Oh No, Not Mojo Nixon (1957-2024)
Saluting rock's wildman, last seen on his own Outlaw Country Cruise
He’d probably prefer to go out this way — a cardiac arrest overnight, following a typically kick-ass performance on the Outlaw Cruise that he organized from his groundbreaking Outlaw Country Sirius-X station.
Still, it’s a shock to hear of the death of Mojo Nixon, the funny, frantic and reliably outrageous performer who campaigned all his life for a heightened sense of all of American excesses - from Elvis on down, even as he berated lawyers, banks and dour arena rockers along the way.
First as a two-man guitar-and-percussion act, Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper, and then as a frontman for his own rock band, and finally as a master of ceremonies, channeling the kind of classic and non-Nashville country for his vital radio network, he never stopped being a livewire advocate for American music of all different kinds of vital stripes.
He became a personal hero for me and my pals as younger reporters, discovering him first at a still-legendary 1986 triple bill soon after I moved to New England that was never quite equalled: with Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper on a bill with They Might Be Giants and headlined by The Pogues.
The brash, punk-inspired energy was immediately appealing, but Nixon incorporated into it a knowledge of American blues, country and early rock ’n’ roll. Certainly his frenzied acoustic guitar playing accompanied by percussion like a big, empty water jug on songs like “Mushroom Maniac” and “Gin Guzzlin’ Frenzy” that had lineage to early American string bands predating country and bluegrass (though played with a frenzy that made it something new and engrossing).
His songbook was filled with songs that shaped his worldview and musical taste with urgency, particularly naming prevailing pop culture heroes: “Don Henley Must Die,” “Debbie Gibson is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child” and “Stuffing Martha’s Muffin,” skewering MTV VJ Martha Quinn.
He was one of the few performers of the era to so easily fit in humor with his music.
“People seem to get all bent out of shape about all this, but it’s all in fun. We’re not talking about bran surgery, we’re talking about rock ’n’ roll,” Nixon told me in 1990. “If Don Henley gets a sense of humor after this whole experience, that was my point.”
But what an unusual point. Laughing out loud during a song wasn’t something rock fans often had an opportunity to do — certainly not in the sometimes precious world of alt rock.
“I think somewhere along the line you had to become a comedian or a musician,” he said. “You couldn’t be a funny musician. It’s like the Coasters or Roger Miller never existed. You know, in the ‘40s and ’50s in rhythm and blues and country, there were tons of musical comedians — people who were funny and wrote songs. But at some point, everybody was thinking you had to save the rainforest with this real dour act.”
He called it “the Sting program, where you want to be taken as a serious artist.”
Certainly he shared their concern for world problems, he was quick to add. “I’m for saving the rainforest — but I don’t wanna be whining about it.”
But by adding that humor, he was often pegged as a novelty act, which wasn’t quite right either.
“Obviously, I’m not doing a parody thing like Weird Al or something,” he said. “Part of the reason on this record you can play next to the Replacements or Los Lobos or whoever, and we’re rocking’ in there right with ‘em.”
He was doing just that on the tour he was promoting in that interview — performing with a band instead of his old sidekick Skid Roper. “Me and Skid made a big noise when there was just two of us. Now there’s four of us.”
By then, he said, “I felt like the two-man thing had run its course musically, spiritually, road wise, every which way,” Nixon said. “Live, we were repeating ourselves, laying the same clubs, playing before the same people, kinda doing the same show. I was ready to go on to something new. It’s something I wanted to do for quite some time. Skid didn’t want to do the band thing.”
Besides, he said, it better reflected the sound on his albums. “All the records since ‘bodacious’ have bass on them and extra guitars on them and background singing, keyboards — all kind of junk.”
He had enlisted the Austin band the Neptunes to become his Toadlickers. It was one of two bands he was involved at the time; the other being The Pleasure Barons, a big, brass-backed outfit co-led by Country Dick Montana of the Beat Farmers, a similarly hard-drinking, hard-charging performer who would die in 1995 at just 40.
That tour had him playing with Boston’s Cavedogs and the Dead Milkman, who immortalized him in their biggest song “Punk Rock Girl:” “Security guards trailed us to a record shop / We asked for Mojo Nixon, They said, "He don't work here" / We said, "If you don't got Mojo Nixon then your store could use some fixin'"
At the college show in New London that came the following week, The Dead Milkmen headlined, but it was Mojo who came on stage to tie its lead singer to a chair at one point.
His was a set of songs that celebrated dive bars and lowbrow enthusiasms, with anthems like “I Wanna Race Bigfoot Trucks” and “Winnebago Warrior.” But not just a brash, beer-guzzling crazy man, he was steeped enough in rock and roll such that there was some Tony Joe White funk in things like “Chicken Drop,” a roadhouse blues feel on “I”m Gonna Dig Up Howlin’ Wolf” and quotes from Iggy Pop to Lou Reed to Jonathan Richman emerging in his songs, especially when he was just in the duo with Skid Row.
And not only did he sing “Elvis is Everywhere” — and a followup “(619) 259-KING” — he often draped his stage with a tapestry of the King. So naturally, when some pals and I got our hands on some second-hand rubber Elvis wigs that had been used in the parade celebrating the Statue of Liberty centennial in 1986, we naturally brought one up to Mojo at a show in Northampton, Mass.
He liked the wig well enough, I suppose, but to tell the truth, he didn’t need him to fully represent the spirit of unbridled American freedom of rock ’n’ roll.