I have a bad feeling that no one is going to read this review. But that’s not my problem. My problem, or I suppose it’s more of a gripe about a gross injustice, is that Cows/The Heroine Sheiks frontman Shannon Selberg has never gotten his just desserts. Minneapolis’ clamorous Cows put on the best live shows I’ve ever seen, and Selberg remains the most entrancing front man I’ve ever seen dominate a stage. Add a slew of wonderfully scabrous Cows’ LPs full of noise rock classics like “Hitting the Wall,” “Dirty Leg,” “Walks Alone,” “Allergic to Myself,” and “Cartoon Corral” and you’re left to wonder, “What does a maniacal genius have to do to become famous around here?”
Because the great American listening public repaid Cows (and its successor, The Heroine Sheiks) by consigning them to the fringes, along with other great bands from the Midwest like Killdozer, Halo of Flies, and Scratch Acid. It peeves me, it does. Here was an intelligent madman who wore a skinny penciled-on handlebar mustache, mousetraps on his ears, and a horrible wig beneath a battered cowboy hat but never cracked a smile. Instead he would puff out his skinny chest and belligerently stare down the audience, like Joe Pesci saying, “What’s so fucking funny about me?” Never in my life have I encountered a human being so simultaneously amusing and downright menacing.
When Cows took a metaphorical captive bolt pistol to the forehead in 1998, Selberg relocated to New York City and took a stab at acting before founding The Heroine Sheiks, a very different glass of milk from the brutal onslaught that was Cows. Selberg supplemented his trademark bugle with a cheap toy keyboard, and proceeded to produce songs that were less pummeling than slinky and slyly insinuating, although the band didn’t completely abandon noise rock. I remember speaking to Selberg by phone about The Heroine Sheiks’ debut album, 2000’s Rape on the Installment Plan (an homage to Louis Ferdinand Celine’s darkly hilarious novel Death on the Installment Plan), and he told me, I believe in all sincerity, that The Heroine Sheiks’ aim was to “put rock back in the fucking business.” Indeed, he predicted that their debut CD would become a make-out masterpiece, the next Let’s Get It On.
I can only hope he was pulling my leg. Because while Rape on the Installment Plan is one captivating listen, I can’t imagine a single, solitary person, of whatever sexual persuasion, deviation, or perversion, ever putting it on to get it on. Marvin Gaye it ain’t, and it has about a one percent seduction quotient. That said The Heroine Sheiks’ music was funkier and far less bludgeoning than anything the Cows had ever done, thinner sounding and less frenetic too, and I can see why Selberg, having produced album after album of punishing ear abuse, might think of Rape on the Installment Plan as appropriate foreplay music.
It’s a pity that Rape on the Installment Plan wasn’t an updated Let’s Get It On, if only because Selberg’s notions of sex run towards the polymorphous perverse. He proved this with “Shaking,” the Cows’ ear-battering cover of Johnny Kidd & The Pirates’ 1960 hit “Shaking All Over,” which he turned into a paean to getting ass-fucked by a woman. “Yo girl,” he sings, “I love it when you make my asshole bleed,” adding “I’m shaking in my colon/I’ll shake it in my back door/Hyut!!/I’m shaking all over.” Approximately 100 bands have covered this song, but not one of them had the maniacal audacity to turn the song into one of the weirdest treatments of sex in the history of rock. And he wrote a song called “Pussy Is a Monarchy” too!
The 2000 line-up of Heroine Sheiks consisted of Selberg on vocals, keyboards, and bugle; John Fell, who played with Kid Congo Powers, on drums; the Swans’ Norman Westberg on guitar; George Porfiris on bass; and Scott Hill on keyboards. Their debut was praised by both critics and fans, and they constituted a sort of minor league supergroup, the Damn Yankees of noise rock. But despite the buzz they never broke though, either to the bigger money or the larger clubs. They remained a cult band, just as Cows had been, and I can recall seeing the Cows in a quarter-full Black Cat, which is to say they never came close to breaking through to the big time.
