Artist Biography

"The essential elements of our poetry shall be courage, audacity, and revolt."
-The Futurist Manifesto of 1910

When Jon Spencer hollers "Blues Explosion!" it's like a bazooka going off, a goddam elephant gun. Or a rocket launcher. It blows holes in things.

That you know it is coming does not diminish its impact. It shares the good-time gestalt and grind of James Brown barking Hit me!, Flavor Flav's yowling, crackalicous Boyeeeeee!!!, Prez Prado taming his big band with a guttural Uh!!!, championship wrestler Ric Flair celebrating his high style and bone-breaking brutality with a gleeful Whooooooo!! - or, for that matter, comedian Soupy Sales' own trademark explosion, getting smooshed in the kisser with a cream pie. What the hell, everyone needs a signature riff.

"Blues Explosion!!!" - in which Spencer has reduced all of rock'n'roll to one semiautistic outburst - is well at home with this group. He shares every sweaty drop of their gusto, swagger, authority, conviction and control, as well as (especially in the case of Soupy Sales) their knowing absurdity and fearlessness.

When the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion came shooting out of the womb in 1992, Clinton-era optimism was just beginning to ferment. But the landscape was still lousy with fifth-wave punks miming Black Flag and the Ramones; torpid Zep and Sabbath revivalism; and studied retro garage crud that quickly diluted itself into a fashion statement. Worse yet, a bumper crop of moping, belly-button-picking indie "rock" that didn't rock (let alone roll) was about to be harvested and threshed into a new wave of pabulum for the college radio set - which should have been reason enough for even the spineless nerds in the glee club to drop out and turn on to a steady diet of Charley Patton, truck-driver crank and corn liquor.

The Blues Explosion live show was like a pie in the face to the entire scene - a real smackeroo that left ears and brains scorched, panties wet and grown men gone ga-ga. They were, without qualification, the best live act of their time and, across the paleontology of rock 'n' roll, right up there with The King, The Godfather and The Stooge.

Spencer may have been the focal point, but the other two men in this jihad, Judah Bauer and Russell Simins, posed no small threat. Simins' take-no-prisoners approach to the drums - thrashing, swinging and leaning into long locomotive rolls on the snare drum - and Bauer's thump and twang, yanked from his Telecaster with oily precision and venom - were the thermonuclear core of the reactor. Except for lack of a traditional four-string bass - Spencer's guitar, which often sounded somewhere between a vacuum cleaner and a well-tempered garbage disposal, was usually more than enough to hold down the dirtier end of the sound spectrum - the Blues Explosion was every bit a band in the classic sense. There were no extra parts. No one was replaceable.

Spencer had already made his mark fronting Pussy Galore, one of the most willfully confrontational groups of all time. They had juggled with Molotov cocktails of punk rock, Stones-isms and noise. With Blues Explosion, he stripped it down to a jet-powered race car that took off so quickly it obviated the need for rearview mirrors. It was the futurist model of an old-style R&B review, performed with the subtlety (and self-referential bliss) of Jerry Lee Lewis having at it with a pneumatic drill. And when Spencer hollered "Blues Explosion!" the room shook.

Was it a celebration, a warning or a declaration of principals? Or was it some kind of elaborate joke?? Perhaps he was testifying to his own optimistic but very real belief that in rock'n'roll there was deliverance. Sometimes it sounded like they were kicking the bejeezus out of the previous 30 years of rock'n'roll simply because they could. But the truth of the matter was that this shit moved.

So what if Spencer boosted bits from Johnny Cash and Jet Screamer? Evolution was too slow, so he created his own musical language. Sure, some of it was pastiche - a patina of greaser sexabilly smeared over a bedrock of brutal guitar clang and buzz, punk rock, irreverence, ass-shaking rhythm, rebellion and, well, shtick. And why not? A guy howling "Blues Explosion!" - or variations on a theme, e.g., Blooooooooozzzzzzze Explooooooooossion!!, Blooooooooozzzzzzze Explooooooooossion!!!!! or the deceptively simple, recondite "blues explosion" - and gesticulating wildly across the elements of a vintage theremin, is prima facie ridiculous. But no more ridiculous than a screaming black queen from Georgia covered in pancake makeup and mascara, hair piled high, pounding out pumped-up boogie-woogie and pretending to like girls; or a French guy painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa and declaring it a masterpiece; or the generally held belief that an electric guitar distorted and amplified beyond any normal human pain threshold is somehow desirable.

-Mike Edison