Geek Weekly #9

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"I've got to build a guitar as well?" Langford asked. "Sounds like work with shop on the end of it. Do they have drum circles?" Langford said he saw one in Seattle and "I puked down the front of my shirt." It was a waste of energy, he said, human sweat better spent coal mining. [That's a Welshman for you - s.l.]

"It's shocking talking to kids," he figured. The youth of today have a completely disregard for history. "People are just fed crap and they accept it." What they focus on in popular culture is "so relentlessly trivial". He feels sorry for them, but, as the father of a tyke, he has "great hopes for the next generations. They have really got something to revolt against." Such as the Information Age and the Internet which is "glorified advertising".

Langford is completely and utterly opposed to the death penalty. He did a benefit gig in Chicago for Illinois Artists Against the Death Penalty, fighting for moratorium in Illinois which was eventually granted. "The first political campaign I've been involved in that's getting anywhere."

But he received an e-mail from an "irate feminist"" livid that some of the songs he sang at the fund-raiser glorified violence against women.

He said he did 16 songs and two were like that, one being the Louvin Brothers' "Knoxville Girl" and "Cocaine Blues," made famous by Johnny Cash.

"I sang it as faithfully as I could, like Johnny Cash in a room full of prisoners." It's part of history and not to be censored, he argued. "I'm not calling you bitch," he replied, but the song is a slice of the writer's imagination or observations at a specific time. "People on the Left don't get out much," he sighed.

Langford admits the criticism "hurt me a bit." He is not anti-woman, but merely an artist echoing other artists' ruminations on life and death. The Louvin Brothers' vocals on "Knoxville Girl" are eerie because there is no nuance at all, no indication that a young woman is about to killed and the killer shows little remorse, or so it seems. "It's just very ambivalent. There's no moral to it."

Langford the Mekon moved to Chicago in 1992 and had no intentions of performing. Just married and without a job, he eventually played again on a small scale and found himself in the middle of people who work together, sharing. "A lot of trust which I find refreshing."

He had lived the music business of people who don't "bother if you don't have a hit record." Music has been played locally for thousands of years and hit records are a recent phenomenom. "Why should I have to feel like I should stop playing when I hit 30?"

As for Insurgent Country, "it was a trend."

"There has always been country on the fringes, a long way from the Nashville pop." Punk rockers seem to flock to it but "there's a lot of fucking crap," out there, would-be country twangers with "pieces of straw sticking in their teeth."

Langford had heard Cash in Leeds but "I didn't really know he was

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country." Cash was more like Elvis. "I thought of country as a late-night adult thing, slightly sordid."

On the Mekons' first U.S. tour in 1986, friends shared albums by George Jones, Ernest Tubb, Jimmy Rodgers, Jerry Lee Lewis and others. He really dug honky-tonk music. Back in Leeds, Langford and his gang would hold countrythemed parties, wear cowboy outfits, drink Cajun martinis and "get stinking drunk."

"I could really identify with it," he said. Music from the 1950s, the southern U.S., they had threads he recognized. Good country music is really "white urban blues" - three chords. Never interested in singing folk-blues with an American accent, he found kindred spirits in a Merle Haggard song or "Long Black Veil" found on Timms' Cowboy Sally 1997 CD, and also on Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison from 1968. Timms also does a stunning rendition of Dolly Parton's "Down From Dover," a sad tale of a pregnant, unmarried woman shunned by her parents and deserted by the father. She gives birth but the wee girl perishes "and dying was her way of telling me he wasn't coming down from Dover," Timms' strong voice sings.

"It's such a weirdly campy but morbid song, which suits me," Timms said in early July, me in Calgary, she in Chicago. "It's a really pretty song ... and it's over the top." She has sung the tune since 1985, along with other classics like "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" and "Horses".

Also a Chicago resident, Timms has a part-time job and has had articles published in Chicago Tribune. She won't say what the job is, telling me politely but firmly that it's none of my business. "It's not a very interesting job."

Timms has a stock reply to how she got into country: the Mekons were doing it England long before Uncle Tupelo surfaced, and English performers were singing country in the 60s.

