Lisa Christ Superstar

Driving On Holy Gasoline

"I suggest we go faster." - George the fireman at 115mph, somewhere in Vermont. 

1.22.02 - 10:15AM, Lynnfield, MA

It's a masterpiece of entropy. Some teenage chica in a shocking green Kia pinged into a tanker about a quarter mile in front of me. It rocked on it's axis, and then like some stop motion dinosaur with too many caveman arrows in it's neck, it toppled over, spilling it's black lifeblood all over the highway. So here I am, trapped in a maddening circle of ambulances, cop cars, and fire engines, with much flashing of lights and crashing about. I can't even get out of the car to find a place to piss, lest my motorcycle boots be swallowed up to the ankles in crude oil, so I just have to sit this one out. I'll just let the music do the talking this month. But remind me to tell you about how I made a 68-year old man cry next time around. 

Fleshpeddlers - "Falling into a Dream" (www.fleshpeddlersmusic.com) Uh, oh. Water color painting on the cover. Of flowers, no less. And to be honest, the aptly named first track, "Disco Song" continued scaring me to death- it's the kind of slurring zombie funk that Syrup slide around in, minus the muscle rock guitars. Luckily, things take a radical shift towards goopy sex rock from there. Fleshpeddlers are the brown acid of rocktronica- Velvets drone funneled straight down Jesus and the Mary Chain's freedom through feedback tunnel of fuzz, set loose in a funhouse of splattering drumbeats. "Falling into a Dream" is what it would sound like if the dance floor was filled with Venus Flytraps snapping at your ankles. Electric (www.electric-web.net ) Electric bring to mind 80's UK junkie-cowboy fashion rockers Head, which might not help much, so think Dracula vamping it up at a glitter rock revival hosted by Soft Cell. That's not to say that these German rattlesnake daddies are some kind of foppish dandies in the underworld, even with the feathered boa spirit of Bolan prancing about- they are, first and foremost, a heavy rock band. It's just that Electric are big on the silver pants swagger, fusing Cult riffs and Sweet pop into an updated version of Silverhead's prog-glam. The band's secret weapon is the Rube, who's flash-slash guitar makes all the right moves, like a teenager in a pinball trance, allowing Electric to swing wildly from meat hammer Zep riffs to Queen harmonics and back all in the lascivious wink of a heavily mascara'd eye. The chesty twin census takers on the album's cover don't hurt either. Nastys (www.thenasties.evisionsite.com) A band like these gutter sluggers write a song called '24 Hours', it's got to be about the longest they've ever gone without a drink. There's a mean streak of dirty-assed blues permeating their metal riffing danger punk that chases them around like a monkey with hypodermic fingers, suggesting that the Nastys have seen things that'd curl your toes, and that this 4 songer is a snapshot from their holiday in Hell. Reverend JD Nasty grunts like a revival tent leper, teeth and lips flying around the stage as he mumbles tales of woe and Mexican sex rituals, the band lurching around him loose limbed and hungry. Closest cousins, sonically speaking? Poison 13. Only those motherfuckers didn't have trumpets. Elektrik Mistress (www.elektrikmistress.00band.com) You can guess by the spelling of 'electric' that there's more than a hint of metal singeing the whiskers of these Canadian cats-in fact, there's big meaty fistfuls of it, green tinted biceps bulging with head banger bliss. This chick-free Mistress sound like Zakk Wylde and Sebastian Bach's back room, coke frenzy super group- guitars that squeal and punch, ego star vox, the kind of flash and strut that defies the age of angst and heads directly to those heady days when rock and roll came from the crotch. I'll bet that there's a Van Halen poster on their rehearsal room wall, and that Sammy Hagar is not on it. Epicenter - "Every Point Has a Beginning" (www.epicenterband.com) Dust Rock from Denmark. A Moody bass throbs like the heart of a vulture perched on a cactus, watching impassively as a sand- blast of street metal guitar and skull crack battery creeps like death over the horizon. Elements of stoner groove, grunge crunch, and 80's metal riff- chug all collide in a cloud of murky brooding and debris strewn fuzz. Just a 3 song sampler here, but it bodes well for a post-apocalyptic future of desert warriors sporting a bitchin' pedigree of tunes. Greenhouse Effect "Blast Shield Down" (www.greenhouseeffectmusic.com) There are strange, vague, possibly insane messages wafting in and out of this record, some of which take over 20 minutes to reveal themselves, talk of hovering fish, of Buster Crabbe's lonely, doomed mission, of the palm trees on Mars. And like some kind of nefarious gang of social engineers, Greenhouse Effect have carefully constructed a sonic landscape that crawls and rumbles, part Sabbath, part Chrome, with a slow, deliberate efficiency, guiding you like a queen - seeking insect into their web of polyester conspiracies. That's what's really going on, but if you're lucky, all you'll hear are the monolithic piles of thick-as-a-wall riffage digging a hole straight to China, stoned but lucid, as free and loose as ancient astronauts can get. Either way, whether your down with the shadow syndicate or just a head in need of banging, "Blast Shield Down" is quite possibly the greatest acid-stoner-space-doom-rock record ever made- and yeah, ya cocky bastard, there's been others. Dog Leg Preacher (www.cdbaby.com/cd/dogleg) Dog Leg Preacher already win whatever the fuck game we're playing here on the basis of their name alone, so even a passing affair with full blown rockage would be enough for me, but dig- Halen '78 licks peal out of the speakers, followed by the sproing of one of those rattler tail things ZZ Top used to dig, and some kind of high pitched screech tears through the din- "Well, it's Saturday night, and I'm feelin' alright!" 13 tracks of fingerless gloved flash metal biker boogie ensue. Seattle bred, but born to die in with their boots on in Sturgis, Dog Leg are the muddy saviors of all the outlaws, crazy girls, twitchy fuckers in mirrored shades, and fist fighting rock and roll animals abandoned in the wake of the grunge era. If your idea of a real cool time involves pig roasts and chicks in half-shirts chomping at mustard slathered hot dogs on a string- and it should be- then I got your house band right here, citizen. 

