As a banjo strikes the first notes of a Louvin Brothers-popularized standard,
"Knoxville Girl," the song opens waltz-time pretty, like music playing at a
country-fair dance in summer. "I met a little girl in Knoxville/A town we all
know well/And every Sunday evening/Out in her home I'd dwell," sings the
Handsome Family's Brett Sparks, his sturdy baritone carefully embracing words
of courtship before turning cemetery-solemn. "We went to take an evening walk
about a mile from town/I picked a stick up off the ground and knocked that fair
girl down/She fell down on her bended knee, for mercy she did
cry. . . . Don't kill me here, I'm unprepared to die."
It becomes grimly apparent -- by the next verse, actually -- that the narrator
has no intention of listening to his bride-to-be's desperate pleas. Instead, he
beats her to death, eventually gets caught, and is left to languish in prison
contemplating his awful crime and wasted life. The song's grim story line --
and implicit life-without-parole message -- makes it the perfect choice to open
The Executioner's Last Songs (Bloodshot), a benefit CD compiled by the
Pine Valley Cosmonauts and the first volume in a series of discs aimed at
raising money for the Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium Project (volume two is
scheduled for early next year).
The disc features murder-ballad covers of songs by the likes of Hank Williams,
Johnny Paycheck, the Adverts, and Merle Haggard clustered around the twin
themes of violence and vengeance. A veritable who's who of the underground
roots scene -- Steve Earle, Freakwater's Janet Bean, Neko Case, Paul Burch,
among others -- swap stories and songs as guest singers while the Jon
Langford-led Pine Valley Cosmonauts make like a trad-country house-band version
of Booker T. & the MG's. From the manic howl and freight-train rumble of
"Gary Gilmore's Eyes," as sung by the Waco Brothers' Dean Schlabowski, to Jenny
Toomey's languorous reading of Cole Porter's "Miss Otis Regrets," The
Executioner's Last Songs brims with effortless vitality, gallows humor, and
a sense of unforced camaraderie among its performers. In short, it's got loads
of personality (and personalities), yet it never comes across as overbearing or
self-righteous -- a danger whenever rock musicians approach a subject as
politically charged as the death penalty.
Long-time Mekon leader Jon Langford conceived and spearheaded the project, and
he says that reaching out to like-minded friends in the underground music
community rather than pop superstars was the key to striking the right balance
between making a point and making a mess. "This is a bunch of friends, really
-- and it's a group," he emphasizes over the phone from his studio in
Chicago, where he's readying plans for a 25th-anniversary Mekons tour to
support a September release and fielding submissions for a follow-up to The
Executioner's Last Songs. "I hate the sound of tribute albums where country
superstars deliver sanitized, slowed-down digital ballads of Hank Williams
songs. You listen to a record like that and it's just an incoherent, unfocused,
obese load of crap. But people buy 'em by the droves and somebody makes a lot
of money. I wanted to make a coherent album -- and I think this album stands up
against anything else I've recorded."
Langford and the Chicago-based Bloodshot label estimate that the disc has so
far raised between $40,000 and $50,000 for the Moratorium Project, which itself
is meeting with success: a recent string of exonerations of innocent men
sitting on death row has, until further notice, halted executions in the State
of Illinois. "We're not trying to feed Africa or save the rain forest,"
Langford points out. "We're trying to civilize America."
A British expat who's adopted Chicago as his home town, Langford first began
mulling the moral ramifications of the death penalty when he moved to Illinois
from the West Yorkshire city of Leeds in the early 1990s, around the time mass
murderer John Wayne Gacy was executed by the state. "I didn't really have to
think about it before because I lived in Europe -- I lived in the rest of the
world. I was shocked when Gacy was executed and there was no debate and no
protest. The Gacy incident would have been a great time for people to stand up
and say no. Why do we have to be monsters just because this guy's a monster?
I'm not saying killers should be part of society. They should be locked up. and
there should be a big wall, and you should pay people to ensure that they don't
get out again."