"I don't really know what that term means," she said of Alternative Country. "In most cases alt-country just means crap." Many bands are like "fast fish waiting to pounce on the passing waves."

Influenced by her friends' musical tastes, country seems oddest to Timms because she's English, she said. She also likes "the subject matter."

"Country songs I choose are closer to folk music than country," she said, citing artists like Willie Nelson and older material. "I'm a folk singer, essentially."

As for my latest favorite song, "Glue", Timms said she asked Jeff Tweedy to do it but he was busy. Thankfully, in my opinion, Andre Williams was enlisted. "The idea," of doing the duet with Williams, "was just very amusing to me."

I suggested her cooing declarations of love sounded like Jane Birkin on the immortal Serge Gainsbourg song "Je t'aime . . . Moi non plus". Timms sends shivers up the spine while Birkin's orgasmic shuddering was controversial in 1969 and still makes the man squirm, if you know what I mean, and I think you

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do.

"I think I was going for more of a Diana Ross sound," replied Timms, but figures she didn't quite make it. She did.

The Sadies led by the Good Brothers, Dallas and Travis, is an outfit that Timms declares she would love to work with any time. I met the talented group of skinny Canadians 1 through friends and they had the pleasure of crashing on my South Austin floor with the sugar ants during SXSW 1999.

The Sadies played in Calgary while I was there. So enthralled was I to hear great music instead of a Waco juke box I staggered close enough to the stage to place my beer on the speakers. The only way to see a band.

The locale was the Night Gallery, which DiMond and fellow former Meat Purveyor, guitarist Bill Anderson, in town with Neko Case, also experienced. When not commandeering golf carts at the folk festival, DiMond and Anderson stole away to quaff Canadian suds and mosh - [to the Sadies? - s. l.] at the Night Gallery. That may have been where DiMond acquired a black eye, or perhaps it was the result of her unbridled embrance of the finest sport known to man and woman - hockey.

In November, while getting lubricated before a puzzling Reckless Kelly show at the Saxon Pub (why are these guys popular?) [got me, but they were fun at my cousin's wedding] and showing the Draught Horse bar wench how to lean into a slap shot, DiMond accepted my request to call Houston despite my sorry state.

"It was great," she said of the van ride through Western Canada. Timms and Rauhouse did the driving and worrying; DiMond and Langford did the drinking and the farting.

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"I got to skate the Olympic Oval!" An excited DiMond praised the Calgary facility, built for the 1988 Winter Olympics, "gorgeous, pristine."

"I loved Edmonton," she said. "It's a hip little town." That'll be news to my friends.

As for the fans she encountered, there was a weird split between the folkies who remember the Mekons and the newer ones familiar with The Waco Brother. The Mekons' fans were obsesses. Timms called them "'loomers,'" DiMond said, "because they loom over her." "I could be dead and they couldn't care."

Gently seeking some sizzle to sell my steak, what of her van mates?

Timms can be "intimidating." and Langford is "amazing, decent, intelligent, generous." He has more integrity than anybody."

I'll bet he wouldn't try to make money off of the efforts of others. I tried and couldn't.

Ah, but what the H-Edoublehockey-sticks, Bloodshot was kind enough to ship me a couple free CDs. Lo and behold, in the booklet accompanying Down to the Promises Land is one of my snapshots of the Sadies. A tiny slice of posterity instead of profits, I can live with that.

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[Below photo]: Sally Timms

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Decon and Tangle at the Cat Circus; or, Russian Blue

by Steve Decon

"Cat Cirus? What the hell is a cat circus?" That's the first response people give me when I mention this little adventure. It's usually quickly followed by, "How the hell do you train a cat?" Well, my friends and I will answer these and many more questions as I take you for a quick tour of the twisted world of Kouklachev's Cat Circus.

First, the basics. Kouklachev is a native of Russia, where he has been running this circus for some time. He has a theatre in Moscow and his show is apparently very popular there, selling out quite often (we saw him in a rather cramped high school auditorium at St. Stephen's it too was sold out). The

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