"Wire Tapping
Building A Better
Explosion
The Jon
Spencer Blues Explosion line up a bevy of cooks
in their new soul kitchen, Adam Heimlich smells what's cookin'.
On the walls of Greene St. Studio hang framed gold
records for Kurtis Blow's "The
Breaks," L.L. cool His Bigger And Deffer, and Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation of
Millions To Hold Us Back and Fear of A Black Planet, alongside a dozen other hip-hop classics. It's in this basement complex in Manhattan’s newly malled-out Soho district
that the
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion have put the finishing
touches on their latest Matador album, Acme.
Work on the album began back in
October 1997, when the band entered the studio with
Dan Nakamura, a.k.a. the Automator - who produced Dr. Octagon's The Octagonecologyst,
as well as some tracks from Cornershop's When I Was Born For The 7th Time - for
"Right Place, Wrong Time," a cover of the Dr. John hit used on the soundtrack to
Scream 2.
"I've been very lucky to be able to do whatever the fuck I want," says the well-mannered
Spencer. "The reason we did that
Scream 2 soundtrack was to try working with
a producer. We were definitely into the Dr. Octagon record - it's a great record,
and also a bizarre kinda record. So besides 'Right Place.' we recorded some other
songs."
For Acme, Spencer - who's been producing his bands' music since the days of Pussy Galore - wanted to open up the recording process
to see how giving others free reign would affect his songs. It's an approach the Explosion tested on their
1995
EP Experimental Remixes. This time, says Spencer, "I was totally open to anything
that came back."
The next stop for
Acme was Steve Albini's studio, Electrical
Audio, where the
Blues Explosion cut some tracks in the days
following their 1998 New Year's Eve Chicago performance. "Steve's we cut everything
live, like we always do," he says. "I Wanted to use Steve because I knew he would
do a good job and the tapes would sound great, and we could send them to anybody
because we had a great starting point and couldn't really go wrong"
Work on Acme continued right up until the start of this summer, when
Spencer and the bandmates
Judah Bauer and Russell Simins started
coming through the hours of tapes produced, engineered or remixed by Spencer, Albini, Nakamura and invited guests such as Atari Teenage Riot's Alec Empire, Moby, Greene
St. veterans Nick Sansano and Greg Shaw, Cypress Hill co-producer T-Ray, Big Star
and Panther Burns producer Jim Dickinson, and others. "We went with the songs that
were a lot more groove-oriented," says Spencer, "There's not much high-energy, flat-out
rock stuff. It's more soulful."
Despite the team effort, Spencer thinks Acme sounds coherent
and not like the JSBX's previous remix foray. "It's picking up where
[1994's] Orange left off," he muses. "It's definitely very different than
[the 1996 album]
Now I Got Worry, that kind of really nasty
rock record."
To illustrate Acme's seamlessness, Spencer explains how the album came to
have no production credits.
"Some songs, I had two mixes of the same song and I'd edit them together, just taking
the parts that I like," he says. "It was only after working for months that the
album started falling into place and making sense." |