"Have I considered leaving the US?" says Jon Spencer. "No! I'm engaged. I'm keeping up on the news, attending protests. I play rock'n'roll, one of the genuine, true American art forms – that and jazz. And as someone who has dedicated their life to this most American of art forms, I’ll be fucking damned if these pricks can plate it with gold and call it something else.
"I am hopeful that a change is gonna come, if I can quote a better songwriter than me."
Now on his fifth decade playing “this most American of art forms,” Jon Spencer is still a true believer in the power of music to effect personal and political change.
His new album, Songs of Personal Loss and Protest, is a response to the MAGA ‘pricks’ and ‘half-wits’ and their tech and media allies laying waste to his country. It also rages against the dying of the light, documenting the ravages of time on his friends and family.
It’s therefore a heavy record full of deeply “personal shit” intertwined with white-knuckled political fury. For Spencer, playing rock’n’roll is both an act of defiance against “fascism” and an opportunity to renew himself.
Songs of Personal Loss and Protest is also a funny and playful record, full of bizarro lyrical references – a sea horse, an incontinent cat and Kojak among them – and musical twists and handbrake turns. It’s a mutant, impure and very idiosyncratic version of rock’n’roll.
Spencer has not hoisted his freak flag alone. His band – for which he still does not have a name – is a power trio: himself on guitar, Macky (or Spider) Bowman on drums and Kendall Wind on bass, although she often uses the instrument as a lead guitarist would. Both are well under half Spencer’s age (22, 25 and 61 respectively) and are also the rhythm section of the Woodstock garage punks – and Jason Momoa protégés – The Bobby Lees.
Spencer talked to us about the genesis of his new album, the perilous state of his nation, the thrills and challenges of touring and his plans to release archive Blues Explosion recordings.
Firstly, and just to be clear, the title of this album is not ironic or a curveball. It’s meant to be taken straight?
Jon Spencer: It’s not a joke. It’s not a piss-take. It is certainly informed by that phase of life where you are dealing with people in ill-health and friends and family passing away, in addition to dealing with our own set of challenges of getting old.
Case in point, the final track ‘No More’. It’s a song about the death of your father.
The first verse is literally inspired by when my father passed and I was living with my mother because she was undergoing treatment for cancer. Both of my parents are/were not terribly sentimental people and in some ways guarded or closed off. Pretty quickly, she went right about just getting rid of all of this stuff in a very business-like way. So the lyrics came out of there.
Losing a friend or a family member is a heavy thing. That song was one of the ways in which I've been dealing with it and processing that experience.
It's an excellent song. Maybe the best track on the album.
I like that song a lot. It was just something which happened while we were on the studio floor waiting for a technical problem to be resolved in the control room. We were just messing about and that song came out. My favourite things from a session can be something like that, something unplanned and unwritten just coming together.
That really surprises me because I thought you would have been working on the lyrics over and over.
No, it’s been a heavy few years and so everything was there, ready to come out.
I was also surprised to hear a song so lyrically undisguised from you. It's essentially a poem. I'm not aware of anything similar to that that you've done in 40 years.
Thank you for the kind words but I would politely disagree. I think I've definitely written from a personal standpoint in the past. I think I've been quite open and honest in my lyrics, and raw and personal.
You could go all the way back to Hey Mom on Extra Width [The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion album, 1993], even Pussy Galore songs. Maybe the difference is that my vocal delivery on a song like No More is very plain and clearly audible and intelligible, whereas earlier Blues Explosion or Pussy Galore songs the vocals are admittedly a little garbled and buried in the mix.
Your father was a world-class organic chemist, a teacher and researcher at Dartmouth College…
The flag on the College Green was flown at half-mast for two days when he passed. There was a little placard explaining why. It was a very touching, nice tribute. I took photos to share with my family.
I did not have a very close relationship with my father. I’m thankful that I got to spend a bunch of time with him at the very end. To his credit, he was always very supportive - both my parents were always very supportive - for any and all of my artistic endeavours.
