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By Root 541 0

is all rock ‘n’ roll's ever been about from day one. (I mean, not being able to play is never enough.) You should hear the drum riff after the first verse and chorus of the title cut—sounding like a peg-leg stumbling through a field of bald Uniroyals, it cuts Dave Tough cold and these girls aren’t even junkies (of course)! They just whang and blang away while singing in harmonies reminiscent of three Singing Nuns who’ve been sniffing lighter fluid and their voices are just so copacetic together (being sisters, after all) you’d almost think they were Siamese triplets. Guitar style: sorta like 14 pocket combs being run through a moose's dorsal, but very gently. Yet it rocks. Does it ever. Plus having one of the greatest album covers in history, best since Blank Generation. God Bless the Shaggs. Now if they will only emerge from (semi?) retirement (?) no one ever will have cause again to say “Rock ‘n’ roll is dead, man….” Up an’ at ‘em, Valerie.

The Village Voice, January 28, 1981

Dead Boys

Almost Count Five

You could make a case that the Dead Boys are just a little Sex Pistols for the CBGB congregation to dream on till Rotten & Co.hit these shores; lead singer Stiv Bators flays his flesh a la Iggy and manages regularly to wrench his face into a sniggeringly Rotten grimace; lead guitarist Cheetah Chrome is at least as thuggish as Vicious; and the group's relationship with their audience is love-hate at best— the last two shows I saw were interrupted when beer bottles were flung at the stage (Cheetah claims it's the same guy every time). The group has more or less bragged in interviews that violence seems to follow them around, and a source as reliable as Sire Records’ bio relates harrowing tales of Bators's self-inflicted cuts, bruises, and scratches, and Jimmy Zero's fan-inflicted cigarette burns.

I suppose you’re going to tell me that this obligatory punk glorying in self-mutilation and sadomasochism is revolting and gets more so all the time. When Iggy cut himself, after all, he did it because he was truly insane; with groups like the Dead Boys and the Viletones it's more offensive than terrifying. It's so transparent that they’re gouging themselves not because of some dark inner compulsion but for the simple reason that, like every male jerk in any fledgling band circa 1973 who smeared makeup all over his face, they think it’ll make them stars.

Yet in spite of all this patent jive I not only find the Dead Boys inoffensive, I like them. Look, you may think I’m sicker than they’re pretending to be, but it really doesn’t hurt very much to administer those little surface cuts, besides which they’re gonna get the shit kicked out of them when they go to England so they’re bound to really suffer for their art sooner or later. Not that they should suffer for their art, or pay any other kind of dues for that matter; not paying them is what American punk rock has always been about. Jimmy Zero told me he always thought they were a comedy act, and Young Loud and Snotty, their first album, is classic trashy American garage rock which you ought to take about as seriously as it takes itself. People tend to forget that groups like Count Five were able to laugh at themselves in the middle of mid-Sixties marijuana longhair politics. The Dead Boys’ dopey cultivated hostility doesn’t bother me any more than the fact that their album is a fucking demo, or that they were barred from the final mixing sessions by producer Genya “Hot Pants” Ravan. They’re a hell of a lot closer to the swill I grew up on (Shadows of Knight, Standells, Chocolate Watch-band) than all those crappy English bands imitating the Ramones.

There are those who will argue that the Dead Boys’ original material is sexist. What a brilliant deduction. But, as the Spokesmen spake in “Dawn of Correction,” “You missed all the good in your evaluation.” The good is that like most punk bands, the Dead Boys are probably too drunk to get it up anyway, are scared shitless of real s&m, and in general conceive of sex not as a matter of male supremacy but as a dirty little business.