When I started writing about music in the Eighties, a prominent beard on a musician was often viewed as a sure sign that the performer was an out-of-touch hippie fossil, or barring that, a member of ZZ Top. That started to change during the goatee epidemic of the Nineties, which I was convinced would make facial hair disreputable for decades to come once the grunge bubble burst. But history has proven me wrong, because the late Zeroes have seen an outgrowth of musician facial hair worth of a post-Civil War presidential campaign, along with a revival of the hierarchy of beards. In what follows below, I’ll survey some of the notable beards of the moment, ranked from zero to ten on the Sanders-Hudson index. For the uninitiated, that index celebrates the beardly perfection of saxophone visionary Pharoah Sanders and Band keyboardist Garth Hudson, whose historic contributions have done for beards what Christopher Walken has done for the cowbell.

Facial outgrowth isn’t always a sign of greatness, or vice-versa. Patchy-faced Bob Dylan and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy have sometimes dabbled in facial hair, but these are not beardly men; you might as well put a spoiler on a Volvo station wagon. Nobody knows that better than Tweedy himself, the author of “Bob Dylan’s 49th Beard” (“things got pretty weird, and I grew Bob Dylan’s beard”). And beardrevue.com gave a major thumbs down to Stuck Between Stations favorite Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet), ranking him three points below the composite band score assigned to current beard icons the Fleet Foxes. Explaining the Captain’s lowly 5.9 ranking, the site noted: “His lip ferret was merely average. And his poet’s beard was never much more than the obligatory mark of a mad musical genius.”

At the outset, I have disqualified Devendra Banhart, because that would be too easy, like naming Jesus on a list of famous sandal-wearers. This list is for beard-growers, and I have it on good authority that Devendra was born bearded to traveling circus performers from Caracas. Here are my rankings in this year’s Battle of the Beards:

• Kyp Malone, TV on the Radio (Sanders-Hudson Rating: 7.5)

The guitarist-singer from Brooklyn’s innovative art rockers-turned-mutant funkateers had this year’s beard competition all sewn up. But, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Kyp has now trimmed his beard.

TV on the Radio, “Dancing Choose”

• Jim James, My Morning Jacket (Sanders-Hudson Rating: 7.0)

James’ Kentucky combo may well rank as the most hirsute band of the past decade. But he’s docked two notches here, because his Prince falsetto on this year’s Evil Urges is less convincing than that of Spoon‘s Britt Daniel, and worse, he has reportedly switched to a mustache.

My Morning Jacket, “Wordless Chorus”

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A short trip to Austin earlier this month felt like a homecoming, even though I’ve never been there before. I’ve rarely been bombarded with so much music, with so little planning or effort, for so long into the night, since I left Chicago for California more than two decades ago. Austin is the sort of place where you venture out for coffee after your night of music and find out that the coffeehouse (in this case, Jo’s Hot Coffee on South Congress) has its own house band playing a bang-up set of western swing. A record store mural across the street from the UT/ Austin campus registers the city’s sense of music history: among others, Buddy Holly, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash share wall space with Dylan, Iggy, and the Clash.

If one figure spans all those influences, it is the provocateur, painter, raconteur and raver Jon Langford. The Welsh-born Leeds-to-Chicago transplant and Bloodshot Records mainstay has—in the 23-year stretch dating from the Mekons’ often-mentioned, seldom heard Fear and Whiskey—done more than just about anyone else to resuscitate the withered heart of post-punk and reclaim the tarnished soul of American country. In Austin, I was thrilled to discover that the Yard Dog Gallery has a fantastic collection of Langford’s visual art, mostly densely layered, distressed images of iconic American roots musicians in graveyard settings. Blindfolded, sullied and marked for extinction, the characters remind me of Chicago artist Ivan Albright’s studies of decay and corruption; constantly “dancing with death,” they are unsettlingly alive and a reminder of the slow death that comes out of greed, fear and homogenization.

As a curmudgeonly first-generation art school punk who writes lines like “John Glenn drinks cocktails with God at a café in downtown Saigon,” Langford is smart enough to realize he doesn’t play or paint “authentic” honky tonk any more than Vampire Weekend is a gang of African tribesmen. And unlike some of his retro-worshipping peers, he acknowledges that the “golden age” of county music had its own problems with pills and pretenders and poor directions. Yet he uses his outsider’s distance as an advantage. While bemoaning the death of country music at the hands of what he calls “suburban rock music with a cowboy hat on,” Langford’s work cuts deeper than that, excavating the signs of life in a cultural landscape pockmarked with interchangeable strip malls and Kenny Chesney records. There’s also a redemptive element in the search; like his protagonist in his Waco Brothers anthem “Hell’s Roof,” he’s reclaiming a lost history, “walking on hell’s roof, looking at the flowers” (and not “walking in a clown suit, looking at the flowers,” as I misheard Langford’s impassioned growl for more than a year).

Jon Langford, “Hell’s Roof”

Continue reading Jon Langford: South By East By Midwest →