Listen, I know most sleaze beasts my age really did cut their rock n’ roll teeth on all these idiotic spandex bands like Cinderella and Ratt, but that’s only because they grew up in the Midwest or in the suburbs or in fuckin’ Canada, where that sort of malarkey was spoon-fed to the Wild and the Young in heaping helpings of pre-packaged rebellion. And ok, so nobody was getting’ FOOLED by Quiet Riot, but they sounded just perfect to drunken 16 year olds, so what the hell, why not let Metal Health drive you mad?

Me, I’m from the city. That’s not my fault or yours, man, it’s just the way it is, and even though the football players and drug nerds probably whooped it up to QR and Def Lep at keggers aplenty back then, Teen Sleazegrinders in my town had options. Looking back, maybe I should have spent a little more time working on getting laid and a little less on hanging around the newsstand dressed like the dude from Fields of the Nephilim, reading English music papers like the NME, Sounds, and Melody Maker and chain-smoking menthols, but hey, at least I knew who Disco 2000 were.

Throwing Crazy Shapes

I feel Like a Truck, It’s Kicking In Good

VPP dissolved in 1986, and a year later, Moss formed Drug free America with gravel-throated vocalist Steve Dixon, who went to art school in the late 70’s with Soft Cell’s Marc Almond, and even formed an (I’m guessing) insufferably precocious synth-punk band with Marc and the

Later on that year, they dropped their most devastating payload, the “Dayglo Pussycat” 12” single. They (there’s actually 4 dudes on the cover, but I think two of ‘em are just stand-ins) look like sinister napalm addicts from Planet 1975 on the stark, black and white cover. They’re all shades, leather, chain mail, skull rings (and skull belt buckles), bullet belts, beards, and scowls, a buncha dirty motherfuckers that just lost a real nasty-ass war. Total badasses. Inside, A-side “Dayglo Pussycat” sounds like Zodiac’s Prime Mover as mangled by some insane Vegas show band with jungle rot. Flash metal guitars smash headlong into new-wavish synths, a horn section, tribal warfare drums, and Dixon’s skuzzy yelling. “There’s a million hearts/waiting to be broken”, he growls. “Let the tears flow! Let them flow!” A classic of mean-spirited excess, “Dayglo” is pure sleaze set to a broken-necked sex-disco beat.

“Attitude” contains most of their hits (although “Day Glo Pussycat” is conspicuously absent) including the devastating “Just Like Daddy’s Gun”, which is pretty much the growl n’ roll equivalent of a belligerent drunk that stumbles over to your table to call you “fuckface” and pour his beer in your lap, right in front of your girl, for 7 minute straight. It’s also got the amazing “Viva Viet Vegas”, a brawling epic of stabbing horns, thumping drums, whirring chopper blades, Satanic-panic vox, and the “Pretty Woman” riff tortured and mutilated beyond repair, as well as the manic robo-sleaze madness of “(Talkin’ bout)Your Brand New Auto-mouth”, and an unsettling orchestral third act that will have you convinced that you are about to meet you maker, and he is none too fuckin’ pleased to see you. It’s some fucked-up record, Jack.

Nostalgic for the Future

Understandably, Drug Free America didn’t catch on with Drug Addled America AT ALL, even with the hardcore Foetus-heads. DFA’s vision of barbed-wire sleaze didn’t exactly mesh with the Crue’s hookers and blow aesthetic, ya know? In those waning days of Flash Metal Supremacy, bands were getting increasingly literal and obvious– also-rans like biker glam meatheads Little Caesar and tepid, half-Japanese sleazesters Cats in Boots were beating the formula into the ground, sopping up the last 30 seconds or so of hairmetal’s 15 minutes before it all dried up completely. Bands like Drug Free America and other like-minded Brit beat-aholics – World Domination Enterprises, Meat Beat Manifesto, Renegade Soundwave, Slab – were offering a tantalizing new road for flash metal to travel down, opening up a mind-bending new vista of sexy, sleazy sounds. However, besides Zodiac Mindwarp’s disastrous attempt at Flashbeat Metal, “Hoodlum Thunder”, and White Zombie’s much more successful reinvention as superdisco mecha-metalbeasts with 1992’s “La Sexocisto”, nobody bit. So we got grunge and fuckin’ Candlebox instead. Lucky us.

Although they continued to do well in England, shortly after “Attitude”, DFA called it quits for 3 years, eventually remerging in 1992 with a new album, “Trip”, a complete and utter Flash Metal Suicide that dropped the ‘Nam-metal freakshow for a straight-ahead electro-dance sound. In 1994, Dixon left, and was replaced by the highly fuckable Hayley Windsor, a Bjork-alike in PJ Harvey skin. She sang on DFA’s next two albums, and continues to perform with Moss in the bass-driven electronica outfit Mirazma. How the machine gun turrets and flame throwers and corrosive drug riffs and slimy screams gave way bubbling synths and the frothy chirp of Windsor is anyone’s guess, but suffice to say, despite lyrics like “Sliding down a rope to hell, he feels a little higher, arm your RPG, take aim and fire” (from Mirazma's “To Give Death”), Moss doesn’t look like he’s gonna strap on his bullet belt and head hell-bound for Viet Vegas again anytime soon. But hey, at least we had 1989, right?