The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (catl)
Lee's Palace. Saturday, July 31, 2010.
I kinda have an aversion to reunions and nostalgia tours. Not, by and large, out of snobbery or anything so much as they tend to be expensive and underwhelming. And, I suppose, I like to think of myself, sometimes, as a "with it" sort of guy, who's engaged with so much with music in the here-and-now that I don't want to be amongst the multitude of folks who don't go to many shows anymore — and when they do, it's the same bands they saw fifteen years ago. I'd skipped out on seeing some of the titans of mid-90's alt.rock as they made their way through town this year — and yet, here I was out to see The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.
Well, the fact that this was at Lee's helped, keeping me closer than I'd be at some gargantuan festival. And my curiously was definitely sparked when I saw Jon Spencer playing with his other band, in a set that showed he was still an A-1 entertainer. But overall, I dunno why my gut was saying to go with this one, but I went with my gut.
In a nice bonus, local "play the blues, punk" crew catl, long a favourite 'round these parts, was tapped as an inspired choice to open. Although I was down on the floor and close to the stage as the trio emerged, they were obviously an unknown to most of the crowd here. Leading off with an unhurried take of "Oh Death" before picking things up with the shout-ier "Hey! Hey!", though, they quickly got a lot of the early crowd onside. Though there was that usual element of "we got here early to get a stool and we're staying put", a couple people did come up to dance, which vocalist/keyboardist Sarah Kirkpatrick approved of — it was slightly odd to see the band on a big enough stage that she couldn't just jump down to join in.
Never less than high-energy entertainers, on this night I especially dug the hot licks of "Caroline" amongst the stuff from this year's noteworthy With the Lord for cowards you will find no place. There was also a tasty helping of stuff that hasn't been tackled in any official release yet, either: between their ace originals, like a gospel-flavoured one ("give me something to believe in") and the realm of covers they could tackle, the band has a bunch more songs to play than the ones on their albums, like "Hold My Body Down" and the bracing "5 Miles", which might have been the spine of the set.
It was a reasonably-sized early crowd, but there was still lots of room down on the floor. More than enough for one no-neck drunken dude with a backwards baseball cap — he looked like a suburban poor man's Little Steven — taking up a lot of space with with some dancing/staggering. He was repeatedly dancing into the guy closest to him, who has quickly starting to look pissed off. For a second, the possibility that Little Steven was going to get decked hung in the air. Between songs he kept shouting that everyone else in the room were "fuckin' zombies" for not dancing enough. He fell into the demographic segment of "people who don't realize they can't hold their drinks like they could ten years ago" — of which there were more than a few in attendance on this night, a persistent danger at reunion/nostalgia shows.
But that quote-unquote amusement notwithstanding, catl's set was a great time, as it always is. On the generous side for an opener, too, stretching out to forty-five minutes.1
Listen to a track from this set here.
And after that, the customary rush of bodies swooping to fill in the floor below the stage, as people jockeyed for position to see the band they'd heard of before. Just like for catl, the drums were set up much closer to the front of the stage than usual, to the extent that when The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion emerged, the three musicians were in a straight line across the stage. An egalitarian stance, to be sure, though Spencer — dedicated enough to rock'n'roll to be wearing his leather pants on a hot summer night — was definitely the focus on stage. The band had gone on hiatus in '06, not releasing any new material since 2005's Damage, and though there have been live appearances over the past couple years there hasn't been any indication of new material forthcoming from the band.
Here, they led off with "Chowder", a song dating to the Acme era, but not on that album2 — although that might not have been a "can't miss" opener, at least it was a sign this would be more than a "just the hits" sort of show. And regardless, Spencer was in fine fettle, greeting the crowd after a couple songs in his hyperactive huckster-like manner, like a rock'n'roll evangelist half-speaking in tongues: "Thank you! Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen! That was a blues explosion! Ladies and gentlemen, that's a blues explosion!" Fittingly, there was no shortage of guys on hand ready to shout "blues explosion!!" back to him.
If there's a propensity amongst some of the fanbase to mark of the band's later stuff with a kind of declining trajectory from their peaks of Orange/Now I Got Worry — and I'll admit I'm more or less in that camp — one purpose of a show like this is to put it all back together and present it as a unified body of work, the setlist flitting back and forth in the discography. So peak-era stuff like "Chicken Dog" (from Now I Got Worry) ended up tossed in there with "Sweet 'N' Sour" (from '02's Plastic Fang3 and way-back stuff like "The Feeling of Love" (from '92's Crypt Style. The latter would be combined with Dub Narcotic anarcho-joy anthem "Fuck Shit Up" in a vocal spot for Judah Baker, who was rocking a "Lawrence from Office Space" look.
The band gained strength as they went along, the guitarists locking in increasingly tightly with drummer Russell Simins. I wouldn't be the first to notice (indeed, Spencer himself did, stopping one song to bring this up) that Simins is the backbone of the band. And soon, the songs were flying by in a sweaty blur of full-immersion chaotic goodness. There was some stuff I hadn't figured on hearing, like "Son of Sam", a Chain Gang song which the band covered for one of their relatively obscure "jukebox singles", though I'm guessing it might have been in their live repertoire beyond that.
There were a lot of songs — some would appear as fragments, basically serving as lead-ins to others that would get fuller runthroughs. But some, like "Blues X Man" would get stretched out, both in its spoken middle section and the theramin freakout at the end. "Magical Colors", the finale of the main set, would also get an extended coda, stretching out almost ten minutes.
Obviously this was hitting directly in a lot of the crowd's pleasure centres — they were rapturously called back for an encore by the chanting crowd, and during "Sweat", the guy beside me was rubbing his scalp like it was one of the pleasure orbs in Sleeper. The band played a generous twenty-minute encore following the hour-long main set — I counted something like twenty-seven songs, though I might have missed something in the rush. Really good stuff, high energy throughout and a most worthy reunion. I'm glad I set aside my reservations about this one.
There was an embarrassment of riches in this set to pick from — you can check out a couple tracks, here and here.
1 catl are always a recommended live pick, but their next couple gigs look to be extra-worthy, including an xmas party at The Dakota, a familiar haunt for the band (December 18) as well as supporting Elliott Brood on New Year's Eve at Lee's.
2 For those who dig complicated discographies, the JSBX does pretty good in that regard, with several albums containing variable tracklistings, and plenty of out-takes relegated to singles, companion EP's, etc. "Chowder", for example, originally appeared on the Acme Plus EP, which was released internationally as Extra Acme. A lot of this confusion has been pleasingly smoothed over with the recent series of reissues, two-disc packages which recombine all these extra tracks in one place.
3 I admittedly wasn't really paying attention by the time of Plastic Fang, but "Money Rock 'N' Roll" here was an argument in its favour.
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