Customer Reviews

Dirty Shirt Rock 'N Roll: The First Ten Years

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The release of Dirty Shirt Rock 'N' Roll cues up a plan to reissue (and remaster!) much of the Blues Explosion catalogue this year. The compilation is subtitled The First Ten Years, which means it features tracks from all the main studio albums apart from Damage. It also includes collaborations, singles, the relative rarity "Buscemi" and the "F*** S*** Up" cover from live album Controversial Negro.

Dirty Shirt's more obvious omissions include "Soul Typecast", "2 Kindsa Love" and "Sweet 'N' Sour". The selection and sequence nonetheless creates a coherent collection out of the releases from 1992 to 2002. The liner notes are insightful, too, and inspect the construction of that cacophonous sound from diverse angles (hardware info: Jon Spencer uses a standard Shure SM57 mic!*).

Dirty Shirt Rock 'N' Roll has been out for over three months at the time of writing. You'd hardly know it. Spencer signed copies for pre-order, but they're still for sale. He did it for a New England chain and online shop called N****** C***** (it only offered comics when it started in the late seventies but now mostly sells music). It has quite a stock of autographed albums and most of them should probably remain in stock. It's certainly right for the autographed Mark Ronson CDs to languish there for eternity. Even if Jon Spencer signed a hundred thousand, though, the pre-order Dirty Shirts should've sold.

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion will never be as big as Elvis, but then nobody will. FAT ELVIS JOKE GOES HERE. Still, Dirty Shirt deserves more attention from Amazon reviewers, music magazines, blogs and all that. This is my bit for the cause. Please, do what you can. Did you know that just a couple of listens to the distilled spirit of rock & roll helps ward off bands like U2?

*Just remembered that one of the songs on the Pussy Galore album Dial M For M*********** is called "SM 57".

Momma loves your stuff boys,Every song is very cool and groovy sounding, right down to your very soul.Amen!

The JSBE, hereafter styled "JSBX," was prob my favorite band of the Clinton era. I had even done a complete discography web page, since vanished. However I lost interest after the mediocre werewolf-themed release for Matador (but the subsequent effort on Sanctuary was not bad).

I see 2 issues with this one: a) generally the music has not aged well [in contrast to P.G. anyway] and b) it's not really a "greatest hits" type of outfit; get Extra Width or some version of Xtra Acme, if you like either of those you'll most likely enjoy the rest of the group's catalog.

Though this is actually a good comp: only three lame songs (first one; last one; also "Lap Dance") and a few inspired choices such as the 4th from the Calvin Johnson session, the closer from Orange, and "Buscemi"--the guys always did great b-sides, e.g. the UK single for 2 Kindsa Love (in copyright limbo I suppose) and each of the Acme outtakes was better than any of the album tracks.

Personally I'm more excited by the Year One re-release, having misplaced a prized 1+2 import of Crypt Style about a decade ago