MO' SPENCER

Last Thursday, I spent some time on the phone with Jon Spencer, former Pussy Galore mastermind turned leader of the Blues Explosion. The bulk of the group's catalog is being remastered and reissued by Shout! Factory this year, including the once promo-only live disc Controversial Negro. Anyway, he had a fair amount to say, and MSN Music (the outlet that commissioned the piece) didn't have room for all of it. You can read their version here; below is a fuller transcript of our conversation.

In retrospect, would it have been easier to deal with critics if you’d left the word Blues out of the name, and just been the Jon Spencer Explosion?
Maybe it would have been easier, but you know, when I thought up the name, I thought, “Wow, what a great name! It’s crazy!” And, you know, I’ve never shied away from doing something that was crazy or doing what was in my heart, certainly not with this band. So perhaps things would have been easier, but it probably wouldn’t have been as good. You know what I’m saying? It has been unfortunate that some people have been so tripped up by the word “Blues” in the band name or some of the sounds we employ, some of the records we’ve made, the shows we’ve done. Like I said, we are kind of a crazy band, and we definitely take influence from a lot of different kinds of music, and yeah, sometimes the band has been misunderstood and unfairly and even bizarrely judged. I think that does seem to be a problem with the blues thing for some people, sure.

And my follow-up to that is, you were just the Pussy Galore guy at that point, so what made you think you had sufficient name recognition to put yourself up front that way?
Just balls, just chutzpah. I had no good reason. It was just rock ’n’ roll.

There were a lot of “alternative” or indie rock bands in the ’90s, from Pavement to the shoegaze acts from England, that really didn’t bring it live. Were you challenging them to step their game up, in a way?
Well, I think so. I think that the live concert was very important to us. It was extremely important that we play a great show—that we put on a show, you know, and not just get up and shuffle around onstage and look at our feet. Showmanship was very important to us. And I think that came from some of our peers. Some of the bands around at the time were up on stage giving 110 percent, bands like the Jesus Lizard for instance, but most of it came from our love of older acts, older rock ’n’ roll bands, older rhythm ’n’ blues acts, older soul acts. For example, James Brown was a huge touchstone for the Blues Explosion. So I think that yeah, when we started and were going, the kind of high-energy showmanship was not so common in the indie or underground scene, and I don’t think it was because we wanted to throw down a challenge to the other bands, I think it was just because it was in us and it was something that we believed in. It was and still is very, very important to us.

How clear was your vision of the band when it started? Because the sound changes radically between the tracks on Year One and the stuff on Extra Width.
Yeah, from Year One to Extra Width to Orange, you can really hear the progression and the band sort of coming together, forming, gelling and solidifying. I think when we started, there was a great rush of ideas, and a great rush of energy, and I think the roles within the band became more defined and more focused over the course of those three records. We never would talk about what we were trying to do, we just did it, you know? So I think through many shows, many, many concerts, and a lot of touring, we came to better understand who we were and what the band could be.

A lot of the Blues Explosion songs, especially on the first few records, aren’t traditional verse-chorus structures; they’re riffs, beats, and collections of cues, almost like conducted improvisations. What was your songwriting process like then, and what was your studio process like?
The songwriting process was pretty much always the same. Pretty much all the songs were written by the three of us just getting together and we would play. We’d each play our instruments—Russell [Simins] played the drums, Judah [Bauer] played the guitar and I’d play the guitar, and I would sing. And through my singing, I would cue the band and…I was not only the lyricist but also the bandleader, I suppose. So yeah, we would just get together and play. And yeah, not all of the songs were traditional. Some of them were more traditional than others. Some of them did lean towards a more standard arrangement, familiar kind of structures, but for me and for us, we were interested in a lot of different kinds of music. Some things like No Wave, definitely punk rock, even free jazz, but one kind of music that really influenced us was rap, was hip-hop. And the thing that was most liberating about hip-hop was the way in which some of these producers and artists would construct songs by cutting and pasting and sampling and stitching things together. That was a really big influence on us.

