The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion “A Reverse Willie Horton” 1991. Today, June 18th, is JSBX guitarist (and fellow Appleton, WI native) Judah Bauer’s 48th birthday. A Reverse Willie Horton is a super-rare, super-early JSBX release (only around 500 copies pressed); it’s possibly a bootleg (one of only three other releases on Pubic Pop Can Records – a “label” that is more likely Siltbreeze Records). From Pop-Catastrophe: “During an interview with Fiz Magazine (Issue #5) Jon Spencer discusses the various editions of the first album and hints at the origins of this particular release; ‘When I was travelling around with the Gibson Bros. last year I had a tape of that with me because we had just done it. I let a few people dub it so maybe something came from that.” although it has since been suggested that the album was released the band’s consent and it seems unlikely that the record was made from a dubbed cassette.’ The sound quality on this LP is actually really decent and not at all dissimilar from JSBX’s first couple of “official” releases of The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion on Crypt and Caroline. The tracks that appear on A Reverse Willie Horton mostly mirror those official releases – all were recorded and engineered “by New York’s most famed producer, [Mark] Kramer (Ex-Butthole Surfers, Bongwater and founder of the Shimmydisc label) and their second session which was presided over by Steve Albini (ex-Big Black/top producer/all round bitch.) According to Blues Explosion drummer Russell Simins and guitarist Judah Bauer, the Kramer session took just two and a half to three hours in which they recorded fourteen songs, only doing second takes here and there. ‘The thing is that on some of that stuff, that three hours of rock mixes, we didn’t even go to the mixing board. That’s all on record: that bootleg – ‘A Reverse Willie Horton’.” (pop-catastrophe)

My favorite tracks are “Twenty-9″ (listed as both “Twenty Nine” and “Twentynine” on other releases – the version on A Reverse Willie Horton is also completely different to their official Crypt Style release), “Typecast,” “Lovin’ Up a Storm,” “’78 Style” and of course “40lb Block of Cheese” which always makes me laugh because I envision the origin of this song as the guys sitting around late-night in a dark NYC apartment in ‘91, Judah regaling Jon and Russell with tales of what it was like to grow up in Appleton, Wisconsin (“You walk into any grocery store and there’s, like, a 40 pound block of cheese staring at you”).

Here’s a couple of Judah Bauer photos, the first I took at a friend’s apartment in 1987 (Appleton) and the second is of me with him at a JSBX concert in 2012 (Milwaukee).