"You think it’s easy being in a band?” Jon Spencer asks aloud with an overload of attitude on Beetle Boots, a gleefully raucous meta-commentary that, interestingly enough, sits in the middle of the rawk lifer’s first-ever solo album, 2018’s Spencer Sings the Hits. He’s racked up more than enough experience to weigh in on the question, having worked with Eighties noise rock pioneers Pussy Galore, rockabilly renegades Heavy Trash and the equally conventions-twisting Boss Hog and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. But by 2017, the latter three projects had all slowed down significantly, and the guitarist-vocalist found himself without anyone to jam with for the first time in decades. Eventually, he decided he had to forge forward on his own.
“The idea wasn’t to make a solo record; the idea was just to make a record. I was kind of in limbo, didn’t have a band anymore; the Blues Explosion had stopped and Heavy Trash had stopped,” he says over the line from his New York City apartment, explaining that even though Boss Hog released their Brood X in 2017, that band’s part-time status left him without a steady creative outlet.
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“Push comes to shove, then some guys pulls a knife. They arrested him – but that was my introduction to Dave’s band”: Alex Van Halen on the first time he and Eddie met David Lee Roth at a show that nearly ended in violence
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