Arm wrasslin'

The hearty "well, well, well" Burnside issues at the end of the first track of his raucous new A Ass Pocket of Whiskey (Matador/Fat Possum) says all that and more. "Going Down South" is one of the regional standards he's been personalizing since at least 1967, when bluesologist George Mitchell brought his tape recorder to the Burnside house and discovered that the spirit of the blues was very much alive and kicking ass. But this time the groove's been tightened, the guitars have been cranked a notch louder, New York City alterna-rockers the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion are in the band, and you can sense a little "Well, we'll just have to see about this" in R.L.'s voice.

A Ass Pocket of Whiskey is the fallout from a tour last year that featured the sixtysomething Burnside opening for the Blues Explosion, a cantankerous trio fronted by a former member of the avant-scuzz, noise-rock group Pussy Galore. There are precedents for such arrangements: the Stones inviting Howlin' Wolf and Son House to open for them on Jack Good's Shindig TV show in 1965; John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat in 1970; Eric Clapton backing Howlin' Wolf on The London Sessions (Chess) in 1972. And the list of rockers who have mined the deep legacy of the blues for inspiration, copped riffs from the greats, and even put their names on standards like "In My Time of Dying" goes on and on and on.

But the Burnside/Spencer deal is different. For starters, though Spencer may privately share Clapton's scholarly attitude toward the blues, his public shtick -- and yes, shtick is the word for it -- has more in common with John Belushi's parody of white guys playing the blues than with The London Sessions. Just check out the way Spencer asks Burnside whether he can borrow "40 nickels for a bag of potato chips" on Ass Pocket's "The Criminal Inside Me." His huckster persona, a marriage of snake-oil peddler, used-car salesman, and retro-hipster, is irreverent. But it's clear that Spencer's having a laugh at his own expense, too.

And then there's the issue of Burnside's blues, which bears only a passing resemblance to the familiar 12-bars of Chicago and Texas. As producer Robert Palmer explained in the liner notes to Burnside's 1994 disc Too Bad Jim (Fat Possum), "North Mississippi blues is a churning, jamming one-chord exercise in stamina and mass hypnosis. Even players with local roots -- including, truth be told, various members of local bluesmen's families -- easily get confused or lost playing the older North Mississippi blues."

The members of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion were clearly not raised on the idiosyncratic deep blues of the Delta or the surrounding hills. On Ass Pocket, their version of "Shake 'Em On Down," a Burnside standard, piles a mess of buzzing guitars over a hip-hoppish beat and rocks hard and steady. But it doesn't have the loose, intuitive groove or the gritty hypnotic drone of the version Burnside and his band recorded for Too Bad Jim. That has a lot to do with Russell Simins's powerhouse drumming, but it's also there in the guitars, all four of them. When Burnside and his sideman, slide-guitarist Kenny Brown, play the tune, the guitars talk to one another. Add Spencer and Judah Bauer to the mix and you get something resembling a heated argument where each voice is speaking in a slightly different dialect.

The effect is more a friction than a fusion, which is more than likely going to set blues purists on the warpath. It gets better, or worse, depending on your point of view (and I'm always in favor of setting the purists on edge), on "Goin' Down South," an oddly galloping tune that gets steamrollered by Simins's boot-stomping beat and sand-blasted by Spencer's buzzomatic guitar. But when Simins starts swinging on "The Criminal Inside Me" and Burnside answers Spencer's drunken noodling with a hearty "I got a ass pocket of whiskey and a front pocket of gin," there's definitely some intuitive chemistry at work.

Whatever Ass Pocket (which was taped live at a barn in Holly Springs) lacks in purity it makes up for in potency, with harmonica blaring, guitars chugging, and a whole lot of cussing and hollering going on. It's kind of like mixing that whiskey from R.L.'s ass pocket with some gin from the front pocket and tossing it back. The first sip may not taste so great, but by the third or fourth shot it's . . . well, well, well.