Boss Hog – Beat: Lovers’ Rock (PRESS, AUSTRALIA)

“It’s been a bit hard to miss Cristina Martinez recently. While her ass may not have reached the cultural-heritage listing soon to be afforded to Kylie Minogue’s showstopping derriere, the promotional artwork for Boss Hog’s second Australian tour has centered largely on the imagery of Martinez-in-little- clothing.

It’s a noticeable symbol in the lineage of the band. For much of their tenure, which now spans more than ten years, Martinez has played second fiddle in the band to Jon Spencer, the increasingly-popular Blues Explosion frontman who just happens to be her husband. In the band’s early garage days, people like Spencer, Jerry Teel and Pete Shore were much more a part of Boss Hog’s sound than Martinez was.

Things started to change when drummer Hollis Queens joined the band, replacing original drummer Charlie Ondras, who died of a heroin overdose in 1992. Queens and Martinez share something in common: they’re both married into the Blues Explosion; Queens’ husband being the combo’s other guitarist, Judah Bauer. By 1994, when the band was looking at signing with Geffen, it was Martinez that handled the negotiations, poring over the contract and making sure she understood every facet of the deal.

1995 found Boss Hog reintroduced to the world with their second album, a self-titled affair that took their funky, bluesy, garage rock into shiny new surrounds. Media milled. around Martinez and Spencer, the latter by this stage a certifiable rock-icon. Terms like ‘the sexiest couple in rock-n-roll’ were routinely thrown around, and the band was painted as a union between the two. Which, by that stage, it almost was. Even if it hadn’t been like that previously.

“John kicked me out of Pussy Galore because we were just not capable of functioning together in a band.” Martinez is recalling her tenure in an early line-up of Pussy Galore, Spencer’s influential anarchic-garage combo whose ranks, in such early times, included Neil Hagerty, who has gone on to great acclaim with his partner Jennifer Herrema in Royal Trux. “At that stage of my life it was impossible to be in a band with someone you loved. Someone that I loved.

“I was completely socially retarded back then, and I hope and pray that I’ve learned some things in the last 10 years.” She stops, considers the thought, and then laughs, “I have. I can safely say that I have.”

In 1989, with some time under their belts Spencer and Martinez founded Boss Hog. It took until that 1995 effort for the band to be more “equitable”. It’s an environment that Martinez has continued to foster even as she has become the band’s leader. She’s the top of the food-chain when it comes to Boss Hog. She signs the contracts, looks after the interests of the group, and even directed the video for the title-track of their latest album White Out.

Released last year for independent label In The Red, whose roster specialises in raucous garage rock, and with separate distribution deals for different “territories”, White Out is a strange change in direction for the band. With Delta 72 organ-hand Mark Boyce added as a full-time keyboardist, the record moves away from sassy straight- up rock-n-roll into more new-wave territories, aided in such by production from Gang Of Four
icon Andy Gill.

Gill, Martinez offers, was brought in to work on the record for “his ability to make serise out of a noisy band.” The resulting songs, she continues, “happen to be a great deal more modern-sounding than I expected.”

“I thought it was going to be like a big Las Vegas show, with a horn-section, a big spectacle. That’s the direction I thought I would like the band to go in. But it didn’t go that way at all. It’s all just a matter of what-happens-in-the- studio, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

It’s arguably their most accessible record, but it was recorded after their departure from Geffen, a sinking record label that was never going to keep a ‘fringe’ act like Boss Hog on their books. Nevertheless, the subsequent red- tape of such a divorce contributed to the already-long hiatus between the band’s second and third records. “I’d have to attribute the change in label to at least six months in the hiatus” Martinez recalls.

“When it was up in the air,” she continues, “and we didn’t know whether or not they were going to put out the record, I was really unable to work. I pretty much sat on my hands. I don’t enjoy the position of being the pony performing tricks. I didn’t want to do that, so we all stopped working on Boss Hog, and sat there until they decided what was going to happen. When they decided to let us go, it was fine, it was easy to continue working. I only don’t perform well when on demand.”

“It was good that I had the opportunity to really think about what mattered to me. Had it happened very quickly, I might have been quite hurt by the entire process. But because I had a lot of time to consider my options, I think it was a lot better for me. And when the time came and they dropped us. was really easy to start working again, easy to say ‘fuck it’, because that’s not what is important to me. What’s important is to put these songs out, because they’re great songs. What’s important is to tour and perform. The situation gave me time to get a good perspective on it.”

The most notable event, however, in the between-albums lay-off had little to do with such record company machinations. It came in the form of Charles Henry, Martinez and Spencer’s first child. Martinez’s devotion to her child is apparent with even a mere mention, and Charlie joins the couple when they tour together as Boss Hog. Which is also a seasonal thing.

Martinez realises that Boss Hog has to play second fiddle. to the Blues Explosion, whose lengthy recording sessions and litany of touring commitments takes up most of Spencer’s time. Boss Hog’s second tour of Australia comes as a break from his working on a new Blues Explosion record. “That’s his priority,” Martinez notes, “that’s the reality of it.”

The reality extends to the circumstance of relationship, with Spencer spending long periods of time away working and touring with the Blues Explosion. And, then, as a sharpened turnaround, when Boss Hog go on tour the pair find themselves in constant companionship. Martinez has experienced this enough to be able to calmly talk about it.

“Ordinary people go off and do their thing and work, and then they have a limited amount of time to spend with each other,” she offers. “For us, we have these long stretches of very intense interaction that’s just non-stop, 24 hours a day, 3 weeks at a time. That’s excruciating with anybody, not to mention that it’s somebody that you can pull all the punches with, be as evil as you possibly could. It’s just begging for sadism.”

Right now, she’s just happy to be working in Boss Hog, even if this tour is the last of their creative output as a band for a while. With Spencer working on a new Blues Explosion album, and such an album committing him to a year of touring “at the very least”, she’s realistic that another hiatus is on the table for the band. “We won’t even be able to begin to write for at least a couple of years,” she offers. “That’s the reality of it. It’s going to be at least that long, and who knows what’s going to happen to me personally in that time.”

Right now, though, she’s happy to be playing live again. “When we play live, it just becomes rock-n-roll” Martinez laughs. When they started touring again after the release of White Out, she confesses she “was really excited.” “I’d really missed performing live. I really enjoy it, and I feel much more comfortable doing it now than I did previously.”

This tour has found them joining forces with combos like Brassy (who feature Spencer’s sister, Muffin), the Delta 72, the Need, and the North Mississippi All-Stars, and, for the first time, Boss Hog have found themselves playing at rock-festivals. This year, they set about playing iconic events like Reading and Leeds, scaling the European festival circuit for the first time.

“It’s a little bit daunting going out an playing in front of such a big crowd,” confesses Martinez, “especially because I’m used to playing in a very intimate atmosphere, where I can literally ‘touch’ people. To play way up above everyone, 25 feet away from people who are way below you, behind a fence.”

Still, Martinez is candid, if a little sardonic, in offering that performing is really what she does best. “When asked on my visa what I do, I always write ‘entertainer’,” she notes, slyly. “And that’s really what I believe that I do. I’m a song-and-dance lady.”

Boss Hog’s Whiteout album is out now on Genie records through EMI. Boss Hog are playing at the Corner Hotel on Thursday October 19 and Friday October 20. Tickets are on sale now from the Corner Hotel (phone bookings, 9486 9977), Missing Link, Greville, Gaslight, Augogo and Polyester.”