...or To Hell & A Handbag with Wendy O. Williams
TITLE: "Doom Song"
ARTIST: The Plasmatics
ALBUM: Metal Priestess
RELEASE DATE: 1981
I was walking up Broadway this week, passing by the countless crappy sneaker outlets between Houston and Astor Place, and was stopped dead in my tracks by an old familiar face. Staring from behind the glass was the black-eyed glare and mohican pate of the late Wendy Orlean Williams of The Plasmatics circa 1981. Her face was part of the design of a Plasmatics-themed handbag. At this risk of sounding entirely melodramatic, this just about ruined my day. The Plasmatics barely got any respect when they were a going concern and nine years on since Wendy took her own life, this just seems like a needless twisting of the knife. There is, of course, the very strong argument that suggests that the Plasmatics didn't deserve any respect, but we'll get to that later.
I remember stumbling across Beyond The Valley of 1984, the band's second album from 1981, at a long since-vanished record store on Madison Avenue 44th Street and not believing my eyes. The band was depicted on horseback -- all mohawks, sneers, leather and strategically-applied duct tape -- with fists aloft like a scene from some deranged hybrid of "The Road Warrior" and "A Fistful of Dollars". On the back cover was a picture of the band standing in front of a burning car that they had just, presumably, blown up. "There is absolutely no way," I thought to myself at the time, "that this album can be anything less that entirely entertaining!" I bought it on the spot without having heard a single note off of it.
My first encounter seems like a pretty fair encapsulation of how people came to appreciate the Plasmatics. The band certainly looked fantastic, and the maelstrom of hype and outrage that swirled around them (or simply Wendy, really) inarguably made them compelling. The music was always secondary, if even that. In a way, the Plasmatics just adopted Kiss' playbook of more-bang-for-the-buck and kicked it up several notches. As such, it's probably no coincidence that Wendy later went on to work with Gene Simmons following the dissolution of the original Plasmatics.
They still got everything wrong, though. Doubtlessly inspired by the media fanfare that simultaneously embraced and reviled the Sex Pistols, The Plasmatics were born out of manager Rod Swenson's designs to shake things up in a similarly spectacular fashion. Unlike the messy trajectory of the `Pistols, however, the Plasmatics' brand of chaos all seemed rather carefully choreographed. The shock rock aesthetics on display -- nudity, violence, cross-dressing, profanity, etc. -- never felt especially organic. It was all just spectacle for spectacle's sake. No matter how many times Wendy asserted that destroying a television set with a ball peen hammer or blowing up a car onstage were legitimate statements about shunning the vacuous materialism foisted upon us by a zombified society, it never really felt like anything more than a luridly juvenile freakshow. As much as they may have wanted to, the Plasmatics just didn't seem to mean anything.
That would have been fine, however, if they'd at least produced some great tunes along the way. Though I strenuously defended it at the time, the Plasmatics' music was never anything all that special. That didn't stop me from snapping up all their records, though. After Beyond the Valley.., I dutifully picked up the Metal Priestess e.p. (their finest hour, for whatever that's worth) and the very metal Coup D'etat a couple of years later. I'm really not proud to admit this but I once shafted a local used record store over a Plasmatics record. They were selling a copy of the band's debut LP, New Hope For The Wretched as a deluxe picture disc (the vinyl platter looked like someone had vomited radioactive slime all over it), but were asking a king's ransom for it. Like a dick, I slipped that record out of its sleeve and swapped it with another record. I brought the picture disk -- now sheathed in a different album's cover -- to the counter and paid pennies for it. I was never a bad kid -- I didn't make a habit of ripping stuff off, but for some reason, I had to have this picture-disc. Decades later, I still feel guilty every time I walk by the shop in question.
The great tragic irony here is that most of the Plasmatics records were unlistenable. And not unlistenable in a compelling way, either. l mean, I have several records that I'd deem unlistenable -- stuff like No New York, Diamanda Galas' Plague Mass and some albums by bands like Flipper, Swans and Missing Foundation. But those records remain vital and interesting because of their respective histories or because they're so ugly that they're almost beautiful. The Plasmatics' records, however, just weren't that way. They were artlessly bad; bad music with dumb lyrics. No single member of the band really distinguished themselves as promising either. Wendy's voice was nothing special to begin with, and gradually just eroded with each successive album (to listen to her final solo album is a major chore for the ear). Imposingly tall guitarist Richie Stotts made the odd entertaining caterwaul with his instrument, but no one in the band really had any great redeeming style. Ultimately, the music was -- and sounded -- incidental to the plot. I still loved it at the time, though.
The Plasmatics called it a day shortly after their abortive heavy metal makeover (they went from playing a bad approximation of Punk Rock to a boring approximation of metal). I lost interest around the same time. Wendy went onto record a couple of solo records and Richie Stotts went onto form a short-lived band called King Flux. Bassist Jean Beauvoir had de-camped prior to Coup D'etat to become a member of Little Steven Van Zant's Disciples of Soul and later to attempt a solo career making hopelessly bland, middle-of-the-road rock. In relatively short order, the world promptly forgot about the Plasmatics.
While I'd stopped listening to the Plasmatics with any semblance of regularity, I kept all of their records. I even re-bought a couple of them on compact disc. My fondness for them now has more to do with nostalgia than anything else. Wendy, of course, tragically shot herself in 1998 after suffering from deep depression, putting a sad cap on the band's history. There would be no reunion tour. No more cars to blow up. They were relegated to the past.
These days, I'm not sure what to think when I see someone parading down the street in a "vintage" Plasmatics t-shirt, especially if they're under the age of 30. I have to bite my lip and quell the urge to run up and quiz them about the band or force them to hum a few bars of "Masterplan" or "Sex Junkie" or any other of their innumerable inane anthems. I feel strangely protective of the Plasmatics, if only because I truly bought them at the time, however ridiculous that sounds in retrospect.
This morning, inspired by spotting that stupid handbag, I dialed up some Plasmatics on my iTunes while cleaning up the apartment. If ever I'm playing this stuff, I'll invariably choose a selection from Beyond the Valley.. or Metal Priestess. The latter really did find the band at their height -- Wendy even sings on "Lunacy." This particular track, "Doom Song," while inarguably ludicrous, is by far my favorite. While picking my kids' toys up off the floor, I was shocked that I was still able to sing along with Wendy and get all the schlocky, ersatz-occult-bothering lyrics right, let alone re-create Richie's frantic solo in suitably ridiculous air-guitar fashion.
If you do dig this stuff, most of the band's music is still available via the band's suitably over-the-top website.
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