Categories
GUEST EDITOR

Inside The World Of Jon Spencer: Jim Dickinson

There comes a time when nothing else but a brain-hammering session with Pussy Galore‘s 1989 album Dial M For Motherfucker will do. And not just to clear the house of your so-called friends who’ve been sloshing cheap wine on your expensive new carpet all night. (Although it might work for that, too.) Jon Spencer, the man who shocked and awed the world with the noisiest band in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, went on to form three more exhilarating combos: Boss Hog (with his wife Cristina Martinez), Heavy Trash (his most recent band) and, of course, the stunning Blues Explosion, whose recent career-spanning compendium, Dirty Shirt Rock ‘N’ Roll (Majordomo), tells you plenty about the DNA of the man in charge. (The label is reissuing expanded versions of out-of-print Blues Explosion albums Now I Got Worry and Controversial Negro this week.) Spencer is guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.

JimDickinson

Spencer: Jim Dickinson is the other connection to those Panther Burns records. Jim produced and played on a lot of those records. Jim had such a long and storied career. He did so many crazy things. One of his early bands—I think they were called the Jesters—had one of the last singles on Sun, “Cadillac Man,” a great record. And he worked all the way through his life. You’ve got Jim and Alex Chilton and Tav Falco and Charlie Feathers and Rufus Thomas. All these people, they did their own thing. Even in the face of little or no commercial success, they stayed true to themselves. I did a record called Spencer Dickinson with Jim’s sons, Cody and Luther, in Coldwater, Miss., where Jim lived. They had a funky old barn there, very run down, which Jim had set up as a studio called the Zebra Ranch. He had acoustical tile in there that came from when they made the film Great Balls Of Fire!, which starred Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis; Jim was hired as a technical adviser. In lieu of payment, he asked for a truckload of the acoustical tile they used when they were building the Sun Studio set. They got hold of some tile they used in the original Sun Studio, and it’s asbestos, which is illegal now. Jim attached great significance to these totems, almost like they’re religious artifacts.

One reply on “Inside The World Of Jon Spencer: Jim Dickinson”

Comments are closed.