IS No MAGGoT PRoBLEM!!! (And Col.

North didn't give money to the contras, and Ronald Reagan isn't lying and the Mets didn't win the '86 World Series. . . )

IJ I I

BY

FNil[

II|UECE

ake it from Wendy O. Williams, the

high priestess of heavy metal: THERE

Wendy O. Williams is back and she's

brought the Plasmatics with her. With Mog-

gots: The Record, they've redefined "incesticide." Now it's death by maggots. The album is part "lnner Sanctum" (an

old-time radio horror show, back in the

days before Stephen King) and part "Satur-

day Night Live" (an old-time TV comedy show, back in the days before the current nowhere version). Interspersed with Wendy's jagged benzedrine metal homiliesquaint tunes with titles like "Brain Dead", "You're a Zombie" and "The Day of the Humans is Gone"-is a Rod Serling-like
narrator who tells strange and horrible tales of beautiful bra-less girls who get eaten alive by "knockwurst-sized maggots." No one survives either the tale or the songs. "The Plasmatics have always been at their best not giving a f "k. People think

BOB LEAFE

overwhelming figure, she is the soul of amiability. No less so than Tina Turner, Wendy O. is a survivor. She grew up in a rural part of upstate New York, she says, doing such typically
1950s-type things, like performing on "The

Howdy Doody Show" when she was six, scholarship to the prestigious Eastman School of Music. Despite all that, "l didn't feel like I fit in," she says of hometown life. "l was thrown out."
and such not-so-typical things as earning a

Unleashed); a stunt feature in Playboy, and an album, Kommander of Kaos

(Gigasaurus/Jem). And she still fits pretty

Not that she's doing badly. Wendy commands a hardcore following and last year alone saw a co-starring movie role (Reform School Girls); a long-form concert video (Embassy's Wendy O. Williams: Terror

they gotta make a record with 12 songs which gotta be so long or so short. This is
the first thrash opera or whatever," Wendy

well into her self-designed leather bra, "made especially for me by my friend Sharon, who runs a shop in Greenwich
Village called The Scarlet Leather." Trimly muscular, and finished (she says)

laughs. "We did it just for the fun of it."

And why maggots? "ln my travels," answers worldly Wendy, "l've found maggots seem to be what people hate most." And what do maggots hate most?

with cigarettes, drugs and booze,

the

3S-year-old Wendy looks as if she'll keep on rocking forever-and with none of this commercial crap, either. Too few rock'n'-

roll outlaws are left in this

says

greed-mad

"Maggots hate spaghetti," she

knowledgeably.

The record postulates a hideous future where a worldwide warming trend called the "greenhouse effect" has led to a world infested with mutant maggots. According
to Wendy, "The science is basically correct. The greenhouse bff.ect is happening. The polar icecaps are melting because we're

At 16, then, she made her way around the world: Colorado, Fort Lauderdale, Europe, a couple of weeks in the Himalayas, then finally New York City. There she appeared as a dominatrix in a Times Square sex show, and met her current manager / mentor / video director, Rod Swenson. With him, in 1978, she formed the legendary shock-rock (and, frankly, schlock-rock) band, The Plasmatics. The Plasmatics' many adventures and misadventures have been recounted else-, where and thoroughly. Suffice to say that neither perplexed record companies, brutal

world, and Wendy Williams may be the last vanguard of a music our parents are supposed to hate. "lt's easy to go with the flow, easy to go with the formula," Wendy figures. "Flow is

what everybody else is doing, what the

status quo calls for. That's the easy way, to just do it." If that means putting up with petty indignities and not being a main-

burning so much fossil fuel and tearing down so many forests and juqgles that there's too much carbon dioxide in the air

and the world is getting warmer warmer."'(Or in this case, warmer

wormier.)

and and

stream, commercial "superstar"-h"U, that's fine with her: Aspiring to what's "conventional" and "normal" is what's made us a country of Wall Street thieves
and corporate rock. "Fashion is something you follow, and style is something you create. There're so many different kinds of music-everybody does not have to have the same taste. I don't sing like anybody else. The way I sing

For all her ferocity on record and on stage, Wendy Orlean Williams actually isn't six feet tall. Five-seven, maybe. In the weight-room of her downtown Manhattan loft, dressed in running shoes, gym shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt that does little to hide either her countless tattoos or her
FACES 52

middle-American cops nor the band's eventual breakup slowed Wendy down. "Look," she says, "even today I've got
times when the phone or the electric company wants to cut me off. I don't care," she

declares and

you know-you know-

is fun, and if
it,"
sh'1."

somebody doesn't like says Wendy, sweetly smiling, "tough

she's telling the truth.

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