Performer who mixed roots, punk rock
Mojo Nixon, the singer, songwriter and radio host who rocketed from the lunatic fringe of 1980s underground music to national attention with his rabble-rousing shots at celebrity culture like the 1987 hit “Elvis Is Everywhere” and snarky social commentary like the 1986 song “I Hate Banks,” died Wednesday aboard a country music cruise. He was 66.
His death was confirmed by Matt Eskey, the director of “The Mojo Manifesto,” a 2020 documentary about Mr. Nixon. He said that Mr. Nixon had a “cardiac event” while he was asleep as the Outlaw Country Cruise was docked in San Juan, P.R. He had been a host of the cruise. He lived in suburban Cincinnati.
A statement posted by the film’s official Facebook page said Mr. Nixon had died “after a blazing show, a raging night, closing the bar, taking no prisoners.”
Mr. Nixon caught fire in the 1980s by drawing together disparate strings of American eccentricity — the manic energy of Jerry Lee Lewis, the anti-establishment politics of punk rock, the antics of 1970s Elvis Presley and the pious theatrics of televangelists — and then spitting them back in the form of intentionally offensive songs like “Don Henley Must Die” and “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child.”
His genre was primarily psychobilly, which blends punk, country and rockabilly with heavy bass lines, onstage theatrics and oversize doses of cultural detritus like B-grade horror movies, hot rods and biker gangs.
His music could often be heard at the lower end of the radio dial, on college radio and other proto-alt-rock programming, alongside acts like Dread Zeppelin, Jello Biafra, and Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys — many of whom collaborated with Mr. Nixon over the years.
Just as the director David Lynch was doing around the same time in film, Mr. Nixon sought to channel a deep vein of American weirdness as Reagan-era conservatism set the tone for much of the country’s culture. But unlike Mr. Lynch’s cerebral and macabre work, Mr. Nixon’s material was topical, profane and in your face.
“I’m a rabble-rouser who does humorous social commentary within a rock ’n’ 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.”
Even his stage name — his real name was Neill McMillan — was a mashup of two ends of American culture: “Mojo,” a synonym for unchecked sexual energy popularized by the Doors in their song “L.A. Woman,” and “Nixon,” as in Richard M., who for many people stood for all that was hypocritical and corrupt about cultural conservatism.
He came up with the name in 1983, he told The Times, while drinking at a bar during a bicycle trip across the United States. He choose it, he said, because “it’s two words that shouldn’t go together.”
Mr. Nixon was sometimes written off as a spoof artist, a practitioner of the kind of corny, bawdy songs that blues and country artists called hokum (e.g., Johnny Cash’s “Flushed From the Bathroom of Your Heart”).
But his songs were sharper than that, often expressing a clear populist sentiment: “I Hate Banks,” “Burn Down the Malls” and “Destroy All Lawyers.” Even his songs taking shots at hitmakers like Mr. Henley and Ms. Gibson were really aimed at the music industry that crafted and sold them — he also wrote a song called “Bring Me the Head of David Geffen.”
His crass lyrics were more than just potty humor for its own sake. At a time when music censorship and questions of taste were the stuff of congressional hearings and newsmagazine covers, he joined acts like the rap group 2 Live Crew and the comedian Andrew Dice Clay in poking a thumb in what they considered sanctimonious hypocrisy.
In 1990, he even went on the buttoned-down CNN public affairs program “Crossfire” to debate the conservative commentator Pat Buchanan on whether warning labels should be placed on records with explicit lyrics.
Whether he was fully serious or just an act, where Neill McMillan ended and where Mojo Nixon began, was always part of the myth he spun.
“I just want to be a tiny piece of the great American crazy myth,” he said in 2017. “Not the story they tell in schools, not the story they tell in the movies, but the wild, crazy, free, nut job on the outskirts of town story.”
He grew up listening to the Beatles and Jerry Lee Lewis, as well as to protopunk acts like the MC5. He also nurtured his goofy anarchism — he was arrested at 14 after a one-man protest against Danville’s leash laws, under the banner “Free the Dogs.”
Mr. Nixon attended Miami University in Ohio and, after graduating with a degree in political science in 1979, moved to London, where he tried to pierce the city’s punk scene but ended up playing country cover songs in the city’s bars.
He returned to the United States to join Vista, a domestic service agency akin to the Peace Corps, and was sent to Denver.
There he formed a punk band, Zebra 123, which he described as “the Clash meets Jerry Lee Lewis.” The band attracted the suspicion of the Secret Service after performing an “Assassination Ball” on the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s death.
“I’m a rabble-rouser who does humorous social commentary within a rock ’n’ roll setting.” Mojo Nixon in a 1990 interview with The New York Times