The dirty rock'n'roll of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

In the '90s, before anyone had ever heard of the White Stripes or Black Keys, and while the indie rock crowd was enthralled by Stephen Malkmus, a genuine rock misfit turned out a memorable catalog of wild, raucous and at times tough-to-to-listen-to, trebly riff rock that could best be described as blues-punk.

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion -- led by the inimitable Jon Spencer -- was an amalgam of MC5, The Stones, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. It was a noisy, stripped down version of rock with nothing left but the sex, swagger and loads of reverb. It was a band that paid tribute to the blues while they parodied it. That distinctive sound is captured well in the retrospective of the band, Dirty Shirt Rock 'N' Roll: The First 10 Years, a 22-track best-of that came out this week.

The Blues explosion had several ties to successful indie acts of the time -- they were on the super-cool Matador records (home of Pavement, Superchunk, Liz Phair) and Beck contributed to the song "Flavor" on the band's breakthrough '94 record Orange -- but they never advanced past being a novelty rock act. In fact it's hard to believe the band even warrants a "greatest hit." Orange was acclaimed by critics of every kind and was even picked as a top 20 album of the year by The Village Voice, but the band never enjoyed the kind of wide-spread success that future "blues" revivalists like the White Stripes would enjoy in the early aughts. It was the Blues Explosion, after all, that had made it cool to rock with just guitars and a drum (no bass necessary, thank you). In the '90s alt-rock world, they were real misfits.

For the uninitiated, the video for "Wail" from the '96 album Now I got Worry summarizes the band's aesthetic. (It was directed by Wierd Al Yankovic and references The Macarena, remember that?)

Critics of the band, even those who found Orange so refreshing, wondered about the band's lack of range. JSBE managed to keep the basic formula fresh with pure energy, but Spencer never sung a song from the heart. JSBE's songs were, after all, parody... when they were sung with conviction, it was a conviction of the pelvis. When the band released 2002's Plastic Fang a loosely thematic record that centered on horror movie motifs, particularly werewolves. The record is perhaps one of the most blistering, relentless and pure fun rock records ever made (up there with Motorhead's Ace of Spades) but the rockerati were on to new things: The White Stripes and The Strokes. No one noticed that the clowns in the JSBE had pioneered the new garage rock sound nearly a decade earlier.

To be fair, while JSBE's sound was fun and the band was whip-tight (Russell Simmons' drumming is one of the greatest forces in rock) it's easy to see how one might tire of songs about rockin', drinkin' werwolves and lap dances. It's a charge that shadowed some of Spencer's closest peers, most notably Beck, another master of postmodern music deconstruction whose best strength is irony. Beck, of course, did his best to pave over the problem with his trio of "introspective" acoustic records: Mutations, Sea Change and Modern Guilt. Spencer, though, has never put down the clown mask. In fact his most recent project, Heavy Trash, is more of the same -- ironic garage rock with an emphasis on Spencer's most camped-up Elvis-like persona.

But like Motorhead (again) or even early rock acts like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, appreciation of Spencer is not dependent on identifying with him. Actually, It's impossible to do so. It's not music for the mind but for the hips. It's pure ear candy. And the best kind, at that. That comes through well on the 22 selections on Dirty Shirt Rock'N'Roll. Nearly all the tracks are from the band's four terrific mid-career albums: Orange, Now I Got Worry, Acme and Plastic Fang. Personally, I'd recommend just getting those four albums. Each, if not full of sincerity, is thematically unified and well worth a thorough listen. There's too much good stuff that doesn't make the cut here (though the selections make sense).

So no, the Blues Explosion never played serious music. It never played the blues. How could a kid from New Hampshire know the blues, anyway? As Spencer would often say -- in revival preacher tones -- "I don't play the blues. I play rock 'n' roll." He knew what he could do. If he couldn't write a song with emotional depth, he could definitely tear up a guitar and play loud rock 'n' roll. And rock he did. Nothing more, but definitely nothing less.

How I learned to stop caring and really like Pearl Jam

It is not terribly cool to like Pearl Jam. In fact it hasn't been particularly cool to like Pearl Jam for a long time.

It's been a problem the band has faced since its starring role in the alt-rock revolution of the early nineties faded with its third album "Vitalogy," and though it tried valiantly, Peark Jam couldn't seem to shake the perception that it was directly responsible for the onslaught of mediocre Modern Rock it left in its wake. As a rock snob who spent an inordinate amount of time being overly judgmental about these things (and admittedly more concerned about the hipness of my music collection than I should have been), I largely ignored the band for the last 15 years, only reconsidering them recently on this blog here.

Last week I found myself considering Pearl Jam again. The trigger was random: I had heard offhand that the band was playing several dates at Madison Square Garden and had chosen as opening acts two bands I like quite a bit: The Black Keys and Band of Horses. It reminded me of how much I've liked Pearl Jam's practices.

