Jon Spencer’s voice
slithers halfway between howl and croon; like the King baying at the moon.
“They call me the loveless/I’m a mean sonofabitch,” he sings on “The Loveless,” a cut from his new colab with Matt Verta Ray
(Speedball Baby, Madder Rose), Heavy Trash.
Spencer’s a suave sonofabitch as well. He comes on greasy and strong. His
music’s undeniable sweat, swagger and reverence are menacing.
And though something of an iconoclastic cult figure, Spencer has no underlying
motive beyond diggin’ the kicks the music brings. It
happens every time.
“I know once we get
started playing, I’m just going to feel swept away,” Spencer says from his home
in New York.
“It’s just the music. I don’t know how to explain it any differently. It really
just makes me feel so good.”
I dunno,
maybe you like your rocks on. But if you really wanna
know why rock ‘n’ roll is such a turn-on for guys like Spencer — if you
really want to get right down to what delivers the shivers and the shake appeal
— you’re gonna have to get past the luster and glow
and the haircuts. Past the thrash, twang, and thunder.
You’re gonna have to paddle outside the mainstream.
You’re gonna have to strip way down and dig deep
beyond the bones to find its primal seed.
For most bands today
that’s simply too much work; they opt instead for the same old hopscotch. Gone
is the ability to conjure, to entice and excite. Gone is the pioneer spirit.
Gone is the urge.
Most bands, not all.
Not Heavy Trash,
anyway. They dig deep. They strip away. They’ve still got the urge.
Heavy Trash is a rockabilly duo in the classic sense of the term. And yet, by writing
originals and focusing on the soul of the music and not its coiffured
confines, the true grit prevails. Heavy Trash is more about the spark than the
flame.
“What interested both
of us about playing rockabilly was not so much playing stuff that sounded like
an old record per se,” Verta Ray says. “But trying to
discover what we thought was cool about [the records] in the first place. The sort of weirdness like Charlie Feathers’ style or the kind of
anomalies that came out of that culture.”
Both musicians have
adhered to this philosophy on their own for years.
Spencer has throttled
rock ‘n’ roll brilliantly with huge doses of raw, wrong, and weird. From his
early days with Pussy Galore to his work with The Blues Explosion, Spencer
truly embodies rock music’s seminal rebellion. And by rubbing elbows and
learning at the feet of masters like R.L. Burnside, Rufus Thomas, Andre
Williams, and The Reverend Solomon Burke, Spencer is able in turn to play music
that’s as genuine and sincere as its creators.
But it’s not just the
sound.
“I think all these
guys…. these are people that really did their own thing,” he says. “I think
they were trying to make money too, but their music was very personal and
specific to them as individuals and really came from their hearts. And as much
as I like to idealize these musicians, heroes of mine, it was nice to see
something real out of these people and take some kind of life lesson.”
And upon this lesson,
Spencer builds a monstrous and bluesy sound that resurrects Link Wray, Elmore
James, Hound Dog Taylor, Junior Kimbrough…. besides the legends he has
collaborated with.
“I like stuff that’s
very dirty and simple sounding,” he says.
By the time Verta Ray was playing guitar in Speedball Baby,
he was already a full-blown rockabilly picker.
Speedball Baby’s
music is dark, brooding, full-blown junkie noir; a blast of Burroughs’
bellowing bedlam couched in doom and Beat aesthetic. Verta
Ray’s black-clad, ducktailed twang was the only
glimmer of hope.
“I’d just been
playing rockabilly since I was 11,” he says. “And that’s how it came out.”
Verta Ray and Spencer are both denizens of the New York City underground. They’ve shared
bills, jammed backstage, and hung out spinning records. Heavy Trash was only a
matter of time.
A little more than
two years ago, the duo began knocking around covers and originals at Verta Ray’s studio on Ludlow Street.
“Having a studio is
so helpful,” he says. “It takes pressure off going to the studio. We’re always down there and we just turn on
the tape machine when something feels right.”
From those sessionsin those lower East
Side bowels, Heavy Trash emerged.
With the duo playing virtually all the instruments (despite a ton of guests), it’s 13 tracks of raunchy and raw. Verta
Ray’s guitar is full of Echoplex bounce and Spencer’s
sexually charged singing is pure rock ‘n’ roll hillbilly gone slick. In fact if
you go back and listen to anything he’s ever done, Spencer has always been a rockabilly singer.
Thus Heavy Trash fits
well in the Spencer lexicon, which Spencer credits to those around him.
“I think the key is
that it’s a combination of people,” he says. “I mean, I don’t write songs by
myself and I’m not up there playing by myself. I really am lucky to be able to
write music and be able to play music with some really amazing folks.”
Still, it only takes a coupla seconds listening to Heavy Trash or anything
he’s involved in for that matter before you know Spencer’s in the room.
“Apart from being a
really good singer and front man, he’s a natural born band leader,” says Verta Ray. “It started out as a
collaboration, but he’s so good at setting the mood for the things that
I’ll often follow his lead as far as how something’s being arranged. He’s got
really good ideas.”
Ideas like
synthesizer breaks or weird fuzz tone guitar effects ain’t
in the original rockabilly cookbook.
“Not that I object,”
says Verta Ray. “It just never occurred to me. I
wouldn’t have thought of it. Jon’s very adventurous. I think he approaches
music in a very unorthodox way, whereas I came up the more
straighter root. I lean more towards hooks in songs and Jon leans more
towards that sort of Beefheart-style angular stuff.”
And therein lies the band’s traditional grasp and authenticity. The
musicians within this idiom that they emulate were moving forward, frequently
taking the wrong fork in the road to arrive at their own sound.
“For me and Jon the
main thing was discovering the stuff about rockabilly that was really
individual to those performers rather than what they all had in common.”
Spiritually, Heavy
Trash has one foot in Sun Studios when Elvis suggested they all get real gone
for a change, and another foot in anything goes where
their individuality and anarchy is unleashed. They shoehorn yesterday with
tomorrow and blast it out today. It ain’t new… but it
is.
“There’s a high
premium set on the shock of the new,” says Verta Ray.
“Every movement that’s come out of New
York has had to have the badge of being the first
time it’s ever been done… in theory. So you start a coupla
paces behind the starting line if you’re doing something that’s tied to
anything that’s already existed.”
Naturally this
antagonizes the skeptics, heretics, and critics.
“Yeah, I’m fine with
that. I’ve had scathing reviews my whole life,” he says.
Heavy Trash headlines this year’s Bug Jar Summer Music Fest with Chinese Stars, Foreign
Islands, Bludwulf, Gaylord, The Purrs, Hinkley, with DJs Thunderclap and El Destructo
spinning in between, Saturday, August 26, at Highland Bowl, 454-2966, noon-9
p.m., free, all ages. www.bugjar.com.
This article appears in Aug 23-29, 2006.
