The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion show at The Roxy, New York City, NY, US with Atari Teenage Riot on 14 December 1996.
nb. Fred Schneider* performed with the band on the song Chicken Dog.
*Russell Simins had recorded with him on his album Just Fred which was released earlier the same year.
Live Photo (top): Ryan Van Meter (https://www.instagram.com/ryanvanmeter.met.humans/)
“Over time, rockabilly has come to seem tamer, so the Blues Explosion recharges it for the hip-hop era.” – Jon Pareles / New York Times
“Never let it be said that The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion puts on a predictable show.
The trio shocked a capacity crowd (that included punk icon/budding actor Iggy Pop) at New York’s Roxy Saturday night when the B-52’s Fred Schneider joined the Explosion on stage. Schneider brought his trademark vocal style and prancing stage presence to the Blues Explosion’s “Chicken Dog,” which featured vocals from bluesman Rufus Thomas on the latest Jon Spencer effort, “Now I Got Worry.” – MTV.com (December 16, 1996)
SET LIST:
Get With It
Wail
Train #3
Son of Sam
Can’t Stop
Cool Vee
Afro
R.L. Got Soul
Get Over Here
Dynamite Lover
Blues X Man
Water Main
Love All of Me
Fuck Shit Up
Hot Shot
Skunk
The Vacuum of Loneliness
Sticky-Identify-Sticky
encore:
All Aboard
Bellbottoms
Chicken Dog (w/ Fred Schneider)
Sweat-Greyhound-Sweat
2Kindsa Love
Flavor
Full Grown
Spin Magazine review by Sia Michel:
REVIEW TEXT:
“JON SPENCER BLUES EXPLOSION
ATARI TEENAGE RIOT
The Roxy
New York City
December 14, 1996When Fred Schneider is introduced as “Soul Brother No. 1,” you know you’re in for an evening of strange signifying. By the time the gleefully nelly B-52’s frontman made a cameo, in a shirt unbuttoned all the way to his happy trail, the stage of New York’s Roxy-a converted roller rink-had already been trod by a German digital hardcore band and a Blowfly-like African-American comic; Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, white bloozemen from way down East, had just finished “Bellbottoms,” a paean to retro chic. And to make the event truly postmodern, Spencer soloed on theremin, just like Jimmy Page in The Song Remains the Same.
Though he’s been playing dumb since a scathing review by a black critic called his act a “coon show,” Spencer, a former semiotics major, is a master of tweaking cultural symbols for maximum provocation. No gesture ever seems pure; when 70-year-old Mississippi bluesman R.L. Burnside recently joined the band on a San Francisco stage, he was being simultaneously honored by his friends, baited into stereotypical trash talk, and milked for authenticity- by-association. The JSBE are classic what’ve-you-got? rebels: They raise questions about cultural ownership and racial dialectic, but never try to answer them.
“Make it fucked-up!” Spencer shouted by way of cosmology, wiry and electric in an iridescent shirt, and the preternaturally tight band-Spencer, drummer Russell Simins, and guitarist Judah Bauer-brought an edgy intensity to favorites like “Afro,” “Flavor,” and the new single “2 Kindsa Love.” When the light was right, you could actually see the “sweat of the Blues Explosion” fly off their foreheads like a Dan Clowes cartoon; Spencer invoked both Elvis-the-pelvis and the Godfather of Soul, and, as a finale, embraced Simins so hard the trapsman fell off his stool. It was visceral, it was entertaining. So why did the performance seem so empty?
Perhaps it was the aftershocks of Atari Teenage Riot, the genre-freaking support act. Like Minor Threat with a drum machine, the Teutonic mixed-race/gender group set hardcore guitar samples to 200 b.p.m. junglist grooves and scorched-throat vocals about hunting down neo-Nazis, lyrics grounded in personal run-ins with the big black boot. In another context, such trad/rad lyrics might seem like typical coffeehouse calls-to-arms; but in this sonic maelstrom they relayed the kind of irony-proof possibility that still leaves people bemoaning the demise of punk and Public Enemy.
Spencer himself may finally be hip to the half-life of a groovyhatefuck; songs from his latest album, Now I Got Worry, conflate parody and true appreciation, verging on saying something sincere. But, like a gangsta, he just can’t blow that cool pose. Could he be an O.G. after all?
SIA MICHEL”
New York Times FULL REVIEW TEXT:
“The New York Times
POP REVIEW
Giving Voice to Testosterone, With Id Rampant
By Jon Pareles
Dec. 17, 1996The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion isn’t about the blues. It’s about energy: frantic, headlong, jump-out-of-your skin energy, testosterone hopped up on anarchy. The singer wants love, and he wants to shake things up. “When I say ‘Come on!’ I mean, ‘Come ON!’” Mr. Spencer proclaimed when the band played at the Roxy on Saturday night.Since the 1950’s, the musical idiom for those impulses has been rockabilly, which lifted blues licks from black musicians and reimagined them as catalysts for going berserk. Over time, rockabilly has come to seem tamer, so the Blues Explosion recharges it for the hip-hop era. Mr. Spencer’s singing voice is a rockabilly burlesque: the Big Bopper’s rampant id. And Like the M.C. of an old rhythm-and-blues revue, he announced “the Blues Explosion!” in nearly every song. But the parody has taken on a life of its own.
With just two guitars (Mr. Spencer and Judah Bauer) and drums (Russell Simins), the trio plays rangy, primitivist riffs, not 12-bar blues structures, and it shifts from twangs to power chords as abruptly as an edit in a hip hop track. Mr. Simins’s drumming pounds and sputters, as choppy as funk; the guitars share or collide on the rhythm, and now and then Mr. Spencer plays a jabbing Keith Richards-style lead. The songs matter less than the dynamics: the crescendos, the outbursts and sudden hushes, the howls and bent notes. Late in the set, Mr. Spencer unleashed a theremin, with its swooping high notes. The dignity and multilevel ironies of the blues were faraway; this was pure rowdiness, seeking its own form and knocking it around.
Atari Teen-Age Riot, a band from Berlin that opened the show, also aimed for pandemonium and frenzy. As leaders of a German rock movement called digital hardcore (which is also the name of its publishing company), Atari Teen-Age Riot has traded punk-rock guitars for keyboards, setting its rants to sped-up drum machines, squealing synthesizers and densely layered samples of anything from noise to power chords. Its lyrics are shouted slogans carrying the same messages as standard hardcore: don’t conform, mistrust the media, unite and fight. And it owes a lot to older discord-mongers like Public Image Ltd. and especially Public Enemy; its slower songs were like sequels to Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe the Hype.” But its faster ones, at techno tempos, combined floor-rumbling rhythms, distortion at every level, salvos of fast drumbeats and sudden stops and interruptions, bristling
with exhilarating irritants.Atari Teen-Age Riot may despise media but not marketing. While the four band members were illuminated only by strobe footlights, the band’s name on a banner behind it was always visible.”