After my father passed, it was interesting and touching reading letters that people had sent my mother and hearing comments from some of my father's former students in college about what he meant to them and how he touched or affected their lives through his teaching.
He mentored a young chemist who went on to win the Nobel Prize. So maybe that's part of the answer to the question in No More about what does a life amount to?
Well, he was proud of that – it was a big deal. But I guess all of us are trying to figure that question now and I don't think there's one right answer. I don't know if it's about framing things in terms of success, winning awards or scoring points.
Is making your art, playing music, a sufficient answer for you?
It was important to me to make another record but it's always been mostly about the shows as a form of connection and communication. It's not so important to me to be on the cover of a magazine. I've never really been that fixated on any of that stuff.
Maybe what’s more important is to examine your relationships and how are you going to move through this world. Are you going to be a force for good? Are you going to touch people in a positive way? And that leads into the political.
Hence the songs of protest against the ‘knuckleheads and half-wits at the controls’. Who are your top three most despised, today?
It’s always the same ones. There’s been the same orange clown at the top of the hit parade for years now. I'm so fucking sick of that asshole. I don’t wish ill on anybody but when that guy finally does kick the bucket, there's gonna be such a worldwide hip-hip hooray.
I just happened to see J.D. Vance on the TV earlier today and that guy is a real fuckin’ prick – just completely soulless. Top three? They’re all scum. And you don’t have to limit it to politicians, you need to include these billionaires and the trillionaire and the oligarchs. These are evil fuckers.
It’s insane the amount of corruption and just how fuckin’ blatant it is. The grift is just so fucking insane. And the hypocrisy! It’s so out in the open, so in your face and yet we can all see it plain as day and yet we're told 24/7 like “No, this isn't happening.”
The Kennedy Center! So Trump’s name gets removed and people are watching and cheering, so they put up a tarp on the scaffolding so people can’t see the name has gone. These are such fuckin’ chickenshit babies.
Have you considered leaving the US?
No! I'm engaged. I'm keeping up on the news, I'm attending protests, I call my representatives. I speak to people when I play a concert. I try to engage with people who are coming to see my shows. I put out this record! Why turn tail and run?
I play rock'n'roll, one of the genuine, true American art forms – that and jazz. And as someone who has dedicated their life to this most American of art forms, I’ll be fucking damned if these pricks can plate it with gold and call it something else.
I am hopeful that a change is gonna come, if I can quote a better songwriter than me.
So, this new album covers death, aging, relationship woes, the MAGA shitstorm and more heaviness besides, but it’s also a fun, entertaining and frequently funny album. Sometimes just plain weird and bamboozling.
My music has always had a sense of play and I believe firmly believe that rock'n'roll is a really kind of beautiful art form because it has so much life, because it does have such a wonderful sense of the absurd, this sense of joy and sense of play.
That would apply to Orange Slice Blues – insomnia, anxiety, various kinds of emotional and spiritual damage but with mentions of Prince’s Under The Cherry Moon, [canned pasta brand] Chef Boyardee and actor Telly Savalas. Is that kind of clash something that you're particularly proud of?
Yeah, that clash or frisson. I mean, if it was all about like, ‘Shit, I can't sleep’ and ‘Fuck, I feel terrible about myself’ and ‘What the fuck am I doing with my life?’ – that can be a drag. I like listening to songs which have little light touches and weird kinks in them, otherwise it's just dreary. It's rock'n'roll and this is what I believe it should be.
It bounces through numerous different references and ideas - you get a lot in two-and-a-bit minutes.
You’re welcome! Mentioning Chef Boyardee just gave me a little tickle. I don't think every song and every line needs to be laboured and sometimes the trick is to not second-guess yourself, if it makes you smile or gives you a little rush. When I was a kid we used to eat Chef Boyardee a lot. It’s this incredibly bland and processed Italian food but I loved the canned ravioli as a kid!
Slip Away contains a note to yourself that you “gotta stop fucking up my life.” How's that been going since you recorded the song?
