Review: Drugs are Nice

Everything you wanted to know about Jean-Louis Costes, Dame Darcy, Bill Callahan, GG Allin, Boyd Rice and Anton LaVey but were too afraid to ask.

Mike: If I had a normal family, and a good up-bringing, then I would have been a well-adjusted person.
Scott: It depends on what you call normal.
Mike: Yeah, it does. Well, you know. Normal. Like a mom and a dad and a dog, and shit like that. Normal.
Scott: So, you didn't have a normal dog?
[My Own Private Idaho]

"She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do."
[Zelda Fitzgerald]

Doyenne of dirty glamour, icon 'zinester and Suckdog front-person, Generation-XXX-er Lisa Carver - the original Suicide Girl - takes you on an accelerated trip through her DIY underground. Are you experienced?

Trawling through her formative years - and avoiding the David Copperfield crap - Carver's early childhood reads a lot like Larkin's This Be The Verse, and, just like the poem, her parents give her plenty of extra faults: her father, a mostly-absent, narcotics-dealing murderer, taught her to feel alienated and threatened; her absent-minded mother dispensed wisdom with her hands. Hardly a surpirse then that Lisa, the ‘first out-and-out freak in Dover' New Hampshire, became attracted to shock punk and feces thrower GG Allin, swapping letters and spit with him, and going on to form the musical performance art noiseniks Suckdog: “neither of us possesses any musical talent, the plan is to open the doors to the artistic centres of our brains with the dementia resulting from hunger and faigue..If Suckdog isn’t good, at least we can make it unique.”

Moving through people and places, Carver, a 'freak-seeking missile', collects a good few weirdos along the way, loving in triangles but never being square. Challenging everything (wage ‘war on the perceptions of reality’), resisting nothing (‘we get these impulses and we don’t do them because there are all these invisibles walls up everywhere, but they’re not real'), ripping up the rule book (‘we don’t have to follow any rules - not even the rule to not follow rules’) and being a downright provactive, Carver eeked herself a place in the American sub-culture of the late eighties/early nineties, using her brain more than her vagina. "I am a chronicler similar to Andy Warhol - except the people entering my factory are more lost than pretty."

Her prose, like the clear-headed confessional of Rollerderby, is angsty, disarming, self-deprecating and above all unapologetic: no regrets. Be that when she runs away to Paris at nineteen to marry Jean-Louis Costes, who like Paris is 'old and dirty', or when she takes up prostitution, saying it was "a lot like the shows, except I don't have to come up with my own character or new rhymes."

"To protect ourselves, we spun cocoons out of TV, books, video games, early sstole alcohol, and dreams. And then one day we realize we're grown up and yet still all muffled inside what we've built around us. We don't feel real...We try to get out of these cocoons and make our way down to where our bodies are. We try shoplifting and racist/sexist/agest humor (trying to offend our way out); we get naked on stage. We try seep deprivation and razors on our skin, We date creepy, scary sleazes who we half-hope, half-fear might do the cutting or us. But we're so used to living inside a dream, even cutting feels dreamy. We can't get out. We can't wake up."

Carver's wake-up call comes from an abusive relationship with social terrorist and would-be facist Boyd Rice, and though she depicts him more of a bad-tempered mummy's boy than a Satan-worshipping Nazi, it was only Lisa herself who seemed surpirsed when Rice turned out to be a bastard. During her time with Rice, her path crossed Anton LaVey's, providing probably the most controversial chapter in the book, were she describes LaVey as a 'delirious, decrepit pervert, who is probably abusing his kid', for which Carver took a kicking from his cronies.

Lisa Carver wanted to change the world "using real names, real deatils, was my little contribution to the revolution (well, that and peeing in a litter box)", but, despite glowing reviews from the likes of the NME and the tragiclly-hip Rollerderby zine attaining a readership of 10,000, she never really cracked it outside of underground, muchless the US, a fact she acknowledges herself: "not one of us managed a successful transition to mainstream... you cannot translate Nietzschean self-immolation to a mass pop audience".

Yet Drugs Are Nice is an anti-PC and essential account of the final days of the 'zine-boom movement and the DIY music scene, and while Carver may not have 'redefine[d] class and beauty for the whole world' with the people she went to high school with reading about '[her] in People magazine in the check-out aisle' - that honour would go to Courtney Love - she is head-and-shoulders above the best (and worst) of the Rrriot Girls who took their clothes off and stole other people's ideas.

[ST]

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Drugs are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir by Lisa Crystal Carver
Snowbooks
310 Pages