PLASMATICS AND WENDY O. WILLIAMS


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Death of a rock star:
the suicide of Wendy O. Williams

Within days of the death of Frank Sinatra, record stores worldwide were full of Sinatra merchandise. The industry had been waiting for such an event: longstanding ill-health had given the men in suits ample opportunity to design the artwork and get everything ready for the word go. Or, to be more precise, the word goodbye. For, as in the case of so many deceased singers and musicians, death gives a massive boost to an artist with limited contemporary appeal.

The death of Wendy Orlean Williams falls neither into the category of Sinatra, nor that of the younger casualties such as Kurt Cobain. Aged 48, her death was untimely yet, having retired from the music business ten years before, there is no sense of incompletion or of her career not having come to "full term" - Williams' work can be judged as a complete entity, neither dragged out into old age, nor cut short.

The Plasmatics' music and live act has been misconstrued a lot - in the actual music, and in its lyrics, themes and sentiments. Thus, the band laid the foundations for a music scene which would later serve as a vent for the hedonism of the disaffected, disenfranchised youth of the late 1980s. Yet all too often, people have tended to equate punk music with 'inability to play', for the Plasmatics' music can best be defined as thrash-punk - though it is and symbolises many other things besides. 'Coup d'Etat', the band's last recorded album (apart from the Maggots WOW/Plasmatics reunion album of 1987) showed a slightly more mature rock edge than their previous work, but the Plasamtics' punk ethic was never lost. Yet the stereotypical punk comparison does not hold - true, in the last few years there has been a proliferation of punk nouveau (most notably the early '90s grunge scene) influenced by the archetypal stroppy cartoon image brought to mind by the Adverts' "Gary Gilmore's Eyes", anything by the Ramones... but witness the lyrics, chord sequences and Richie Stotts et al's lead playing on many of the tracks...

Williams' solo work also shows a more melodic side, especially on tracks such as 'Opus in Cm7' and 'Legends Never Die'. Critics claim that these tracks are a 'non sequitur' on the otherwise decidedly 'don't fuck with me' W.O.W. album, yet it is here that Rod Swenson's musical sensibilites and Wendy's vocal talents combine to best effect.

Though the Plasmatics' songs are not best known for subtlety, the theme of Maggots is unclear. Drawing together many of the themes expressed in the rest of the Plasmatics' work, at one level it seems to relate to AIDS, and the sleeve liner includes a message to practise safe sex. It can be seen, in may ways, as a continuation of 'Just Like On TV' from Coup d'Etat: the ultimate horror story scenario... the end of Maggots no doubt symbolises the end of civilisation (many of Wendy's songs deal with this). "As she looks down the ten flights to the street below, [Cindy] sees a scene of chaos and pandemonium. Feeding on the people with uncontrollable lust are giant maggots... the sun is setting in the sky. It will be night time soon." Now, one cannot know whether Wendy had AIDS in mind, but many references throughout the album suggest it. Though it is, of course, always possible to see a posthumous significance or relevance in music, especially in the lyrics: see Hole's 1994 album "Live Through This".

The Maggots album, and several of the Plasmatics' other songs, can be seen as a condemnation of contemporary Amerian middle-class values. From the beginninng of Maggots, the atttitude is obvious: "We are in a middle class apartment in a middle class apartment building. The decor is shopping mall modern. The White family are sitting around a shiny formaica kitchen table eating dinner..." Fast Food Service and 12 Noon are also an expression of this.

The majority of the music press's reaction to Wendy's suicide has been to concentrate on certain 'stereotypical rock star' aspects of the band's career and live shows - aspects which should almost certainly be taken as, at least partly, tongue in cheek on the Plasmatics' part. (Their act "...featured chainsawing guitars and smashing televisions - as their popularity increased, the budget stretched to blowing up Chevrolets..." according to the NME, the week after reports came of Wendy's death.) The band's destructive nature onstage has been much misinterpreted - their gestures can be variously interpreted as materialistic or anti-... in many ways the Plasmatics, and Wendy, were the antithesis of the 1980s mindless materialism, especially that in the music business.

One of Wendy's recurring themes is 'the rock star', what it is to be one, the trappings of rock stardom and her portrayal of the nature of our here worship is pretty accurate: in Opus in Cm7 she asks "Why do our heroes all vanish? Why are our heroes all dead?" Legends Never Die is a paean to the characteristics of fame generally; having "been to hell and back" (It's My Life) Wendy was in a position to be able to talk about it. (It makes one wonder why, if Wendy was so against stardom, she became famous in the first place. It would seem that the Plasmatics' success happened almost by accident...) Pig Is A Pig is an exploration of human cowardice in the context of fame, and is "dedicated to a special kind of person - the kind of person who's hiding... behind a guise of repectability..." This desire for the authenticity, for the "real thing" was, in the end, one of the contributing factors in Wendy's despondency: she could not bear the "hypocrisies of life" (as she called them) and her suicide note spoke of "a place where there is no self, only calm".