The Cedar sat down with multidisciplinary artist, and founder of country punk band Waco Brothers, Jon Langford. Learn about Jon’s approaches to his art — both music and visual — and the importance of collaboration in his work.
Catch Waco Brothers at The Cedar on Friday, October 14, 2022. Pit Stop opens.
Jon Langford.
The Cedar: The Waco Brothers is currently a six-piece band?
Jon Langford: Yes.
The Cedar: Do you consider yourself the lead of this or is it a collaborative project?
Jon: All the things I do are collaborative.
The Cedar: Do you prefer it that way when you work?
Jon: Absolutely, yeah. It's too much responsibility with the leader of anything. If you want to be the leader of anything, you've got a problem. We actually formed a band in the ‘90s, where it was kind of a collaboration between me and a guy called Dean Schlabowske who was a singer in another band – it was a kind of hardcore band. We were in the Mekons, but we both have this love of country music. We wanted to have something that we could play locally in bars and be paid in beer, and that spiraled out of control. It started when Bloodshot Records started in Chicago. They encouraged us to make an album. We were just doing Johnny Cash, George Jones covers, and we thought no one's gonna really want to hear that. We deliberately wrote a bunch of songs with simple chord structures, like a country song – which is a skill in itself to be able to write something that's simple – and then put them through the Waco process, sausage machines. They came out sounding quite noisy. It's fun, exciting rock and roll but basically the form of it and that subject matter was always our take on country music.
The Cedar: Do you think people were surprised when you made the switch? Or was it a natural progression to what you were doing in the Mekons?
Jon: With the Mekons we veered into a form of roots music. Our peers were interested in acid house music and electronic dance music while we were getting interested in kind of violins and accordions and Cajun music. There was a movement in Britain in the ‘80s called cow punk, which we kept ourselves as far away from as possible because it was just kind of like kitschy, where you’d dress up like Americans and pretend to be cowboys. But, you know, in a way, we were part of that in the sense but we were taking people like Hank Williams and Jimmy Rogers and Loretta Lynn, who died today, extremely seriously and thinking of them as kind of like folk philosophers, rather than something funny and kitschy.
Waco Brothers.
The Cedar: As an artist, do you have to give up the desire to control your image at some point because you can't control how people view you anymore?
Jon: Yeah. I would say that the way we've conducted ourselves with the Mekons and in the Waco Brothers is almost as important as the music in a sense, but I just think it's been, you know, we have not been career orientated, ambitious. Money was about providing for ourselves and hopefully creating for our audience some sort of joyful, interesting experience. More seriously now, after the pandemic, I'm glad that's where we were – what our priorities are. We did a lot of weird things during the pandemic, playing much smaller places to much more intimate crowds and pivoting a little bit to find different ways where it makes sense. It's been quite, quite rewarding. I found people very receptive as well. It's almost like we took music for granted for a long time. There was just this kind of corporate machine that churned stuff out. Now I think people are a little more selective about the experiences they want to have and it's been quite interesting. For us, you mentioned collaboration. For me, music is a fantastic collaborative language.
I'm a visual artist as well, and it's kind of hard to do visual art. In the same way. The mechanics of music are just so open. It's painful, so sometimes, to be able to play music it's just a real joy because you get to collaborate with lots of people and when you get together you don't have to prepare that much. You just get together, start playing and something nice happens.
The Cedar: When you approach your visual art, how do you do that differently from music? Is it totally separate in your mind?
Jon: No, definitely not. I went through a period of not making any visual art. When the band formed initially, we were all art students. I think there was some kind of rejection of that academic world that we were going through, although certain things did kind of seep into what we were doing. Music just seemed fine. The politics and the whole atmosphere of the punk rock thing consumed us. We were just deeply into that. Later on, I just became more and more interested in visual art again, but it is problematic that it's better. It’s quite solitary. I quite enjoy that sometimes, to sit on your own and have some quiet time. But it would be nice if there was a way to make that a more collaborative experience.
