Amphetamine Reptile Cheesecake

For today’s little tidbit I’ve plumped for the morally upstanding, shrinking violets and wall flowers that are Nashville Pussy and their fist-in-your-face debut LP Let Them Eat Pussy from 1998.   I guarantee there will never be books written about this LP, no 40th anniversary documentary about the making of Let Them Eat Pussy, Christ I’d be very disappointed if they could remember a thing about it.

Now let’s get things straight here, this is a band whose sole reasons for existence are noise, sex, sleaze, acting real mean and the fact that their name has a bit of a rude word in it.  In case you don’t know, the music they play is an arse-rattling collision between Motörhead and any number of various US punk ogres like Fang, or The Dicks, or MDC; latterly flavoured with a pinch of southern rock.   Once described by a proper music journo I read as, ‘two guys you wouldn’t want to fuck with and two girls you, err…’ , I love Nashville Pussy unreservedly for their mix of beefcake and cheesecake.  This is joyous noise.  I mean come on! Their original bassist (on the left) was a 6’2″ former model who liked to blow fire on stage, Ruyter Suys* is both gorgeous and a scary shit-hot punk metal guitarist; what’s not to love here for any 41-year-old balding family man? If this band did not exist I’d have had to invent them.

Like much that is good in my life I stumbled across Nashville Pussy in Chuck Klosterman’s excellent book Fargo Rock City and not having much cash to risk on an import copy of something I wasn’t sure of the merits of, illegally downloaded bits of Let Them Eat Pussy and other of their tunes.  Now my finances are a bit more stable this is not something I do anymore at all and I do understand all the arguments about how file-sharing rips off artists at the expense of new art, not that I totally buy this argument at face value.  In a spirit of total dubious moral convenience, I used to operate a two-tier moral system here, backed up by the fact that as a nutjob collector if I really liked something I’d buy it on vinyl just as soon as I could – I’d download from big bands only – okay so this then got me into various grey areas, what constitutes ‘big’?^ why aren’t big bands entitled to the fruits of their labours? who the hell are you to justify your theft like this anyway hiding behind a pseudonym like some kind of blackmailer? you looking at me? yeah, you, you heard me – wanna make something of it? outside?

Long story short, I loved Nashville Pussy and so bought all their stuff anyway.

Let Them Eat Pussy opens with the low blow that is ‘Snake Eyes’, a full-throttle ode to the joys of being a hard-living (or should that be, hard livin’ ?) mean son-of-a-gun set against a backing reminiscent of sheet-metal Motörhead.  You don’t need the lyrics to ‘You’re Goin’ Down’, ‘Go Motherfucker Go’, or ‘All Fucked up’ to guess their contents.  It’s pretty one-paced but in a really great way, exhilaratingly so actually  – like being strapped to the front of a speeding train.

My particular faves are ‘I’m The Man’ ( I’m the man, a real motherfucker / You ain’t shit, just another sucker / I wake up with my balls on fire / I sweat gasoline when I perspire), their cover of The Contours’ (Smokey Robinson penned) ‘First I look at the Purse’ and ‘Johnny Hotrod’, which for my money is the best thing on offer here, it’s a blistering tale of a dirt-track loser and a real epic by their standards weighing in at 2:56 ( when they pulled him out the wreck he said ‘did I win? / No you silly boy you just FUCKED UP AGAIN !!).  But basically if this sort of racket is your game, you’ll lap it all up, I’ve never grown out of finding swearing big and clever, or punk-metal and so I play this a lot if the kids aren’t around.

I don’t want to get all macho on you but it’s great music to iron to. Word up.

126 Down.

*pronounced ‘rider sighs’ the internet tells me; and we all know that everything that anyone puts on the internet has to meet with strict standards of accuracy and truthfulness – it’s not like any random dweeb can set up some sort of half-assed Lego and LP based nonsense and go around pontificating about stuff like he was … oh.

^the definition I stuck with was ‘tours in a bus not a van’, if you’re interested.