Sabrina
RockArena of Cookie 
Driving on Holy Gasoline
Sleazegrinder at 100 mph
"Poets don't drive." - Zodiac Mindwarp
Sleazy rock journalism only pays the rent if you're homeless, so just like every other fucker on the street, I have to work some dopey day job to survive. However, I'm not one to suffer much, for art or anything else; so while most rock and roll lifers toil away scooping ice cream, manning xerox machines, or (even worse) doing PR work for hopeless nu-metal bands, I drive. Convertibles mostly, a Jaguar or a Porsche here and there. I show up at the airport at 7:30 in the morning, they hand me some keys and send me to New York, New Hampshire, Connecticut, wherever. Since I have to get there and back in 8 hours, I have to drive terribly fast most of the time.
During these speed trials, I rock. I rattle the windows and tweak the volume even higher, until my steering wheel is vibrating like a house-wife on a washing machine, until the music is like an all-engulfing, world-eating scream. If I didn't, I would surely go mad. Anybody that finds themselves trapped in a flash of squealing velocity for long periods of time knows what I'm talking about. You're never unaware that you are seconds away from a fiery death, that one false move will be the end of you and whatever unlucky soul you plow into. It's like the "Road Warrior" at $8.50 an hour. Whether it's Lord Humongous behind the wheel or just that one- armed drunk you saw at the Honeydew Donuts earlier, there are giant 18 wheeled monsters bearing down on you with grills like steel shark teeth just a few hungry feet behind your wafer- thin fiberglass bumper. Predatory cops, crazed cab drivers, lost tourists, the half-blind and heavily medicated elderly; they are all your enemies, all out to kill you, vicious speed demons from the netherworld in ill-fitting human masks. Then there's the fatigue. I'm a rocker, and at times a roller as well, so it's absurd for me to get up at 5:30 in the morning to go to work, let alone commandeer a moving vehicle. By noon, you can find me driving with only one watery eye open, torturing my nervous system with caffeine. Thank God for the rumble strip, it's like my ever- vigilant tarmac alarm clock.
All of which sounds like some daunting and perilous struggle, but that's just through the jaundiced eyes of a hack beat poet who still seems to labor under the delusion that the world owes him a favor. All I'm really doing is cruising around in new cars with the top down, blasting the sweet salvation of holy fucking rock and roll. There are worse fates. And so, as I grind the gears of these shiny new machines, my ears burning with the kind of decibels I can't even achieve at home on my dented, wheezing boom-box, I sample the latest sonic witchcraft. As I do, I babble into the micro-recorder, capturing the rock as it happens, a sort of half-assed black box, ensuring an absurd post-mortem investigation. "What happened?" my grieving widow will ask, choking back her sobs. "Please tell me he didn't suffer too much." The state trooper will try to keep a straight face as he tells her, "Well, his last words were, 'This record makes me want to fuck something.' And then he slammed into the school bus at 95 miles an hour." Righteous.
Once in awhile, I'm lucky enough to have a rock starress ride shotgun with me. You'd be surprised how easy they are to find. Just go to the airport and hang around outside a terminal in a cool car cranking Motley Crue, they'll show up. A little cocaine residue on the dashboard doesn't hurt either. This time out, Cookie's blue-haired supergirl, Sabrina Rock Arena succumbed to my promise of candy and abandoned all logic, jumping into the car with nothing but a Johnny Cash lunchbox and a goofy smile for baggage.
Cookie play sexy muscle car rock, sleazy C&W dancing naked with glittery flash metal. Sabrina is their showy front fox on bass and vocals. Originally from the South Bay, Cookie abandoned the suntanned also - rans and never weres in California for the great and terrible, damp and fertile, post-grunge northwest, where they've been staking out their claim ever since. They're like some kind of girl powered Supersuckers, roots rock gone all evil, like the devil in a calico dress. Behind it all is Sabrina's whiskey drenched, chain smoking rasp, part heartbreak, part speed trap, all rock and roll, in the purest possible sense. She's like the best friend that you really, really want to make out with, the cool chick that can get you into, and thrown out of, every swinging joint in town, depending on her mood. The day we hung out, she was sick as a dog, sniffling into an Elvis handkerchief, still damp from the soaking rain of her home turf in Seattle. I asked her if she was up to the task of a high-speed rock interview, if maybe she just wanted to go home. She told me the road was her home. Then she told me to drive. We hit the fucking road.
The Rain Drips Down Like Death
"You know what the weirdest thing about Seattle is?" Sabrina asks me, as we pull onto 93 north, heading towards the beach. "You get into an elevator, and people with piercings and tattoos start talking about the weather for 15 minutes.
