The Eclectic Mix
from People Magazine (1981?)
Who could have a bad word for Christmas? Count on punk princess Wendy O. Williams, the Plasmatics' lead singer. "Christmas is obscene," says the rocker who simulates sex onstage with musical instruments. She trashes Yuletide as a barbaric ritual "in which millions of innocent trees are chopped down to stand on an altar where they die a slow death, in which people spend resources they don't have on things they don't need. Christmas" she sums up, "is the ultimate microcosm for rape and plunder in the name of lost green, peace and joy." Oh, shut up, Wendy.
Homecoming queen choice hits sour note
Tattooed, bleached-blond Wendy O. Williams, the heavy metal rocker who has performed in costumes composed mostly of leather and electrical tape, didn't get to be a homecoming queen at the University of Wisconsin -- even though fraternity Theta Chi invited her. She accepted the frat's request to appear in Friday's homecoming parade, but university officials in Madison felt that would have been "inappropriate." Paul Ginsberg, dean of students, said he vetoed Ms. Williams' appearance in the parade Friday because of the publicity she attracts. "I thought Wendy Williams in a homecoming parade was inappropriate. Her private life is apparently quiet and serene, but her public life is hardly that," Ginsberg said. Ms. Williams has been arrested twice on obscenity charges, which were later dropped. She is currently suing Milwaukee police, alleging they fondled and beat her during a 1981 arrest after her performance with her band, the Plasmatics.
from People Magazine (1982) Dressing Down
She was two hours late for a Detroit concert, so to make amends wiggy rock star Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics offered fans a little extra flash. She said she would pay $25 each to two male and two female concertgoers who would bare more than their souls to the crowd. Four volunteers showed some T&A, stripping Wendy of $100 in no time flat. Said Detroit promoter Gail Parenteau, "It was like a punk version of The Price Is Right."
The Hartford Courant October 30, 1984 The World's Astir When Wendy Wails
NEW YORK--Ponytailed and perky, Wendy O. Williams is the girl next door--assuming, for the moment, that the girl next door is an explosives enthusiast, sings like a caterwauling banshee and has had her left arm tattooed with the credo: "I Love Sex & Rock 'n' Roll."
Williams did not always have a ponytail. As lead screamer for the Plasmatics, described as a "porno punk" band by some critics, she wore a Mohawk and swathed her bosom in shaving cream.
But she's older now, and ponytailed ("my anti-fashion statement"). She has set off on her own with a solo career that has yielded a new album, "W.O.W.," produced by Gene Simmons, formerly of KISS.
(Williams will perform at the West Hartford Agora on Friday.)
Is Wendy O. Williams mellowing? "I'm still the same excessive person I've always been," she said in an interview.
In four minutes of mayhem in the video of her song, "It's My Life," Williams throws a television through a window, destroys a house with a bulldozer, wrestles two women and climbs a ladder from a moving car to a plane. The car goes off a cliff, where it explodes.
"This is the most excessive video I've ever done," she said. "That's who I am, that's what I'm into."
The album also is "excessive," she said. It is raucous, heavy-metal rock, full of booming drums and screeching guitars that are nonetheless overpowered by Williams' raw, rasping vocals.
Offstage, Williams is charming and animated, clad not in metal armorplate but in torn jeans and a yellow muscle shirt. She's the kind of person who gives a reporter a friendly peck on the cheek to say goodbye; she's the kind of rock star who writes to her fans, corresponding with some for more than five years.
"I like to be there for them because a lot of times you feel like there's nobody who understands what you feel," she said. "In this insane world, there always seem to be so few breaths of sanity, and a lot of the insanity of what I project seems sane. Or makes you feel good."
Born in upstate New York--she will not say when, though some accounts say she is 34--Williams won a scholarship to the Eastman School of Music as a teenager, but quit.
She came to rock the long way: She was a lifeguard in Fort Lauderdale, Fla; danced in a gypsy troupe in Europe; studied with a guru in the Himalayas; was a macrobiotic cook, and wielded the whip as a dominatrix in a Times Square sex show.
It was at that time that she met her manager, Rod Swenson. In 1978 he helped create the Plasmatics and Wendy O., the "dominatrix of decibels."
