Today the World, Tomorrow Milwaukee
From its vibrant music scene and community to its culinary pleasures, lakefront scenery, museums, breweries, and numerous concert venues, Milwaukee has always been a hidden gem. Many musicians forged their careers in Milwaukee as well. Think Al Jarreau, The Violent Femmes, Les Paul, and Greg Koch. And then there was the lesser-known Jim Spencer.
“Today the world, tomorrow Milwaukee,” was Spencer’s optimistic motto. By the mid-1970s, the Milwaukee singer-songwriter and poet had established a name for himself in the city of nicknames (Milwaukee has been known as Cream City, Beertown, River City, City of Festivals, and many other pseudonyms). Had he lived into midlife and beyond, Spencer may well have taken the world by storm.
An integral and beloved part of the Milwaukee music scene in the ’70s and early ’80s, Spencer was involved in every aspect of his artistry: the writing, playing, singing, arranging, publication, production, and distribution of both his music and his poetry. And he transcended genre.
Should you listen to his albums Landscapes or 2nd Look, which came out in 1973 and ‘74, you might classify him as a folksy singer-songwriter, but if you listen to The Blues Are Out to Get Me or Wrap Myself Up, which he put out in collaboration with the funk band Son Rize in 1979, he’d strike you as more of a blues-funk musician.
And then there is the acclaimed The Most Beautiful Song in the Forrest, a children’s album that he wrote and produced for his daughters in the late seventies.
In 1973, Spencer formed a band called Major Arcana, which boasted a lineup of Milwaukee’s musical royalty, including Sigmund Snopek iii, Jay Borkenhagen, Rob Fixmer, and Tom Ruppenthal. A second iteration of the group, which included several additional contributors, produced a psychedelic folk-rock album under the same name. The album cover, a wild and colorful daydream of oddities, was illustrated by underground comix artist Denis Kitchen of Kitchen Sink Press.
Jim Spencer and Barry Patton, with permission by Barry Patton
“Jim was a very, very active counterculture, renaissance man,” said collaborator and band member Barry Patton of his late friend. Patton co-wrote several songs with Spencer, played and performed with him regularly (including opening for Queen), and is featured on the Major Arcana Album.
Bassist Brian Richie of The Violent Femmes said of Spencer that “he was a punk personality with a folksinger persona.”[i] To those who knew him, Spencer seemed to have teetered on the edge of greater success, but due to his at times unreliable and erratic behavior, his bandmates couldn’t always count on him.
Profusely productive, he spread himself thin, sleeping little and diving into one project after the next. Tragically, he passed away unexpectedly in 1983 due to an undiagnosed congenital heart condition. Despite efforts by his friends and family to bring more awareness and acclaim to his work, today, Spencer remains a Milwaukee legend who is an otherwise relatively obscure artist.
Yet recently, Out-sider, under Guerssen Records, an archival distribution company dedicated to exposing lesser-known music to a “new generation of listeners,” re-released the Major Arcana album, complete with the original insert illustrated by comix artist Peter Poplaski, while Patton, who has recently retired and re-emerged on the Milwaukee music scene, continues to sift through Spencer’s body of work, setting some of his unfinished lyrics to music and sharing them with audiences for the first time.
“His lyric sensibility is always the most interesting part…. he was an incredible singer, he wrote great melodies, but his wit, and his word play is, I think, the crux of a lot of his songs,” said Patton. With Guerssen’s re-release of the Major Arcana album, whose sound could be likened to that of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, or Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die, you can hear it yourself.
Listen to Jim Spencer and the Music of Major Arcana Here:
[i] Jim Spencer — Today the World, Tomorrow Milwaukee by Dave Luhrssehn, https://numerogroup.com/blogs/stories/jim-spencer-today-the-world-tomorrow-milwaukee
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