Interview: Boss Hog's Cristina Martinez

Boss Hog headline the Bowery Ballroom tonight. Tickets are still available.

"We were not enjoying each other's company as much as we did in the beginning. It just got kind of intense."

Boss Hog in Barcelona, photo by Oscar Garcia

From its inception in 1989, Boss Hog's 11-year history was marked by lineup shifts, the absence of strict recording timetables, and a fondness for NSFW album covers. On the flip side, Boss Hog did the dirty, raw guitar blues thing way before it was cool, all the while, having a vivacious, bad-ass frontwoman in Cristina Martinez. But for the last eight years, Boss Hog had been dormant until the Nightmare Before Christmas, an All Tomorrow's Parties installment that took place last week in Somerset, England.

While Spencer has been active this decade with various projects like Blues Explosion and Heavy Trash, Martinez voluntarily gave up the rock-and-roll nights for a more responsible day. We caught up with her after she got off work. -Michael D. Ayers

What are you doing these days?

I do production. When we first moved to New York, we still needed day jobs and I started doing production--there's a big publishing industry here, as you may well know. It was one of the few jobs that all the musicians had--freelance pay stuff. It was before desktop publishing, and it was artistic and easy and you got paid shitloads of money to do very anal work. But it was easy and that's what I started out doing. And then when desktop publishing came in ages ago, I was right on the ground level of that; I worked my way up very quickly, and for a long time, I worked at big magazines and was holding a pretty good job. I stopped doing all of that when we signed to Geffen and just focused on that for awhile.

And when I had a child, after a certain time, he went into school and then I had to stop touring and had to drop anchor. I just took care of him for a long time, until he was old enough that there was all this [free] time; it seemed that maybe I should start contributing financially to our family. So I started doing a little bit of work here and there, but what brought me back to it was when Bust Magazine bought its title back. And that magazine is run and owned by a friend of mine; so I helped her get it back on the ground again. I realized I was spending a lot of time doing that, and not making a lot of money, so I might as well get a real job and make some money. So I got a job with [Major Media Company withheld] again. But I don't know if you need to tell everyone that; I just told you because you asked, but I don't think it's very interesting.

Oh, it's very interesting.

Is it really? [laughs]