The Plasmatics did not make their name with music. They were "better obscene than heard," wrote one Washington Post writer in 1980.
Instead, they made news with their prodigious acts of destruction.
In 1980, 10,000 watched on a Hudson River pier as Williams drove a 1972 Cadillac packed with explosives onto a stage that also was rigged to explode. She jumped out; the car and stage blew up and dropped into the water.
"You've got a president who is the most popular president in history, doing violent things like putting missiles in Europe.... To me, that's violent. What I do isn't violent," she said.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Wendy O. Williams: It's Her Life
She's on her own now, serious about making music--and breaking rules
Unlike her music, which is rough and tough, she is blond and slight, as a good woman ought to be. And then you remember that she has been arrested twice for obscenity and once for accosting a photographer in Chicago. You wonder how one small person could have got into so much trouble.
"I have no subtlety," Wendy O. Williams said, laughing softly. "I have no subtlety at all."
She is not the girl next door. She never said she was.
She has been an actress in a Times Square sex show. She has been on the People magazine best-dressed list. She has been on the cover of Kerrang!--a British heavy metal magazine that lavishly praises her music. She has been on the cover of Vegetarian Times, with which she shared a recipe. She has just been nominated for a Grammy award. She is in St. Louis to star in the Westport Playhouse production of "The Rocky Horror Show".
In the playhouse lobby, she moves constantly in her chair, with a kind of controlled energy that hints that she could spring at any moment. She is visibly energized by talk of her latest rock video, in which she did several dangerous stunts.
"Some people party, doing all kinds of substances. I get off on heavy rock'n' roll and doing these stunts. And I'm a vegetarian," Williams said.
Gone is the white Mohawk haircut and punk wardrobe that influenced women's fashion across the country. This day--a day of rehearsal--her hair hangs softly in a ponytail, and she wears tights, leg warmers and a shirt.
"I'm not into fashion. Fashion is something you follow. Style is something you set."
She is happy to show off her tattoos--one a graceful rose woven with the name of one of her songs, ("I love sex & rock 'n' roll") and one the logo of her new solo album "W.O.W." But at the same time, she will not tell her age.
"I will not be judged like an automobile."
She speaks quietly in a voice something like a sexy Selma Diamond.
"I'm not in it for the money. I'm in it for the adventure."
She is talking about her career, but she also is talking about her life.
The new rock video, filmed to "It's My Life," a cut from "W.O.W.", is an obvious example.
She wrestles two women. She drives a bulldozer that demolishes a house. She climbs from a speeding car onto a rope ladder hanging from a speeding airplane. She climbs into the plane. The car races off a cliff and explodes in a fiery ball of light.
What does all this mean?
Williams laughs. "It's a conceptual art piece. The statement is the statement."
She will, however, explain some of what it represents to her.
"It's my revenge against the soft-focus fantasies that are put out. I get so upset. They bring women out in lingerie. The men just use them as objects. My video is just me being excessive
"The basic point is that it's my life. I'm going to do what I want. Nobody's going to tell me what to do. And it's a strong woman. I'm not afraid to be strong. Everybody worries they've got to fall into these roles. Don't worry about it. Just be yourself."
Williams has. It has not always been easy.
There were few women in heavy metal rock when she and Rod Swenson created the concept for the Plasmatics, the band that made her famous and occasionally infamous.
Williams credits Swenson as the artist behind the invention. He is her manager and producer-director of her videos and of what her publicity material calls her "wreck and roll" shows. They've been together for more than 10 years.
"He's my brain. He's my stability. He makes it all work," Williams said.
Back in New York City in 1978, she and Swenson wanted to shake up the stagnating rock scene.
"I was bored with what was happening in rock 'n' roll. I wanted to break the complacency. I wanted to turn it on its ear."
The Plasmatics did this, not just with rude, crude and sometimes satiric lyrics and hard, screaming music. They did it with theatrics. Williams drove a car on stage and then exploded it. She drove a bus through a wall of television sets. She sawed a guitar in half. On stage sge lost a costume that consisted primarily of shaving cream.
She was arrested in Cleveland and then in Milwaukee, on charges of making obscene motions on stage. In Chicago, she was accused of assaulting a 6-foot-tall photographer.
