Jon Spencer turned 60 in February this year. His 50s yielded a run of consistently excellent records: the Blues Explosion’s Freedom Tower (2015); Boss Hog’s Brood X (2017); and three records under his own name: Spencer Sings The Hits (2018); Spencer Gets It Lit (2022) and Sick of Being Sick! (2024). His work as a producer on Samantha Fish and Jesse Dayton’s Death Wish Blues (2023) was even nominated for a Grammy (in the Contemporary Blues category).
“Those are all good records,” he says, “but I don’t think of this as my best decade because it’s been so fractured. In other decades, I was putting out a record every year. There was a higher rate of productivity and there weren’t the same kind of struggles.”
Spencer’s 50s were indeed rough: the Trumpian de-evolution of his homeland; the ordeal of the pandemic in New York City; the decimation of the live music scene; and the end of four of his bands: the Blues Explosion; Heavy Trash; Boss Hog and The HITmakers. Those dissolutions – particularly the Blues Explosion and The HITmakers – left Spencer feeling like he “had the wind knocked out of my sails.”
In 2021, Spencer left New York City after more than 30 years there and moved to the Hudson valley. There he formed a new band with Kendall Wind and Macky Spider Bowman, best known for playing punk rock in The Bobby Lees. The record Spencer made with them last year, Sick Of Being Sick! was a direct response, and a solution, to the personal trough in which he found himself.
The cure for America in 2025 might not be rock & roll but, in Spencer’s view, “I’ve got to do something. It’s such a dark and depressing time.” Rather than the blind nihilistic youthful rage of Pussy Galore, Spencer’s fury has turned openly political, to the point that his latest single ‘Come On!’ is intended as a protest song against Trump 2.0.
Playing live with Wind and Bowman, Spencer not only re-found “the energy, the intensity and the physical force” of the Blues Explosion but also the desire to play more and more of his old songs. The trio have more than 40 songs in their repertoire, drawn from all four decades of Spencer’s career. And it is from those that Spencer has chosen his ten tracks for tQ.
Pussy Galore – ‘No Count’ from Pussy Gold 5000 (1986)
Jon Spencer: ‘No Count’ is a great ‘60s garage punk song by Ty Wagner and The Scotchmen. I first heard it in the early 80s on a comp, The Chosen Few. Pussy Galore played it live quite early on. Many, many years passed and out of the blue, I started to get texts and phone calls from Ty Wagner. Even though they were friendly, I was a little spooked that I was going to get hit up for some money. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I just didn’t respond. Then last year these people making a documentary about Ty Wagner got in touch. I was doing a session for KEXP in Seattle and I asked Ty if he’d like to come and do ‘No Count’ with us. He gave me two pairs of shoes: one was blue suede! Ty’s a very sweet guy, very kind. The other week he gave me a call: “I’m in the hospital. I just got out of heart surgery. I just want to say, I’m watching your stuff on YouTube and your music saved my life!”
Ty is a true believer in the importance of rock & roll. Isn’t there too much of the cynical punk in you for you to go that far?
JS: Not at all. Look at me: I’m 60, still playing in a band and driving around in the back of a van.
Pussy Galore – ‘Sweet Little Hi-Fi’ from Sugarshit Sharp (1988)
JS: This was the second time we had worked with Steve Albini. He came to New York City and we went to Chung King Studios in Lower Manhattan where Rick Rubin did most of the early Def Jam stuff. When Steve passed there was all this stuff about how he could be a curmudgeon, prickly and antogonistic, but he was also an extremely smart guy, an excellent engineer and he was a very kind person. He openly shared his expertise – not just about making records, but touring and promotion. He was a real scene supporter. We also did the Devo song ‘Penetration In The Centerfold’ at that time. In one of the breaks, there’s a clattering of metal percussion. That’s me throwing automotive springs and other stuff down the fire escape at Chung King. Steve was supportive of the aesthetic direction – and he would then know the best microphone to capture the sound of metal being hurled three flights down a concrete stairwell!
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – ‘’78 Style’ from A Reverse Willie Horton (1992)
JS: ‘’78 Style’ is about my van. Pussy Galore bought a 1978 Chevy 10, a cargo van, the smallest they made. And as the song describes, the licence plate was ATD-408, it came with wood panelling in the back and with Bugs Bunny mudflaps. I used to park it in a lot in Williamsburg, at a time when Williamsburg was a very rough spot, so it was incredibly cheap. Pussy Galore, Boss Hog, the Gibson Brothers and the Blues Explosion toured in that van. I don’t have any notalgic feelings for the old New York of that time. I don’t want to go back. I don’t wish it was like that now. But playing with Judah (Bauer) and Russell (Simins) in the early days of the Blues Explosion was tremendously exciting; it was completely wild and just seemed like a wide open vista of possibility musically, but grounded in rock & roll, R&B, soul and yet we had the freedom to fuck around and do some crazy shit. There was just this tremendous energy built up. It was like The Big Bang.
