Since the mid-’80s, Jon Spencer has been fronting bands and serving as a notable supporting character in what the world used to call alternative music. Despite using the word blues in everything from his group names to song titles to lyrics, he’s been steadily pumping out rock ’n’ roll in the traditionally dirty sense of the term, with varying degrees of faithfulness to the original formula.
By the early 1990s, Spencer’s manic attack became more focused and groove-oriented, suddenly leaning mainstream—hovering above the underground, but not exactly Billboard Top 40 material—in the MTV “120 Minutes” post-Nirvana success. That change came thanks to the formation of the The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, whose relentless recording, touring, and strangely danceable distortion numbers brought the band close to full-on stardom.
While he collaborated on a host of projects outside of the Explosion, neither Spencer nor his main band ever enjoyed the arena-sized afterglow that later contemporaries like The Strokes or The White Stripes achieved. Yet they managed to find themselves as an ongoing part of the conversation, contributing the theme music to Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations,” for instance.
In 2001, when I caught the Explosion headlining the Siren Music Festival put on by the now-defunct Village Voice in Coney Island, Spencer hit the stage shining and shaking like a true charismatic icon. Presiding over a sea of drunk hipsters, his schtick hit with the intensity and wackiness reminiscent of an in-his-prime, late-1970s, white-suited Steve Martin doing stand-up: arms outstretched, an ear-to-ear smile, and a goofy lack of logic that was impossible to turn away from.
He never lost that fervor. But by the start of this decade, the Blues Explosion called it quits and Spencer went on to record a few of his own records as a solo artist. His newest, Sick of Being Sick!, sounds less like a departure from the thesis of his best-known act and more of a continuation. This year’s single “Come On!,” tracked with his current backing band, reveals the good vibes of a showman still imploring us to love one another—and, of course, to get wild.
