You can tell I’m not particularly hip when I heard about the Mekons from the New York Times. It was around 1992, and The Times listed a few bands that the newspaper’s rock critics thought were great and that the typical reader might not have heard of. This reviewer praised the Mekons Rock ‘n’ Roll record, so I went and got it. Exactly what I was looking for.
To explain: When new wave and punk came along, I was just of legal age. I started studying in 1977 and Talking Heads, The Clash, Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, Pretenders were the bands of the time, that was my music. It was so much better than the over-produced ’70s rock I heard on the radio in high school. Loving these bands became part of my identity.
Then, in the 80’s, I just couldn’t find anything good. U2 were okay, the indie scene was starting, bands like the Feelies were already making records. But musically I was stuck in the seventies. Then came the Mekons. They had indeed been part of that first flowering of a new sound in the late ’70s, but unlike many other bands of the era, they had found a way to carry on. You’re just getting started!
They drew on all these different styles, had a punk aesthetic at their core, but also listened to Hank Williams, world music, mid-century English dance music. Despite barely being able to play their instruments at first, they wrote really good, catchy songs and, just as importantly, they didn’t overproduce them. They had a really fresh sound, great songs, a political leaning that I liked – they were extreme left – and generally they were funny and depressing at the same time. An amazing combination! Love at first sight.
Where did I get the record back then? Maybe in Boston babysitting a friend’s house. Maybe also at Tower Records in Philadelphia. It was around 1992, my second novel had just come out, and I was in a dark chapter of my life. My father was ill and my marriage fell apart. I had led a very disciplined, work-oriented life in my twenties to write these two novels. It was now clear to me that my life had to change.
In a way, I’d never been in my twenties. I had been so ambitious, so single-minded, worked so hard that I went straight from a teenager into a forty-year-old. Now my marriage was slowly unraveling and I started dating other people. I liberated myself and therefore also looked for new music. In a way, I experienced a second adolescence.
The first time I saw them live was in the fall of 1993 or 1994 in San Francisco. My wife and I thought moving to another location would solve our marital problems. We looked at cities on the west coast. When we were in San Francisco, we would pull out the free local newspaper and see who was performing. And there it was: The Mekons were playing in town that very night. Maybe “I Heart Mekons” had just come out and they were touring with that record. They were very loud, and as always, I made little earplugs out of a napkin to block out the noise a bit.
The Mekons were great! After The Corrections came out in the early noughties, I tried to persuade The New Yorker to let me write an article about the Mekons. But at the time, The New Yorker wasn’t writing about rock ‘n’ roll, so that was turned down. I saw them perform at Berkeley one night and they were all dead drunk and stumbling around the stage. It wasn’t a good show. But from then on I kept in touch with them on a small scale, sending them occasional emails and once attending a panel at Columbia University where their work was discussed. I was one of the panellists, along with Greil Marcus and other luminaries.
I last saw her in Santa Cruz, where I live. They played at a restaurant called The Crepe Place, where you can get crepes and there’s space for a tiny stage at the front of the bar. And the Mekons are no small band. They took up about half the room and we were about sixty people in the audience crammed in front of the stage.
It was a fantastic concert! There is a kinship between me and the Mekons. I’m not so much of an angry person anymore, but I still see things through murky glasses. Finding humor in the dark is still very important to me as a writer. My favorite Mekons lyric line is from the Fear And Whiskey album: “Darkness and doubt/ Just follow me around.” Every time I think of that little rhyme, I laugh.
I’m still looking for new music, something that’s intelligent, melodic, not overproduced, and ideally kinda funny. My latest discovery is a songwriter from Quebec, Helena Deland. A lot of her is a bit too somber for me, but there are a few songs that made me think, oh yeah, she’s an amazing songwriter! But there are so many bands hiding out there that I didn’t know about for a long time. I had never heard of the Saints until a hipper friend pointed them out to me. I didn’t know anything about Mission Of Burma for a long time. Maybe my life would have been different if I had seen Mission Of Burma live in the 80’s. With earplugs.
Cover Stories
Celebrities and their favorite records. This time: Jonathan Franzen. Since the publication of his novel “The Corrections” (2001), the American has been one of the most important writers in his country. Franzen was born in 1959 and grew up near St. Louis in the Midwest, where his novels are often set. In the tradition of literary realism, Franzen creates family portraits, he writes dense, complex novels that often focus on the rebellion of grown-up children against their parents. His most recent book, Crossroads, was released in 2021 and is about a Midwest pastoral family in the 1970s.