Anyway, the LP opens with the pounding drums of “Wandering Mongrel,” a sinuous and syncopated number with big power chords but none of the feral guitar pummel of Cows. You could almost dance to the thing, which is certainly something you could never say about Cows. And Selberg sounds relatively sane, a frightening thought. He exhibits none of the enraged (feigned or not) nervous tics that made his vocals with Cows so unique. Better, as in great, is “Nuclear Jeannie,” which opens on an ominous note and features a cool chorus. Selberg drags out his words, then plays a tremendous bugle solo which is followed by some seriously out of whack guitar by Westberg, and this one could almost be a Cows song. It’s followed by the fast-paced “Okkk?”, in which Selberg returns to Cows mode while Westberg plays an excellent omnipresent guitar riff that is as ominous as it is cool. And when Selberg isn’t singing about executions and human evolution he’s tossing off off-color lyrics that go, “I wanna turn you round/And bend you over/And educate ya/Is that okay?/Okkk?” It’s a wonderful song and I bet even your grandma would like it, that is if she’s demented and lives in a nursing home and is deaf.
“Jew Jitsu” is an almost funky number and another big winner, what with its opening guitar clamor and great drumming. Selberg then comes in and spends the entire time riffing on the title, as Westberg plays punishing martial arts guitar. Selberg is in top form, the song seesaws along, and yes you could dance to it, so maybe Shannon is right in calling this fucking music. Except that it’s followed by the slow but excellent “Space Invader,” in which Westberg plays some of the strangest guitar I’ve ever heard while the bass throbs and Selberg practically whispers “Pay attention/Pay attention” and “She’ll take everything if you let her.” Finally the drum beats faster and faster and Westberg really cuts loose, while Selberg continues to whisper every now and again. I’ve never heard a guitar like Westberg’s; it’s distorted and threatening, a space invader that means us no good.
“Was a Man” is a droning mid-tempo number in which the band makes a wonderful din while Selberg stretches his vocals on the choruses. He sings about being born and abandoned and turning into a schoolyard bully, while Westberg’s guitar explodes every now and then and the rhythm section kicks keister. Then follows the slick and insinuating “Let’s Fight,” about a jealous guy who doesn’t believe any of his girlfriend’s answers about where she’s been. The keyboards are great and Selberg sings it in a seductive voice that is belied by his grilling of said girlfriend. “We’re gonna fight/We’re gonna bite/We’re gonna argue/And bicker/And loudly discuss it,” the band shouting “Fight!” between each line He then turns his attention to her “friend,” who she says is “Just an old friend/He’s not your type… and besides he’s gay” but he doesn’t believe it for a minute, and it’s impossible to know whether he’s the jealous paranoid type or she really is running around his back.
“You Know” is slow and keyboard-based and is another paranoid number about romance. The keyboard riff carries the song along as Selberg sings about hearing his girl talk in her sleep before saying, “Why don’t you dream about me/You never dream about me.” “I Got Doubts” is a raging monster of a song, in which Westberg plays a guitar that sounds like a chainsaw while Selberg is joined on the vocals. On this one he sounds every bit as deranged as he did with Cows, and it makes me happy. “Effity Eff” is a hilarious tale of misfortune and also roars along Cows style, with a big prominent bass and a guitar that sizzles. Selberg starts at a bar, fails to attract any women, finds a cocaine dealer but can’t find his wallet but it doesn’t matter because the dealer turns out an undercover cop who kicks Selberg in the balls and throws him down the steps, and the next thing he knows he’s in a cell being accused of murder. And between each of these disasters he sings, “Fuckity fuckity fuckity fuck,” which never fails to make me laugh, as do the lines, “I’m locked up with a rapist/And a one-eyed child molester/And an angry drunker wrestler/Temples flare.” Which is followed by some cool keyboard noise, random shouts of fuck, and finis, it’s over.
I’ll never love The Heroine Sheiks the way I love Cows, which doesn’t matter much since they haven’t released an LP since 2009’s Journey to the Edge of the Knife (another tip of the hat to Celine) and I’m assuming they’re kaput. But they put a new twist on noise rock and produced some amazing tunes and kept Shannon Selberg on stage, where he belongs, and those are all very good things. Selberg will never become a household name, because he never compromised his outrageousness in order to succeed in the music biz. “Trying to get ahead by doing the right thing in rock,” he told me, “is like putting on a suit and tie to buy a lottery ticket.”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