Williams thinks that being a woman may have had something to do with the trouble she had. Mick Jagger, for example, has never made much secret of what he suggests on stage. And would a photographer, as Williams contends the Chicago photographer did, try to detain a male rock star and then file charges against him?
In all cases, Williams was found innocent or charges were dropped, but she wonders whether the arrests would have occurred if she were a man.
"It is a sexist society," Williams said. "I have to work 10 times harder than any man. You've got to be 10 times better before anybody will give you any respect or take you seriously.
Williams takes her work very seriously. She is a workaholic, she said. This was not always the case.
Williams grew up in rural New York. She said her parents would have preferred that she become a teacher, but back when she was a teenager, no one was thinking quite that far ahead.
"We didn't get along. I left when I was 15. I wasn't swallowing the apple pie. And it was very seductive at that time. You had to travel across the country. There were so many things you had to experience. Discipline was one of the things I had to learn."
As many children of the '60s did, Williams journeyed in search of adventure and knowledge. She traveled the United States, Europe and Asia. In the Himalayas she met a Buddhist holy man. From him she said she learned:
"You are a creation of your own consciousness. You have to go to the edge and step out so you have no one to turn to but yourself. At that moment, you know who you are."
Williams said this knowledge helped her open her mind and gather the courage to draw her own conclusions and make her own decisions.
"Traveling. Experiencing. I don't do drugs now, but I did. I was experimenting. I never wanted to do things to drown my senses. I wanted to be more sensitive. I found out that being healthy and loving what you're doing, that this is the best. You'll never feel so high. You'll never feel so good."
At home in her New York City loft, where she lives only a few months out of the year, she grows food such as wheat grass and buckwheat and even composts an indoor garden. She ferments seeds and nuts. She sprouts beans. She makes bread. She loves to cook, and she loves to eat.
"When I got serious about singing, I got serious about staying in shape. I also exercise to kind of mellow me out and make me a nicer person."
Williams jogs, swims or does other aerobic exercise for at least one hour a day. Three times a week, she works out with weights. She makes time to exercise, even when she's touring with her band.
"Women don't have to look like a Revlon girl or the cover of Cosmopolitan. Most people don't look like that. Most people don't act like that. These are alternatives. And I make alternative music."
Part of the alternative always has been the performance style. While smashing TVs initially was done for theatrical effect, public response changed the meaning in Williams' mind.
I started doing it just for the fun of it. Then I noticed people were more outraged about me smashing a TV set than they were about their neighbor being raped. So it became something very conscious I was doing about people who were more concerned with material objects than they were with human life. You take away people's TVs and you've got a revolution on your hands."
The Plasmatics went through more than a dozen different musicians, although Williams and Swenson, who together own the name, remained constant forces and participants. But the time came when Williams wanted to venture out as a soloist. It took 1 1/2 years to get a new group together.
"I wanted the best heavy-metal band in the world, and I got it," Williams said.
The result was her solo album, "W.O.W.," released last year. "W.O.W." just was nominated for a Grammy, and Williams is not understated in her reaction to that.
"I'm thrilled that the industry has recognized me," she said.
This is significant, because heavy-metal music is not usually mentioned in Grammy nominations. And it probably is all the more important to her, because Williams' life revolves around her work.
Williams has no children, is not married, has never been and does not want to be. She does, however, have a longstanding relationship that she values.
She speaks of the value of working on a relationship, and she sounds, just for a minute, a little bit like Doris Day.
She talks of how she answers all of her fan mail. And then she laughs again, saying that the process is slow because she must write with a dictionary at her side. "I dropped out of school," she explains.
"I wrote to one girl--it broke my heart--from the time she was 12 years old to the time she was 16 and died of cancer. Her mother had died, and she just wanted a woman to talk to."
She answers the letters because she knows it is good business to do so. But she also answers them because she wants to.
"Everybody needs the feeling that they're not all alone. Verbal reassurance. Spiritual reassurance. Cosmic reassurance. Whatever. However you find it, it gives you strength to survive.
"I will always be there for people who want to talk to me," Williams said.
And then she hugs the reporter goodbye.
(Thanks to Mike W. for contributing this article)