Ain't Got Time to Bleed
The Lisa Christ Superstar story

"Last night somebody offered to buy me a beer, and I was like, 'No.' So he said, 'I'll do something else for you', and he took his eye out."

What?

"Yeah, he had a glass eye, and he just popped it right out. It was awesome."

There is absolutely no problem with rock chicks, but if I had to invent one, it's that they don't kick out the jams with quite the caveman ferocity of their male counterparts. Except for Lisa Christ. Lisa's writing a whole new chapter about who wears the pants in rock and roll. She looks for all the world like the hot older sister in your teenage wasteland- the foxy tomboy in the AC/DC baseball jersey, the chick that could easily, and gracefully, out-drink, out-fight, out-fuck, and certainly out-rock even the dudes that were already sporting mustaches in the 8th grade. And when she straps on her axe like a weapon and flicks the switches on her wall of Marshalls, there's no question who's carrying the big brass balls around in this rock and roll relationship. LCS play gas guzzling action rock, 70's riff rockets sped to motorpunk velocity- New York Loose taking on Fu Manchu in a drag race where everybody wins. It's the liberating sound of absolute, uncompromising freedom, hard won and forged in the fire of a dark, murky past full of chaos and debauchery, a world left behind when Lisa chose life- and Rock- over the abject misery of a slow, blood -gurgling death by misadventure. Not just a Philly native, Lisa practically owns whatever's left of that town's embattled rock scene, promoting and booking for the legendary Trocadero club, when she's not carving out another two minute, 20 second slice of electric revenge or sketching out yet another scheme for her one-chick grrl power rock revolution. I barely caught up with her in early January to get a glimpse of the ballsiest chick in rock and roll. 

