The love of his fiancée led Jim Spencer to move from his native Kentucky to Milwaukee. The South’s loss became a boon to the Cream City from the late 1960s to the early ‘80s. A cultural polymath of eclectic and esoteric interests, Spencer published an underground newspaper and chapbooks of his own poetry and operated an antique store, among other pursuits. Decades after his death in 1983, however, it’s his music that has given him the following beyond his adopted hometown that eluded him in life.
Chicago reissue label Numero Group has made available in digital form the four independently-released albums Spencer recorded in the ‘70s (the original LPs continue to fetch high collectors prices).
His 1973 debut, Landscapes, wistfully maneuvers between the kind of country-/folk-influenced rock that could have posited Spencer as an AM radio pop peer to Jim Croce with darker, trippier explorations of psychedelia and flights of flute-imbued jazz fancy; an old timey coda with a one-fingered tribute to the U.S. flag evidences the late-period hippie defiance of which Country Joe MacDonald or The Fugs’ Tuli Kuperberg would be proud.
Next year’s 2nd Look retains some of the rural charm that gave its predecessor potential appeal to a mass audience (it’s fun to think that Spencer could have developed into a mainstream country music outlier). However, providing tension against that middle of the road are the way his psychedelic adjacency morphs into prog rock experimental atonality; what were once relatively unadorned melodies are endowed with choral and string arrangements recalling English madrigals. Even Spencer’s singing sounds fuller and more impassioned. What remains constant from his first to second sets is his lyrical navigation through what sounds like contentment to warier emotional terrains of paranoia and despair.
His 1976 offering, Major Arcana, boasts a delightfully goofy front jacket design by local underground comics artist Dennis Kitchen. The album’s title doubled as the name of the studio aggregation under which Spencer identified, temporarily leaving behind a solo artist persona. Under the Major Arcana alias he brings many of his previous stylistic conceits to the most fully realized state in which he was able to capture them. However, the project sounds much less of its time than its predecessors and more akin to an act primed for the Monterey Pop or Woodstock.
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His final album, The Most Beautiful Song in the Forest, gave voice to one of Spencer’s concerns as a father by providing an imaginative entertainment for his own children and others. Having a younger audience in mind does nothing to dull the sophisticated musical sensibilities at play on his previous efforts. The songs he and co-creator Cynthia Dahlke intersperse between Ian McDonald’s narration of a story about a group of youthful friends going to visit a friendly fiddler neither shy from grown-up emotions nor compositional complexity. Perhaps because he was lending his talent to a story and characterizations apart from his own life, Forest ends Spencer’s album-making tenure with his cheeriest long-player and one for which being a minor isn’t a requirement to enjoy.
That wasn’t the last of his releases, however. As the Carter administration wound down, Spencer made a handful of singles—including what may the first by any Milwaukee act in the 12" format—wherein he credibly explored disco and the soul music. They would be his last, alas unsuccessful bids at the commercial breakthrough he sought. If only because those records also fetch astronomical sums on the second-hand market, having all their sides in one package would be welcome, too. But the four full-length projects Numero has restored still present a portrait of a singular talent who is at last amassing the audience outside Milwaukee he has long merited.
For a biographical essay on Jim Spencer by Shepherd Express Managing Editor David Luhrssen, visit http://www.numerogroup.com/d/jim-spencer-today-the-world-tomorrow-milwaukee