In Memoriam: Mojo Nixon (1957-2024), Or “The Life And Supremely Weird Times Of Neill Kirby McMillan, Jr.”
Sorry, it took awhile to process the passing of the man I once called “America’s unfettered id with a social conscience, playing crazed eighth-note rock ‘n’ roll designed to offend every taste."
Greg Allen print sitting atop Toadliquors bassist/Mojo Manifesto director Matt “Earl B. Freedom” Eskey’s piano, next to his Mojo bobblehead.
You know, people out there want to ban books. They want to ban my records. They want to tell me when I can drink and what I can drink. They want to ban drugs and sex and everything. People want to have a lot of rules. A lot of rules and regulations. But listen up, listen up, Mr. Rules and Regulations — I ain't gonna obey!...That's right, man, I ain't gonna do what you say.
“I’m sorry to hear about the passing of Mojo Nixon,” former MTV VJ Martha Quinn posted February 8th, at her Twit— er, X account. “I received his attention in 1987 with [“Stuffin’ Martha’s Muffin”] from the Frenzy LP, connecting us in the musical universe ever since.” This was mighty generous of Stiv Bators’ ex-girlfriend, considering the song protested her employers that used live up to its “Music Television” designation while aiding in the cultural bland-out of the ‘80s. And he used his most potent weapon: His irreverence.
“I wanna be doing some sin with you, Martha Quinn!” he bayed during the course of the song.
“I wanna be gettin' in Martha Quinn!"
Mojo — born Neill Kirby McMillan, Jr., on August 2, 1957, in Chapel Hill, NC — was long in the habit of chuckling while walking past graveyards, before he died from a cardiac event he suffered while napping on the Outlaw Country Cruise ship, then docked in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Hell, he didn’t chuckle. He guffawed like a goddamned HYENA! He absolutely loves, wherever his untamed spirit resides at the moment, that manager-for-life Scott “Bullethead” Reilly and The Toadliquors, his hand-picked band since original sparring partner Skid Roper rode off in the sunset, are proceeding with plans to throw the final Mojo’s Mayhem at Austin’s Continental Club this coming March 16. The original unofficial SXSW day party, inaugurating what is now part and parcel with the music conference that swallowed Austin whole, it will now be a memorial that remains totally in Mojo’s image.
“From the Continental Club stage in 2023 Mojo declared that 2024 would be the final Mojo’s Mayhem,” reads the press release. “The crowd, remembering his 2004 'final gig' bluff, took it with a grain of salt.”
Back in January, in the spirit of “build it, and they will come,” Mojo opened up his prodigious phone book and called his friends, letting them know this would truly be the last time for the all-day event. Now they will play the event as a memorial, renamed “Mojo’s Final Mayhem!!: Fuck You And Your Fuckin’ Feelings!” To name a few, The Beat Farmers play their first Austin gig since founder (and Mojo’s best friend) Country Dick Montana’s passing. Ex-Georgia Satellite Dan Baird breaks his retirement to reunite his band Homemade Sin for the occasion. John Doe, Exene, and Dave Alvin reconvene The Knitters for the first time since 2014. The whole shindig gets capped by what’s billed as “The Toadliquors, Your Mama and Some Other Whore featuring Pete “Wetdawg” Gordon, Mike “Wid” Middleton, Matt “Earl B. Freedom” Eskey, Eric “Roscoe” Ambel, Bill “Hatchet Ass” Davis + related nutjobs.”
With this much joyful noise being made, no one should be surprised if Mojo’s corpse rises from the grave, grabs his Guild, and strolls onstage himself for the finale.
I've been put here on the planet to stir up some shit, to get some rock ‘n’ roll going, to be the fly in the ointment, to be the Cheese Whiz and the caviar of life! That’s what I am!
Little Kirby was a born hellraiser. His father ran Danville, Virginia’s town newspaper and owned a soul music radio station. Neill McMillan, Sr., openly advocated for the Civil Rights movement, incurring the wrath of the local establishment…especially the ones who wore bedsheets and burned crosses as a hobby. His grandmother saw herself, in Mojo’s words, as “a good Southern liberal.” These family ties were the source of Mojo’s politics and his love of good, raw musical expression. As a pre-teen, Kirby took umbrage at a proposed leash law, making a sweatshirt reading “FREE THE DOGS” and warning the mayor at a Christmas party to can the bill, or he “wouldn’t be responsible for his actions.”
He’d been seeing all the radical activism of the ‘60s on the evening news, or in his father’s newspaper. It took hold. This set in stone his lifelong left-wing libertarianism, as opposed to the selfish right-wing variant we’re all more familiar with now.
You know, people say, Mojo, you're always complaining about everything. Why don’t you vote in the elections? Why don’t you get involved in the electoral process? Oh. Oh, yeah. Vote for Clinton, Mojo. It's going to make everything nice and new and neat. We got one fool just as big a fool as the other fool. Ain't nothing changed. Same fool riding around in the black cars. We still riding around on the subway, riding around in the bus. We riding around in a 1978, you know, 1978 El Torino or some damn thing, leakin' oil. Ain't got no money, gotta pay taxes, everything's screwed up.
…I can do anything I want! I'm a free man! This is America! I'm free, drunk and horny, and I'm gonna do what I want to do! I'm gonna have some fun and you can't stop me you knuckleheads!
And where did Mojo get his marching orders? Sure, all that ‘60s radicalism and his father’s and grandmother’s liberalism and activism played a part. But, yep — so did punk rock!
