No matter your take on country music,
you couldn't avoid hearing "Stand By
Your Man" last week, as the news of
Tammy Wynette's death spread. We
were reminded of how, in 1992, Hillary
Clinton told a 60 Minutes interviewer (in
response to a question about Bill's
extracurricular love life): "I"m not sitting
here like some little woman standing by
my man like Tammy Wynette." You know
the rest: Tammy got mad and made
some jibe about Hillary's ride to the
White House, Hillary called to apologize,
and they all played nice. And then last
Monday night, April 6, Tammy Wynette
died while napping on her couch.
You probably didn't hear queen of shock
rock Wendy O. Williams' speed-metal
version of the same song. Last Monday
night, April 6, Wendy O. Williams died of
a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the
head.
Hillary is fortunate she chose to offend
Tammy Wynette, and not Wendy O., on
60 Minutes: Though a five-times-married
lady who insists on standing by her man
(which one?) is scary in her own way,
who knows how the mohawked,
chainsaw-wielding rocker would have
sought revenge on the First Lady?
Wendy O., ninth-grade dropout and
former stripper, was founder and lead
singer of the punk band, The Plasmatics.
She was arrested for punching a
paparazzi (ah, a lady before her time!),
simulating sex on stage, performing
naked (if you don't count the shaving
foam covering her naughty bits), and
beating an officer. She was a riot grrl
before that meant crushes on Web
celebs and baby Tees (Wendy O.
preferred duct tape on her nipples) —
and she is surely the only person in
history to be featured on the covers of
both Vegetarian Times and Cream Shot
(she was a raunchy vegetarian, got it?).
"All she did was eat carrots!" said
filmmaker Kristine Peterson in a Tripod
interview last year. (Peterson worked
with Wendy O. on the film Reform
School Girls.) "She did one scene
where she's driving a bus and she is
supposed to kick the window out and
jump on top of the bus wearing stiletto
boots, a G-string, and a little black
leather bra. The first thing she says is, as
she's driving the bus going 40 miles an
hour, 'Do I have to use my feet? Can I
knock the window out with my head?'"
In recent years Wendy O. lived in
Connecticut and worked as an animal
rehabilitator — quite a tame day-to-day
for someone once wild enough to be
banned from London. I guess you can't
blow up cars in the studio of the
Tomorrow Show forever. Is there a
lesson in her life? Besides the rather
depressing one that if you wrestle
alligators in your twenties, feeding
squirrels in your forties might be
something of a comedown? (Or the
faintly amusing one that not all
vegetarians lead long, healthy lives.)
Maybe not, but it's worth taking time to
honor a woman who rioted so hard she
burned out. "I don't believe that people
should take their own lives without deep
and thoughtful reflection over a
considerable period of time," Wendy O.
wrote in her suicide note. "I do believe
strongly, however, that the right to do so
is one of the most fundamental rights that
anyone in a free society should have. For
me much of the world makes no sense,
but my feelings about what I am doing
ring loud and clear to an inner ear and a
place where there is no self, only calm."
As Jill "The Diva" Stempel writes in her
tribute to Wendy O., "I guess old punks
never die, they just choose to blow their
brains out with a shotgun."
Emma Taylor is the editor of Tripod's Women's
Zone. Her e-mail is emma@tripod.com.
by Joal Ryan
April 7, 1998
Wendy O. Williams was the Queen of Shock Rock. The
chainsaw-wielding lead singer of the Plasmatics.
The outrageous punker who once blew up a car on a
TV show.
When the stunts stopped, when the shows ended,
Williams, in the words of her lover, "found it
difficult to lead a normal life."
So, yesterday, in the woods near her Connecticut
home, Williams shot herself to death. She was 48.
"She felt she was past her peak...," Rod Swenson,
her ex-manager and longtime companion, told the
New York Post. "This [suicide] was something she
had planned; it was no spur-of-the moment thing."
Williams--a 1985 Grammy nominee--most recently
worked in animal care, Swenson said.
It was a not-so-odd job in a life filled with
them: macrobiotic cook, lifeguard, sex-show
dominatrix.
Rock singer proved to be her most lucrative
career.
In 1978, the Williams-fronted Plasmatics burst
onto the New York City punk scene. Williams was
hard to ignore--her chainsaw (used to slice and
dice guitars) as sharp as her trademark Mohawk.
Then there was the matter of her stage wear:
sometimes not much more than electrical tape to
cover her nipples.
The Plasmatics' cult status owed as much to
Williams' stunts as its defiant, radio-unfriendly
music. There was the Playboy spread, the blown-up
car incident (on Tom Snyder's Tomorrow), the 1981
arrest for making obscene gestures with...a
sledgehammer. (The charges were dropped.)
The Plasmatics' recording life lasted until
1987--the last album being Maggots.
Perhaps Williams' most memorable pure music moment
was a 1982 duet with Motorhead rocker Lemmy
Kilmister--their cover of Tammy Wynette's "Stand
By Your Man." (Wynette, coincidentally, died in
her sleep Monday at age 55.)
She also did rap--recording under the name
Ultrafly and the Hometown Girls.
Funeral services were not planned. Williams,
Swenson said, wanted to cremated.