BIG SHOES, PANTS, & PLANS: THOUGHTS ON FOLKS ON FIRE
By Steven L Jones
We’re wearing big shoes
And big pants
Doing lots of work
Making big plans
—Folks on Fire, “Big Pants”
For three years in my youth, I played in a pioneering Louisville indie rock band known for its high-energy grooves and darkly surreal sound. Four decades later, a reunion prompted me to record my thoughts on what the band meant to me and possibly others.
FOLKS ON FIRE was a band that viewed childhood from the cusp of adulthood and vice versa, warily confronting an uncertain future with one eye fixed on the past. Either way, the view wasn’t pretty. So you might as well dance. It was also a band that countered inanity and a dearth of meaning with satire and dark humor—fighting futility and despair with send-ups of the grotesque and banal in an anarchic, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink style. Yet, the band’s heart remained linked to childhood—not as a maudlin retreat, but as a means to maintain something intuitive and open to wonder as the world grew grim. For all the band’s irreverence, “meaning” was always central to its meaning.
Folks on Fire was my first real band—real in the sense that we wrote our own music, had a unique sound, and tried to make lasting statements built around a collective vision. People still did that in the early ‘80s. Rock music had achieved art-form status during the prior generation, and despite creeping commercialism, the innovations of ‘60s psychedelia and ‘70s punk remained visible in the rear-view mirror of pop culture. The glitz-and-careerism of the MTV era was emergent, but ideals about art over commerce lingered among bands grouped under the rubric “post-punk” (later “indie”).
Appropriately, psychedelia and punk impacted the band’s sound. But we largely swapped rigid, stripped-down rock (this was the heyday of hardcore) for funkier rhythms—still edgy but devoid of three-chord rant. These could be moody and trance-like or sweaty and crazed, with everything from country-western licks, jazz chords, ska beats, and third-world ambiances thrown into the mix. Plus backward tapes, sound loops, and—in our live show—visual overlays like family home movies projected over the band. We were an eclectic bunch, but at our best, we were always more than the sum of our parts.
Folks on Fire (the name came from a country-western spoof inspired by news reports of arson attacks on random strangers) existed from 1983 to 1986 (initially called Jonny Quest). Bruce Linn was the singer and primary lyricist—a frontman whose unflappable demeanor masked a nervy, at times explosive energy. Byron Hoagland and Tim Linn (Bruce’s brother) alternated playing guitar and bass—Byron with melodic fluency and otherworldly tones, Tim with scratchy riffs and arpeggiated chords. John Brunner was a solid drummer with plenty of swing. And I played an upright percussion rig and doubled on background vocals and keyboards. When I left for art school in Chicago in late 1984, the band added Matt Hardesty on guitar and keyboards. I continued to perform live whenever I was in town and played on all our records.
The band’s legacy was compact but rich. We gigged steadily for three years and cut two well-received albums at Louisville’s Real-to-Reel Studios: Folks on Fire (1984) and Under a Hairy Sun (1985). Folks on Fire fractured in 1986 due to the personal tensions and musical differences that often break up bands. A final collaboration occurred when the band backed a project Bruce and I did called We Must Be Astronauts of Love. Released on cassette in 1987, it allowed us to indulge our more experimental sides. But when I listen to it now, I can’t help but hear it as work tapes for a third Folks on Fire album.
Alas, there were no more albums. We never regrouped, and everyone went on to do other things. Consequently, reforming for one night in 2025 impelled a crash course in rediscovering, at age 61, the music of a band that formed when I was 19.
It was a different time, a different universe. We were 18-21 years old. Digital was new; Reagan was president; modems had phones, and phones were all landlines. Vietnam and Watergate were fading memories, and despite covert wars, creeping wealth disparity, and something called the “greenhouse effect,” most people still believed in the American Dream. Our song “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe,” a satirical snapshot of the era, warned that despite the smooth road promised by this facile optimism, there were “a lot of shaking cars out on that highway.”
