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PLASMATICS AND WENDY O. BIO (from Beyond the Valley of 1984 liner notes)
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| Way more than a rock band, as rock writer John Levy said in a recent interview on VH1, the Plasmatics “were a phenomenon”. They changed American fashion, and music, and when they came to town they were news. Their stage shows which included the blowing up of automobiles (usually a cadillac), the sledgehammering of TVs, the chainsawing of guitars, collapsing lighting trusses and exploding speaker cabinets among other things were so excessive they were in the view of Billboard’s Roman Kozak in 1979 the ‘absolute of what can be accomplished in rock and roll” performance, and this view has held up to today, because nothing has yet come close. Created by radical conceptual anti-artist Rod Swenson around the now legendary Wendy O. Williams, the Plasmatics, who, among other things, brought the mohawk haircut to rock and roll and American culture, were, in the words of WBCN’s Oedipus “the most outrageous band in the world”. Swenson, who got an MFA from Yale, came from the view that the measure of art is how confrontational it is. His immediate opus prior to the Plasmatics was “Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater” in NYC’s Times Square, and was here where he and Williams met when she applied for a job. Deeply involved in the underground rock scene at the time producing shows and videos of then hardly known groups such as Patti Smith, the Ramones, the Dead Boys, and others, Swenson was determined to produce the world’s most confrontational or ultimate rock band, and Williams was the logical choice to star. Completely rejecting the disassociated hypocrisy of the conformist culture around her Williams had walked out on a repressive home and high-school life when still a teen. “I’d rather be dead”, friends remember her saying, and by the time she showed up in Times Square she was more convinced than ever that the only authentic way to live was in complete opposition to the banality, the lethargy, and the denial or complacency of the status quo. Challenging convention at every turn, the Plasmatics exploded on the underground scene in 1978 with their debut at CBGB in New York. They synthesized punk and metal when it was a sacrilege to do so, and produced shows so intense and over the top, they have never been equaled. After releasing multiple EPs and singles on local Vice Squad Records, the Plasmatics were signed to Stiff Records in the UK for their first full album “New Hope for the Wretched”. Following the release of “New Hope” the group went to play their first show in the UK and were labeled “anarchists” and banned by the Greater London Council. “Beyond the Valley of 1984”, the second Plasmatics album first released in 1981, was recorded during one of the most intense periods in Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics careers. Following a show in Milwaukee Wendy was arrested by the Vice Squad on an alleged obscenity charge, and beaten unconscious. When Rod attempted to go to her defense he too was beaten unconscious, and others were arrested too. Two nights later after being released on bail Wendy was arrested again in Cleveland on a similar charge and the band faced serious legal bills to keep out of jail. Dates followed in Europe with riots after a number of the shows while in the States the Bond’s Legal Defense fund benefit shows were set up in New York to raise money to pay the legal bills, and it was right at this time when the landmark “Beyond the Valley of 1984”, with its Orwellian and apocalyptic themes was recorded. In between touring drummers, Alice Cooper’s drummer Neil Smith was brought in to play drums, and the 50’s vocal group “The Angels” were used for backing vocals on the song “Summer Nite”. The album contains numerous Plasmatics classics such as “Masterplan,” “Living Dead,””Fast Food Service” (from the New Hope period), “Nothing,” and “Pig is a Pig” sung with ferocity and passion coming in no small part from the upcoming trials in Milwaukee on just these issues. As usual with the Plasmatics the music was ahead of its time with its beginning here of the synthesis of punk and metal, and the first time an audience heard the country western opening to “Pig is a Pig” jaws dropped to the floor. The awesome cover art captures the accusatory Judgment Day flavor of the album itself. Shot by Swenson (under the pseudonym “Butch Star”) in the Arizona desert (a favorite Plasmatics place for experimental performance pieces), it shows Wendy and the group on horseback, fists in air (the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse some reviewers have written), while a white late-model Cadillac is ritualistically blown up, assistants in lab coats and gas masks dive for cover, and a helicopter hovers in the background. “’Valley’s’ cover,” wrote Cream Magazine’s Edouard Dauphin,”is a masterwork of orchestrated chaos, surrealistic vision and...awesome logistics,” while the record inside, he wrote,”draws a bead on a laundry list of sickies, sadists, culture vultures, and money clutchers...(a) definitive cry of outrage about those who would like to manipulate and control our patterns of thinking.” Play it loud! |
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