The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion set live at Lollipop Festivalen, Stockholm, Sweden on 26 July 1996.
“LAYDEEZ an’ gennelmen- introducing Mister Jon Spencer, the only man to successfully wear a canary- yellow shirt without looking either a) like an extra from “Eldorado” or b) jaundiced. But then, there’s a lot of things Jon does that most others don’t. Offend people he hasn’t even been introduced to, most definitely (s’OK, we can handle it); turn plums into prunes at a hundred paces with one sneer, quite possibly. Jon Spencer may be short, but he’s long on attitude. And, let’s face it, little else counts when you’re A Rock Star.
Up there onstage as dusk begins to settle, in front of a couple of hundred heroically pissed-up Swedes “dancing” with two left feet, Jon Spencer doesn’t shine-that’s way too subtle a thing to do-he throbs. He howls and he hiccups and he croons. He does a PJ Proby and splits his jeans from crotch to knee. He yelps like a coyote with its paw pinned to a hotplate. He and Judah Bauer slash wildly at scuffed guitars, changing tempo with stop- on-a-dime certitude while Russell Simins thumps away dementedly behind; together, they let loose their own monstrously minced, divinely delinquent, outrageously sexy irreverent version of the blues.
They’re tracing a lineage that stretches from Howlin’ Wolf and Jerry Lee Lewis through Elvis to the Stones and Hendrix, right up to Beck and The Make-Up. And then. spitting in its eye. Listening to “Bellbottoms”, and to “Firefly”, “Wail” and their cover of Dub Narcotic’s “F*** Shit Up” from the impossibly funky forthcoming LP, you can almost understand what must have so terrified white middle- America when raw blues erupted in its face in the Fifties.” – Sharon O’Connell / NME
Image: Screen grab of the band performing Chicken Dog which was broadcast on 24 August 1996.
Band Portrait: from POP #20: Interview (PRESS, SWEDEN)
Live Review: Melody Maker (10 August 1996)