War On Everybody

Lisa talks like it's her last quarter and she's still 5,000 points away from a Space Invaders high score- she anticipates my next move and swallows my question marks before they even escape out of my mouth. Her answers are a lesson in multi-tasking, as she drops a thought mid-sentence, switches subjects, and then effortlessly slips back to the original inquiry. She claims caffeine indulgence, but I suspect she's like this all the time. No wonder they call her Christ. "My real last name is Cohen", she tells me, "and my mom's always like - because I'm Jewish, you know - 'Why don't you drop the Christ?" Lisa picked up her rock star surname from a previous band mate. "It was Psycho Mike, from Bad Luck 13. We put out a record, it was really like Zeke, by the way- he called me Lisa Christ Superstar, just as a joke, and it just kind of stuck." Bad Luck 13 Riot Extravaganza, the Philly hardcore institution known more for beating each other half to death with chairs onstage and burning clubs down than for their chainsaw punk, figure prominently in the LCS story. "We're still pretty young", she says of her band, "We're about 2 years old. How we got together was- see, I was in this band called Savage 3D, and the bass player from Bad Luck is my bass player, Blunker. I had a side band with the guitar player and bass player of Bad Luck called "Sambo", and that's where I met Blunker." The cleverly named Blunker, it seems, had tired of rolling around in tacks and getting punched in the face by overzealous punk fans. " That's basically what happened- he got sick of getting set on fire, so we decided to get our own band together." I ask her for some insight into the unbridled, sociopathic chaos of Bad Luck, but she's as stumped as I am. "Well, I'm friends with them, and one of the guitar players, about ten years ago, I was in a band with him called "The Right", so I've been friends with them for a long time", she explains. "They're really nice guys, I don't have any idea how they don't get hurt, I don't have a clue, and they've got a really great following, too, they've played huge shows, but I'm not so into - this is as a promoter, too- bands that come in, and the fans destroy the room." 

We Got Your Disease

With such hardcore friends, Lisa's obviously got a punk pedigree, but she prefers the Rollins band over Black Flag. She cites Girlschool as a primary influence, but she wears a Tree shirt onstage. So is Lisa Christ a punk chick, or a metal chick? "I think I'm a little of both", she says. " Last night I saw the Circle Jerks where I work, and it was amazing, and I remembered that influence on me, but growing up, Jimmy Page was always my favorite, and then the Sex Pistols, and Chris Haskett from the Rollins band. He was huge, probably one of my biggest influences." There are other influences at the core of Lisa Christ Superstar, but they're more medicinal than musical- a river of alcohol and a vast cache of dodgy chemicals, the long gone legacy of Christ that still colors her rock and roll after many years of nail biting abstinence. Her straightforward, heat seeking lyrics in songs like "Copping in the Graveyard" and "One Man Train Wreck" tell the terrible true tale in all its gory details. I mention one of my favorites to her, the venom spitting 'War Machine'. "I used to do a lot of drugs", she readily admits. "I'm in recovery now, have been for about 7 years. Anyway, the line was, 'I was a dope smoking motherfucker, and I don't want to hear another single fucked up thing I've done to your head, because I'm at war, baby'. That's a weird line that you picked out, because I can remember when I was using, people would tell me about things that I've done to them, and even after I stopped, you know what I mean? Whether I was doing drugs or not, people would always talk about stuff I've done to them, and I just felt like, what about all the stuff you've done to me?" Lisa thinks LCS is a chance to offer a much needed alternative to the typical dead end trail of rock and roll decadence. "When I was growing up, I didn't have any female role models, except for Chrissie Hynde, I love her, and Girlschool. But I didn't have anybody around me that said that it was cool not to drink, not to do drugs, you know what I'm saying? So, I got wrapped up in all that. Now, there's a whole straight edge movement that wasn't real popular [back then]. It was my choice, of course, to drugs, but I succumbed to a lot of peer pressure. You know that whole idea- if you want to be a rock star, you've got to do drugs- but it doesn't really work out that way. In the song 'Wreckage', I write about that- 'I'm a rock star, through the wreckage, gonna live my life going straight edge'. I don't oppose to people drinking, I mean my job as a promoter, I want people to buy beer at the bar, which really messes my up in my head, but people want to drink, I've got no problems with that, it's just something I can't do anymore." Now almost a decade into sobriety, she's finally settled into a drug and alcohol free existence, with only rock left as a lasting obsession. "My boyfriend, Scott, he's also in the band, he's the drummer; he's sober too, so that helps a lot, but it's not always easy. I've said prayers in every dirty bathroom from here to wherever." 