Folks on Fire released two LPs in as many years, and as with most young bands, the first one basically captured our live act. It’s our broadest, most frenetic record, with many of our most crowd-pleasing songs. “Irritated and Inflamed” (the title came from a hemorrhoid cream ad) opens with a group yell, then bursts into a David Lynch-like portrait of rot beneath the suburbs, minus the perverse sex. Instead, it invokes portents of decay in a collective “neighborhood of make-believe” between fuzz-guitar leads and crashing false endings. “His One Mistake” sets a melodramatic dialogue between a sinner and his potential redeemer (voiced by me and Bruce respectively) from a found fundamentalist temperance tract to a mid-tempo funk groove. “Workerbee” is a change-up—a gentler song about the bond between band and audience that uses the stage as a metaphor for engaging with life. “I might jump, but I’m not afraid,” sings Bruce. “What a lovely moment! Nothing can be said.”
But the LP side-closer forever established Folks on Fire as more than a snarky post-punk band enamored with funk. “On Any Single Night” is a moody storm of detuned guitar and hypnotic percussion, and the band’s first lyrical “journey to the center” (a phrase from another expansive first album track, “Time Winds Up”) that suggests an escape into deeper consciousness from an oppressive exterior world.
On any single night, in any one house
Pass the long night, long night hours
Casting shadows from passing lights
A drum in my chest, a pound in my head
Late-night TV set the room aglow
Turn off the sound, more shadows to throw
The song recounts a trip through time and an encounter with primitive ancestors redolent of the altered states of analytical psychology. But this psychic trek is triggered not by an analyst, drug, or meditative practice but by the cathode-ray glow of an old-school television, and the track radiates a youthful slumber-party-in-the-dark vibe. Cavorting with ancestral hominids recurs in the album’s final track, “Feet/Adam Exchange.” But here, the focus is the “speechless revelation” that human feet evolved from simian hands, once used to climb trees. In both songs, there’s a sense that evolution and devolution are flip sides of a coin—that civilization robbed humanity of a primal connecting principle while the loss of ancient ritual and wonderment risks returning us to a primitive state.
“Peanuts Envy,” which opens side two, embodies the band’s wary, cusp-of-adulthood perspective. It begins broadly with the Freudian joke of the title and a lewd reference to Dolly Madison (mascot of the commercial pastry company that sponsored the Peanuts TV specials). It’s set to a punky send-up of Vince Guaraldi’s iconic “Linus and Lucy” theme but shifts ominously to a minor-key evocation of post-adolescent tensions and consequences. “All those empty bottles and cigarettes / They pile in over your head,” Bruce sings before a dance-break coda finds him rapping metaphorically about popular kids’ games (“Things they go by faster and faster / It’s a crippling game of Twister”). Charles Schulz’s comic strip and animated specials were almost as impactful as rock music on my generation, and their dynamic of hapless children confronting adult doubt and ennui is a perfect touchstone here. The LP’s remaining tracks (“He-Man,” “Wild Wild West”) use pop culture motifs as springboards to critique media overload and an America in decline.
If the first Folks on Fire LP captured our live set and most anthemic songs, the follow-up, Under a Hairy Sun, was more of a studio album, with material finished onsite, more prominent keyboards, and darker, more introspective lyrics. It opens with a faintly heard phone call: “If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?” asks a voice. “I have no idea,” responds another. Inspired by the writings of anomalist Charles Fort, this snippet of dialogue segues into the album opener, “No Idea,” an eerie prog-like track with violin, ghostly guitar runs, and no conventional lyric. Instead, nonsense syllables and random bits of conversation punctuate the music. Themes of madness and despondence recur on the album, sometimes linked to late-Cold War anxieties (“LIKE A HYDROGEN BOMB…” reads a scare headline on the record’s back cover). Lyrics shift from subjective to omniscient, sometimes within the same song. “Another Godless Night” is a breakneck Goth-country tune with sinister chanting and varispeed vocals that evoke domestic discord (“She feels like it’s a No-Pest Strip / And she’s the fly”) and first-love heartbreak.
