Sleazoid Express
By Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford Fireside Books, 2002
Years ago, a friend once gave me a spiral-bound, Xeroxed collection of Landis’ seminal trashfilm fanzine, Sleazoid Express, which obsessively detailed his adventures into the twilight world of rough trade and gutbucket b-movies at various Times Square grindhouses. It was one hell of a read. No one had ever written movie reviews like these before, where you were actually afraid for the reviewer’s life, as he went shoulder to shoulder with the petty thieves, low-rent pervs, and slumming junkies that crawled around these apocalyptic theaters like mutant man-roaches. Suddenly, a trip to the movies seemed more like a combat skirmish, a living distillation of all the zero-budget sleaze on screen, dropped right into your lap for a buck or two a pop.
Ultimately, the grindhouses fell to Guliani’s Times Square gentrification, and the pursuit of bad movies moved to the calmer waters of living room couches, where you could watch the worst of humanity in relative safety, without the fear of darkness-cloaked pick-pockets or aggressive tranny hookers. I mean, unless you invite them over. But before you get too comfortable, check out Sleazoid Express,which lifts the rock on Times Square and allows you to see all the ugly little secrets that hid beneath it. The book compiles pieces from the original zine as well as newly written articles.
Landis and Clifford take us on a block by block tour of the defunct theaters, detailing the idiosyncrasies and criminal tendencies of each, and then gives us a historical and anecdotal run-through of the movies they showed. Everything from the infamous Ilsa series to Andy Milligan’s numerous forays into Long Island-lensed, penny ante junkfilm is covered, and all the rampant perversity and lowlife dirty tricks involved in their creation and screening are described in Landis’ signature hardboiled prose, making for an authentically harrowing trip back to the “Deuce”. Along the way, he uncovers a few obscurities that only grindhouse vets would readily remember, and in the case of sick fuck slavesploitation flick “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, that’s probably for the best. It’s still great fun to read about, though, and if you have any interest at all in the sordid world of pre-video sleaze- or in the even more sordid world of real-life, Times Square denizen sleaze- than “Sleazoid Express” is a must-read. You’ll want to wash your hands afterwards, but you’ll love how dirty they get along the way.
The Flaming Dragons Of Middle Earth are led by Danny Cruz. He has down syndrome and loves Sun Ra and Black Sabbath. He leads a revolving cast of non-musicains in a weekly Freek-Out that takes place at The Brick House Community Center, 24 3rd street, Turner Falls, Massachusetts, on Thursday nights from 4 to 6 PM. He makes the the most outside, outsider music in America right now.
When Ken's not spreading Demonology far and wide, he's yukking it up with the MAG gang!
Check out the Movies About Girls show!
This week, a short-but-sweet hour-ish long podcast wherein the gang shows up, cracks wise, and then splits.
Also, we revisit that time Jimmy Ether and I flipped out on menthol sticks.
And I talk a little bit about this movie:
You should see it!
Anyway, bite-sized fun!
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Goodbye song by Bobby McClure See you next week!
Listen, I know most Advanced Demonologists my age really did cut their rock n’ roll teeth on all these idiotic spandex bands like Cinderella and Ratt, but that’s only because they grew up in the Midwest or in the suburbs or in fuckin’ Canada, where that sort of malarkey was spoon-fed to the Wild and the Young in heaping helpings of pre-packaged rebellion. And ok, so nobody was getting’ fooled by Quiet Riot, but they sounded just perfect to drunken 16 year olds, so what the hell, why not let Metal Health drive you mad?
Me, I’m from the city. That’s not my fault or yours, man, it’s just the way it is, and even though the football players and drug nerds probably whooped it up to QR and Def Lep at keggers aplenty back then, Teen Demons in my town had options. Looking back, maybe I should have spent a little more time working on getting laid and a little less on hanging around the newsstand dressed like the dude from Fields of the Nephilim, reading English music papers like the NME, Sounds, and Melody Maker and chain-smoking menthols, but hey, at least I knew whoDisco 2000were.
