The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion: 'When you dig up the past, the bones are just toys'

The Skinny: Take us back to 1990 and the formation of The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, how did you get acquainted with Judah Bauer and Russell Simins?

Jon Spencer: Well Russell began playing with some friends of mine in a band called Honeymoon Killers. This was after Pussy Galore – my band prior to the Blues Explosion. I was just kickin’ around and began to hang out with these guys – they were my neighbours as well. Russell was a great drummer, he and I just hit it off. Eventually I got playing with Honeymoon Killers, and then Russ thought it would be fun to play as a duo.  Judah Bauer was Russell’s friend, at the time they were sharing a loft together in Brooklyn. Judah was a young kid around 18, he’d just come in on the bus from Wisconsin. So Russell brought him along one day, the three of us started playing together and found out that we could make music.

Did you have many common musical interests at the time?

Some, but not tonnes. A real important one for us right from the beginning was Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers – a great blues musician from Chicago. The most important common interest was the desire to kick out the jams, as it were.

There’s a lot of  humour to the Blues Explosion, which has meant you’ve not always been taken entirely seriously. How do you respond to that?

It’s a playfulness – but there’s also great joy. It’s very alive music and I feel that’s a big part of rock’n’roll – it’s a very life-affirming thing for me. This kind of vitality, this liveliness and this levity – those elements of the band have confused some people. Especially in America, more kudos is given to somebody like Bruce Springsteen than, say, Little Richard. People want rock stars to be a bit more serious – poets of a different sort. Me? I’m a primitivist, I think there’s great truth and beauty in lines like Tutti Frutti.

There was a lot of angst dominating the airwaves when you first appeared on late night MTV, the Blues Explosion looked and sounded like an antidote to that...

Yeah, I think we definitely were a shot in the arm. We were entertainers; there was a sense of show business to what we were doing. We were versed in old traditions and we were interested in carrying that around while a lot of other bands at the time weren’t interested in connecting with an audience, some of them seemed against the idea of entertainment.

Was the band a reaction to that?

A little bit, but not to such a degree that it was hateful. Again, to compare and contrast with Pussy Galore, that was reactionary, and a lot more confrontational.

By the time you released Orange in 1994 you’d found allies in the Beastie Boys – who had come back to embrace their instrumental side – and an emergent Beck. Was that a particularly creative period?

They were all creative times, but I suppose around the time of ‘94-‘95, as the Blues Explosion we’d found ourselves. The first few years were that period of development and definition – things were solidifying in the way the group functioned, the sound and what everybody did in the band as far as songwriting and ideas went. By that time we really knew where we were and what we were trying to do. At times we felt a certain kinship with other artists, I can’t say it was overwhelmingly so. With Pussy Galore I really felt connected to a scene and this underground culture. Not as much with the Blues Explosion, I always felt a bit on our own, but there were exceptions. 

When you came to record Acme four years later you enlisted six producers – including Steve Albini and Dan the Automator – to oversee the sessions, which was a gamble that speaks for the band’s diversity. What drew you to those two very different producers in particular?

They were people we liked, we appreciated what they were doing and what they were about – it was as simple as that. The thing that really made us want to work with Dan was the Doctor Octagon record, specifically Blue Flowers. With Steve it was everything, he’s a brilliant engineer.

Your first decade was the most prolific; what conditions forced you to take your time in the new millennium?

It was all by our own choice, I mean, for the first ten years it was a mad rush – we were just incredibly busy, touring and making records all the time. Then, after so many years, we became interested in not being so busy [laughs], and also interested in making music with other people. So I’ve spent time working with Heavy Trash, Judah Bauer has played with Chan Marshall [AKA Cat Power] for several years, and Russell’s played with a bunch of different people – most recently he’s been spending a bit of time with Harper [son of Paul] Simon.

Blues Explosion albums have been difficult to buy for too long, was that the main impetus for revisiting the catalogue now?

Yeah – I hope people can get them now! I’m very proud of these albums; I had to make them available again. Everything had gone out of print and it’s all reverted to the band; we own the catalogue. I didn’t want to do just straight reissues either; I tried to be as complete as possible and include as much material as I could that was recorded at the time of every album.

You say complete, but was it difficult to judge what to put out there for public consumption?

With a few exceptions, I didn’t want to include multiple versions of any one song. Enough time has passed that this almost feels like someone else’s band. There’s a separation now between me and these albums, I’ve tried to make them interesting as a fan. Some of the stuff was hard to find. I mean, we own it all but locating it was another thing. And some of the old analogue magnetic tape needed to be baked because it had gotten a bit sticky.

What’s been your own most enjoyable chapter of the Blues Explosion so far?

For me, as far as albums, I’ve gone through many phases. For a while it was [1993's] Extra Width, then [1996's] Now I Got Worry. Of course Orange is a very strong record, but I don’t put that at the top of my list because a lot of outsiders consider it the record. I wouldn’t pick one album, it would be one period – the time that we spent with R.L. Burnside was the greatest for me. Not just that album [1996’s A Ass Pocket Full of Whiskey], but also the time we spent just living with him, touring and playing together. I don’t think a lot of people had ever heard of R.L. or had ever heard his music before we took him out on the road. We weren’t missionaries, we weren’t out there to educate people, but that’s what happened.

These days people talk about the Blues Explosion in the past tense, as if it's finished. But you never said goodbye…

We never put a stop to it, we never called it quits. We’re largely inactive, but every once in a while we do get together – this year we’ve been more busy than we have in a long time. The reissues were a huge undertaking for me. Our heyday was a while ago, but we’re not finished. The times we are playing it feels great, not much different than it used to feel. It’s still very electric, very powerful, and it makes me feel good.