It's a work in progress, right? I don't know anybody who says, “I got all my shit figured out.” Would you believe someone who says that? I mean, you might think that for a moment or a day or a week.
Your press release says “the answer is always rock'n'roll.”
Playing rock'n'roll changed my life and enabled me to remake myself and that is something that continues to happen. That opportunity exists for me every time I play a concert.
This isn’t my original concept. I think it's in Greil Marcus’ great book Mystery Train. When I read that book a long time ago, it resonated with me.
If I understand correctly, some of the album was written as demos by you, some of it was worked out as a group with Spider and Kendall.
I wrote the songs on my own and demoed them, but the demos were a little more ragged, a little more loose this time around – Kendall and Spider were putting more of themselves into their parts. They should do that, that’s their department – I'm not playing the bass or playing the drums. It is a shared writing credit. I’m part of a band. You can look at the front cover – and it’s the three of us.
You've described yourself as the editor of the songs. Is that from your love of hip-hop?
Give It Up 4 The Devil – that is a collage, editing, cutting between two different isolated performances at different times in the studio. So that is in an assemblage. But even with songs that were written and rehearsed and played many times like Orange Slice Blues and Step On The Gas, even with those songs, I would say that there's an influence of post-punk or industrial, or musique concrète, noise kind of thing.
But hip-hop, yes it's always been a huge influence and it doesn't have to be like, “OK I'm going to take this jam from Wednesday and this other jam from Saturday and we're going to edit them together.” It can be an influence just thinking about, “after the bridge we're going to jump to this other time signature and throw in some kind of beat.” That comes from listening to hip-hop, like The Bomb Squad.
You went to Applehead Recordings in upstate New York to make Songs of Personal Loss and Protest. It's in a lovely location and near to where you live, but why else choose it?
Yes, it’s convenient. And yes, it’s a beautiful bucolic setting. They have an amazing 2-inch multi-track analogue recording machine and an amazing console but the main reason is that I enjoy working with Chris Bittner, who is a fantastic engineer. I kind of go through these phases and I’ll have these relationships with engineers, where I’ll do a string of records. I find it’s fruitful to return because the more you work together – kind of the same way the more I play together with Kendall and Spider – the language develops so that you're able to achieve greater things.
What – structurally - is keeping you and the band functioning as recording artists and touring?
I have a lawyer, a business manager, a booking agent for the UK and for Europe I have another person, an agent that handles North America and pretty much the rest of the world. The record is out on Shove which is the label I started in 1985 with Julie Cafritz to put out Pussy Galore records.But I don't do it by myself. I work with a company in Brooklyn called Virtual, which helps with the manufacture and distribution of the recorded product.
Anything else coming out on Shove Records?
My intention is to get back into reissuing Pussy Galore and Blues Explosion titles, not just strict re-issues but there's also some out-takes and stuff that's never been put out. There are two projects I'm interested in pursuing as far as the Blues Explosion: one would be a collection of B-sides from Plastic Fang (2002) and random bits and bobs recorded around the time of Damage (2005).
And the other is what we always called The Black Album after the Prince record, which is the stuff we recorded at the studio [Blues Explosion’s drummer] Russell Simins had for a while, called the Empire View Studio. There was a period of woodshedding that led up to Damage but there's a lot of stuff that never moved out of there.
And on tour, what’s the set-up now?
Typically, we are touring with one person, the tour manager - it's a pretty lean operation.
In Japan, for example, I'm working with a company over there called Creativeman Productions, who I’ve worked with since the early or mid-90s. In August, we’re going to be part of Summer Sonic, a big summer festival put on by Creativeman. The Blues Explosion headlined the first one. I'm not of the same stature as I was then, but it’s great to be included this year.
So, I do have several long-standing relationships - same lawyer, same business manager, same agents for Europe and America for decades.
You are reaping the benefits of those networks that you’ve built up.
Yes – and these are also old friends.