On the live album, Controversial Negro, I feel like I can really hear the influence of Lux Interior of the Cramps. How big an inspiration was Lux for you, as a performer?
Sure, Lux was an influence definitely. Yeah, the Blues Explosion shared something with the early Cramps in that we had no bass player. Lux was definitely a thing for me, and rockabilly was, and is, for sure. You know, I also think a big influence for us was the Stooges, in particular their live record Metallic K.O., which is a pretty extreme record on its own.

The Rolling Stones are clearly important to you, also. The song “Magical Colors” sounds like something from Goats Head Soup or It’s Only Rock 'n' Roll. What’s your favorite period of the Stones?
You know, I think around ’65, I guess, after they’d been going for a bit and the songwriting really started happening and coming into flower. I mean, the early records are pretty great too, but they’re pretty much all covers. I thought it was nice when they really started writing songs and before they got too psychedelic, but they had a little bit of that pop and psychedelic stuff happening.

A lot of the material on the Year One CD was released on a bootleg called A Reverse Willie Horton before your official debut album or Crypt Style came out. Was that something you put out yourself?
No. I did not put that out, the band didn’t put it out. We were playing around and had done that first session, that Kramer session that ended up on Reverse Willie Horton, and I passed some cassettes around and I think one of those cassettes found its way into the wrong hands.

You had a lot of collaborators on the various records. Why was that important?
It’s great to play with some of these people, to have the opportunity to meet, let alone play with people like R.L. Burnside, Rufus Thomas, Andre Williams, these people who are just heroes, gods to us. To be able to make music with them was out of this world. And it wasn’t just giants from many years ago whose records we had fallen in love with and studied, but also some of our peers, people that were around at the time. A good example is Money Mark, the keyboard player, who’s all over Now I Got Worry. To be able to play with these people – why did we do it? I don’t know, I guess because it felt good, and it was a thrill. And it was for the good of the songs, you know, I think it helped the songs.

As time went on, there started to be a much wider gap between the experimentalism of the studio albums and the rawness of the live show…
Yeah, the early records are much more straightahead, you know, a band playing live in a room. And as the years went by and we continued to make records, we would for the most part still start with a band recording live in a studio, but I began to get more loose, more free, more creative. Some of it just comes from having the money to be able to do that. It’s a bit of a luxury, if you will. And some of it comes from just knowing how to do it. Knowing what you want and having the wherewithal to do it. And I think what’s important for me to point out is yeah, the Blues Explosion had and still does have tremendous respect for the live concert and we work very, very hard to put on a good show, there’s a tremendous amount of hard work and discipline that is involved, but at the same time these records which have been reissued, there’s an incredible amount of hard work that went into these albums. And yeah, some of it was a lot of experimentation. There was a lot of thought, a lot of deliberation, a lot of hard work that went into making these albums. And a concert is one thing, a studio album is another thing. But in no way was either taken lightly. These albums were not done quickly and they certainly weren’t tossed off.

There’s an incredible amount of B-side material, outtakes, live tracks, etc. on these reissues. Were you guys just in the studio constantly?
We spent a lot of time in the studio, but no, not constantly. I think more importantly, we just wrote a lot. We were very busy, we had a lot of ideas and a lot of songs and we were in the studio enough to get them all down on tape. Yeah, it is striking what a busy band we were. For every record we released, we probably recorded and mixed at least two albums’ worth of material, if not more. There was a lot of stuff, a lot of material, and when it came time to do these reissues, I thought it would be best to try and be as complete as possible, make this material available.

Whose decision was it to release the reissues out of chronological order, and why this particular sequence?
On some things I defer to the label, but there was a bit of back-and-forth about the order. The label felt very strongly about not just releasing them all together, all at once, so there did have to be some sequence, and I can’t remember exactly why, but at some point we decided not to do it chronologically. And that’s okay with me.

What are your plans beyond this current batch of tour dates? Will you be going back into the studio, or returning to the road in a more extensive way?
I think we’ll probably continue to play shows here and there in the immediate future. We don’t have any plans for a full-blown tour, but it’s felt very, very good to play live again. So we’ll be doing a bit more of it.

You recently played the Pitchfork Festival in Chicago, and it seems like indie rockers are putting on weak shows again. What’s up with that?
That was a very hectic day for us, we got in just a little bit before we had to play and just had to do the show and then left after the show, so I didn’t see too many of the other bands. But I think that, as much as I hate to say it, I think that music scene is not much better today than it was in the early ’90s. Don’t get me wrong, there are some good bands out there, but there’s a lot of people that could be doing something more, could be more creative and yeah, could be working harder.