The Cedar: What drew you back to painting, or was it a gradual thing?
Jon: I was making artwork. I just couldn't really stop myself. It was a lot to do with music and actually thinking about music and visiting Nashville and being very interested in the history of music and reading a lot about it. I started to see what certain genres went out of fashion and people sort of disappeared. I was interested in Nashville going down there, and we got all those old bars and there's all these paintings and photographs up on the wall – publicity photographs. They were extremely, extremely poignant photos of young people smiling hopefully from 50, 60 years ago. A lot of them never got anywhere, but it captured a moment when you have that hope. It was you hoping for the best. So I started making paintings of those, and that's basically what started me off. When I moved to Chicago in the ‘90s, some people had seen some of my work and were interested enough to invite me to have an art show which I'd never considered. But they'd seen illustrations or album covers I had done, so it became an obvious step to move into that. I needed to make a living after being dumped for the second time by a major label in 1992. We were in a state of great disarray and had lots of legal problems, so it was probably a good time for me to pick up my paint brushes again.
The Cedar: When things like being dumped by a label happened, were you in despair or was it a good thing?
Jon: No, not really despair, because it didn't make much sense. The whole thing wasn't a very joyous experience. If you went from being a brilliant independent artist that a major label wants to sign, to being an artist at the major labels just signed, then you become a corporate employee. It doesn't make a lot of sense. We function better when we're in control of every aspect of what we do. Even now with Bloodshot Records Just stopping. We were with them for about 25 years. It was a sensible, safe place for the Waco Brothers to be that provided a venue for all these things we wanted to do. We couldn't really imagine that not existing, but it actually is quite exciting. Because this is a different world and it's a different landscape and it makes us behave in a different way. We're finding it quite rewarding. We haven't got a lot of work, but it’s all good. It's all one kind of post pandemic things that you take on in a funny, funny new world. That’s to be appreciated, so no regrets with any of that. Usually when something changes, you can look at it both ways, but I think we've always taken it as a bit of a blessing when you move into a new phase.
The Cedar: So don’t romanticize the past, is what you’re saying? Let’s relish the past for a little bit. Tell me about your working relationship with Dean. Why do you feel that you two have been friends and collaborative for so long?
Jon: One of the things I would say is that it's not about the money. There's no ego. We can write together and we can write separately. I don't think either of us have any kind of worries about the other person. I think songwriting duos are often very competitive. We understand what our strengths are better than other people do. He lets me do what I want to do and I can do what he wants to and we will comment on each other's stuff and help arrange it. It's like two songwriters within a band, which is much nicer than having just one. But with Tracey [Dear], as well, a mandolin player singer, so we write songs for him. So there's actually three lead vocalists in the band, which makes it quite exciting. Alan Doughty also joined us. He's was in a band called Jesus Jones which was a very skateboard punk electronic band. He ended up living in Chicago. We asked him to join a country rock band. He said, “What would that be like? I don't know how to play that music at all.” He also was very proactive with production and just the arrangements of the songs. It's very democratic. And then since the last couple of years, we’ve included Jean Cook, who was a violin player from New York. We've expanded. So we have a female Waco Brother, but don't call her a Waco sister, because she doesn't like that.
The Cedar: So Jon, we're really excited to have you at this Cedar Cultural Center. What brings you back to Minneapolis?
Jon: I've got a lot of friends from Minneapolis, the Mekons were signed to Twin Town Records in the ‘80s. We've tried to keep regular contact with a bunch of the people who worked for that label and the people we knew from the clubs that make up the city. Minneapolis isn't that far from Chicago, but we don't get up as much as we'd like to. And the last three years it's kind of weird. No one's been traveling anywhere, so we're just eager to get up and playing.
Catch Waco Brothers at The Cedar on Friday, October 14, 2022. Pit Stop opens.