John Spencer doesn’t do nostalgia. The underground rock icon has spent the last 30 years making a racket, burning through bands, and leaving behind a trail of battered amps and blown-out eardrums. But now, with Spencer Sings the Hits, he’s finally gone solo—not because of some grand artistic reinvention, but because, as he bluntly puts it, “Didn’t have a band anymore.”
For a guy who’s spent most of his career feeding off the energy of others, going it alone wasn’t exactly the plan. “I missed having a band,” he says. “So I figured, well—you should just get up and do something.” That “something” turned into a raw, scrappy, full-tilt rock record that kicks harder than most bands half his age. It’s also, in a weird way, a return to his Pussy Galore roots. “There are some very definite nods,” he admits. The metal percussion, the tuning method that makes every guitar purist in a five-mile radius break out in hives—it's all there. “About half the record is in a slack tuning. I’d write in a specific key, then put the guitar away, detune it, and try again. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it sounded like hell.”
The results are gloriously unhinged. Hornets, a skronky groove-heavy standout, sounds like it's being played through a busted speaker in a basement filled with cigarette smoke and bad decisions. “That’s all M. Sord,” Spencer says of his drummer. “He’s the one that really makes that song something else.”
Ask him if he cares that rock music has been declared dead for the 48th time this decade, and he shrugs. “I never started banging away on a guitar because I thought I could make money,” he says. “I did it because I couldn’t help it.” His heroes were never the ones cashing checks anyway—The Stooges, Throbbing Gristle, Big Black, The Jesus Lizard. The ones too weird, too abrasive, too stubborn to compromise. “They did their own thing, and they just kept doing it.” Which is why he’s unfazed by the whole “rock is dead” conversation. “It comes in cycles,” he says. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and rock has always been ‘dead’ to somebody. I came up in the underground. That’s where I’ve always been.”
Of course, there’s being underground, and then there’s getting your song in a major Hollywood blockbuster. Baby Driver opened with Bellbottoms—an absolutely unhinged needle drop that made audiences explode in applause before they even knew what the hell they were watching. But this wasn’t just some random sync job. Edgar Wright had the scene mapped out in his head since the ‘90s. “The first time I met Edgar was in 2005,” Spencer says. “One of the first things he told me was, ‘I’ve got this idea for your song in a movie.’ Turns out he’d been thinking about it since Orange came out.”
Did it change his life financially? Spencer laughs. “Huge spike on Spotify,” he says. “Doesn’t mean a damn thing. Nobody’s buying the record, they’re just streaming the one song. But hey—got some licensing deals out of it.” Would he work with Edgar Wright again? “If there’s a Baby Driver 2 and they need a prison guard, sure. I’ll go back to prison.”
Meanwhile, Acme just turned 20, and Extra Width hit the quarter-century mark, not that Spencer’s paying attention. “I don’t really do nostalgia,” he says, but he will talk about Acme's chaotic recording process, which involved Steve Albini, Dan the Automator, and, in one particularly bizarre session, Detroit legend Andre Williams. “We saw him play in Chicago while we were in the studio,” Spencer remembers. “We went up to say hi, told him we were recording, and he just said, ‘Well, I’m coming over.’” What followed was a session that quickly turned into a full-blown coup. “At some point, Andre just took over. He was ordering everybody around. He was the producer now. We just rolled with it.”
If Acme was an experiment in controlled chaos, Extra Width was the Blues Explosion finally getting their footing. “The first record was just energy and ideas,” Spencer says. “Then we went on tour with The Jesus Lizard. Playing night after night, we figured out how to work together.” The takeaway? “Watching those guys grind it out every night—that was a big influence on us.” Unlike so many ‘90s bands who coasted into mainstream alt-rock status, the Blues Explosion never had the luxury of radio play or MTV hype. “We weren’t relying on any of that,” Spencer says. “We were just out there, playing shows, winning people over one at a time.”
That’s the plan with Spencer Sings the Hits, too, though he's still getting used to being a frontman without a built-in gang of musical co-conspirators. “This is a whole new thing. I’m trying to find my legs,” he says of touring as a solo act. “Four shows in, we’re still whipping it into shape.” But that’s what he’s always done—hit the road, raise hell, and make noise. “People want to come in and join the party, that’s fine,” he says. “But I’m just going to keep pushing forward.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below!