PUSSY GALORE DESERVE BETTER

I wish this article was better.

I like Pussy Galore, a lot. I have almost all their studio releases in my iPod (I've never heard the live album, and I don't like Historia de la Musica Rock), and some of it is really thrilling stuff. Right Now! is so simultaneously jacked-up and sagging, it's like a series of seizures. Same with the early EPs. But Sugarshit Sharp and Dial M for Motherfucker demonstrate real accomplishment. Skip past the cover of Einstürzende Neubauten's "Yu-Gung" on SS; check out "Sweet Little Hi-Fi." That's just a flat-out good song. So are "SM 57" and "Dick Johnson" from Dial M. This crew knew what they wanted to achieve in the studio, and they did it. They were a good band.

I saw them play in Los Angeles in 1989, on what I think was their final tour; Julia Cafritz wasn't even in the band anymore, it was just Jon Spencer, Neil Hagerty and Bob Bert. They played at one A.M. on a Monday night, to a barely half-full club. I bought a T-shirt from Bert for five bucks; it started out red but wound up fading to the color of an old ketchup stain, all stretched out of shape and warped-looking by the time it finally found its way to the trash a half-decade or so later.

Anyway, as much as I love the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St., I also own and have occasionally even listened to Pussy Galore's version, and it has some aesthetic merit, especially early on. It gets worse—noisier, more half-assed, like the group has lost interest in the joke but feels compelled to reach the end—as it goes on. But it's worth hearing. It's worth analyzing.

This Quietus piece provides no analysis. The author clearly thought his idea (to claim that PG's version of Exile is superior to the original) was, in effect, too good to check. Reading this, I'm not even sure if he even listened to the PG Exile before writing the column. He offers no description of any value to anyone who might want to seek it out (it's all over the Internet, naturally), instead coughing up this hairball from an old issue of Forced Exposure: "four track tape feedback, guitars that are out of tune and time, voices telling you to go fuck yourself, versions of previous epics retroactively aborted back to unformed foetuses drowning in sonic uterine discharge, convulsing over exploding tape heads..." Jesus, what year is it? Are we really still trying to be Lester Bangs and Byron Coley? I don't wanna get all Robert Christgau here, but for hell's sake, stop masturbating and start writing.

LIVING IN THE BUBBLE

Like many people, I am on Bob Lefsetz’s email list. I get one or two emails a day from him. Most of them are rants about the shitty state of the music business. Which is fine, if unsurprising and redundant. Like Howard Beale says in Network, “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.” Still, it’s fun to read Lefsetz’s splenetic spluttering. Sometimes he gets righteous about things like ticket prices and bullshit “VIP packages” that really are worth complaining about.

But his worldview is skewed and myopic, so much so that it makes even his valid points hard to support sometimes. I'll explain.

I’m guessing Bob Lefsetz is about sixty years old. And for that reason above all others, his worldview is obsolete and irrelevant. He suffers from the delusion that all Americans his age suffer from: that the way he’s always known it to be is the way it should be and the way it could continue to be, in perpetuity, if people could just be brought around to his way of thinking. But in fact, the music industry as people Bob Lefsetz’s age knew it is such a massive historical anomaly that to see it as anything else is farcical.

Let me break it down: Recording technology has existed for less than 150 years. Cylinders were introduced in about 1880, and by 1910 records had taken over. Tape recording was popularized in the 1940s. Various other inventions like the transistor radio, 33 1/3 and 45 rpm records and home stereos to play them on, etc., etc., caused popular music to go through a boom cycle. But this was also related to the economic and demographic changes that arose in the wake of World War II. The children of returning soldiers—you know, the Baby Boomers—had indulgent parents who gave them allowances to buy shit, and eventually they got jobs and bought more shit, and consequently they exerted a disproportionate influence over popular culture. And because this was the only world they’d ever known, they figured it was the way things were supposed to be, and the way things always would be. When they became record industry executives, they continued to believe that things would always be the way they’d been.