While their music has not always inspired me, they've always carried themselves admirably. Never, in all the years they've toiled away since Ten sold 13 million copies, did they degrade themselves. They never put out a dance album, never asked Timbaland to produce a single, never sold a song for a commercial (that I can think of). And for a band so outside of current tastes, they've always had very good taste. They could have easily taken the road of many of their early '90s peers and fizzled out in a conflagration of cliche and irrelevance. They did not.1

So I started listening to Pearl Jam's material -- the whole discography. Everything. It occurred to me that I'd been unfair to the band. And that U.S. tastemakers have also been unfair to the group, too.2 Listening to the music objectively, it strikes me as consistently very good. It's cerebral but not necessarily melodramatic. Ponderous? Sure. But not enough to keep the music from being worthwhile. The songwriting is mostly very strong. The musicianship superb. And when these guys get into full swing, the sound is intense. They are a rock band that can hit you in the gut as well as any.

From a rock critic standpoint, Pearl Jam's greatest failure seems to be that the band has never changed much. And I think it'a a fair comment. Every Pearl Jam album is grounded by the same guitar/bass/drum sound with a mix of slow acoustic ballads, mid-tempo power anthems and hard-charging punk-inspired scorchers. But to be fair, I think this is a point where rock critics continue to do music and good bands (and ultimately the listening public) a disservice. Why should invention be essential to the appreciation of every new rock record? Very few bands can successfully reinvent themselves from album to album (R.E.M. and Radiohead come to mind... But swapping sounds has been a mixed bag for even very talented acts like Wilco and Beck). It's an impossible standard for 99 percent of professional musical acts, yet critics behave like it's necessary.

Yet what's worse, is it's not a standard universally applied. For instance, Pitchfork, the hippest of hipster tastemakers, issued high marks for the last two Dinosaur Jr.albums. Both albums are great, but they're great because they harken back to the band's classic late '80s sound (a sound that paved the way for Pearl Jam, by the way). They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, a reinvention. Every J. Mascis record sounds a lot like every other J. Mascis record. And I think that's a good thing.

The Ramones never once changed their sound, yet most rock snobs love the Ramones (I, too, love the Ramones). Sonic Youth has always sounded like Sonic Youth (thank God) and Pavement, the most critically acclaimed indie band, the Beatles of lo-fi, Indie Rock, only sound different on Wowee Zowee, an album most rock critics didn't think lived up to the bands sloppy debut Slanted and Enchanted.3

Now I'm not going to argue that Pearl Jam is better than Sonic Youth or Pavement. I don't think I could support that case. My point is that the rock critic's insistence on the new undervalues competence in the musical marketplace and overvalues so-called "new sounds," and often mistakes them for invention. The White Stripes picked up a ton of critical acclaim but invented little. A band Japandroids attracted universal acclaim last year with an album that sounded like a throwaway SPOT session from the SST vault.4

So, sure, Pearl Jam now sounds a lot like Pearl Jam (almost) 20 years ago. And a lot of their recent output does not seem as inspired as those first three records. But the band has been on a lot more often than not, and they have certainly been a lot better then they've gotten credit for. They're not the Pixies, but who is. Sometimes you just need to learn to relax and enjoy music for what it is. There's nothing at all wrong about a really good rock band that's not cutting edge. It's amazing that it's taken me this long to figure that out.

Footnotes:

1. This is, of course, debatable. But I don't think a band that can sell out a weekend at Madison Square Garden can ever be considered irrelevant. It doesn't make them good, but a band with that kind of audience matters.

2. An odd fact I uncovered while looking through Pearl Jam's discography: the last four or five albums have all sold far more copies in Australia and Canada than in the U.S. I don't know what to make of that fact. I don't think it's indicative of the U.S .having hipper tastes than Canada or Australia just that we inexplicably have less taste for something uniquely our own.

3. One thing I've never understood is the hipster rock critic unfaltering, cult-like love of this album. Pavement is a great band but it is a band that got much better at realizing and executing its music ideas after its debut. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Wowee Zowee and Brighten the Corners are all far superior in nearly every way.

4. SPOT was the house producer for the legendary punk label SST records. He recorded lots of legendary albums that didn't always sound all that good.

The Big To Do: Not as big as past DBT but very good

A lot is made in rock criticism of invention. Rock critics are obsessed with hearing new sounds and new ideas. In order for a record to be truly great, it needs to give us something we've never heard before. This has been true of some of the greatest bands of my generation: R.E.M., U2, Sonic Youth, Pavement, Radiohead to name a few.

The Drive-By Truckers haven't invented much musically. They don't veer far from well-established conventions of country and southern rock. They have a thoroughly modern and raucous approach to the music, including a three-guitar attack that at times sounds like Sonic Youth covering Lynard Skynard, but the approach to song structure is well-worn. There are regular verses, choruses, guitar solos, etc. It's new music, but it's familiar.

