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Terrible twosome team up for the soundtrack of Mike's life.

 

BY FRED MILL

 

If I Have Fun Everywhere I Go - the book - is the jizz- and reefer-stained chronicle of Sharkey's Machine/Raunch Hands/G.G. Allin/Edison Rocket Train dude Mike Edison's life, then I Have Fun Everywhere I Go - the CD, on the Interstellar Roadhouse label - is the soundtrack. Or, more accurately, the spoken word companion, produced by Jon Spencer and featuring musical accompaniment from Edison, Spencer and a three-piece rhythm section. (Also guesting: Dälek mixmaster Alap Momin.) Like a cross between a jive-talking beat poet and a stentorian-voiced televangelist confessing to carnal knowledge of barn animals, Edison roars through selected passages while the musicians serve up everything from straight-up garage-blooze ("GG Allin Died Last Night") to twisted carnival music ("Jews For Jesus") to loops/effects-strewn hip-hop ("Talking Main Event Magazine Blues").

 

You can check out some choice samples from the record, as well as a cool Jon Spencer radio commercial, at Edison's MySpace page.

 

 

Going into the project, Edison and Spencer considered precedents like Ken Nordine's Word Jazz albums and Public Enemy's embracing of musique concrète. And unlike Edison's fez-punk combo Edison Rocket Train, whose 2006 album East River Delta Spencer also produced, IHFEIG presented some unique obstacles in the studio.

 

"With the Rocket Train," explains Spencer, it was pretty cut and dry. This wasn't a band; it's an audio book, basically. I've also seen Mike [doing readings] with a drummer and bass player and he'd play keyboards. It's all cool and everything, but sometimes it would be overpowering. So the big challenge was to make it so someone could hear the story and get the jokes - to make sure that everything was coming through."

 

Spencer and Edison live within a few blocks of each other in New York; at one point Edison served as the Blues Explosion's official "Minister Of Information," and Spencer will be sitting in on guitar with Edison at selected book readings. How did these two notorious personalities first meet?

 

"It may have been in Madrid, when the Raunch Hands [Edison's old band] were living over there, on an early Blues Explosion tour in '91 or '92," says Spencer. "I remember it being really early in the morning, at some rock ‘n' roll bar, just kinda being bowled over by this guy talking a mile a minute and drinking and eating simultaneously in between hits of whatever - some [laughs] evil powder that was around. It was a pretty crazy scene!"

 

"Crazy scenes" of all manner of debauched hilarity are described in Times Square neon colors in Edison's book. Yours truly was present for one of them: It was the summer of '87 when GG Allin's band, for whom Edison then drummed, made a swing through the South and I witnessed the full frontal, chicken-chokin', feces-flingin' Allin effect, right down to the part where a pair of frat boys piled on him for grabbing their female friend and dry-humping her like a jockstrap-clad dog in heat. Unlike Allin and a number of other indelible personalities who pass through the pages of I Have Fun, however, Edison lived to tell his tales.

 

"Mike's a very, very bright guy," says Spencer. "And resilient. He punishes his body quite a bit, but you know, he's still going."

 

 

[I Have Fun Everywhere I Go - the book - is reviewed HERE on the BLURT site.]

 

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