But the only reason things ever were like that—the only reason records ever sold in the “golden age”—was because the technology to freely duplicate them didn’t exist yet. If file sharing technology had been around in 1964, those same Baby Boomers would have downloaded the living fuck out of the Beatles’ albums. And the Rolling Stones’ albums. And every other canonical, classic rock artist who folks like Bob Lefsetz hold up as paradigmatic and worthy of emulation.

This is an idea that is literally unimaginable to Bob Lefsetz. Because he doesn't just believe technology has changed the market, he believes people have changed. This week, he wrote:

This business will not be vital again until there's a stable of stars, hopefully a plethora that people follow and want to see…Everybody else lives and dies on the hit single. If Christina Aguilera had fans, she'd be able to sell tickets without airplay. But she needs hits to get bodies into seats. In the old days, bands could tour without hits whatsoever. But that was back when music drove the culture, when you knew the players like sports team members, when you had to go to the show, when you were addicted to the radio.

Pretty much everything in that paragraph is wrong. First, the business will never be “vital” again. The monopoly on the means of distribution has been broken, and it cannot be rebuilt. There are no hit singles because the record industry doesn’t manufacture singles anymore. And Christina Aguilera? She’s a part of the old-school, obsolete, Lefsetzian worldview and business model. She was built by a machine designed to create pop stars, no different than a movie star of the 1930s created and maintained by a finely tuned publicity machine. It is literally impossible for an artist like Christina Aguilera to have fans that will manifest the kind of devotion that Phish, or Cannibal Corpse, can conjure up, because Aguilera has spent her entire career deliberately keeping fans at arm’s length. She speaks through carefully sculpted quotes in US Weekly or heavily edited interviews for MTV and VH1, not through Twitter or a blog. Bands that do that, bands that seem to have arisen from the same muck as their fans, are the bands Lefsetz says could tour without hits…but only “in the old days.” When he thinks about bands touring without radio support, he’s probably thinking of Grand Funk Railroad. He has no idea that it’s going on all around him.

Oh, and that whole thing about knowing the bandmembers like members of sports teams? Bullshit. Sure, people knew John, Paul, George, and Ringo. They knew Mick and Keith and Charlie. But who knew all the names of Ted Nugent's backing band when he was packing arenas? Who knew the names of the members of the Silver Bullet Band when Bob Seger was huge? Nobody.

Later he writes:

The radio. And then MTV. They centralized focus. They delivered a platform for star-building. Someone left of center could get exposure and make it. Like Culture Club. MTV broke Boy George big, radio followed. But FM radio built Hendrix and Cream, the music was so exciting you listened every night. Because everyone was different, everyone was testing limits, everybody wasn't the same. And if you don't think everybody's the same today, try listening to Top Forty radio.

This is the problem in a nutshell. Lefsetz still believes in a Top Forty. He still believes in top-down culture, in societal unification through pop music. He rants and raves that everyone around now is a “niche” act. That’s the worst thing you can be in Lefsetz-land—a “niche” act. He can’t imagine a universe in which people don’t care, don't think it's important, whether or not their neighbor is listening to the same albums, watching the same TV shows, reading the same books that they’re reading. He probably read Bowling Alone and nodded through his tears. And because of this belief system, which he's too old to shake loose, he has no idea how obsessed people younger than him are with music. The 17-year-old girl who wrote the letter to Alternative Press that I reprinted two posts ago? She doesn't exist in Bob Lefsetz's universe, because she's not buying records and he's never gonna go to Warped Tour and see her and all her screaming friends. Hell, we're talking about a guy here who didn't even write about Malcolm McLaren's death. I bet he'd never heard of the guy.

The idea of a monoculture was always bullshit anyway. Back in the hallowed Sixties and early Seventies, when Lefsetz’s cultural preconceptions were being cast in stone, there was one music magazine of any consequence—Rolling Stone. Maybe Creem. Anything Rolling Stone didn’t cover didn’t get covered. Now, people get their information directly from bands—at least if the bands are smart, they do.

The record industry was a bubble. It took a long time to burst, because it was entirely technology-dependent. But now it's burst, and all the ancillary industries around it—like music journalism—are deflating too. The only thing that's not going away is music itself.