You Can’t Kill Me: Celebrating the Life of Mojo Nixon
The revered rock ‘n’ roll outlaw died unexpectedly at age 66
I hate to say this – I really hate to say this – but somewhere, wherever he is, Don Henley is probably having a little ironic laugh.
Maybe a wry chuckle. But maybe raising a toast, too, I dunno, to the spirit of his one-time nemesis and punk rock burr-in-the-saddle, Mojo Nixon.
Mojo wrote that song, but he beat Henley to the grave.
AUDIO: Mojo Nixon “Don Henley Must Die”
On Wednesday, Mojo suffered a heart attack while onboard the annual Outlaw Country Cruise. (He hosted the Outlaw Country channel for Sirius/XM.) The cruise was regular spot for him, both as performer and host. It had set sail from Miami on Sunday.
Let me take you back in time. It was late in summer of 1990, and Mojo and I were sharing a pizza pie and some beers at a Newton, Massachusetts pizzeria. Mojo was not a shy man and at this moment, as the song “Don Henley Must Die” had been raised, he was off like a bat out of hell: “Rock and roll is supposed to be wild and crazy and fun and free and in the back seat with the judge’s daughter at the drive-in movie theater with a fake ID and somehow that all turns into ‘Louie, Louie’ or ‘Maybelline’ or some song and I don’t know what Don Henley does but it ain’t rock and roll.”
In the song, he called Henley “a poet of despair, pumped up with hot air/He’s serious and pretentious and I just don’t care”? A few other things, too, and the song had a kicker: “The same goes for you, Sting!”
What pissed him off most about Henley?
These thoughts, he told me, bubbled up in Mojo’s brain while watching the previous year’s Grammys, when Henley won Best Rock Male Vocal Performance for The End of the Innocence.
“They’re all dressed up and everything and everybody’s taking everything so damn seriously,” Mojo said. “All artists don’t have to be this giant fraternity party of rock like I am, but they can loosen up their ponytails a little bit. It shouldn’t be dead serious and boring Any time someone tries to be the big Sunday school teacher in the sky, you kick them in the ass.”
To Henley’s credit – and I kinda hate to say this, too – but his response, one of ‘em anyway, after an initial angry dismissal, was that he most certainly would die, but just not on Mojo Nixon’s timetable. And then on Aug. 2, 1994, Mojo was playing a gig on his birthday in Austin, Texas with his band, the Toadliquors, at a club called The Hole in the Wall.
Who showed up?
Henley. Jumped up on stage. Joined in on the chorus of “Don Henley Must Die.” This would be like Neil Young joining Lynyrd Skynyrd back in the day to sing “Sweet Home Alabama.” (That almost happened, by the way and in 2000, I asked Young about the rumor, that he sang that with Ronnie Van Zant once, harmonizing on the “I hope Neil Young will remember/Southern man don’t need him around anyhow.” Nope, Young said. He was going to. They’d made plans. He thought it’d be fun. And then the plane crash.)
VIDEO: Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper “Debbie Gibson is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Love Child”
Henley was not the only one to suffer the sting of Mojo’s wit. There was “Debbie Gibson is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Love Child,” there was “Stuffing Martha’s Muffin” (about MTV VJ Martha Quinn and her, uh, muffin), “Shane’s Dentist,” about the Pogues’ Shane MacGowan’s tombstone teeth, “Bring Me the Head of David Geffen,” and, of course, his 1987 alt-rock radio/MTV hit, “Elvis Is Everywhere,” more about the lunacy of Elvis’s obsessive/he’s-still-alive! fans than Elvis.
Mojo Nixon – birth name Neill Kirby McMillan Jr. – died at age 66. Mojo’s family issued a statement to Rolling Stone shortly after his death, reading, in part, “How you live is how you should die. Mojo Nixon was full-tilt, wide-open rock hard, root hog, corner on two wheels + on fire… Passing after a blazing show, a raging night, closing the bar, taking no prisoners + a good breakfast with bandmates and friends. … Mojo has left the building. Since Elvis is everywhere, we know he was waiting for him in the alley out back. Heaven help us all.”
When Mojo and I sat down in 1990, he was pretty jacked up, i.e., normal. He’d done six albums with partner, mandolin and washboard player Skid Roper, but felt that work had run its course and his current album, technically his first solo album, was called Otis – named after the town drunk on the Andy Griffith Show. He recorded it with X bassist John Doe, Beat Farmers drummer Country Dick Montana and guitarist Eric Ambel from the Del Lords and Bill Davis from Dash Rip Rock.
“This is the first post-punk cowpunk supergroup,” Mojo crowed. “Everybody had fun. Everybody was there to help exorcise whatever demons I had.”
Musically, a lot of those songs were put a gutbucket Chuck Berry framework with added “big noise,” as Mojo put it.
As it happened, Mojo was working on a screenplay for a film called Citizen Mojo. He was hoping, as told me, to con somebody into financing it. Ultimately, the con didn’t work and it never came to fruition.
But writing it, he said, forced him to analyze his own character. “I had to figure out what the five points of Mojoness are,” he said. “One of them is definitely celebrity-bashing – when someone gets too big, I’m the court jester who puts the pin in them and lets the air out of their balloon. The other elements of Mojo are: a healthy disregard for decorum as your mom perceives it; the great love of things American, whether it’s bigfoot trucks or Otis the drunk or go-carts; a great love for American music – something you can play on the front porch with an acoustic guitar that would make your grandma dance; and also this Richard Pryor stream-of-consciousness, the existential weirdo out there on stage with a jet pack.”
VIDEO: Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper perform “Elvis Is Everywhere” on The Arsenio Hall Show
I was thinking of Alice Cooper and his eventual separation from his character on stage and off. How much of this was the real Mojo him and how much a semi-fictional alter-ego?
“It’s not a separate character,” he said. “It’s the character I wish I was. As time goes on, it gets much closer and closer, but there are definitely times when I’m just sitting around the house watching Perry Mason and noodling around on the guitar. Then, I’ll jack it up. All of a sudden put it in overdrive, double-overdrive.”
His great hope?
“Some guy will be listening to my records and three months or three years later will go, ‘Say, man, Mojo’s advocating anarchy!’”
We caught up again in 1997, this time with Mojo on the phone from a Motel 6 in Raliegh, North Carolina. He was playing a Boston club soon, promoting that show and touring behind an odds-and-sods compilation album, Gadzooks!!!: The Homemade Bootleg, which I noted had four songs on it about getting drunk.
“Something I’m good at,” he said, hewing to the write-what-you-know dictum. “I’m not writing, you know, lovey-dovey songs. But it wasn’t like I sat down and wrote ‘em all in one night. I got to the same drunk state [to write] four different times. It’s my oeuvre, which is a French word for ‘stuff that you do.’”
I asked how he’d define his job if he had to.
“Outside agitator,” Mojo said. “That’s what I’ve always done. I was an outside agitator in third grade.”
But not all of it was for yuks. On Gadzooks!!!, Mojo had a song called “Death Row Blues,” where he nicked some riffs from the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” and the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner,” and spun a gripping story-song from a condemned man’s point of view, a roots rock Southern echo of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Mercy Seat.”
And after that, well, “Amsterdam Dogshit Blues,” which is about exactly what you think it is about.
So, I had to ask: How low is your bad taste bar?
“It’s on the floor and I’ll dig a hole and go under it,” Mojo said. “That’s what makes me, me.”
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