Hostile City, USA

Is Philadelphia really the City of Brotherly Love? "I haven't figured that out yet", Lisa says. "If you're a scenester, play pop music, and have a mod haircut, than Philly loves you. The scene in Philly is very 'indie'. People like indie bands, the shoegazing stuff, a lot of pop. I've never been into that at all." LCS are outsiders in their hometown, Lisa being one of the few wavers of the freak flag left. "The scene outside the city is a lot better", she tells me. "The problem is that in Philadelphia is that there's just not a huge rock scene. We've played with the Gaza Strippers, Atomic Bitchwax, Spirit Caravan - I'd rather have us play with bigger bands. It's cool to be put on a good local bill, but there's not too many big drawing rock bands in town. Luckily, we've been able to play with a lot of cool out of town bands when they come through." To make up for the home disadvantage, the band is planning to start strafing the outlying regions for more fertile pockets of rock-New York, DC, Baltimore. Their initial forays were mostly successful missions, with one glaring exception. "Probably our worst show- we got accepted to this thing - somebody called me from Virginia, and they got our tape, these two girl promoters. They wanted us to play this women's music thing in Harrisburg, Virginia. We thought it would be cool, we've played in Richmond before, so we said, cool, let's get out there. 5 of the longest hours I've ever driven, and we pull up- I told them off the bat what we were like, I told them to listen to the record, they told me they knew what we were like- so we pull into this coffee shop, and it's like, hippies, and girls with their acoustic guitars. We rolled in with our cabinets, and it was just like, oh my God. It was a coffee shop, it was really quiet, and I was like, you know what? I'm not gonna sacrifice for that, I'm playing. Oh, it was awful." She laughs. " They had chairs pulled up really close to the stage, and they were all just sitting there. We started playing and it was just awful. And that was a quote unquote women's night, and I was just like, we really gotta check these things out first, because I don't know how many of these I can do."

Pour Some Sugar on Me

"There's some great bands with women in them, like Stinking Lizaveta, we love playing with them, and Thorazine, Squatweiller- there's some great rock bands with girls in them, but there's only a handful that are signed to like, majors, and I can't understand why there hasn't been a really big breakthrough. That's something that I really want to do." It's been said that women playing rock is self-defense, a way of breaking out of the gender-ghetto that rock and roll typically confines women in- the groupie or the sex goddess. Lisa's been doing her part to shatter these stereotypes. "I do a lot to support female musicians", she tells me. " I have a balcony night at the Troc once a month called Sugar Town, and it's been very successful- but how can I say this? I've never been comfortable with the female thing when I play; I've always felt more masculine. All my role models have been very masculine, from David Lee Roth, to Lemmy, to Henry Rollins. He's a very masculine guy, but I really grabbed on to his lyrics." That explains why she can make references to 'getting hard' in her lyrics so convincingly. It also explains why she's been attracting a fan base of young women, who aspire to her sense of female empowerment. "Yeah, we've played a couple of all ages venues and that's been really cool", she says. "Young women coming up to me- that's very new to me. When I played in Savage 3D, I used to wear stuff that was more revealing, you know what I mean? And I had a lot of guys coming up to me. But now, I just play what I want to play, I wear what I want to wear, and women come up to me, and that means a lot to me. Just to see a woman get up there, and not care about all that, and just play, I think that's great. My whole life I've been like that. I don't really like the mopey, 'Oh, my boyfriend left me' kind of thing, and I've always identified myself more with males, just because I have mostly male friends, most of the musicians I've played with have been men, and when I'm on stage, I feel very masculine, more masculine than feminine. But I'm very feminine, too, so it's very bizarre. I feel like I'm right down the middle, so I want to have songs where guys can totally identify, too. But when girls come up to me after a show, I love that, it makes me feel so great."

