What is a Woman? Kitty, bunny, sunny? Titian’s Magdalene or Caravaggio’s Medusa? Are the Venus of Willendorf and the Venus of Milo namesakes or the same person? Klara Zetkin – street or Communist? The antique sculptor admires every curve, the Puritan prefers a Woman fried. In Alice in Wonderland, the Lion and the Unicorn explicitly state that the Girl (young Woman) is a mythological creature and generally a fabulous monster. Indeed, the unfortunate Heinrich Kramer was so horrified by the Woman that, out of fright, he unleashed a whole “Hammer of Witches.” At the same time, Pushkin, Byron and all other poets have completely opposite views. The woman Tove Jansson gave little people (children) a lot of wonderful stories, while the Woman Agatha Christie killed at least one adult in each of her stories, without feeling a single drop of sympathy or remorse. On commercial radio stations, Women (probably not real ones) scream, moan and whine, harassing the listener that your Heinrich Kramer, at the same time, on good smart sites like ours, all women’s voices are extraordinarily beautiful. With so much contradictory information in hand, let’s try to figure out who a Woman is and what her role is in rock and roll, the most important of the arts.
Poison Ivy
Poison Ivy Rorschach was born under the pseudonym Kristy Wallace in San Bernardino, California. Her family often moved, so friends and cockroaches did not have time to get started, the girl entertained herself: she blew up Barbie dolls with firecrackers, dressed up a cat in their dresses and ran along the walls to the alien doo-wop “Martian Hop” by The Ran-Dells. When the dolls and cats were over, the older brother showed how to play the surf song “Pipeline”, having come up with a lifelong occupation for his sister. Ivy finally decided on her path at a concert by Bo Diddley, next to whom the Duchess, a rhythm guitarist in a golden outfit, was on stage.
Poison Ivy met her future husband and accomplice at the University of Sacramento, where they both chose the subject of art and shamanism. They brought both with them to New York, where her chosen one took the name Lux Interior after noticing the phrase in an automobile advertisement. By 1976, the couple, having found a second guitarist and drummer, went to rattle in the hotbed of marginal music – the CBGB club. Calling themselves The Cramps, Lux and Ivy vividly invented their own style of cycobilly, a witch’s brew of wild varieties of rockabilly, garage rock and mystical surf. Vocalist Lux took on the role of butler Larch from The Addams Family, who stood on stilettos on a slippery slope of sexual perversions. Despite the instability of the line-up and the short-sightedness of the labels, the band has gained a cult status. It was Poison Ivy who created the characteristic sound of The Cramps with guitar passages in the spirit of Link Ray, was the producer, co-author of all the original songs and a true Queen of cycobilly. Unfortunately, her voice can only be heard on two tracks on the album “A Date With Elvis”: “Kizmiaz” and “Get Off The Road”, but the influence on the genre can hardly be overestimated.
Wendy O. Williams
Wendy Orleans Williams was a quiet and diligent schoolgirl who played clarinet in the school orchestra, but suddenly dropped out of school at the age of 16 and left home. Selling donuts, lace panties, and rescuing drowning people on the Florida coast, Wendy saved up some money for a trip to Europe. There, she picked up the ideas of Zen Buddhism and macrobiotics, mastered dancing for uncles much better, but shoplifting and the sale of counterfeit bills did not go at all. Nostalgia and, perhaps, some problems with the law brought the prodigal Orleans back to New York, where a magazine with a good advertisement inside lay badly on a bench at the bus station. Responding to the ad, Wendy found herself at the casting of Captain Kink’s Theater, directed by Yale graduate Rod Swanson. The Theater staged provocative sex shows, and Swanson quickly saw the potential of Ms. Williams. Together they came up with the idea to assemble a rock band in order to shock the audience even more.
Wendy and guitarist Richie Stotts shaved their mohawks on their heads, imitating Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and in 1978 they went to the notorious CBGB, where The Cramps had announced themselves two years earlier. The club scene turned out to be too small for playing with chainsaws and shotguns, not to mention the fact that it takes a lot of space to blow up a car, so soon Plasmatics was known all over the States, and Wendy was noticed by Lemmy Kilmister, Gene Simmons and internal organs. At concerts, Wendy went out dressed in shaving foam, screamed in a brutal voice and imitated masturbation, for which she was repeatedly placed in jail, jail cells and monkey houses. It’s enough to listen to such apocalyptic howls as “The Damned” or “Black Leather Monster” to understand what kind of boys the boys from the Sex Pistols looked like against the background of this hardcore fighting porn star.
Marianne Faithfull
Marianne Faithfull, on her mother’s side, belonged to the Austrian aristocratic family of Sacher-Masoch, whose difficult fate great-great-grandfather Leopold once made famous with the book “Venus in Furs.” After studying at a Catholic school and recovering from tuberculosis, a fragile girl with the face of an angel in 1964 accidentally got into a party of The Rolling Stones. Producer Andrew Meadow Oldham immediately decided to make her a star and Mick Jagger a lover. It turned out to be both: “As Tears Go By” written by Jagger and Richards instantly became a hit, and in Mick’s bed, besides Mick, there were indispensable attributes of the era – herbs, pills and powders.
Having hit her stride, Marianne began playing Chekhov in the theater, acting in films with Alain Delon, recording all sorts of records, not forgetting to accept the “attributes of the era.” Tours, preparations, performances, preparations, Mic, preparations, preparations, filming, preparations, take Marianne away. Acute laryngitis, withdrawal symptoms, nervous exhaustion – such a combination would stop a horse at a gallop, it knocked Faithfull out of the saddle for ten years. In 1976, she returned with the album “Dreamin’ My Dreams”, where she unexpectedly sang country music. There was no trace of the heavenly bird, now her vibrato sounded low, like Eurydice returning from Hades, playing with shades of otherworldly wisdom and forgiveness, which sent herds of goosebumps through the listener. Angelo Badalamenti, Tom Waits, Nick Cave and many others were honored to work with such a voice. Marianne Faithfull’s farewell opus was “She Walks In Beauty”, where, to the accompaniment of violinist Warren Ellis, she read favorite poems by English romantics Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth.
From the above three brief examples, the conclusion follows: A woman has had and continues to have a powerful influence on rock and roll. As an Artist, as an Idol, as an Inspiration. The rest of the Woman remains terra incognita, which we will explore in new articles and in the surrounding reality, and possibly beyond. Let’s protect and admire this mysterious unique creature.