Mojo spoke in Toadliquors bassist Matt “Earl B. Freedom” Eskey’s award-winning documentary The Mojo Manifesto: The Life and Times of Mojo Nixon of how he went to law school on a promise to his father on his deathbed. But after Neill Sr. passed on, he realized he could do what he wanted. And what he wanted was to “move to England to live in a squat and join The Clash!” There obviously wasn’t a vacancy in The Only Band That Mattered at that time, so pre-Mojo made do by playing Dion and Jerry Lee Lewis songs in the tube station for spare change, according to his bio, a document as likely given to self-mythologizing as many things in his life. Thanks to a VISTA assignment that took him back Stateside to Denver in 1980, he ended up in “a bad-boy punk band when there were a lot of new-wave skinny-tie bands,” called Zebra 123.
“The infamous Zebra 123, visited by the Secret Service,” Mojo joked in 1999.
“No one would let us play because fistfights would break out,” he continued. “So we had this thing, The Assassination Ball, on the anniversary of Kennedy getting his head blown off. And we had this picture of Reagan and Carter with their heads exploding. Then the Secret Service came and told us that was a bad idea. They thought we were raising money to shoot the president, and they took a very dim view. We were a little punk rock combo, three chords and a cloud of dust.”
Going by the scant recorded evidence available, Zebra 123 should’ve been on the international punk map. This was blazing, roots-inflected pogo rock with a smattering of reggae, ala his heroes The Clash. But their moment was “‘80 or ‘81,” as hardcore began decimating the original punk remit. Still, wish we at least had a self-released EP to commemorate the five seconds they existed.
Nevertheless, punk informed his energy, attitude and defiance to his last days. He eventually ended up in San Diego, following a girlfriend, playing in 50 million bands, and coming across Dan McLain, former drummer for local punk pioneers The Penetrators in the process of transforming himself into the larger-than-life Country Dick Montana, the spark plug behind cowpunk pioneers The Beat Farmers. He already chased the “Kate Bush-loving girlfriend” away with a “Howlin’ Wolf-only” policy on his turntable. Witnessing McLain’s new band Country Dick and The Snuggle Bunnies not only convinced him to remain in San Diego, but convinced him he should pursue a raw, primitive, blues-drenched rock ‘n’ roll sound, still infused with punk energy and aggression.
Next was the legendary cross-country bicycle trip with two pals, from San Diego back to Danville. This was where Mojo Nixon arose from the ashes of Kirby McMillan’s soul, allegedly on the back of a heroic night of drinking on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street. He created a new persona, so he could be more himself than he already was. Kirby McMillan returned to San Diego as Mojo Nixon, “playin' guitar, hollerin' about injustice, having a good time, drinking and fornicating. Mojo=Voodoo Nixon=Bad Politics.” It’s from here that everything we know him for emanates: Hooking up with Snuggle Bunny Richard “Skid Roper” Bank, playing washboard because he didn’t have a drum kit, basically playing everything Mojo couldn’t as he sat down, ranting and raving, acting like a Southern Holy Roller preacher with a profane secular message, picking primitive bluesy rock ‘n’ roll on a hollowbody guitar, occasionally picking up an empty water cooler bottle he thumped as he chanted about the benefits of psychedelic mushroom ingestion. Along the way, a Mojo convert named Scott Ambrose Reilly hopped in their tour van and had his own conversion into their manager Bullethead.
I spoke with Bullethead recently by phone. He spoke of Mojo giving the misfits of the world a voice, encouraging them to be themselves. It’s what he did for Bullethead. It’s what he did for all the good people who flooded the internets with testimonials to the 20 minute conversations he had with them, either at a bar or after one of his gigs, pretty much anyplace he encountered them.
“Mojo seemed to have 20 minutes for everyone,” he chuckled.
This was the man’s ultimate gift, beyond informing us that the spirit of Elvis Presley infuses everything, or acting as an accurate gauge of who in this world to hate, or arguing eloquently with Pat Buchnan on national TV against music censorship, or bringing Don Henley onstage at Austin’s Hole In The Wall to sing on “Don Henley Must Die.” Mojo Nixon was on a crusade for the freedom to be exactly who we all are, even if it was just to drag Jello Biafra’s inner country singer outta him. That was how I initially met the man, interviewing them for Alternative Press during SXSW. Well, that time, it was mostly Biafra answering all the questions. Poor Mojo, believe it or not, could not get a word in edgewise! He gave up midway through and headed down to the bar!
28 years later, Mojo finally had his chance to answer my questions, as he and Eskey promoted The Mojo Manifesto on the phone with me while boarding the Outlaw Country Cruise ship that year. He’d been a fixture on that annual event from the git-go, he and Bullethead showing up in matching louder-than-Lemmy’s-Marshalls tourist wear. Just as he’d been a fixture at SXSW from (near) the beginning. He was planning on it this year, but whatever higher power Mojo never recognized had its own plans for him. It’d be interesting to hear the man’s thoughts on the controversy over the U.S. Army’s sponsorship of SXSW this year. He would have surely roared about this and much else for what was intended to be his final show ever. Instead, he rocked for the last time the night before he expired on that cruise ship. Somehow, that makes a helluvalotta sense, Mojo legendwise.
“Mojo’s Final Mayhem isn't just an event,” the press release advises. “It's the ultimate send-off for a man whose spirit embodied the heart of rock ‘n roll.” Everybody’ll be there. I plan to take the afternoon off from finishing The Book for it.
“As Mojo said, ‘You only live once so off with them pants. Hell ain’t for sure, it’s only a chance.’” Or: Oh, you can put me in jail, you can kill me, you can execute me, but you can't kill rock ‘n’ roll, man….
R.I.P.. Mojo. Hope you and Country Dick are yukking it up something fierce.
Signed, Your Friend,
“That Punk Rock Guy In Austin”
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