Mojo Nixon Has No Regrets – Definitely Not Picking on Popstars, Nor 'Don Henley Must Die'

The legend of the musical mayhem of Mojo Nixon is one the music world knows all too well. It's filled with copious amounts of beer and drugs, a trail of chaos from gig to gig, a couple of movie roles and even a voice role in a video game.

The only difference is that Mojo somehow survived it, and the drive and energy that built his career — with loud, angry outlaw rock, in a mix of country and punk — hasn't died.

"Part of it is I'm not that talented," Nixon says with a laugh from his home in California. "I really bear down. Paul McCartney is talented. I'm a guy playing Chuck Berry songs real fast, real loud, and a lot of succeeding as an entertainer is confidence. I have an enormous, irrational amount of confidence that I'm going to make this work."

More than a decade ago, his bassist Matt Eskey started compiling over 100 tapes of Nixon's concerts and music videos along with recordings of his wedding in a San Diego go-kart place, an interview he did with Pat Buchanan on CNN's Crossfire and the spots he did for MTV. Then Eskey took a crash course in filmmaking through Google and got Mojo, members of his band The Toadliquors and names such as Bullethead, Jello Biafra, X's John Doe and Kinky Friedman to sit down for interviews. All that work resulted in The Mojo Manifesto: The Life and Times of Mojo Nixon. The documentary premiered last year at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin and it's getting a digital release this Friday on streaming platforms.

"The real thing that got the movie going was they made a documentary about SXSW and they showed it for the 25th anniversary and I was in it," Nixon says. "My bass player saw it and said, 'That looks pretty good. It's just this bullshit talking thing. Maybe I should make a documentary about [Nixon]."

The film chronicles more than just the crazed career of the renegade entertainer's rise to fame with insane hits such as "Elvis is Everywhere," "Don Henley Must Die," "Burn Down the Malls" and "Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Love Child." It tells the entire story of how Nixon got his name, how his songs got on the radio and the appeal of his rebellious spirit in a music industry that's too serious for its own good.  "Since I never took myself seriously, I want to poke 'em in the eye," Nixon says. "I want to deflate them. I wrote 'Don Henley Must Die' because Don Henley was on the Grammys. Don Henley was in the country Monkees of the '70s, The Eagles, and suddenly he's on the Grammys acting like he was Bob Dylan. So that's what made me mad. I don't take anything seriously."

Nixon describes himself as a mix of Foghorn Leghorn, Elvis Presley and Otis the Drunk from The Andy Griffith Show. His love for screaming about inflated egos and pop stars propped up by corporate suits has created more than a few infamous run-ins with the targets he lambasted lyrically. Perhaps the most famous happened in 1992 at the Hole in the Wall in Austin when the Don Henley himself jumped on stage to sing "Don Henley Must Die" with him and the band.

"I talked to Debbie Gibson when I was on the radio in Cincinnati," Nixon says. "Her mother? Not so much. Her mother sounded like someone who was in The Sopranos. Her mother was cursing me out and she sounded like a Long Island gangster."

Nixon started recording with his former stage partner Skid Roper; Nixon was the screaming jester on guitar and Roper provided the musical talent. The two started to build an audience on college radio stations, got to open for NRBQ and The Pogues and got name-checked in The Dead Milkmen's "Punk Rock Girl."

The two parted ways when Nixon wanted to build a band that attracted a budding music channel called MTV. The channel hired Nixon to do spots for the network for which he had total creative control. The spots built him an even bigger fan base and led to roles in movies such as Great Balls of Fire! starring a "coked-up" Dennis Quaid (according to Nixon) as Jerry Lee Lewis, and the first Super Mario Bros. movie starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo in which Nixon played (seriously) Toad.

"What I really learned is I can't act," Nixon says with a laugh. "I need to act big and loud and in film, they want you to do less and less and read them his soul through your eyes."  Nixon may have an unnatural supply of confidence, but he's not afraid to be self-effacing. It's helped him fight any fears a normal person might have about meeting someone else's expectations and making someone else's vision come to life.

"One of the things I always felt we were selling was a giant fuck you and we don't give a shit," Nixon says. "We don't care. We don't care what you think."

Nixon may not be touring as much as before, but he's still doing the occasional show and hosting his own show on Sirius XM's Outlaw Country channel. Following the film's release, he says he may do one more tour and then call it quits.

But he won't go quietly.

"The film has a narrative and it's unbelievable but it's finally going to come out," Nixon says, "and I'm going to cause more trouble in the world."