Yet, while there's nothing new in the Truckers' musical approach, the band's remarkable songwriting, it's absolute mastery of genre and the ability of its two main song writers, Patterson Hood and Mike "Stroker Ace" Cooley, to tell riveting stories makes the band one of the truly great American rock bands of the last decade. At some point, isn't it good enough to just play rock and roll really well? And to do it honestly?

Great rock and roll is in healthy supply on The Big To Do, the band's latest 13-song studio album (it's 6th since 2001's excellent Southern Rock Opera). Like all other DBT albums, The Big To Do is full of raw and ruthless guitar work, a healthy dose of honky-tonk twang and a thumping rythm section that would make Muscle Shoals proud.1 These guys could be called the ultimate bar band (though that description is a bit overused) but they are better than that -- a band of consummate professionals in every way.

And, again, there are the songs and the stories. Chuck D once called rap in it's 1988-92 hey day, CNN for black people. DBT's Hood and Cooley are Faulkners of the trailer park. Consider several of the tales from the album:

The opener "Daddy Learned to Fly" is narrated by a young boy who believes his departed father is on a nonstop flight. In "That Wig He Made Her Wear," a narrator relates a case in which a preacher's wife kills her husband and gets a light sentence when the jury learns the man abused her and made her wear a pair of high heels and a wig before sex. And on "Birthday Boy", a world-wise stripper offers a birthday boy some advice.

Hood and Cooley are masters of the oddball tale. They are champions of the losers and the little man.2 And more so here than on 2008's excellent Brighter Than Creations Dark -- on which the subject matter was more serious -- the tales are sinister and completely twisted. There are no songwriters in contemporary music I know of who tell stories like these.

In "Drag the Lake Charlie," a narrator asks just that after a local trouble maker named Lester goes missing. The narrator hopes they do find Lester at the bottom of the lake:

Remember what happened last time Lester went on the make
I heard it took the cleaning crew two weeks to clean the bar
They never found that teenaged girl
They never found the car.

In "The fourth night of my Drinking," the narrator gets a day closer to his demise with each drunken episode. From the song:

On the third night of my drinking I was yelling at your house
I had a stick in my hand and was convinced that some man was in there hiding out
I had a foot on your door; you had me down on the floor
I woke up next morning and my jaw was sore

It's this rotating cast of gothic southern characters that puts DBT over the top. The Black Crows can do southern rock. But they cannot write the kind of gritty-real tales of Hood and Cooley. It's what truly separates DBT from the ordinary.

The Big To Do is not as strong as Brighter... or the Dirty South, both of which are masterpieces in my opinion, even if they are not thoroughly innovative. There are great songs here, but all 13 are not as strong as some of the band's prior work. Shonna Tucker's vocals offer a nice change of pace -- she sings on two songs, here -- but she's not the songwriter her bandmates are. Her sings slow the album down a bit.

Still, for fans of the band, or for fans of straight-up, no bullshit American rock, this is a terrific album by an accomplished, hard-working band.

Footnotes
1. The Truckers trace their roots to that musical mecca. Hood's father David Hood was the bassist of the Muscle Shoals Rythm Section and Hood, Cooley and bassist Shonna Tucker are all from the region though the band is now based in another big music town: Athens, Ga.

2. The first DBT song I heard that I really liked was "Puttin' People on the Moon," from The Dirty South. In the song, a down and out narrator turns to petty crime to support his family when he can't find real work. He plaintively asks mid-song: "If I died in Colbert County, Would it make the evening news? / They too busy blowin' rockets, Puttin' people on the moon."

Gorillaz bore again

NOTE: This is one of the worst takes on an album I think I've ever had. I clearly went into Plastic Beach looking for Demon Days 2 or for Blur's Think Tank 2. This record is now one of my all-time favorites. I just needed time to catch up with Damon Albarn.

Listening to the Gorillaz, the fake (or cartoon) band of Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewitt, is fraught with conflict for me.

On one hand, I'm a huge fan of Blur, the Brit Pop juggernaut of which Albarn was the frontman through the '90s (and more recently for the band's one-and-done reunion last year). I also really enjoyed Albarn's The Good, The Bad and the Queen.

On the other hand, I haven't heard more than three or four hip hop albums that I've liked in the last 15 years.1 The pacing, subject matter and composition of hip hop has fallen a long way since its peak in the late 80s and early 90s. To my ears, it's hard to imagine how the music could get any worse.

So for me, the Gorillaz' new album Plastic Beach, which dabbles a great deal in hip hop, the experience is disorienting. And ultimately dull.

There's a lot worth trying to like on the Gorillaz. There's a leitmotif of experimentation that brings the Clash's Sandinista! to mind (in fact, Albarn's collaborator on The Good, The Bad and The Queen, Paul Simonon of the Clash is on this record, too).

