Music Review: Jay Spears - What's Not to Like?

An appreciation of my favourite pop star

It’s not easy being a politically engaged queer artist. On the one hand, there is the instinct to puncture pomposity and pretention (ie, to get your dick out), and on the other, the desire to stand up for your dignity as a human being (ie, to keep it buttoned up). Jay Spears is engaged in a project: the creation of a fictitious homotopia, in which old-fashioned, folksy values are reclaimed for the queer folk. On the whole it is a gently comic vision, but it is always subtly subversive and it occasionally erupts into full-on political activism. Spears is an eccentric and an original, less pretentious, and on a tighter budget, than the established gay pop stars, but funnier, more radical and more now.

A recap: the first CD, Boy Howdy, was a ragbag of songs in a somewhat loose assortment of styles, unified by Spears’ hilarious wordsmithing and strident personality. Here was a man torn between lusting over firemen and thinking up triple rhymes:
"He’s big! Like a guard or a tackle.
He’s burnin’ me up with a crackle crackle crackle
He makes me sing like the Mormon Tabernacle
Choir!"
(The song in question, House On Fire, also includes the deathless line, “Call 911, make a fireman come.”)

The key-note was comedy. There were stories about flaunting your hot date in front of disappointed rivals, guys who come up with inadequate excuses when they cancel (“He got a new puppy so he had to stay home”), days from hell when you drop your wallet in the toilet. The stand-out track was the delirious I Like Mike (“I like Mike – what’s not to like?”) a hot voodoo swing number with duelling saxes and a chorus of studs (“We like Mike!”). Here Spears set out his stall as to his vision of modern gay sexuality. The musical and cultural references are consciously retro; ‘50s wholesomeness/squareness is subsumed into the homo agenda. The lyric reads like Tennessee Williams straying into a Jane Austen novel, the refined narrator gently insisting on proper behaviour from his brutish ball-playing admirer:
"Mike doesn’t chew
Cos I asked him not to.
He asked me to dance but I sat it out—
Mike got the hint and he spat it out."

The new CD, Playin’ On My Team, has a thicker, more confident sound, and the eclectic elements coalesce into a signature style, guitar-pop with an agenda. Once again he is supported by his Harmonious Hetero Homeboys and other guest stars. The drums sound better, the backing vocal arrangements are excellent as ever and there’s great work from solo instrumentalists (the spectre of Brian May continues to hover magisterially over the feast). Spears himself plays guitar, bass, mouth organ and banjo. In other words, this is not an album thrown together on someone’s Apple Mac in twenty minutes.

The hilarity is less manic this time, tempered by more depth and atmosphere. Swept Away describes a swimming accident on a camping trip, and yields a nice goose-bumps moment when you realise that Spears is actually talking about something else: no matter how wholesome or well-meaning we may be, sex (or does he just mean life?) is a force of nature and it’s bigger than us. We could be happily married one minute and a lonesome cowboy the next. A haunting harmonica part (by Ken Deifik) chills the warmth of the campfire guitar. Perfect.

On Who Is This Guy? Spears lets go of his compulsion to amuse, and allows himself to be a poet, accompanied by a gorgeous gypsy violin (Darius Campo) and sexy Rawhide back-up vocals:
"Ask the right question if you know how:
What’s going through my heart right now?"
The result is mature and authentic, reminiscent of some of Bob Dylan’s Desire. In the last verse Spears strays into uncharacteristically pornographic territory, asking “this guy” to “drench my dormant desert with unbidden seed.” The line is whispered. Did the wholesome homo shock himself with his own image?

One of Spears’ strands is the depression-era misery-ballad. On Boy Howdy we got the Lou Reed-esque gloom-fest Nothin’. Similar in format is the new My Belinda, in which he duets with regular guest vocalist Annie Combs. But there’s nothing hetero about it: what we hear is the heart-warming sound of a pouf and a dyke whining simultaneously, and in harmony.