Toilet Girls

"One time in Savage 3D, we opened for the Jason Bonham band at the Troc, and there was this one guy yelling 'Take your top off!'. So my bass player and my drummer took their tops off." Lisa laughs at the memory. "I was just like, you know what? I used to think that was cool, but I don't anymore. I've seen girls on stage take their clothes off, and the guys are all like 'Oh my God', but really, how much people pleasing do I need to do? It just makes me feel cheap, and it's just not something I want to do. That's why it's important to me when women come up to me after a show." The down-tuned sexuality of Lisa's persona is the result of yet another lesson learned. There were times in the past when she was asked to be downright kittenish. "I was. I had that, and it was called Twat. We opened for the Toilet Boys in Philadelphia, and the other girls, they wanted to get dressed up, and I was like, 'I'm not getting dressed up, I just want to play in my jeans and my t-shirt, and that's it. And ever since then- I don't know, most of the girls, maybe 90% of the girls I've met, except for 1 or 2, were always into the 'cuter' aspect of it, and I never wanted to be involved with that", she tells me. "Twat was some of the best musicians in Philadelphia. There was Wendy from the 440's, Joanne from Thorazine and this girl from this band called Pang; she's a great drummer. We did a lot of covers, you know, 'Hot For Teacher', stuff like that, and we were just starting to write some originals, and then, they just started with the cutesy stuff, and I didn't want to be involved. I learned my lesson about doing that when I play; I'll never do that again. One time I had this short skirt on, and I think I put my foot up on the monitor", she laughs, leaving me to fill in the blanks. "And I said to myself, I just can't be doing this'. I've learned that I'm just much more comfortable my little uniform- my jeans, my work boots, my Led Zeppelin belt buckle, and I'm good to go."

Eat My Dust

The only grievance a danger rock fan can have about Lisa Christ Superstar's fast, fucked, and furious debut EP is that it only clocks in at 12 minutes total. You barely have time to find a suitable wall to crash your mean machine into while it blasts away before it's over. Luckily, help is on the way. "My friend Frank, he's in a band called Anthrophobia, he's got his own record label, he wants to put our record out. I want to put out another 5 song CD. A lot of people want us to put out a full length, but I really don't want to do that, I just want to put out something with 5 songs, so we can sell it for 5 bucks. Maybe people can just get a collection going. I don't want to put out a full length until we get signed to a label." Leave them wanting more, the pop narcotic credo. "Exactly. Nobody wants a band that plays for too long, nothing's worse than that. So we should have a new record out by April or May." And just to keep things interesting, there's the 'high concept' project. "We're working on a Captain Beefheart tribute record." Obviously, this bears some explaining. "It's a very weird project. It's a Captain Beefheart record, and all the bands have a girl in them. Very bizarre. It's being put out by Mike Villers, he's got very eclectic tastes. He's the guy that put out the Jim Carroll tribute record a few years back. We're going to record our song for that in February." I ask Lisa if she was a fan of Beefheart's experimental freak-out rock before the project. "Oh my God, no", she laughs. "But I've been listening to it, and the song we're doing for it is called 'Plastic Factory', and it's a really good song. I like it more than I did before. I actually wanted to get someone else to sing on it, I wanted to ask the singer from Rancid Vat, but Mike said no, he wanted a girl. I'm flattered to be asked to do it, though. We're going to have a lot of fun with it, it should be a great record." If anybody can turn the ramblings of an old hippy drug casualty into screaming rock action, it's Lisa and her apostles. Look for the Superstar machine at a sweaty rock dive near you this spring - just don't spike Lisa's coke. Rock and roll is all the fuel she needs.

For more info and LCS swag, check out www.lisachristsuperstar.com 

Next issue - Living the glamorous life with Hollywood's own Leigh Silver. 

- I smoke my cigarettes with style, Sleazegrinder