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – ‘Talk About The Blues’ from Acme (1998)
JS: We did this with Dan The Automator. He made it sound awesome but all the parts are pretty much there in the demo, which I built out of samples of sessions we’d done with Calvin Johnson at the Dub Narcotic Studio in Olympia, Washington. It’s very much like a hip hop or a rap song; it’s cut up and stitched together. The song was my reaction to being freaked out by some Rolling Stone interview I did and being included in their blues issue. So it’s twisting the Mississippi Fred McDowell line “I do not play no rock & roll.”
Do your remember playing ‘Talk About The Blues’ on prime time French TV, rampaging around the studio and jumping on a table next to Jackie Chan?
JS: I have no memory of it. Only that there is a YouTube clip. So much of my life is like that.
At the time of Acme, you were sort of famous …
JS: I don’t think I enjoyed that. I tried to keep it at arm’s length. I was just interested in making records and playing shows. I come from DIY punk. I don’t long for security. I’m not interested in ‘a career’ or fame. I was in the band because I loved music and felt compelled to do it. I’m still doing it now because it’s a salve to my soul in some way. But I can’t do it alone. This is an equation; it’s a group and a shared experience with the audience, a magical spell and we all need to be in on it together.
Heavy Trash – ‘(Sometimes You Got To Be) Gentle’ from Midnight Soul Serenade (2009)
JS: For me, Heavy Trash was an opportunity to explore rockabilly and country roots music and to play and write songs that didn’t seem possible with the Blues Explosion. I was looking for something that was more playful. It was fun to write and record with Matt Verta-Ray. He is such a wonderful rockabilly guitar player. It takes such skill to excel at that. He has his own studio in New York City, so we could just stretch out and experiment. On ‘Gentle’ there’s just the two of us. That’s my monkey drumming on it and in the video. Some of the lines and the imagery are inspired by some science fiction B-movie about an alien I happened to catch. This journalistic approach in a way came from Albini, that you can write a song like: “Fuck! This guy stayed at my house and broke this thing.” That’s actually the Jesus Lizard song, ‘Mouth Breather’ with David Yow singing about Albini complaining about, I can’t remember which guy from what band, who stayed at his house and broke some shit. Albini was talking to Yow: “Fuck this guy! And look at this – this door’s all fucked up! I mean, I really like this guy, don’t get me wrong, but he’s a mouth breather.” So that becomes the song.
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – ‘Wax Dummy’ from Freedom Tower – No Wave Dance Party 2015 (2015)
JS: When we supported Samantha Fish, she asked me and Macky and Kendall to play it. She loves that song. It was her walk-out music. We recorded Freedom Tower at Daptone in Brooklyn, which is a very funky studio in the front room of a house with really crude old equipment. We tracked there but mixed with Alap Momin from the industrial hip hop group Dälek up in Spanish Harlem: two completely different worlds. There was a difficult period in the Blues Explosion when we were trying too hard to please some imaginary audience but the last two records – this and Meat + Bone (2012) – we were back doing what we wanted to do. On ‘Wax Dummy’, I was channelling Chuck D there. Oh yeah, he’s never far from my mind! There are definitely songs about the end of my love affair with NYC on the record. It’s not an easy place to live. Cristina (Martinez, wife and Boss Hog bandmate) and I had raised our son. The way we were using the city had changed. And we had changed. I’m not missing the city at all.
Jon Spencer – ‘Trash Can’ from Spencer Sings The Hits (2018)
JS: ‘Trash Can’ is a call to action couched as a dance song: ‘Do the trash can’ but it can also mean politcal action, protesting or overthrowing the government! I don’t like things which are too on the nose; I like to keep it playful.
So you’re not from the ‘Nazi Punks Fuck Off’ school?
