If you had met me in the spring of 1996, and then the following fall, you would have done a double-take. In fact, a few people did. In between my sophomore and junior year of college, I had ditched my frightening tortoise-shell androgynous Birth Control Glasses and gotten contact lenses. I'd also bought some new clothes and cut my hair. Gone were the eye-disturbing blood-red-on-blood-red ensembles, the greasy mushroom fro, the general sense of "I don't know who the fuck I am, but you're going to see me, dammit."
I'd also started a strange kind of internet flirtation with a girl who lived in Kentucky, who shall remain nameless so as not to injure her reputation for ever getting herself involved with the likes of me. Both of these have a connection with The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion in general and Acme in particular.
There was no Match.com in 1996, and flying across the country to visit someone you'd met online was not unheard of, but still odd. I have no idea where I got the money to fly to Kentucky twice, but I did. Our incompatibility was total, as I remember it: she was a lively, spontaneous Rock-n-Roll girl deeply into the Beats; and I was Brooks-Brothering it up on the new and oft-declared principle that "the classics never go out of style," who was freaked out by his sexual inexperience and couldn't name a poet more recent than Yeats. But she passionately dug the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, who I had never heard of.
Shoot forward a couple of years, past the awkward end of whatever our relationship was, and I see that the JSBX has a new album out. Maybe I have Orange already, but I think I don't. What I do have is disposable income, and a will to dig a band with a technicolor name and a sound as warm and satisfying as the slice of melted cheese on a piece of apple pie.
So I pop it in, and for the first time hear: THIS IS BLUES POWER, and I am transfixed. It rocked, hard. It got heavy. It kicked it into high gear, and talked about the blues, and you know you're responsible for what happened to my brother! It attacked, and it made it all right, and I was a fan.
And I'm sure if I grew up in Kentucky or Memphis or someplace else where this kind of Dirty Shirt Rock n' Roll sprouts up from the soil like bluegrass or kudzu, I wouldn't have been as impressed. But this was Philadelphia in 1998, where everyone who wasn't lapping up Dave Matthews like latte spilled on their J. Crew sweaters was embracing the suck of the Marylin Manson/Limp Bizkit/Creed Cerberus. But in Jon Spencer and the boys, I found something that, however leavened with irony, required no apology, as it needed no explanation.
That meant something to me then. It meant that I didn't belong to a dead culture, but legitimately rocked out to the sound of my times. It meant that I could step out of the cage of my own geekdom and play with the other kids. I had made a decision in that long-ago summer of '96, that I didn't want to put people off anymore. That there was a way to bridge the gap between my passions and prejudices and the now where I met everyone else. Though no one else I knew ever dug it as much as I did, this record gave a thumbs up to my new approach to life. In his own way, Jon Spencer was to me what Joey Ramone or Lou Reed was to older generations. If I meet him, I might just tell him so.
Grade: LL
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