Some bands are critics' darlings, for some mysterious reason. I never understood, for example, why my music encyclopedias classify almost the entire output of Elvis Costello or Dexys Midnight Runner as essential listening. Well, the Plasmatics are the complete opposite. It appears that most music critics hate them with genuine passion. I don't get it: A punk band with a voiceless former pornstar for a frontwoman, two loud but inept heavy metal guitarists and a stage show that included lots of nudity, blowing up cars and cutting up guitars with chainsaws? Isn't that the very definition of good taste? Or were these critics ashamed of being aroused by the dominatrix attires of Ms Wendy O. Williams (a.k.a.WOW)? Anyway, a few words about this remarkable performer: At 16, she left her New York home to drift all over the US and Europe, doing all kinds of jobs and getting arrested for various minor offences - finally settling on a career as a live sex performer. She made her screen debut on the 1979 porn movie "Candy Goes to Hollywood", where she memorably shot ping pong balls out of her vagina. Colourful character, to say the least. Around that time she met her future partner and manager who was trying to put together a punk rock band and who convinced her to change career, while staying in show business. So at her 30est, much later than most singers, she stood behind the microphone stand for the first time to lead her band, The Plasmatics. Now, when I called WOW voiceless, I was, of course, exaggerating. She does have a voice, just not the singing kind. She can shout and she can scream with the best of them. And her band got better, almost professional, with time. Their lyrics were confrontational, often sexually explicit or politically charged, attacking the Establishment and Reagan's conservative America. The punk sound of the first two albums gradually gave way to Heavy Metal and the Plasmatics made a living in the music business, admittedly more thanks to their (literally) explosive live shows than the music per se. Although reviled by critics, they've been championed by friends and collaborators including Kiss's Gene Simmons, Motorhead's Lemmy and Joey Ramone. "Final Days..." is one of two compilations of Plasmatics/WOW material released post-millennium. I'll tackle the songs in chronological order: The earliest tracks here come from their 1981 album "Beyond the Valley of 1984", they are the punk/metal dynamites "Masterplan" and "A Pig is a Pig". The latter was written after an incident WOW had with the Milwaukee police, when she was arrested during a show for "indecent exhibition", brutally beaten and sent to the hospital with multiple injuries. On top of it, she was charged with instigating the incident and assaulting a police officer - charges of which she was later acquitted. Another obscenity trial (for performing on stage with nothing but whipped cream covering her private parts - how the hell did she get the whipped cream to stay?) came to nothing but, much like the infamous Jim Morrison Miami incident, it almost killed the band's career, marking them as troublemakers while club owners cancelled their shows, fearing they may be shut down by the police. No wonder then that WOW sings with such vile, initially using a mock-country rhythm and continuing with a metallic all-out assault on "pigs". From 1981 and the "Metal Priestess" EP we get "The Doom Song" and "12 Noon". The former features a long organ and spoken word interlude, before it slips into Metal, the latter is more punk/new wave and reminds me of (LA punk band) X. Their Si-Fi theme justifies the "Apocalypse" of this compilation's name. And, although we don't have anything from 1982's Coup D'Etat album, we get 4 demo versions of that album's songs: "Stop" comes off like a Black Sabbath/Sex Pistols hybrid and is one of the band's better compositions. "Just Like on TV", "Uniformed Guards" and "The Damned" show the band's transformation to a metal group to be completed. 1984's solo project "WOW" was a professionally recorded metal album produced by Kiss's Gene Simmons and featuring all of Kiss as guest musicians. From it we get "Opus in Cm7", a mid-tempo hard rocker, which Plasmatics fans must find too tame (it even features piano). Even more irritating for them will be "Lies", a rap metal ditty from her third (and last) solo album (1988's Deffest! and Baddest!)."Brain Dead", "Propagators" and "Finale" come from the band's last Plasmatics album, 1987's "Maggots: The Record", balancing among punk, hardcore and metal. Wendy left the music business in 1989 to devote herself to organic farming and the rehabilitation of sick and abused animals. Unbeknownst to most of her fans, this ferocious performer was, in real life, a quiet person passionate about vegetarian diet, natural food, exercise and the care of animals. Whether she was unhappy in her private life or she suffered from a mental illness isn't at all clear, but the fact is that between 1993 and 1998 she made three suicide attempts, of which the last (with a gun) was successful. Her suicide note gave no explanations other than it was a conscious decision and not the result of desperation or self-loathing. She was 48 y.o. at the time.
**** for Stop, Masterplan
*** for The Doom Song, Just Like on TV, Propagators, Uniformed Guards, Opus in Cm7, The Damned, A Pig is a Pig, 12 Noon
** for Brain Dead, Lies, Finale
Well put, sir!
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