Steve Earle, who turns in a lean, harrowing reading of the traditional folk
song "Tom Dooley" on The Executioner's Last Songs, has for years worked
with various anti-death-penalty organizations. An alternate version of one of
several songs he's written on the subject, "Ellis Unit One," makes an
appearance on Sidetracks (E-Squared/Artemis), his recently released
collection of odds and ends that gathers together some of his most
stylistically diverse work and most surprising covers. Alongside a rocked-up
cover of the Chambers Brothers' psych-soul classic "Time Has Come Today" -- a
duet with Sheryl Crow -- sits a faithfully serrated take on Nirvana's "Breed."
Most startling, though, is his genre-hopping foray into reggae territory on the
Slickers' Jamaican anthem "Johnny Too Bad." Although none of these selections
comes close to surpassing the originals, Sidetracks offers a unique
glimpse of Earle's extracurricular activities.
The chilling "Ellis Unit One," a song he originally wrote for the Dead Man
Walking soundtrack, stands out as the disc's most affecting track. For
sheer pathos and naked portent, it almost matches "Over Yonder (Jonathan's
Song)," a meditation on capital punishment told from the perspective of a
death-row inmate that Earle, who himself has spent some time in jail on drug
charges, included on 2000's Transcendental Blues (E-Squared/Artemis).
This one is the death-penalty song that cuts Earle the deepest and is the most
personal. " `Jonathan's Song' is the result of me witnessing an execution,
so it can be a little hard on me. It's not a lot of fun to sing."
The idea for The Executioner's Last Songs took root when Langford
performed with Earle and Tony Fitzpatrick at a concert in 1999, which is where
he met Dick Cunningham, a defense attorney active in the anti-death-penalty
movement who had helped free a handful of inmates on death row in Illinois.
(Since 1989, 13 innocent men have been exonerated and released from death row
in that state; according to Amnesty International, more than 100 persons have
been exonerated nationwide after wrongful convictions during the past 26 years;
and 60 Minutes recently reran its story on the alarmingly high number of
death-row inmates whose convictions have been overturned in recent years.)
That's when Langford says he first became convinced that the anti-death-penalty
campaign was a "winnable" fight.
Earle, who stands to attract some strong criticism when Jerusalem
(E-Squared/Artemis) hits stores on September 24 with a song about the American
Taliban convert titled "John Walker's Blues," points to a moratorium now also
in place in Maryland as a sign of increased skepticism surrounding capital
punishment -- and an increased willingness by each side to talk and work
together. "What that means is that even people who still fundamentally support
the death penalty are willing to admit that the system is flawed, and that is
encouraging to me. Rather than yelling and insisting that we're right, we have
to trust that we're right and trust that capital-punishment supporters are not
bad people, that they believe what they believe because they've been lied to.
Without the help of a lot of people who believe the death penalty is just and
fair in certain situations, there would not be a moratorium in Illinois right
now."
Still, there has been resistance. "Somebody said we're all a `murderer lovers'
club in some right-wing paper," Langford allows, his voice thorny with sarcasm.
"Yeah, we want to see murderers roaming the streets. I come from a country that
has many murders a year and there's, like, 100 times as many here where you
have the death penalty, which is meant to get rid of it. It doesn't work, and
anyone who thinks it does is just kidding themselves and lying, basically. The
main catalyst for me is having kids that I know are going to grow up in the
States and I don't want to have to explain it to them. As I see it, when
somebody dies like that, the blood is on all of our hands."
Yet one wonders whether a relatively modest, independently released album like
The Executioner's Last Songs -- or any one song, album, or piece of art
-- can make a substantial difference. Are semi-underground artists like
Langford and Earle merely preaching to the choir? How do you reach people on
the opposite side of such a volatile issue?
"The vast majority of the time we are preaching to the choir," Earle
concedes. "But there's been a slow change, and, you know, not all of my fans
oppose the death penalty. But I know of some who have changed their minds
because of some of the songs I've written, and that is one thing art can do. I
don't think artists have a responsibility to do anything other than create art,
but if what you're doing is art and not entertainment, I think it is inherently
political. I don't think you have to go out of your way to make political
art."
Langford takes a pragmatic view. "We've raised some money for the people who
are working thanklessly within the campaign . . . so it's a
success as far as I'm concerned. It's just one little tool. I don't know how to
go out and change the minds of the great majority who really don't think about
much, and probably don't like music very much, and now who obviously don't
think about voting very much. Why the hell are they going to listen to me? I'm
not Bono, you know."
Issue Date: August 30 - September 5, 2002
