Back in the "no future" early days, punk didn’t offer a great retirement plan. After a record or two of three-chord raging, you could stay the course, turn pop, get clever, or check out altogether, like Sid Vicious or Darby Crash. There were pros and cons to all of these.
Now, you can grab a hat and an acoustic guitar and ride off into the sunset. It’s a standard move, the ol’ alt-country switcheroo, but it wasn’t an obvious choice in 1985, when a gang of artsy, lefty ex-punks from Leeds, England, opened its fourth album with words worthy of the Clash or Johnny Cash: "I was out late the other night/ Fear and whiskey kept me going."
The band was the Mekons, and 30 years after Fear and Whiskey arguably gave birth to alt-country, they’re still going strong—and hitting the whiskey. They return Nov. 27 with Jura, a joint album recorded with ace twangster Robbie Fulks on a boozy 2014 trip to Scotland, and sometime next year, they’ll release the record they cut live in July at Brooklyn’s Jalopy Theatre.
If punky-tonk has become less prevalent on, oh, the last dozen Mekons LPs, co-founder Jon Langford still throws down the hoedown with his Waco Brothers side project. And he hasn’t forgotten why Americana first seemed like a plausible extension of angry UK guitar music.
"Both were concerned with addressing their audience directly," Langford says from Chicago, where he relocated with the Mekons in the mid-'80s. "Someone like Merle Haggard, there wasn’t a real big barrier between him and his audience, even though he was a big star. He was very much a populist, very much speaking and writing in terms that were instantly translatable into the experience of his audience. That’s what punk felt like to me."
The Mekons began drawing these connections in the early '80s, after producers Bill Leader and John Gill hipped them to the raw power of British folk (heard on 1983’s The English Dancing Master EP), Cajun music, reggae, and other stripped-down sounds. At the time, punk was growing staler by the second, and the Mekons—themselves in a transitional phase after a period of inaction—opted to switch up instruments, add violin and accordion, and betray one of the genre’s central conceits.
"Punk was very much about discarding the past," Langford says. "Suddenly, three years later, there were these threads going through the past that were really fascinating."
One of those threads connected British folk to American country, which Langford and fellow singer and guitarist Tom Greenhalgh studied via the "honky-tonk classics" tapes given to them by Chicago DJ Terry Nelson. It all came together on the brilliant Fear and Whiskey—a record that suggests a fiddle bow being dragged across Wire, or maybe the house band at some fantasy pub-saloon where cowboys and striking British miners crack Thatcher jokes and sing along with "Hard to Be Human Again" at the top of their lungs.
"We saw America as this strange land nothing like England, nothing like Europe," says sweet-voiced singer Sally Timms, who joined just after Fear and Whiskey. "People rode around in beautiful Cadillacs and listened to country music. It was different, but it’s about failed relationships and drinking and not having enough money and all those things that seemed to be a thread back to the first Mekons record."
Meanwhile, back in America, the members of L.A. punk stalwarts X were also connecting the dots between Buck Owens and "Blitzkrieg Bop". In 1985, the same year Fear and Whiskey came out, X grabbed Blasters guitarist Dave Alvin, reinvented itself as the rollicking trad-country offshoot the Knitters, and released Poor Little Critter on the Road, another seminal alt-country album.
At the time, X singer, bassist, and songwriter John Doe was as bored with punk as Langford had been. Thanks to greaser guitarist Billy Zoom, X had long worked rockabilly into its sound, and the more they listened to old blues and country, the more everyone realized that honky-tonk—O.G. bullshit-free music—wasn’t that different from what they’d been doing.
"X had a lot of songs about loyalty and/or infidelity, songs about relationships, social commentary," Doe says. "Maybe country music is more direct, but that was a main point of punk rock: The lyrics were about something. A lot of what was called rock'n'roll before that, the songs were about fucking nothing, because [artists] were trying to be so general. You had to relate to 10,000 people at a superdome."
Doe has stuck with roots music throughout his 25-year solo career, filling gaps between X and Knitters reunions with no fewer than nine excellent albums of country, folk, and down-home rock'n'roll. Americana, he says, has always been his answer to the question all ambitious punks must ask themselves: "What can I get away with?"
"Not in a cynical way," Doe says. "But what can you sell? The Clash could get away with doing dub because they listened to it so much. But I couldn’t. So what can I get away with? What can I sing and actually believe in and deliver?"
