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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 genera-
tions. 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

36 Geek Weekly #9

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