Wild and free

Brash, irreverent Mojo Nixon built musical career flouting convention

By DAVID L. CODDON

As Mojo Nixon tells it, his first demo was recorded “within spittin’ distance of the Hotel Del.” That recording included two tunes that would become part of the Mojo legend: the outrageous “Jesus at McDonald’s” and “Mushroom Maniac,” about his friend and idol Country Dick Montana.

The year was 1985, and the “recording studio” was a house on Star Park Circle in Coronado occupied by the mother of Joey Harris, who, like Montana, was a former member of the San Diego pre-Beat Farmers band the Snuggle Bunnies.

“There was a garage that had been turned into a studio apartment on the side,” Nixon recalled. “We recorded it in one afternoon. It might have taken two or three hours.”

The demo would become the first album for Nixon and his mu- sical partner at the time, Skid Roper. And “Jesus at McDonald’s” was to be their first cult single. Years later, Nixon would return to Coronado, living there with his family for more than 10 years.

« The full-length documentary film “The Mojo Manifesto: The Life and Times of Mojo Nixon” is expected to be available for streaming this spring. Above right: Three of the albums Nixon has made since 1985.

The man born Neill Kirby McMillan Jr. in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was on his way to fulfilling a goal “to bring punk rock energy to American hillbilly music.”

Growing up in the South, principally in Danville, Virginia, and being the son of a father who ran a radio station, Nixon’s early life was rooted in music. “The more primitive, the more rural, the more back in the woods, the better,” he said of his youthful musical preferences. “When I was in junior high, I was crazy about Led Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin leads you to the Yardbirds, who lead you to Sonny Boy Williamson, who leads you to Howlin’ Wolf. Eventually that was the guy I wanted to be: the guy howling in the woods.”

He also envisioned himself as a showman, a combination of Richard Pryor and Jerry Lee Lewis he described as “some unholy amalgamation.” He named that “wild and free” entertainer Mojo Nixon.

Nixon’s story, one of audaciousness, drive and utter contempt for the conventions of the traditional music business, is chronicled in a full-length documentary film by his former Toadliquors bandmate Matt Eskey titled “The Mojo Manifesto: The Life and Times of Mojo Nixon” (expected to become available for streaming this spring). It features interviews with Nixon past and present, footage from onstage performances including one at San Diego’s bygone Bacchanal club and snippets of video versions of some of his best-known musical spoofs.

His breakthrough “Elvis is Everywhere” brought Nixon to the attention of MTV in the mid-1980s. The fledgling music-television network asked him to create some promotional videos that it could use among its regular programming.

“They were playing very mainstream videos then,” Nixon recalled from his home, now in Cincinnati. “They were using me to appear to be hipper than they were. I remember thinking ‘I’m not going to sell out.’ So I made a list of 20 demands, and they agreed to all of them.”

While the exposure on MTV brought Nixon to the attention of a wider audience, the relationship inevitably didn’t last. When Nixon made a video for his song “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Love Child,” which co- starred actor Winona Ryder, the network refused to air it.

“I was making fun of how they made their money,” Nixon said of the MTV executives. “They weren’t going for that.”

While “Debbie Gibson” and “Elvis” may be the most remembered of Nixon’s anarchic compositions, his fans can name many others including “Burn Down the Malls,” “I Hate Banks,” “Bring Me the Head of David Geffen” and “Don Henley Must Die.” There are quite a few more that aren’t fit to print.

One title that can be is “Gonna to Eat Them Words,” which Nixon wrote as a response to a girlfriend who had told him that he needed to fall back on something else “when this music thing doesn’t work out.”

“I am very determined,” he said, “and when people tell me I can’t do something, I’m determined to do it.”

Nixon’s move to San Diego in 1981 was inspired by seeing the Penetrators in concert and their larger-than-life drummer Dan McLain (later known as Country Dick Montana). Two years later, Nixon played his first San Diego gig at the Texas Teahouse in Ocean Beach and became a fixture in the emerging local music scene, one that included Country Dick’s Beat Farmers and the Steve Poltz-led Rugburns.

Poltz recounted seeing Nixon for the first time at the Ken Cinema, performing in between a movie double feature. “I remember he was banging on a Sparklett’s water bottle. My mind was blown because one, I was going to see a movie and I wasn’t expecting to see this; and No. 2, the chutzpah this guy had. He was so in control of the audience.”

Nixon was all about “performance art. Every single thing was to perform, to put on a show for the people,” said his old friend Harris. “He wasn’t interested in how sharp the band looked or how they sounded. He just wanted to get out and entertain people. A lot of time he did it without a microphone because he’s so loud.”

After his MTV experiment, Nixon continued to perform in the ’90s but also did “a bunch of cockamamie things”: an acting role in the Jerry Lee Lewis biopic “Great Balls of Fire!” appearing Off Broadway as a snake-handling preacher in a production called “Gravel’s Spine” and playing a live-action Toad in the 1993 “Super Mario Bros.” movie.

By the end of the ’90s, Nixon — who’d been touring constantly with his backup band, the Toadliquors — was losing his mojo for performing onstage. “I was afraid that if I stayed on the road and was full-time Mojo, I’d only last another two weeks,” he said. “I could have gone healthy and turned Mojo into a cottage industry and played safe parties. But no one wants to see live-forever Mojo. People came for the chaos.”

Not surprisingly, the son of a radio station owner took his act to radio. San Diego stations balked. “The Mojo Myth was so powerful they all thought I lived in a van down by the river,” he said. “Nobody would hire me. So I had to go to Cincinnati.”

After three years there, Nixon returned to San Diego when he was hired by the classic rock station KGB-FM, replacing longtime DJ Jim McInnes. “I did that for two years,” he said with some obvious disdain. “Every time I played Styx or Journey, a small piece of my soul fell away.”

McInnes, a musician himself who today hosts a weekly music show titled “Vinyl Resting Place” with Rez Radio, holds no grudges. He calls Nixon “one of a kind, that’s for sure. He just seemingly out of nowhere created this character called Mojo Nixon and started going out and doing it and not caring whether anyone liked it or not.”

The 65-year-old Nixon, who is married (the wedding was held at a go-kart track in Chula Vista in 1989) and has two grown sons, resided in a rented Coronado home from 2003 to 2016.

“I figured we should live in San Diego’s hidden gem,” he said of that residency. “Behind enemy lines.”

For the last 18 years, Nixon has been working for satellite SiriusXM Radio’s Outlaw Country station. He has a featured show “The Loon in the Afternoon” and another, “Manifold Destiny,” on SiriusXM’s NASCAR Radio channel.

After a careening ride of a lifetime and a permanent place in the psychobilly culture, Nixon says he’s only “almost famous.” But he does look back on his musical career as successful, “especially considering how limited my musical talent is.”

Does he see himself as a cult hero? “Yes.

When my bass player made the movie (“The Mojo Manifesto”), I said, ‘Just make the cult happy.’ ” ■