Throwing Crazy Shapes
My primary musical obsession back then was Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction, and his whole high-tech Jesus-biker-savage-freakbeat-sex messiah routine, so I read the papers every week, scanning for the latest Z skinfo, and sniffing out the inevitably coattail riders. Out of Zod’s fertile cartoon Viking-scape sprang a myriad of rock, cock, and shock-a-delic bands, all of ‘em larger than life and driven by thudding machine-beats and sledgehammer guitars. Pop Will Eat Itself dragged the Z-aesthetic straight into the disco inferno, merging hairy-scary rawk with Sigue Sigue Sputnik futuristic bleeps and blips and even primitive whiteboy hip-hop, and for one brief moment (the Box Frenzy LP), they nailed it. Crazyhead dressed just like the Love Reaction, and even ripped ’em off wholesale for their first few singles, before fizzing out on a warmed over biker-billy sound. Goth-pop Weird Girl Danielle Dax dropped her puppy killer routine for one glorious Zod-inspired sleaze metal single, “Cat House”, and Wendy James’s T Rex-riffing glitter-pop band Transvision Vamp were like the Love Reaction’s pink puffball doppelgangers. Gaye Bykers on Acid, as the name would imply, played Z-esque psychedelic, Stooges-fried motor-rock, and the Almighty, hell, you could barely tell the difference between the two bands. But out of all the Tattooed Beat Messiah-bes running amuck in the UK in the late 80’s, the band that stomped on all their neon skulls was Drug Free America, a bunch of barking-mad ex-new wave freaks dressed in ‘Nam chic threads so super-swank, they very nearly out-cooled the Love Reaction’s Nazi-biker leather warrior look. Even better, they sounded the way they looked, like combat shocked maniacs looking to make you dance with machinegun fire. They had dirty, thumping death-disco beats, they had thick, sick Big Black-style bass rumblings, they had dive-bombing sleaze metal guitars, and they had a dude in mirror shades and a camo-covered helmet up-front who sounded like 17 packs of cigarettes, barking out psychotic neo-beat poetry through a crackling megaphone. Ok, so they couldn’t synchronize their stage moves like the Love Reaction and their singer never fucked any Banaramas in the ass in the back of any shiny black limos like Z did, but Drug Free America still knew how to spread their disease all over the place, baby.
Drug Free America rose from the ashes of Vicious Pink Phenomena, a sex-obsessed British new wave duo from the early 80’s. Brian Moss, the synthro-pimp, and Josie Warden, the minidress-sporting crooner, recorded a slew of semi-chart burners like “Fetish” and “Take Me Now”, from 1982 to 1986. Their space-porn disco tracks have been endlessly remixed ever since, and one such hi-fi sci-fi hit, "8:15 to Nowhere”, has been released in no less then ten different versions. I know, you don’t care, but hey, legend has it that Brian Moss beat up Sisters of Mercy front-grump Andrew Eldritch in 1984 for hitting on Warden, so it’s not like he was a total pussy, even if he was making puffball astro-pop at the time.
I feel Like a Truck, It’s Kicking In Good
VPP dissolved in 1986, and a year later, Moss formed Drug free America with gravel-throated vocalist Steve Dixon, who went to art school in the late 70’s with Soft Cell’s Marc Almond, and even formed an (I’m guessing) insufferably precocious synth-punk band with Marc and the equally young n’ arty Fad Gadget. Luckily, there was no trace of ‘art school’ left in him when he teamed up with Moss. Their first single, “No Solid Ground/Throw a Crazy Shape” was released in 1988, on Blind Eye records. Beating Life Sex and Death by at 4 years, they launched a neo-metal glamdirge assault of crazy-angry-guy howls and buzzsaw guitars. “No Solid Ground” was pure adrenaline (“Enough ain’t enough/on the killing floor”), and “Throw a Crazy Shape” was like Jim Thirwell reeling from a vicious sucker punch, dizzy and mean and feral. Machine rock was still in it’s research and development stage in 1988, so nobody knew exactly what Drug Free America was up to, but they knew what they liked. DFA got the royal treatment in all the papers and scuttled up the indie charts.
Later on that year, they dropped their most devastating payload, the “Dayglo Pussycat” 12” single. They (there’s actually 4 dudes on the cover, but I think two of ‘em are just stand-ins) look like sinister napalm addicts from Planet 1975 on the stark, black and white cover. They’re all shades, leather, chain mail, skull rings (and skull belt buckles), bullet belts, beards, and scowls, a buncha dirty motherfuckers that just lost a real nasty-ass war. Total badasses. Inside, A-side “Dayglo Pussycat” sounds like Zodiac’s Prime Mover as mangled by some insane Vegas show band with jungle rot. Flash metal guitars smash headlong into new-wavish synths, a horn section, tribal warfare drums, and Dixon’s skuzzy yelling. “There’s a million hearts/waiting to be broken”, he growls. “Let the tears flow! Let them flow!” A classic of mean-spirited excess, “Dayglo” is pure sleaze set to a broken-necked sex-disco beat.
The flip has two tracks. “Zero” is a cinematic, goth-tinged, evil-cowboy sin-stromental, and “Candy Revisited” mixes spy jazz horns, splattery industro-beats, acidic sleaze riffs, and more of Dixon’s venomous bellow. I’m not sure what it’s about, but it SOUNDS like murder.
