Mojo Nixon, RIP
By 
I will have thoughts on that asshole Toby Keith in the next music notes, but I am not waiting to remember a much greater musical figure--Mojo Nixon, who died of a heart attack while on a country music cruise after playing a show. Mojo was truly one of the great lunatics of modern music, a hilarious dude who both worked hard at his craft of being a hilarious dude and actually produced some pretty damn good music.
Mr. Nixon was best known for his celebrity spoofs, like “Don Henley Must Die” and “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child,” and for satirical tirades like “I Hate Banks” and “Destroy All Lawyers.”
The best part of the Debbie Gibson song is that Winona Ryder played Gibson in the video, which MTV refused to air.
“All of it was performed in maximum overdrive on a bed of rockabilly, blues, and R&B, which earned Nixon some friends in the roots rock community but had enough punk attitude — in its own bizarre way — to make him a college radio staple during his heyday,” the All Music Guide wrote.
“I’m a rabble-rouser who does humorous social commentary within a rock-and-roll setting,” he told The New York Times in 1990. In another interview with the paper, he described himself as a voice of “the doomed, the damned, the weird.”
Born Neil Kirby McMillan Jr., on Aug. 2, 1957, in North Carolina to a father who owned a soul music station, Mr. Nixon was drawn to music from a young age because, he said in 2017, “it’s exciting, it’s dangerous, and it makes the church people nervous.”
In the 1980s, he began performing with Richard Banke, better known as Skid Roper, in San Diego. Their third album, “Bo-Day-Shus!!!” was the first to make the national charts, thanks to the satirical song “Elvis Is Everywhere.” The song, which posited that Elvis was responsible for everything from building the pyramids to making ships disappear in the Bermuda Triangle, and its music video, got the attention of MTV, which made him an occasional host in 1988.
Mojo later had a great show on Sirius XM. Every time he played a George Jones song, he would shout “SINGS GO GOOD, MAKES YOUR DICK HARD.”
And I will defend that album he made with Jello Biafra, Prairie Home Invasion to my death. I think that’s a great fucking album. Jello sang most of the songs, including his astounding reworking of “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” for the politics of the 90s. But Mojo’s song about the Hamlet chicken plant burning and all the dead workers is a genuinely great protest song.
RIP you crazy motherfucker.