 |
PLASMATICS AND WENDY O. BIO (from New Hope for the Wretched and Metal Priestess liner notes)
|
|||||
| Anti-disco, anti-complacent assembly line rock, anti-bullshit, anti-banality, and anti-formula ‘art’, living, and thinking, the Plasmatics may be the most truly radical band in the history of rock. Built around the utterly awesome, one-of-a-kind, and now legendary Wendy O. Williams by ultra-radical conceptual artist (‘anti-artist”) Rod Swenson, the Plasmatics took the New York underground music scene by storm with their debut in 1978, selling out punk shrine CBGB nite after nite and with the huge crowds they drew virtually creating then unknown venues such as Irving Plaza, The Ritz, Bond’s International Casino and others. By 1979 they became the first to headline New York’s Palladium without a recording contract where they blew up a Cadillac onstage. Despised by the rock establishment which they assaulted with every turn, Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics were so far ahead of their time in so many ways it is hard to know where to begin. They synthesized punk and metal before it was cool to do so, they used chain saws and other noise put through amplifiers, and their stage shows were second to none. Seven full albums and multiple eps were produced under Wendy’s or the Plasmatics name during the decade Williams recorded. Following a series of singles and eps put out from 1978-1979 on home-owned Vice Squad Records, “New Hope for the Wretched”, issued by Stiff records in the UK in 1980 was the first full Plasmatics album ever released. It contains a number of early Plasmatics classics such as ‘Butcher Baby’ (the song that first featured Wendy sawing through guitars with a chain saw during the live shows), ‘Corruption’, ‘Living Dead’ (the song that first featured Wendy sledge hammering TV sets during the live show), ‘Concrete Shoes,’ ‘Sometimes I’, and others. Following Swenson’s interest in random art, the ‘noise jam’ on ‘Dream Lover’ during which Wendy plays sax, has the musicians isolated from one another and their headphones turned off during the instrumental portion so that no one could hear what anyone else was playing. From the shooting of the cover, to the recording itself and tour that followed, “New Hope”, as with almost every Plasmatics/Wendy O. project, was filled with drama and challenge. Stiff had brought in former Rolling Stones producer Jimmy Miller to add production interest to the project but his heroin problem, apparently picked up from Keith Richards, left him incapacitated almost from the beginning, and Rod Swenson and Ed Stasium (later producer of ‘Living Color’ among others) had to salvage the album from tracks recorded in a less than ideal way. With the the awesome album cover showing Wendy et al. with white Cadillac in a swimming pool finished, the group, already an international media sensation following their exploits in the States, was set for their UK debut. A packed press core met Wendy at the airport where, having changed into a nurses costume on the plane, she announced she was there to “give a cultural enema to the British people.” The planned debut show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, sold out way in advance, and where group was set to detonate a car on stage never happened. Labeling the band as “anarchists” the Greater London Council met in emergency session and banned the show at the last minute. Amidst sensational headlines in all the papers the band returned to the States where a month later the album was released and the Plasmatics began a sold-out North American tour. A classic in its genre, the album charted in the UK where chain saw anthem ‘Butcher Baby’ went into the top 40. By the time “Metal Priestess” was recorded and released in 1981, Wendy O. Williams was a cultural icon, the second album “Beyond the Valley of 1984” had been released following a tour which saw Wendy face multiple arrests on alleged obscenity charges, a savage beating at the hands of the Milwaukee police department which landed her and Rod Swenson in the hospital when he came to her defense, countless TV appearances and news stories (including the ABC Fridays show where the band introduced the mohawk haircut into mass culture), and legal defense benefit concerts. “Metal Priestess” was recorded at the private country recording studio of Dan Hartman who produced the record with Rod Swenson. Wunderkind Hartman, first known when a teen as member/writer of the Edgar Winter group (and who went on to produce, write, and perform multiple hits of his own as well as producing for the likes of Joe Cocker and James Brown), and who tragically died in 1994 at the age of 44, became completely obsessed with “Beyond the Valley of 1984”. He contacted the Plasmatics management about becoming involved. “Metal Priestess,” saw another change in drummers and a new bass player, and was recorded in ten days, and mixed in four. “The Doom Song,” “Black Leather Monster,” “12 Noon,” and “Lunacy” became Plasmatics classics and were performed on a numerous national TV shows including SCTV, Solid Gold, and others. |
||||||
