was either the Handsome Family, whose lead singer was so appallingly rude to the bassist that I seriously considered giving him a bloody nose,  


photo by Thompson

Singer/guitarist Tom Greenhalgh sometimes feels like Fletcher Christian.

or Vulva Ultra, whose “stage show” included clips of pornographic films which made me sick to my stomach because I know women who’ve been raped/abused/harrassed by the bread-and-butter clientele of such filth. All of which made me so depressed that Tim (my co-editor) and I actually debated leaving the show as a kind of impotent protest against the life-denying forces of post-Hedeggerian ironic “art,” until we decided that picking up empty beer-cups and napkins was a more effective protest against the Devil’s entropy.

I didn’t think that even the Mekons could redeem such a night. Surprise: they did. Two seconds into the show I was movin’, and I didn’t stop until the last soaring strains of “Curse” had bled from the air like streaks from a Fourth-of-July sparkler. Swinging through a setlist that included most of ‘98’s “Me” and a smattering from their other Touch-and-Go/Quarterstick releases, the band-four vocalists, two guitars, an accordion, a keyboard and bass from the “popular” Sara Corina-sounded thunderously solid and airtight, except during “Enter the Lists.” It’s a tribute to the Mekons’ skill as performers that their glossier, more  


photo by Thompson

Tom Greenhalgh, Sally Timms and Sara Corina
of the Mekons dance round the squares.

electronic stuff didn’t suffer at all in the transition to a rootsier live rock ‘n’ roll show idiom. “Tourette’s,” “Narrative,” and “Lists” sounded just as good as the album, and the sociological overtones (much of “Me” amounts to a deconstruction of capitalist society’s relation to individual and sexual identity) weren’t lost in the general spirit of fun—you could dance and analyze at the same time. It’s music for the head and body. Even more impressively, though, it’s music for the heart. In their willingness to cover weighty issues, the Mekons refuse whininess, sentimentality and feel-good liberal piety, instead landing, again and again, on what may be the hardest attitude of all-melancholia.

“(Sometimes I Feel Like) Fletcher Christian” made me laugh and nearly cry in the same two minutes; “Heaven and Back,” “Insignificance” and “King Arthur” rocked with the determination of a band whose long, hard years of jawdropping commercial failure haven’t slowed them down a bit. Like a leather-jacketed Al Camus, they admit that life is painful and the good guys often lose, that giant multinationals are sucking the life out of nearly everybody (group leader Jon Langford recently compared Wal-Mart to the U.S.S.R. in its “gray sameness”) but keep on hoppin’ up Sisyphus’s mountain anyway because some things are still worth affirming. Not only is this a good message-if all I cared about were good messages I’d just listen to gospel music all the time anyway-but it leads to good art, because it’s the truth about life on earth. It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, but my Bozo Grand Prize goes to people who can convincingly do both at the same time.

And they do it all without slipping into the Rock Star Egotrip.
On stage, they look like a bunch of normal folks in work shirts

And they do it all without slipping into the Rock Star Egotrip. On stage, they looked like a bunch of regular folks in work shirts; there was no expensive light show and no grandstanding. No security entourage. No cheesy jokes. They came off as ordinary people enlarged by the passion of their convictions. During encore, when Tom Greenhalgh screamed the lyrics I’d waited all night to hear-“Call it intuition, call it luck/But we’re right in all that we distrust”-it sounded like the most inclusive victory cry I’ve ever heard, and I spilled into the street with a goofy grin and sore legs from jumping up and down. Later, I started to wish I’d asked them to go to Denny’s with all of us for coffee. Of all the bands I’ve seen, they’re the only ones who might’ve gone.