Speaking of which, you recorded some of the album in Perrosky’s studio in Santiago, Chile and you played again with Guitar Wolf in Japan. You must see a lot of familiar faces on tour?
We're going to play the Sjock Festival in Belgium in July. I was looking at the lineup: “I know most of these people!” It will be especially nice to be there the same day as Deke Dickerson. Maybe he’ll come up and we could do Come On! our protest song together. One of the first shows we play in Italy will be a small festival and on the bill will be Reverend Beat-Man, somebody I’ve been crossing paths with for decades.
There’s a flip side to that. For example, Dallas Good of The Sadies, who you played with countless times, is not with us anymore…
I just saw The Sadies in Bearsville. I had not seen them since Dallas passed (in 2022). They continued on as a trio. It was great, they definitely make it work, but it was a very heavy experience for me. It was very, very emotional to hear those songs without Dallas, especially a song (No-one’s Listening) from their last record (Colder Streams) on which they had very kindly asked me to contribute a fuzz guitar lead. So, to see and hear Travis Good sing his brother’s words and play that song and then also play my lead, that was just too much. I was in tears.
It was so nice to just see Travis and Mike (Belitsky) and Sean (Dean) because I had spent so much time with them. Most of the time we spent talking about Andre Williams. We all spent a lot of time with Andre. He made such a big impression. So there was me with The Sadies and we're missing Dallas and we're sitting around talking about Andre Williams, and we were missing Andre.
Even with your networks and connections, some places are easier to tour than others…
I mean, it's certainly a lot easier to fly to London than it is to fly to Melbourne! And there are some places and some countries and some tours which are a little more put together than others. France! They have amazing, beautiful venues. I think that these places are getting arts funding from the government, so you’re never going to get that in a place like… Ohio.
You obey ‘the Henry Rollins rule’ on tour - don’t eat within two hours of going on stage. What are the others, especially now you are in your 60s?
Trying to sleep as much as possible; napping is extremely important. And also just guarding my time. I need to conserve not just my physical energy but my psychic energy. Hanging out or pressing the flesh, sometimes I just I don't have the bandwidth for that.
You read a lot on tour?
Yeah. I’m I’ve recently read Miranda July’s All Fours and I’m currently reading Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor.
Kendall and Spider are in their mid and early 20s respectively ie. younger than your own son, so the cultural overlap you have must be limited – even the musical reference points – and yet you must have a language you communicate in to play in a band successfully.
That’s not to be taken lightly. “Oh, being in a band: you get together and you play.” No, it doesn’t work with everyone. It’s a very special thing to be able to play music together.
The common musical language is the songs we play together and the songs we write together. There’s some common ground but not a ton beyond that.
For me, it's very strange because I came out of ‘us versus them’ punk – what records you had, what you were listening to, what bands you were seeing was extremely important. For Kendall and Spider, it's “Yeah, I like it” or “I like this song”, it doesn't have to be a whole album or a whole artist’s career.
190 shows and counting with Spider and Kendall, but which ones stand out for you?
The one show that really stuck out for me may have been our second or third show. It was in Cleveland – some sort of hot dog place. It was the first time I felt, “Oh yeah this is going to work.” It really kind of felt like, “Yep, this is happening.”
Can you explain that feeling further?
I guess when things just sort of become weightless, if you will, like there's no longer so much thinking about things, just everything starts to just flow. With Kendall and Spider we don't use a set-list, same as the Blues Explosion. I’m very happy to be able to do that again. I really enjoy that it makes for a different kind of show. Kendall and Spider are such fantastic, smart players that they can handle it. I can start a song or call it out and then they're right there with me on the cue.
It just feels wonderful. It's one thing to feel the kind of awesome power of a band firing on all cylinders. That’s one kind of great feeling and then there's another kind – there is this great rushing of air that happens when you know the whole room is moving in the same direction. I'm talking about everybody there – the audience and the band – when there is this coming together.
Songs of Personal Loss and Protest is out now. Jon Spencer is on tour in Europe in June and July and North America in September and November.
