Suckdog: Drugs are Nice

self-released, 1990,

A slumber party for delinquent teenage girls (and a guy) who never had a slumber party. Their imaginary brothers are in the basement playing punk rock and the girls invade for a song or two to sing about dragons and beasties. They then go to the kitchen to suck on sugarcubes and bother Mom. Later, it's up to the bedroom to do those annoying things teenage girls do (scream, blather, scream, talk about boys, play with tape machines). The night ends in the proverbial attic contemplating love and death and listening to a music box as the New Hampshire winter snow falls. It's horrifying, it's retch-inducing, it's sad and makes for a great listen every few years.

Lisa Suckdog, ingenue, waif, then-pseudo-slut, performance-artist-as- Horatio-Alger- story, future sex authoress and companion of dangerous men corrals her New Hampshire freak family together and somehow produces a critically aclaimed vinyl release. Well, a few critics liked it (they've all since gone through detox and sell flowers on the street corner, though). Included in the line-up are members of GG Allin backup-band wanna-bes Insanicide. Think of this as sort of a King of Comedy with Lisa as Rupert Pupkin and Jim Hildreth as Sandra Bernhard (and GG Allin as Jerry Lewis, although he doesn't make an appearance, alas).

By the way, you can pretty much get the same experience of a good deal of this album, though, by going to Youtube.com and typing in pajama party, sleepover or farts (not that I've every done anything like that - ed.). Or you might, GG forbid, have a teenage daughter and have experienced it for yourself. Even so, this record and most of Lisa's life has been a kick in the teeth to the establishment. So, cheers.

Not much here really lends itself to iPodization - it's an album to hear all the way through and then go curl up in a corner and die. But the opening track ("Your Dragon") sounds like what might have happened had Julia Cafritz had the balls to strangle Jon Spencer and take over Pussy Galore and the closing track, "Brontes in the Attic", an early precursor to all those music box sounds that proliferate in music these days, makes the cut for me. Even before I had read Lisa's book. Ms Carver, who has since become an accomplished essayist and writer, described the making of this song in her recommended book, Drugs Are Nice (A Post Punk Memoir) as a soundtrack to a disintegrating adolescent love affair:



Songs:
"Your Dragon"
"Brontes in the Attic"

Links:

• Here's a link to Lisa's book Drugs are Nice in case you care to buy it. You should. You would understand so much more. And as the queen of branding, Lisa also has a DVD entitled, you guessed it, Drugs Are Nice: A Suckumentary. My friend Gordon Gordon (Teen Fag publisher) says it's "pretty good."
  
• Lisa has succumbed to myspace.com fever to promote her book and documents her recent, and as per usual, storied "book tour" in her blog (she has run afoul of Satanists it would appear). There's a stream of one of her recent very punk rock recordings.
• Lisa's Rollerderby site and her Suckdog site, where you can buy this album in CD format for $5.
• Lisa is currently a hot commodity in da blogs. Number 1 Song has a typically confusing interview with her and Davy from Large Hearted Boy has her write about her book for his Book Notes feat.
  

Saved Round:

When asked about the similarities of the album cover for Drugs Are Nice to Roxy Music's Country Life, she wrote: I believe the same elements that caused them originally to pose or be posed like that caused similar posing in us.









Backcover - liner notes