The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion show at El Rey Theatre, Los Angeles, CA, US with Speedball Baby and Subsonics on 18 March 1997.
Live Photo: Michael Kaiser (https://www.flickr.com/photos/kaiser69/)
This show is referenced in The Ballad of Speedball Baby by Ali Smith.
“Tonight we’ll play with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, friends from New York that we’ve played and toured with often. Our patron saints from MCA will come marvel at their acquisition on the grand stage of the El Rey Theatre – chandeliers (plural) dangling above, a thousand people in the crowd.
Jon and Ron are not the same creature, even though music press always wants to make them out to be. Jon is conventionally handsome, a withdrawn enigma off stage, a controlled ringleader on, polite and presentable although a quiet troublemaker. At our first show together, he sent their roadie on stage during our set – naked except for a family-sized bag of potato chips taped to his waits – to dry-hump Ron and Matt and generally make trouble.
Ron ripped the bag open with his teeth and sprayed chips everywhere without missing a beat, and when I looked off stage, Jon was crying from laughing. Russell, their drummer, is a trouble-enforcer: tall, confident, topped with wild, bushy hair. And Judah, their guitarist, is a quirky reed blowing in a troubled wind.”
“The Blues Explosion is on next, and I watch from the side of the stage. Now this is something the crowd can finally get behind – cool but not scary – and the audience is flipping its collective hair and shimmying in designer clothes and rattling their jewellery and I’ve had enough.”
“Soon after the disastrous LA showcase we played with the Blues Explosion, MCA dissolved its relationship with Fort Apache – having not discovered Nirvana through it, literally or figuratively – and a roster of cool, interesting bands were dropped, including us.”
