How great is Faster Pussycat’s 1987 eponymous debut? In 2005 Rock Hard magazine ranked it at 498 in its book The 500 Greatest Rock & Metal Albums of All Time. That’s only 497 spots away from being the greatest rock and metal album of all time! Numbers 499 and 500 must have been green with envy.
Me, I’d have ranked it much, much higher, because I consider it a top-notch slice of glam metal. Hair metal fans tend to dismiss the LA band as recycled Aerosmith, but they were rawer, and closer in spirit to the New York Dolls (without the camp factor, unfortunately) than any of their contemporaries. Faster Pussycat practically oozes sleaze, and I have to carefully disinfect my turntable after every play.
Faster Pussycat appeared in Penelope Spheeris’ 1988 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, and I suspect the reason was lead singer Taime Downe, whose barb-wired vocals will leave you with bloody ears. He prowls the songs on Faster Pussycat like a hissing alley cat in heat, and he knows exactly when to explode; check out the “Living in LA is so much… FUN!” that opens “Babylon.” Or the way he spits out that “lobotomy” on “Bottle in Front of Me.” And he has one of the best screeches in rock and roll.
The band instrumentalists are ace too, and as I mentioned before they’re rough around the edges; if it’s polish you’re looking for, buy a Warrant album. You can literally smell the cheap perfume of the discount hookers haunting the sleazier parts of the Sunset Strip on them; they were glam metal’s ne’er-do-well younger brothers, flotsam washed ashore on the sordid beaches of West Hollywood.
There are no bad tracks on Faster Pussycat, and better yet you won’t find a single power ballad or cringe-worthy love song. What you will find are fast as fuck songs like “Cathouse,” on which Downe spits his words like machine gun bullets and shrieks like a banshee while lead guitarist Brent Muscat tears off a fierce axe solo. The raucous “Bathroom Wall” crackles with electricity and is a salute to free advertising; the rhythm section rocks, Downe does things with his vocal cords that defy science, and while he never gets around to telling us what happened after he made said phone call he does say, “Boy am I lucky that I didn’t use the other stall.”
“Don’t Change That Song” has a sentiment we can all relate to; Downe is getting in the mood when his lady turns the radio station, or as he puts it, “In the midst of consummation she caused me aggravation/When she started messing with that dial.” Downe brags about having “twelve inches of fun at my command, which gives him two inches on Steven Tyler, but I’m wondering what song he’s talking about. I like to think it’s Loggins & Messina’s “Vahevala.”
On “Bottle in Front of Me” Downe really cuts loose; he’s bought a case of Tylenol for the morning after, but in the meantime it’s “A bottle in front of me is like a frontal lobotomy/One more swig will alter my psychology.” On “Ship Rolls In” he’s eating his dinner from a trash can and wearing clothes he got from the lost and found, but he doesn’t sound overly concerned: “I don’t have much but I’ve got a lot of personality/And that’s all that counts.”
Faster Pussycat slow things down on “No Room for Emotion,” which has a Stones/Dolls feel. Downe compares emotion to “a cloud dripping radiation right on my head,” which makes me think we oughta build a concrete sarcophagus over him like they did at Chernobyl. “Smash Alley” sounds a bit like “Repo Man” and is your basic stay in school PSA, because the alternatives can be pretty ugly: “She’s only fourteen, in the seventh grade/If her daddy only knew he’d be screamin’/in his grave.” Is that really how you want to spend your formative years? “Molested and arrested” when you should be hitting the books on your way to becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500 company?
“Shooting You Down” should have been a big hit single, what with its killer melody, catchy chorus, Downe’s gritty vocals and great guitar solo. “City Has No Heart” is Faster Pussycat’s equivalent of “Welcome to the Jungle,” while “Babylon” would be a great song if it weren’t for its troubling resemblance to the Beastie Boys’ “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party),” right down to its snotty lyrics, dueling vocals and record scratch.
Screenwriter and playwright Wilson Mizner described 1930s Hollywood as a “tour through a sewer in a glass bottom boat.” The same can be said of the hair metal Hollywood of the 1980s and ‘90s. Faster Pussycat may not have been the sleaziest of the spandex contingent, but their sound was about the rawest. Give them a star on Hollywood Boulevard, and the police would most likely arrest it for lewd and indecent behavior.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