JS: I certainly like songs like that and can shout along but I don’t want to be didactic. Although, ‘Trash Can’ does begin “Fuck this orange piece of shit!” But as I get to be old and be a witness to the horrors taking place currently in my country, maybe I am becoming more like: “Wake the fuck up!” There was some political stuff with the Blues Explosion as the band went along due to the second Bush administration, the Iraq War, 9/11. The best example is ‘Hot Gossip’ with our guest Chuck D. But back in Pussy Galore, who was President then? Reagan? Clinton? It just seemed such a joke; they were all crooks. But compared to now? Shit! But when you’re young it’s easier to tune it out. Maybe not for everybody, but it was for me.The nihilism and heavy hatred trip I was on with Pussy Galore was not bucking against the liberal household from which I sprang. It was a very late adolescent way of dealing with my own personal shit, or [a reflection of] my inability to deal with my own personal shit. The act of being in a band and strapping on an electric guitar is a political action. Eventhough rock & roll music has long since been co-opted, it still counts for something. Who was the originator? Little Richard – and he was a freak! A cross-dresser, a bisexual Black man. Rock & roll came from the very people they are now trying to erase and deny. If we didn’t have any of that, we wouldn’t have rock & roll!
Jon Spencer and The HITMakers ‘Junk Man’ from Spencer Gets It Lit (2022)
JS: This is really a pair with ‘Trash Can’. They start both records and have garbage in the title and are lyrically about the same thing but ‘Junk Man’ is a little broader in scope to take in people like Musk and Bezos and the oligarchs. Bezos and Musk have obviously got so much worse since that song. Just un-fucking-believable! I made demos on my phone in New York City during the pandemic. The move out of the city was in process but got stalled, so I was stuck in the city, a bit in limbo during lockdown in Manhattan.
You were in the city for both of its modern tragedies, the pandemic and 9-11.
JS: On 11 September, I was taking my son to school when the first plane hit. He’d only just started school a week prior and we were taking a bus across 14th Street, so when you go across the big Avenues you can look down at the World Trade Center.
Jon Spencer – ‘Disconnected’ from Sick Of Being Sick! (2024)
JS. I live in Kingston now, a small city not far from Woodstock. Woodstock has a reputation for being an artsy cultural place but I would not say, “If you want to be in a band, go to Kingston!” I got lucky finding Kendall and Macky. I first met them when Boss Hog were playing at the Helsinki in Hudson – must have been 2018 – and as always we were looking for support. Someone tipped us off on The Bobby Lees. We checked them out online; they sounded cool so we invited them. I think that show was on the night of Kendall’s high school graduation and Macky was fifteen or sixteen. I ended up producing The Bobby Lees’ second album. And when I was producing Samantha Fish and Jesse Dayton, I was given the job to put together a band when we were recording in Woodstock. For a bass player, my first thought was Kendall. When that record came out, Samantha asked me if I wanted to play support on a leg of her tour and I just said, “Yeah!” And then thought, “Now I have to get a band!”
All of the working titles for Sick Of Being Sick! were just ‘Blues 1’, ‘Blues 2’, so in my mind it was a blues album, as I was working through creatively whatever shit I was going through. We recorded in Applehead Studios where I had done Death Wish Blues, so I knew the studio. It was convenient and they had this beautiful old Ampex 24-track – the Cadillac of old analogue machines. We did it all in three days. I just wanted to keep it plain, get some product out as a calling card so we could continue to get gigs: “Here is this new band. Here we are playing.”
Jon Spencer – ‘Come On!’ (2024)
JS: This Trump re-election was completely heart-breaking and a real gut punch. I found myself reaching out to some people I didn’t even know. Deke Dickerson I was aware of through my friend Bloodshot Bill, the world’s greatest living rockabilly singer. I enjoyed the stuff Deke would post on Instagram and Facebook about American roots music and history, musical and recording equipment – stuff that’s real catnip for me. He’s not just a working musician, he’s an historian and archivist. I wrote to him wanting to express some support and love and solidarity.
Sometime later we were out in L.A on tour with Samantha Fish and had a day off, so we did a session at the recording studio Deke has in his house. I wanted him to play with us and do a sort of protest song. Deke understands gospel and soul and garage punk and all the references: he got it straight off. It was based on the intro to our set where I’m preaching, which we would return to later and I’d get more political. At one show in southern California, the room started booing us and chanting Trump’s name.
When I heard the roughs of our song ‘Come On!’, I got extremely excited: “We gotta do a 45!” Our protest song trying to encourage some compassion and some action is on the A-side and our version of ‘Come-On’ by Wynn Stewart is on the B-side, which we had also recorded at Deke’s.
Can a rock & roll song really have any political impact?
JS: My immediate thought is that it’s not going to change anything. But if so, why did I do it? I guess, I’m not such a pessimist; I do have some hope. And I cannot bear to sit by.
Jon Spencer is on tour in Europe in June and the USA in July, Sick of Being Sick! is ‘available through Bronzerat Records & ‘Come On’ is available here
