I never felt cool enough to like The Mekons.

By the late eighties, when I arrived at the college radio station, they already had a fairly daunting array of records on their discography, and there were very few people or publications capable of stepping up and helping to sort them out. In college radio at that time, it was practically a prerequisite to have a working understanding of the collective works of R.E.M., but a band like the Mekons was a murky mystery. They were great. I somehow knew they were great. Others confirmed their cool quotient, but no one surrounding me had the apparent ability to say “listen to this song” or “listen to this record” or provide any of the other instructions that we routinely provided to one another as gateways into certain music. They were usually ignored by the music magazines, maybe shuffled off to a distant back page with a perfunctory rave. On the rare occasion when I found something written at length on the band, it was often with the sort of unguarded reverence usually associated with those artists that had pushed through to such success that their constant accomplishment had become conventional wisdom. It was like those pieces were dispatches from an alternate universe where Fear and Whiskey took the place of The Joshua Tree in category of breakthrough, iconic albums.

I liked them. I played their music on the radio. And I generally felt unworthy of them, unable to offer up pronouncements with authority the way I could when a new Replacements record or Bob Mould release came out. I could say those albums were good, and I could come up with reasonable explanations as to why. The Mekons remained a mystery to me, a sensation that was only enhance when Too Much Joy, the band that was unwittingly penning the soundtrack to the shared collegiate experience of me and my radio compatriots, released the song “If I Was A Mekon.” This wasn’t a band you just listened to. This was a band you celebrated in song, like some conquering figures from the past.

Since I’ve already admitted I can’t properly align the colors on the Rubik’s Cube of their career you may suspect that this week’s song selection may be motivated by something more than the desire to type out a few hundred words about The Mekons. It’s the city named in the title of the song that led to today’s post. Bright and early tomorrow morning, I’ll be loading myself onto a big bulky vehicle along with a group of students from my fine workplace to head to the largest city in Tennessee to do service for a week. For that reason, I’m going to let this digital space lie dormant for a short bit. My plan is to be back with a new post (and maybe a couple other tweaks) on Sunday, March 21st.

The Mekons, “Memphis Egypt”

(Disclaimer: This song is presented here with the understanding that it is out of print (at least the album I know it from is out of print, because record companies seem to get confused about the Mekons too. It could very well be available on some sort of stray compilation disc or super underground Mekons collection, but if I couldn’t penetrate their collected work back with I had the energy, enthusiasm and curiosity of a nineteen-year-old, I’m surely not going to be able to crack the labyrinth now. Regardless, if any with due authority to do so asks me to remove this track from the Interweb, I will comply at my earliest opportunity. By the way, Phil, this post’s for you since you’re one of the few people I know who is cool enough to like The Mekons.)