The record's themes are also admirable. There's an undercurrent of modern angst and the perils of our disposable culture here that are current. Albarn has always worked in keen, Kinks-like social criticism dating back to Blur's earliest work. There are sound ideas behind these songs, both in composition and lyrics.

But the guest spots suggest a diversity that's really not at work here. All the songs chug along with various degrees of keys and other electronic beep and blips. The sum total sounds like Albarn at work on Garage Band. It's a thin, phony sound -- as flat and undynamic as anything I've heard recently. At it's best, the various guest vocalists are disorienting, lending the record a disjointed feel, or worse yet, the feel of a soundtrack or compilation.

For Albarn, who worked with one of the best rock and pop bands in contemporary memory, it's hard not to be disappointed in that thinness. For most American listeners, who have only heard Blur's "Song 2," a grunge parody that is as far from representative of the band's work as any single song could be, this means very little.2 But I can't help feeling like there's something missing while listening to the Gorillaz -- even in songs like "Melancholy Hill," "Plastic Beach" and "Empire Ants" that put Albarn up front (he sings without help from De La Soul or Mos Def).

No matter what, this just ain't nearly as good as Blur.

It might be unfair of me to hold Gorillaz to this standard. And perhaps there's a modernity here that I am just unable to appreciate.3 But I don't think this lives up to Albarn's great talents. It's a piece of disposable pop, as plastic as the culture he decries on the album's title track.

Footnotes:

1. Outkast's Stankonia and The Love Below, Common's Like Water for Chocolate and The Roots' Phrenology.

2. Though the British music press, where Albarn has been a genuine pop star for 20 years, has fawned over this new album, with most of the big music magazines giving it the highest praise available. Maybe they've gotten over Blur, something I can't seem to do.

3. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the similarly electronic-drenched work of fellow brit group Hot Chip. Hot Chip sounds vital to me. Full of ideas and possibilities. I don't hear that on Plastic Beach.

Is "viral" so bad?

I haven't been able to stop listening to that new OK Go album I briefly reviewed in my last post. So I went to their Web site to see if any Philly shows were in the band's future (Turns out the they're hitting Baltimore and NYC, but not Philly this April) and stumbled across a link to an op-ed by the band's singer Damian Kulash in the New York Times from a week ago.

When I wrote about the OK Go, I had hoped I could embed their new video for This Too Shall Pass. For the not-so-tech-savvy out there, youtube has avery easy function for embedding videos in blogs and other Web sites... If I had succeeded, my post on the band would have included a window where readers could easily watch the video right there without linking to another site -- in this case You Tube. But OK Go's record label EMI won't allow the band's videos (and videos by many other bands now) to be embedded.

Kulash explains how the band essentially became famous for a video it made for the song “Here It Goes Again.” The video, made for peanuts, was free advertising for the band, putting their song in front of tens of millions of viewers who might never have heard the band otherwise. It fueled audiences for a world tour and made them a profitable enterprise. EMI's decision to "cash in" on Web videos has made a similar phenomenon impossible.

From Kulash's piece:

Viral content doesn’t spread just from primary sources like YouTube or Flickr. Blogs, Web sites and video aggregators serve as cultural curators, daily collecting the items that will interest their audiences the most. By ignoring the power of these tastemakers, our record company is cutting off its nose to spite its face.

The numbers are shocking: When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000. Our last royalty statement from the label, which covered six months of streams, shows a whopping $27.77 credit to our account. 

Like a lot of news companies, traditional record industries can't seem to wrap their heads around new business models. So called viral distribution of digital content has destroyed a lot of the old ways of doing business. But when OK Go benefits from viral distribution, and arguably does so in a big way, the traditional record company blocks it.

In the current issue of The Atlantic, there is a story about the marketing genius of the Grateful Dead, a band that made enormous amounts of money with very little radio support. Early in its history, the band embraced the bootleg, allowing fans to record their concerts. The distribution of those bootlegs made The Dead one of the most bankable live acts of the last 40 years. Scholars now think the Dead were pioneers of marketing and business professors are eager to examine the band's extensive archives, which were recently donated to UC Santa Cruz.

I guess a band of acid-addled hippies figured out 40 years ago what corporate suits can't figure out today. You can swap audio and video files, but you can't do the same for the band's live act, it's T shirts and other goods -- things The Dead used to become one of the most successful bands in rock history. Those who want to protect the rights of that which can't be protected are going to lose out.

From Kulash again:
In these tight times, it’s no surprise that EMI is trying to wring revenue out of everything we make, including our videos. But it needs to recognize the basic mechanics of the Internet. Curbing the viral spread of videos isn’t benefiting the company’s bottom line, or the music it’s there to support. The sooner record companies realize this, the better — though I fear it may already be too late.

I think he's right.