In the case of English singer-songwriter Holly Golightly, it’s more a matter of what you’re willing to try. In the early '90s, as leader of all-girl Billy Childish affiliates Thee Headcoatees, her sound was trashy garage-rock. Since going solo in 1995, Golightly has dipped into older styles like R&B, rockabilly, gospel, and country. Those last two are the principal crops she and multi-instrumentalist Lawyer Dave—her partner in life and the kooky Americana duo Holly Golightly & the Brokeoffs—raise down at their farm in rural Georgia.
The funny thing is that Golightly, like Timms, doesn’t consider herself a huge country fan. If we’re talking arcane Americana, Holly’s way more into gospel. She was drawn to country almost instinctually, as the simplicity lets her tell meaningful stories despite limited guitar skills.
"I can’t say those old '50s artists were pushing the envelope and breaking new ground or doing anything monumental on purpose, but they were singing things that weren’t the usual big-band standards that came before," says Golightly, days before embarking on a tour to support the Brokeoffs’ latest, Coulda Shoulda Woulda. "They were singing their own songs, their personal accounts of whatever was gong on with them. The storytelling elements and the innocence of it—I think that rings true for a lot of punk."
The fact that she’s British adds another dimension to Brokeoffs tunes like "Getting High for Jesus". Golightly says that when she pokes fun at American culture, it’s done with love. Sometimes, she’s simply recycling stories picked up from fellow farmers or the guy down at the feed store.
"I didn’t even know this music existed until I was doing it,” Golightly says. “And I’ve grown to really love it. Being British gives me some license to play with things Americans would do in a different way."
On the opposite end of the walking-the-walk spectrum stands Mike Ness, founder and lone original member of SoCal punk institution Social Distortion. Like James Cagney with a Les Paul or Robert Mitchum with neck tats, this quintessential punk-turned-troubadour has been singing autobiographical songs about drinking, fighting, shooting dope, and causing trouble since 1978.
In the early days, before Social D morphed into the punkabilly band it is today, Ness was very much of the year-zero mindset. He was living too fast to stop and think about how the ferociously honest songs on his band’s 1983 debut Mommy’s Little Monster mirrored the music he’d absorbed as a kid.
Those early influences included the Stones and Creedence, his gateways to vintage blues and rockabilly. Somewhere along the way, he got his pre-tattooed hands on a Smithsonian Folkways set of Depression-era songs, and that rattled something deep inside.
"It sounded really desperate and honest," Ness says. "The Carter Family sounded like how I felt inside at the time. And then when I heard the Sex Pistols, they sounded how I felt inside at the time."
In the early '80s, Ness wasn’t feeling that great inside. He struggled with substance abuse and engaged in all sorts of bad behavior he’s sure to detail in his long-gestating memoir. It wasn’t until he kicked drugs in '85 that he figured out how to reboot the band his addiction had nearly destroyed. He was painting houses for a living, listening all day to oldies radio and cowpunk bands like Jason and the Scorchers, and the next move became obvious.
"I just had a direction," Ness says. "I love country. I love bluegrass. I love folk music. I love blues. I love rockabilly. We need to incorporate all this into our sound."
Like Doe and Langford, he knew dudes with spiky hair and leather jackets didn’t have a monopoly on setting intense feelings to music.
"It became crystal clear to me that Billie Holiday is just as punk as Sid Vicious," he says. "It’s the same thing. They’re acting out. They’re singing about their lives. It’s honest, and it’s really heavy, and it’s hard."
Ness’ new mindset informed Social D’s 1987 sophomore effort Prison Bound, a transitional album wherein he laid the template for later triumphs like 1990’s Social Distortion and 1999’s solo Cheating at Solitaire, featuring Brian Setzer and Bruce Springsteen.
"The guitars were practically doing Marty Robbins gunfighter ballads, but the lyrical content was all real life," Ness says of Prison Bound. "That’s when we said, ‘Is this punk?’ I’m singing about almost going to prison. This is where my life took me. What is more authentic than real life?"
If the Social D album he’s writing now is anything like the last one, 2011’s Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes, it’ll be almost rootsy enough to warrant solo billing. This raises the question of whether Ness might someday set Social D aside, go full-time singer-songwriter, and enjoy the benefits of that punk-rock retirement plan he unwittingly helped design.
"I do wonder sometimes whether I’ll still be able to sing ‘Mommy’s Little Monster’ in my late '50s and early '60s," says Ness. "No one really knows until they get there. But that would be a great way to go out. I plan to live to be 100, so let’s say I spend the last 20 years of my life doing that. That would be great."