Not that the album is all doom and gloom. Dance songs and optimistic naif-like narratives also fill its grooves. But only “Baptized by Fire”—a celebration of summer vibes that conflates childhood rites of passage with religious sacraments—merges the two. “Western Civ I” and “Roller Disco” are danceable but dark, the former a jokey critique of capitalism filtered through the ancient astronaut myth, the latter a lurid snapshot of a vapid discotheque (“like something out of a bad CHiPs episode”) wherein a patron O.D.’s on sleaze and opens fire on the crowd like a leisure-suited Travis Bickle. “Aquarium for People” is a folksy take on home life, and “Dream of Jeannie” sets a laugh-ridden rant about monotonous conformity to ramshackle drums and surf guitar.
The two remaining tracks hone the band’s dark surrealism into sharply expressive statements. “Song of the South” revisits the back-and-forth dialogue of “His One Mistake” amidst a swirl of percussion and dervish-like guitar drones. But here, Bruce is a preacher lamenting man’s fall from grace (“Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think about the Lord, and how he was pushed from the center of our lives onto the cross”); I’m a blue-collar worker incongruously expounding on metaphysics (“A friend of mine used to say that madmen have always run the world because we know at heart that the gods are mad”). Characterizations are comic but don’t simply mock religion or rednecks. Instead, they posit ambiguous cultural juxtapositions at a time when rightwing fundamentalism was obscuring compassionate forms of Christianity, and a once-thriving working class was getting shafted by neoliberal economics. Similarly, “Big Pants” (the album closer) contrasts a child’s dream of wearing grown-up clothes in a grown-up world with a child’s nightmare of no future, evoked by “duck-and-cover”-like references to proficiency exams and the Emergency Broadcast System. A recurrent refrain in the fadeout, atop austere drum knocks and pensive guitar, repeats a cryptic dirge.
Do what you like; don’t mind us
We have no eyes, we have no tongues
Under a Hairy Sun was a transitional album, subtler and more experimental than its predecessor. When I hear the record now, it sounds like it’s headed somewhere more mature and fully realized. I regret it was our last project. But aside from a handful of tracks released on compilations and other formats, it represents the culmination of the band’s output. In addition to those deep cuts, a couple dozen songs we played live remain unrecorded.
Revisiting Folks on Fire, I’m struck by parallels between then and now. Forty years ago, we used music to channel the pressures of nascent adulthood in an ominous world of nuclear threat, creeping authoritarianism, and general malaise. Today, similar stressors plague young people and leave them disheartened. But we were born in comparative stability—at the tail-end of a prosperous postwar era that assured us we’d thrive personally and economically in a secure, robust America. The cracks in that idyllic view were apparent when Folks on Fire formed and foundational to our emergent sensibility. But today’s 18-21-year-olds live in a world of diminished ideals where endless war, social atomization, and a gig economy offer little confidence they’ll do better or even as well as their parents. They, too, face a struggle to find meaning in dispiriting times.
For Folks on Fire, that meaning was both inner-focused and communal. We extolled both the “journey to the center” and dancing your ass off in a club. In a sense, the band was a post-punk mashup of Bob Dylan’s withering “It’s easy to see without looking too hard that not much is really sacred” and George Clinton’s brash “Free your mind and your ass will follow” filtered through the melancholy yearning of a Peanuts holiday special. Because in its irreligious way, Folks on Fire sought the sacred. And the band’s dance-through-the-apocalypse creed remained self-critical—skeptical of escapist remedies that might be childish responses to the adult world. Or vice versa.
Steven L. Jones is an artist, writer, musician, and former instructor at Virginia Commonwealth University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His paintings explore psycho-geographic spaces, real and imagined. His book Murder Ballads Old & New: A Dark & Bloody Record was published in 2023 by Feral House (a sequel, Supernatural Ballads: Songs of High Strangeness, is underway). Since Folks on Fire, musical ventures have included the avant-garde roots band the Feckless Hayseeds. Louisville-born, the son of a choir director and violinist, he lives in Chicago with his dog Queequeg.
(Copyright 2025 by S. L. Jones. All rights reserved.)
Folks on Fire 