Sometimes it’s hard to see the difference between well-conceived, well-designed, well-executed art… and garbage.
A broken bottle, for example, is garbage.
Until you put a frame around it and hang it on a wall.
Then it’s an artistic statement about, well, whatever you say it’s about. You can turn anything into art if your manifesto is bold enough.
Rod Swenson earned a Masters of Fine Arts from Yale.
He believed art should be confrontational, and demonstrated it in his neo-Dadaist conceptual performance pieces and experimental theatrical productions in New York City.
In 1976, he placed a casting call ad in Show Business Weekly for his new project, Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater.
It was basically a vaudeville show featuring live sex in a Times Square theater.
Was he making art or garbage?
Born near Rochester, NY, Wendy Orlean Williams had been raised by very strict parents.
She was a shy, quiet girl, played clarinet.
She tap danced on the Howdy Doody TV show, and helped wounded animals.
From the outside, it looked like an average childhood. But she later said her parents were “cocktail zombies” and that she felt like an outcast.
Parents should remember this when deciding how strict to be: some kids rebel in equal and opposite extremes.
Her first arrest was at the age of 15. That was for sunbathing nude in public.
At 16, she dropped out of school and ran away from home, hitchhiked west and south, worked odd jobs at Dunkin’ Donuts and restaurants and strip clubs, and sold her macramé and crocheted bikinis.
She was a lifeguard in Florida for a while.
She traveled across Europe, worked as a macrobiotic chef, then joined a traveling dance troupe. That didn’t work out because she was arrested multiple times for using counterfeit money and shoplifting.
In 1976, she went to New York City and almost immediately saw a copy of Show Business Weekly lying on the bus station floor. It was opened to Swenson’s ad.
She got the gig, performing as a dominatrix, having sexual contact with other performers, puppets, and consenting audience members. Her pièce de résistance was shooting ping pong balls out of her nether region. The show became popular, which earned attention from the police.
There were several arrests for obscenity, but her defiant sexuality made her an underground NYC star.
She got a role in a porn film doing the ping pong routine. That was her only porn movie. She said, “It was just like working in a donut shop, except you didn’t wear a paper hat.”
To her, all work is prostitution.
Swenson and Williams became business and romantic partners.
They were kindred spirits: both control freaks who were anti-consumerism, anti-sexism, anti-conformity. Tired of the theater scene, they decided she should front a Punk band and go really over the top.
The band they formed, The Plasmatics, would be heavy on theatrics:
Making KISS and Alice Cooper look like Shirley Temple.
The Plasmatics’ shows were, whether you liked the music or not, impossible to ignore. Confrontational.
Swenson managed the band, wrote lyrics, photographed album covers, and directed videos.
Guitarists Wes Beech and Richie Stotts were more or less permanent members, but they would go through three drummers and four bass players in their six year career.
Their first gig was at CBGB in July 1978.
It caused such word of mouth that CBGB would book them for stints lasting four nights in a row.
Before long, they outgrew the venue, but there were no midlevel rock clubs in New York at the time. Swenson rented Irving Plaza, a Polish-American community center which had been mostly used for polka dances up until then.
Renting Irving Plaza was a risk. It had no sound or lighting systems, so those would have to be rented, too. Swenson sold his motorcycle to pay for these upfront costs, but it worked. The tickets sold out and people had to be turned away at the door.
Audiences wanted to see Williams chainsaw a guitar in two, shoot a shotgun, and blow up amplifiers and televisions.
Sometimes she’d blow up a car.
At least a few were there to see Williams’ wardrobe of shaving cream and clothespins. Billboard Magazine called them “The absolute limit of what can be accomplished in rock and roll theatrics.”
The onstage destruction meant something in the 1980s.
It was the Reagan years, the decade of the yuppie. Demolishing a television with a sledgehammer showed that consumer goods won’t make you happy. They’re just things, they don’t define you.
That was the artistic message. Whether people thought The Plasmatics were art or garbage doesn’t matter. They came.
It’s worth pointing out that bands who destroy things on stage, from The Who to The Plasmatics, may make negative – though accurate – statements about the status quo.
But any positive alternatives they suggest are overshadowed by the theatrics. It’s a memorable show – but it can defeat the purpose.
Musically, The Plasmatics combined Punk and Metal.
Those two scenes disdained each other at the time, but both embraced the band.
That helped lead both factions to accept future crossover bands like Slayer and Motörhead.
Even so, audiences came as much for the spectacle as for the music. The Plasmatics became the first unsigned band to headline the Palladium, a much larger venue than Irving Plaza.
The Plasmatics’ first single, “Butcher Baby,” came out on March 14, 1979.
It got to #55 on the UK Singles chart.
It was added to their first album, New Hope for the Wretched, which came out in 1980.
The album also got to #55 on the UK Albums chart and #134 on the Billboard 200 in the US.
One would think that her skimpy outfits would attract a mostly male audience, but she was far from a traditional sex symbol.
Maria Raha wrote in her book Cinderella’s Big Score: “Williams was sexual without being submissive.”
By being exactly who she wanted to be — abrasive, radical, and uncompromising — she gained a huge female fan base, too. She embraced her sexuality without objectifying herself.
That earned her a spot on People Magazine’s 1981 best dressed list. She’s the feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir never imagined.
In 1983, she told Night Flight:
“There’s a lot of women out there with good Heavy Metal bands.“
“But they persist to sing like pop singers, because this is what the industry encourages them to do. And I just want to be known as the heaviest woman in Heavy Metal.”