In 1989, after two more successful singles, DFA released Attitude 50 Cents, their first full-length, and their last before heading in a completely different direction.
“Attitude” contains most of their hits (although “Day Glo Pussycat” is conspicuously absent) including the devastating “Just Like Daddy’s Gun”, which is pretty much the growl n’ roll equivalent of a belligerent drunk that stumbles over to your table to call you “fuckface” and pour his beer in your lap, right in front of your girl, for 7 minute straight. It’s also got the amazing “Viva Viet Vegas”, a brawling epic of stabbing horns, thumping drums, whirring chopper blades, Satanic-panic vox, and the “Pretty Woman” riff tortured and mutilated beyond repair, as well as the manic robo-sleaze madness of “(Talkin’ bout)Your Brand New Auto-mouth”, and an unsettling orchestral third act that will have you convinced that you are about to meet you maker, and he is none too fuckin’ pleased to see you. It’s some fucked-up record, Jack.
Nostalgic for the Future
Understandably, Drug Free America didn’t catch on with Drug Addled America AT ALL, even with the hardcore Foetus-heads. DFA’s vision of barbed-wire sleaze didn’t exactly mesh with the Crue’s hookers and blow aesthetic, ya know? In those waning days of Flash Metal Supremacy, bands were getting increasingly literal and obvious– also-rans like biker glam meatheads Little Caesar and tepid, half-Japanese sleazesters Cats in Boots were beating the formula into the ground, sopping up the last 30 seconds or so of hairmetal’s 15 minutes before it all dried up completely. Bands like Drug Free America and other like-minded Brit beat-aholics – World Domination Enterprises, Meat Beat Manifesto, Renegade Soundwave, Slab – were offering a tantalizing new road for flash metal to travel down, opening up a mind-bending new vista of sexy, sleazy sounds. However, besides Zodiac Mindwarp’s disastrous attempt at Flashbeat Metal, “Hoodlum Thunder”, and White Zombie’s much more successful reinvention as superdisco mecha-metalbeasts with 1992’s “La Sexocisto”, nobody bit. So we got grunge and fuckin’ Candlebox instead. Lucky us.
Although they continued to do well in England, shortly after “Attitude”, DFA called it quits for 3 years, eventually remerging in 1992 with a new album, “Trip”, a complete and utter Flash Metal Suicide that dropped the ‘Nam-metal freakshow for a straight-ahead electro-dance sound. In 1994, Dixon left, and was replaced by Hayley Windsor, a Bjork-alike in PJ Harvey skin. She sang on DFA’s next two albums, and continues to perform with Moss in the bass-driven electronica outfit Mirazma. How the machine gun turrets and flame throwers and corrosive drug riffs and slimy screams gave way bubbling synths and the frothy chirp of Windsor is anyone’s guess, but suffice to say, despite lyrics like “Sliding down a rope to hell, he feels a little higher, arm your RPG, take aim and fire” (from Mirazma's “To Give Death”), Moss doesn’t look like he’s gonna strap on his bullet belt and head hell-bound for Viet Vegas again anytime soon. But hey, at least we had 1989, right?
- Ken (former 80's Teenage Sleazegrinder turned grizzled Demonologist)
Drugs Dragons Are a Wisconsin drug gang. Not a drug dealing gang, but a drug TAKING gang. They exist ya know. Back in Jersey I hung around the outer circle of a drug taking gang called G.S.B.B (it stood for garden state something or other???) I never joined anything man so I don’t really know what it’s like to be in a gang, But it always looked really cool. You get to do whatever the fuck you want. Your in a gang!
If this gang shows up at your party they trash the place. You get pissed off, but you can’t do shit about it motherfucker. Anyone playing pussy indie-rock get’s fucked. After a while you drink some beers and snort some speed, smoke some weed, get on the D.D.’s level, ask to be a charter. Fuck you! It’s Anarchy for the living room. Now your mom’s house is fuckin’ destroyed and the bass player is upstairs with your sister. It’ll be no more movies for a week or two, no more running around with the usual crew.
Somebody told me Wisconsin was like the New Jersey of the Midwest. They said that all the other states around it hate the place for no reason and everybody from there has got balls and personality. Is it true?
Reminds me of the wrestler the missing link.
Reminds me of Satan’s Sadists.
This is the follow up to the ultra fantastic Self Titled Lp, it’s just as good.
