Rock Stars: Long May They Rule!

Wendy O Williams: WOW!

By Matthew Ostrowski

Wendy O. Williams, the former sex-show performer who more than achieved her 15 minutes of fame as lead singer of the Plasmatics, shot herself to death in the woods near Storrs, Connecticut. She was 48.

The Plasmatics was an invention of Williams' Svengali, the pornographer-turned-record producer Rod Swenson. The band was active from 1978 until 1983. The band became notorious for smashing televisions with sledgehammers and chainsawing guitars on stage. As their popularity grew they moved on to bigger game - Cadillacs and lighting trusses. Wendy herself achieved renown for performing in little more than a g-string and electrical tape, leading to prosecution and banning in some places, while also making People Magazine's Best Dressed list and the cover of Vegetarian Times. After their first two records, New Hope for the Wretched and Beyond the Valley of 1984, the punk scene had calmed down too much, and they started pushing the heavy metal market. Metalheads being essentially conservative types and afraid of women, the Plasmatics found themselves a band without an audience, and after a couple of diffident solo outings, Wendy retired from music in 1987, working in natural food co-ops and animal shelters until her death.

Although undoubtedly a cynically-created band designed to exploit the punk-kid-wanker market, the Plasmatics were so crazy that they had a lot of influence almost despite themselves. They brought the speed-metal aesthetic of bands like Motörhead to the punk scene, and without doubt there are many speed-metal and hardcore musicians with copies of old Plasmatics singles with their spines turned backwards in their record collections.

Ironically, Williams killed herself one day after Tammy Wynette's death. Williams recorded Wynette's "Stand By Your Man" with Motörhead's Lemmy Kilmister. And Wendy herself walked a strange line between feminist icon and exploited dominatrix-bimbo, humping microphones on stage one day and promoting vegetarianism and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals the next. The Plasmatics took rock theatrics to a new level of excess while eschewing the slickness of the heavy metal scene. Williams was one of the truly scary women in rock, and paved the way for bands like Silverfish and Tribe 8, although sadly, credit is not given where it is due in rock's puritanical culture.

There Goes the Reunion Tour

Rob Pilatus, Superstar. It rolls around on the tongue like a vintage draught of Kool Aid. The man, who was half of the lip-syncing duo Milli Vanilli, died by his own hand, and he was years past his brief period of efflorescence.

It was in 1988 that Pilatus and Fab Morvan rocketed to fame as a videogenic, mega-coiffed, suavely-dancing duo. Their songs "Girl You Know It's True" and "Blame It on the Rain" topped international charts and the pair copped a Grammy in 1990. But they were poseurs - they looked great but studio singers were the real recorded voices. The good times didn't last. Besotted by fame, Rob and Fab insisted that they do their own singing on subsequent records. German producer Frankie Farian, who invented Milli Vanilli, refused and instead made the deception public.

In the ensuing furor the duo's Grammy was stripped, and the pair entered downward spirals. They lamely attempted to record with their actual voices. The result bombed.

Pilatus made a desultory if spectacular suicide try, attempting to jump through a window, entered various rehabs, found himself in frequent trouble with the police for minor crimes and assaults. "The hardest thing to take was kids in a school bus sticking out their tongues at me," he once said.

He was discovered dead of a drug overdose in a hotel room. Still unanswered was the greatest question of all: which one was he, Milli, or Vanilli?

Hide Matsumoto

The world of Japanese rock 'n roll is terra incognita to most westerners. So it comes as something of a surprise to find Japan's rockers and their fans at least as self-destructive and idiotic as their western counterparts. Hide Matsumoto was the lead guitarist for the group X Japan, which thrived on the attention of adolescent girls. Matsumoto was noted for his outrageous hair and admittedly unconventional lifestyle. "There are a lot of times where I'm fighting this planet," he told an interviewer earlier this year.

Hide was apparently depressed by the breakup of X Japan, and his self-destructive streak was known to surface when he drank. He hung himself in an elaborate way with a towel in a hotel room. His death ironically reunited X Japan.

At least one teenage fan killed herself in a copycat suicide. Another, in Korea, jumped out a window, wearing a bright orange shirt with the name "Hide" scrawled across the back. More than 25,000 fans turned up for his funeral. The line at his grave stretched for over a mile.

Eddie Rabbit At Rest

Such is the pressure to sell new records that each million-selling country singer is said to be “original” and “breaking the mold” when we know they are all mining the same tired vein of “She left me just one bottle that I’m downing, now that I wrecked the four by four.” Eddie Rabbitt was a member of this club. He is best remembered by non-country fans (paganophobes?) for his crossover hit “I Love a Rainy Night,” which hit number one in 1980. Other big hits included “Kentucky Rain,” which the corpulent Elvis made into a minor hit in 1970 (Eddie’s big break!), “Drivin’ My Life Away,” “You Don’t Love Me Any More,” “I Just Want To Love You,” “Suspicions,” “Two Dollars in the Jukebox,” and … absolutely nothing that would make anybody think that ol’ Eddie ever read a book or even watched TV in his life. Despite this seemingly insularity, (actually, he grew up in cosmopolitan New Jersey) he served as a judge for the Miss USA pageant last year, and even committed a fair amount of philanthropy. Eddie Rabbitt was not one of those who deserve to be cut down before their three-score and ten, even if “I Love a Rainy Night” is the sort of drool that endlessly repeats itself in the back of one’s head, forcing one … to drink that last bottle and drive recklessly in the four by four.

Springsteen, Per

Bruce Springsteen’s dad Douglas was an important presence in many of the Boss’s songs – whenever Bruce was going on about rebellion or the plight of factory workers, his dad was there, bitterly trapped in a lousy job. In Independence Day, Springsteen sang, “There was just no way this house could hold the two of us/I guess that we were just too much of the same kind.” The songwriter and his father achieved a rapprochement in recent years.