Off stage, Williams was a devoted vegetarian, and didn’t use make-up from companies that tested on animals.
She didn’t smoke or drink, and ran six miles a day.
In the same month, she was on the covers of both Kerrang!…
and Vegetarian Times.
The Plasmatics played sold out shows everywhere they went.
Their appearance on Fridays — ABC’s edgy answer to Saturday Night Live — was the first time many viewers saw a Punk band. Williams was the first woman, and perhaps the first person, with a mohawk on television.
The appearance scared some people, notably authorities in Milwaukee who posted plainclothes policemen in the venue when the Plasmatics played there the following week.
Williams was arrested for obscenity.
On the way to the car, she slapped a cop for groping her. Thrown to the snowy ground, a couple cops held her down while another kicked her in the face. Swenson tried pulling the cops away but was removed and beaten.
The police took them to the station first, and then to the hospital. Swenson wanted to cancel the next day’s show in Cleveland. But Williams wouldn’t be deterred.
She went on stage with a black eye, broken nose, and stitches, and collapsed at the end of the show but her point had been made:
Do not let fascists win.
The charges in Milwaukee included obscenity and assaulting a police officer, which could have resulted in jail time.
However, a photographer had pictures of police beating Williams, which were corroborated by eyewitnesses. The jury took just three hours to find Williams and Swenson not guilty.
The real obscenity, Williams said, was a government that allowed pollution and hunger to go rampant.
While the band was on hiatus, Williams put out a solo record produced by Gene Simmons.
It was called WOW, after her initials, and was nominated for the 1985 Best Female Rock Vocal Grammy (Tina Turner won for “Better Be Good To Me.”)
In the video for “It’s My Life,” she drove a convertible through the desert, climbed up a rope ladder dangling from a low flying airplane, leaving the car to go off a cliff. She always did her own stunts.
She acted in a 1986 B movie called Reform School Girls, playing the leader of the gang of bad girls intent on making life miserable for the good girl sent to the school.
Her acting is pretty good but it’s not a great movie.
Neither she nor Swenson liked it, but they agreed to let the producers use three songs from Williams’ second solo album, Kommander Of Kaos, and wrote a new song for the movie called Reform School Girls.
She also had a recurring role as a spy on the TV series The New Adventures of Beans Baxter. It aired in the summer and autumn of 1987. Her last acting role was on MacGyver in 1990.
Smart, funny, and forceful, she was riveting on TV talk shows:
Appearing on The Sally Jesse Raphael Show, The Joan Rivers Show, Tomorrow with Tom Snyder, and more.
America knew who she was.
But the obscenity charges in Milwaukee made promoters think twice before booking the band. Conservative groups would complain as soon as shows were announced. At some point, there was no sense in touring because they couldn’t get venues large enough for their audience.
Likewise, their label, Capitol, passively resisted promoting their records or tours.
Publicly, the band said they were going on hiatus but they knew it was over.
The Plasmatics released another album, Maggots: The Record, on their own label in 1987.
It’s been called the first Thrash Metal rock opera, taking place 25 years in the future and describing an ecological disaster.
Reviews were positive, with Kerrang! calling it “a work of genius.”
Some see it as a solo record, not only because Williams’ name is over The Plasmatics’ on the cover, but also since Williams and Wes Beech are the only original members left.
Either way, it’s the last Plasmatics album.
She put out one more solo album, called Deffest! and Baddest!, which leaned heavily Thrash Metal, And that was it.
Swenson and Williams had decided early on that they would call it quits if they couldn’t continue without compromising their vision.
They still had a huge fan base, but without venues to play and a supportive label, that point had come.
Williams viewed the music industry as exploitative, superficial, and draining.
All work is prostitution. Her increasing discomfort with her own commercialism and the machinery of fame probably contributed to their retreat from the spotlight.
Swenson and Williams moved to rural Connecticut and built a geodesic dome home.
He lectured at the University of Connecticut’s Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action.
She promoted vegetarianism at a food co-op and became a veterinary assistant and animal rehabilitator.
She was still trying to change the world for the better but had trouble getting used to a quiet life.
She felt detached and alienated.
She said she had experienced everything she wanted to in life and now struggled with feelings of emptiness, isolation, and a lack of direction.
Williams attempted suicide in 1993 and 1997. Many suicides are driven purely by despair, but it appears she felt her journey was complete.
She said she had lived life on her own terms. Even in her suicide note, she framed her death as a rational, voluntary act — a decision to leave rather than continue in a world she no longer felt part of.
She wrote:
“I don’t believe that people should take their own lives without deep and thoughtful reflection over a considerable period of time.
“I do believe strongly, however, that the right to do so is one of the most fundamental rights that anyone in a free society should have.“
“For me much of the world makes no sense, but my feelings about what I am doing ring loud and clear to an inner ear and a place where there is no self, only calm.”
One day in 1998, Swenson returned home and found some things she had left for him: a “do not resuscitate” living will, sealed love letters, to-do lists, a package of his favorite noodles, and seeds to plant. He found her body in the woods behind their house, next to the gun and the nuts she had been feeding the squirrels.
Swenson is still a fellow at UConn.
His most recent paper is titled “Spontaneous Order, Autocatakinetic Closure, and the Development of Space-Time.”
His philosophy hasn’t changed, saying,
“Think for yourself, always question, and remember:
The hope for the world is in the outliers.”
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