The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion show at Theater Kikker, Utrecht, Netherlands on 20 September 1993.
Poster / Quote: Quint Kik (https://www.instagram.com/so.hazlewood/)
“Aside from blogging furiously, I also concern myself with the schedule at OL. I don’t do this alone; fortunately, fellow bloggers Remco and Willem share the load. Beyond urging bloggers to finally deliver those long-promised contributions, the planning process involves selecting topics for our weekly “battles.” It also means trimming the long list of battle suggestions from fellow bloggers when, after some time, it turns out there aren’t enough sign-ups. For me personally, it’s a case of “killing your darlings”: I had to abandon my long-cherished wish to do a reconstruction of *Artists United Against Apartheid*, similar to our *We Are the World* battle. The Theremin battle also had to be scrapped—even though I had a great topic lined up for it.
I first encountered this wondrous instrument on a random Tuesday evening in the spring of 1993. It was at my third club concert; as a fresh-faced history student, I had only just moved into a room in Utrecht. My first permanent address was a small room in a villa on Utrechtseweg, a road running parallel to the provincial highway to De Bilt. One Saturday evening, my housemate Rolf—a third-year history student—suggested I join him at the De Kikker theater on the Ganzenmarkt. I gather from an interview with programmer Jeroen Boekhorst that the venue served as a pop music stage for a time during the 90s. On the bill that night: the brand-new blues-punk sensation, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Apparently, I was one of the lucky thirty people who got to see the band perform for six guilders.
“Ladies and gentlemen: the Bluuuuuues Explosion!!!” the frontman would regularly announce—and just as often announce the departure of—himself and his bandmates, Judah Bauer and Russell Simins. It was a spectacular show, featuring a special supporting role for—you guessed it—the theremin. I stood there, mesmerized, watching the player of this wondrous instrument. Well, “instrument”—it looked like an old-fashioned radio with an antenna and sounded a bit like a musical saw. Incidentally, it doesn’t seem nearly as out of place in (alternative) pop music as you might think. Just consider: besides being an essential ingredient for bands like Mercury Rev, the Flaming Lips, and Portishead, the instrument made an indelible mark on classics such as “Good Vibrations” (Beach Boys), “Whole Lotta Love” (Led Zeppelin), and “Velouria” (Pixies).
For anyone wanting to see the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion performing live with the theremin, I recommend watching this video. In an Australian television broadcast, Jon really cuts loose at the 2:30 mark during the song “2 Kindsa Love.” My own memory of the theremin will forever be linked to the song “History Of Lies.” That particular night at De Kikker, I was so intently focused on watching and listening that I failed to see Simins’s battered drumstick coming my way in time. That stick became one of my first rock ‘n’ roll relics—along with the scar above my left eyebrow and a permanent short-circuit in my brain whenever the Blues Explosion is played. All in all, I was lucky: I could just as easily have taken the much more substantial-looking theremin right in the face.”
