The Art of Multitasking

JON LANGFORD, the Welsh-born, Chicago-based, avant-leftist, pop culture provocateur, has so many concurrent musical projects (venerable punk-rockers the Mekons, alt-country ensembles the Waco Brothers and Pine Valley Cosmonauts, and a new band, Ship & Pilot), along with a thriving career as a visual artist, that he finally decided to address how he got from there to here.

He'll be doing just that Friday at the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage and Saturday at Iota to kick off next week's Future of Music Policy Summit at Lisner Auditorium. With Ship & Pilot and longtime Mekons associate Sally Timms, Langford will perform excerpts from "The Executioner's Last Songs," three multi-artist albums that used classic country, folk and punk songs about murder and death to address the death penalty.

But the program, he says, tells a larger story.

"This is a spoken-word, multimedia piece about the notion of artists as social activists," Langford explained recently from Chicago. "It's not a polemic against the nature of the death penalty. It became more of an autobiographical thing about someone trying to be a musician and a painter and socially active."

Langford will trace a journey that began in 1977 at England's Leeds University, where the art student, inspired when some of his classmates formed Gang of Four, founded the Mekons, now dubbed "the world's longest-running transcontinental punk band." (Its eight members are scattered here and in Europe.) In the early '90s, love took Langford to Chicago, where he began to deconstruct country music, aggressively with the Waco Brothers and somewhat more gently with the Pine Valley Cosmonauts. About the same time, Langford rekindled his passion for art, reflected in his iconographic, country-inspired paintings, prints and album covers; many of them will be projected by VJ Barry Mills during this weekend's performances.

Langford became involved in the death penalty project in 1999 when longtime musician-activist Steve Earle invited him to perform at a benefit concert and to meet several men who had been sentenced to death and later pardoned. About that time, Illinois Gov. George Ryan imposed a moratorium on the state's death penalty, noting that since Illinois had reinstated capital punishment in 1977, more executions have been overturned (13) than had been carried out (12). Just before leaving office in 2003, Ryan, a Republican, commuted the sentences of all the state's death row inmates, saying "our capital system is haunted by the demon of error: error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die." Ryan called the death penalty "one of the great civil rights struggles of our time."

In his native Wales, Langford points out, there is no death penalty, which is why "I was very shocked when I first came to the states. Not by the fact that there was a death penalty here, but that there was no debate, that it was a done deal and to actually question it was considered extremely weird. . . . People would ask, 'Well, what would you do if someone killed your mother, wouldn't you want to see him dead?'

"To be honest, I don't know," he admits. "If it happened to me, maybe I would, but I would hope I wasn't writing any legislation that day. And if I wanted to hunt someone down and kill them with my bare teeth, that would be my right, perhaps, but then the full weight of the law should be on me as well. I just don't think revenge is the absolute right, certainly of the state."

"The Executioner's Last Songs" was set in motion in 2001, first as a Langford-organized benefit concert for the Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium Project "where we had the idea of just doing murder ballads, the death versus death idea," he explains. "From that, [Chicago-based] Bloodshot Records suggested we make an album of it. It seemed like a very opportune thing to do because the people doing the campaign desperately needed money for photocopying and other real low-level stuff. I felt I could provide some money for that and bring attention to their cause." The album raised $40,000 for the project.

Musical tales of death, murder and execution, often from the killer's perspective, included Earle's disquieting version of "Tom Dooley"; Waco Brother Dean Schlabowske's reading of the Adverts' "Gary Gilmore's Eyes"; Lonesome Bob essaying Johnny Paycheck's "Pardon Me (I've Got Someone to Kill)"; Edith Frost's cool version of Merle Haggard's death row plaint "Sing Me Back Home"; and Future of Music Coalition founder/indie-rock icon Jenny Toomey on a baroque-folk rendition of Cole Porter's "Miss Otis Regrets." Langford covered the Louvin Brothers' "Knoxville Girl," a murderer's unflinching account of his grisly crime. Most performers were backed by the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, Bloodshot's house band.

After that album, "a lot of people contacted me," Langford says. "I've been in this, the lower reaches of the music business, for so long that I have a lot of friends who are working musicians, and they all said, 'If you'd asked me, I would have done that.' " And thus was born the two-disc follow-up. Critics couldn't really write about either collection without talking about death penalty reform, but while Langford has made plenty of politically charged music, particularly with the Mekons, he doesn't consider himself a political artist.

"When [the Mekons] started, we had really strong ideas about politics and wanted very much to be making big statements," he recalls. "The harsh realities of the way the media and the industry worked taught us a lot of lessons, and one of the things that this spoken-word show is about is that there are ways to do it and ways not to do it. I just didn't think pop stars should do this sort of Batman/Lone Ranger thing where they swoop in and solve everyone's problems with a huge benefit gig, and the sheer size of it almost crushes people's idea of normal grass-roots activism down to dust."