Survival Research Laboratories: Ten Years of Robotic Mayhem
Directed by Jon Reiss Music Video Distributors
“It’s about creating more problems than you solve.” – SRL director Mark Pauline
The act of creating knife-wielding, saw-toothed, flesh-metal hybrid monsters that scream and eat each other and spit shards of glass into the faces of panicked onlookers is as complex as it is demented, no doubt about it. Many times as a young, angry Demonologist , I attempted building some sort of robot assassin to wipe some schoolyard bully fucker or another out, but as I can barely operate a telephone, I never got very far. That kinda stuff takes more than blind rage, it takes research, and development, and money, and skills, and talent. However, the idea behind Survival Research Laboratories – the un-wholesome collective of Gen-X terror tinkerers that conceived, constructed, and executed the performances, and performers, that make comprise this collection- is a remarkably simple one. You remember the cover of Big Black’s “Atomizer” album? A missile pointed at the Earth and a match. LET’S GO. That’s it, pretty much. Let’s get real, real gone, baby.
Formed in the late 70’s in San Fran (where else) by fledgling libertine Mark Pauline, SRL was an outlaw chop-shop that would beg, borrow, and steal (mostly steal) spare parts from broken machines and suture them together, add motors and whirligigs and steam engines and shock cannons, cover ‘em in animal hides and bones and rotting meat, and let ‘em loose in parking lots, too see what would happen. They combined performance art, actual research and development, industrial noise, robotics, pure, skull-fuck madness, and aesthetic (and literal, really) terrorism in one on-the-edge package, quite perfect for the nihilistic, apocalypse-minded, death trip nation that was America in the 80’s.
Pauline lost a finger or two to his creations along the way, but the amazing death-metal tableaus that he created were astonishing works of art. Luckily, he had the where-with-all and media savvy (despite his supposed disdain for conventional media) to have all of his perfs recorded on video and/or film for posterity. Throughout the 80’s and early 90’s, these nightmarish films were available via mailorder from the back of Film Threat magazine or stocked at hipster cult video stores, but they were never easy to find, which was certainly part of their appeal. It was outlaw art for outlaws, dig?
Ah, but those were simpler times. Virtually all of SRL’s ol' videos are collected in this bitchin’ collection, digitally remastered for yr viewin’ displeasure. But besides the nostalgic punk and death-trippers among us that’ll surely snatch this up for remember-when viewing, what does SRL offer to the new generation of thrill seekers? Does the sight of a shockwave cannon killing a yogurt-filled cow carcass on wheels have the same kinda of relevance in 2004 as it did in 1988?
Well, no, not really. In 2012, we've got too many real problems is to buy into Pauline’s robot-revolution. S’funny, back when these perfs and documentaries were shot, he really did make a lot of sense. Like at the Amsterdam performance, for example, where he talked about the need to add a predatory factor into a society to provoke it into action. There is certainly truth to that statement, and he proved it by shooting fireballs at the crowd until they finally had the sense to head for the fuckin’ hills. The problem is, in these desperate days, we have way too many predators now. But in 1988, even fingerless goofs from Frisco could be King Daddy Bad Asses.
But hey, even if the world doesn’t need Pauline’s suicidal gutbucket machines to straighten it out, that doesn’t mean it’s not a blast watchin’ the rusty beasts go to war. Best of the bunch here has gotta be “The Pleasures of Uninhibited Excess”, a documentary of SRL’s show at an SF art gallery in the late 80’s. Giant balls smash into each other and spew gunk. The shockwave cannon blasts people senseless. “The Finger”, a snake-like robot, flails around the room, lookin’ for victims. Outside, sirens wail. There’s cops and smoke and fire engines everywhere.
Interviewer: Did you see the performance? Aging chick with 80’s haircut: "No, I’m a composer, my ears are precious to me. Plus, I just saw some guy walk out with his nose bleeding." Guy that got blasted with cannon: "They just kept shooting it at me, I tried to get away, but they kept shooting me. The shockwave blasted the mask right off of my face." Mark Pauline: "I don’t think anybody should trust us. I don’t think anybody should trust ANYBODY." Bald guy on the street: "...to combine art with a life threatening experience is like a new high!"
There’s plenty more magic and madness here. People have been attempting to describe these crazy machines for 20 years now, but you really have to see them for yourself. SRLare still in operation, still creating monsters, and still perverting the norm, but this is a great place to start from, if you’re new to this stuff. Forget all those dumb robot battle TV shows, SRL is the real thing, and believe me, these cats are DESPERATELY FUCKED UP. Which is just how you like ‘em, right?
Dolly. No one can match her propensity for heart-rending misery. She is country's reigning queen of the damned. If Daddy Come Get Me and Jolene aren't Total Fucking Doom, then nothing is.