Jay Spears is an exuberant lyricist who manages, on the whole, to steer clear of any suggestion of showtunes (he’s more cinematic than theatrical). Listening to him, one has the pleasant sensation of being massaged by wit.
"I shoulda known you’d be an awful spouse
When our first date was at the Waffle House…"
Yes, it’s a double-rhyme: in America “awful” rhymes directly with “waffle.” In My Ray the listener notices details about the doomed relationship that the narrator is too infatuated to see:
"Big soft hands, we like the same bands,
A match made in heaven, my beautiful man."
The big soft hands are perhaps, in reality, clammy, and as for liking the same bands… It is characteristic of Spears’ deceptive sophistication that he can pose as both naïve and jaded at the same time.

He’s a good vocalist in the sense that Dylan is a good vocalist: it’s all about delivery. For some listeners this will be a stumbling-block. (Diana Krall fans may need some convincing.) He throws himself into his songs with an abandon that at times can sound demented. Personally I find this a feature. It makes me want to sing along as I do the washing up. He will hurl himself into dangerous narratives like the HIV-positive date and the dying mother, he will cover a camp old bubblegum number (My Boyfriend’s Back) that maybe doesn’t quite suit his voice, he will rant against born-again Christians (“Roll up the Bill of Rights and wap! wap! wap! ‘em on the head!”) But then, as he says himself, “walks on thin ice never before felt so nice.” Even the questionable cover-version contributes, like a brush-stroke on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, to the glory of the whole, with its Austen-esque cry, “My boyfriend’s back, he’s going to save my reputation!”

Jay Spears is funny, angry, sexy, generous and badly-behaved. He enjoys himself more than a pop star should. He has no interest in being cool or post-modern or evasive. He is a true heir of the ‘60s, when style and political engagement were more congruent, and pop music had more spiritual energy. He takes Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic battle-cry,
"Excuse me while I kiss the sky"
and, just by softening a single consonant, effortlessly queers it:
"Excuse me while I kiss this guy."

It would be easy to dismiss him as a clown, but on closer inspection his work is quite profound. By drawing on a wide range of folksy musical traditions, some of them from outside of pop’s usual blues-based tradition, he is implicitly queering history: we were gypsies, cowboys, peasants and immigrants; we were on the Rive Gauche when Picasso and Bunuel were mouthing off homophobia; we were there when everyone else was having fun at the high school prom. He also takes on the fact that the era of the closet is by no means over. It is of course partly a Village People fantasy to sing of gay firemen, jocks and mechanics, but that doesn’t mean the real thing isn’t out there—or in there, if we are talking closets.

If Jay Spears were taken from us tomorrow, the Bougainvillea Waltz would be his monument. Over a simple busker’s guitar-line, he goes off on an entirely silly rhapsody about, yes, bougainvilleas, the sort of thing no ambitious young X-factor contender would dream of risking. It’s a moment of madness, pleasure and vulnerability, and only he could get away with it:
"The bougainvilleas are insane this year
Like you, so full so juicy
I wanna reach over there and take a huge bite out of you
And the nectar would run streaming down my chest…"
He has sensibly included the song on both his CDs, the only difference being that a breezy Parisian squeeze-box line has been added for the Playin’ On My Team version. A man needs to get his monument right.

Never burn a Jay Spears CD: your friends are going to need the lyric sheet, and will enjoy the cranky graphics (bougainvilleas are a unifying theme). At www.jayspears.com and www.cdbaby.com you can hear extracts of his songs and see a couple of demented videos.

I leave you with a typically fabulous couplet from Smak Dem Christians Down, an instant gay lib classic which should be blasted regularly from rooftops and sung at the end of dinner parties. I would also suggest that Jay Spears CDs be given out in schools with milk and cookies.
"If you wanna live in a theocracy, maybe ya
Ought to move to Saudi Arabia…"

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Jay Spears’ CDs can be ordered at the two websites below.

click here for Jay Spears's website

click here for CD Baby