The weather is huge there." So is heroin, I add. "Well, it's gray all the time, it's depressing. It looks pretty ugly." As girls sometimes do with the aesthetically challenged, Sabrina fell in love with the grimy, soaking wet little city anyway. Cookie first played in Seattle in 1995, and they instantly found their new home. "The people in Seattle live for music, it's great. Where we were from, just south of San Francisco, it's like we were in the wrong area code. People there would go, 'Eww, you're a South Bay band?' but we'd leave town and people thought we were great. We had to get out of there, because there really wasn't any scene for us. So we moved to Seattle."Moving your rock band to Seattle in 1995 is kind of like moving into an apartment that still has the bloodstains on the walls and chalk-line on the floor from last week's murder/suicide. Grunge had burnt itself out into wet ash looking for a street sweeper by then. "Here's why I'm glad I wasn't around for all that", Sabrina explains. " If I was in Seattle at that time, then I'd be all embittered now, too. All those guys are going, 'there's nothing going on here now, it sucks compared to the way it used to be', and I'm like, 'this place is a fucking gold mine!' Those people don't know what a non-scene is. We've lived in one, so we know how good we've got it in Seattle."
I point out some local specimens to Sabrina. There's a palpable wrong-ness to the people hanging out near the airport, like the microwaves have re-arranged their DNA into new, strange, mutated shapes. "Coming from somewhere else, going to God knows where", she laughs. We shoot past the polluted Wollaston Beach boulevard, past shirtless old men wandering aimlessly, holding transistor radios up to their ears; past the noisy families crowded around the squat concrete bunkers selling boxes of clams, past the pastel colored trailer parks. It's time, I tell her, to do God's work. To spread the rock amongst the mutants.
7.29.01 - 10:30 a.m.
...Anyway, it's kinda like if there was a clan of sluggish hairy cavemen who spent the afternoon battering the shit out of giant wolf spiders to impress the women, and then 2 million or so years later, a trio of snarky longhaired limeys showed up in the same cave with a tape recorder to soak up the atmosphere...let's say lightning, or maybe fate was involved...the resultant mess, found by a bunch of Satanists looking for a goat killing spot a week later, would sound just like this here
Josiah record, "Out of the First
Rays". (www.josiahrock.co.uk) Blue Cheer-ful primo-scree that goes straight for the groin. I'm not accusing the cats at Delerium records of killing farm animals, or anything, but this record had to come from somewhere, right? Speaking of delerium, this
Clone record, "Not Feeling Like Yourself
Today?" (www.zun.com/evileye) is a swirling vortex of druggy hallucinations set to sleazy, female fronted new wave. Pinball tilting, robots-that-bleed music from computer geeks gone wrong, like if some aging hipster told a young Clone that they needed to listen to Alice Cooper if they wanted to know where it's at, but they bought "Flush the Fashion" instead of "Love It to Death."... Fuck, it's too goddamn hot to keep the top up...but I don't know if I can hang with having the
Lovelies
(www.lovliesonline.com) bleeding into the ears of the rest of the highway stars around me. I'd dig on this at home, if I had nothing to prove though, because it's pretty, in a sullen sort of way. Pop, yeah, but the kind that throbs, fueled by bad scenes and worse company. The blonde amazon chick in the halter top and cowboy hat and shades gives off the Nashville Pussy vibe, but this is closer to the sugar twins in the Breeders...Milwaukee Pussy, then. Roof down and shades on, I crank the arena roar of Vancouver's
Junky Gods
(www.junkygods.com) and let freedom fuckin' ring. Like a lot of Canadians these days, the Junky Gods are obsessed with Grand Funk, bringing on the mid 70's boogie metal groove with sweeping melodies, like a big ol' buzzard with cotton candy wings. The closest
thing I've heard to Chicago's legendary street-flash rockers Life, Sex, and Death since their homeless lead singer Stanley wandered off into some alley of obscurity. The stoner rock kids are gonna go crazy for these cats.
Ed's been behind me for about 20 miles now, and he's finally pulling me over, all frantic, flashing the high beams and blaring the horn. I pull into the emergency lane and walk over to his car. He's pissed.
"Ken, what the fuck are you doing? Throwing CDs out the window?!"
"Well, not any good CDs." I can tell it's gonna be a long morning.
Open Wide and Say My Name
Sabrina RockArena has one of the coolest handles in rock and roll. "I got it when we moved to Seattle, after we played the King Dome. They've torn it down since, but we were there, man! Shamefully, I gave the name to myself. Initially, it was just a joke, but then it stuck. But hey, my real name is Sabrina Liberty, what do you think of that?" A rock star by any name, Sabrina has found her self the center of attention back home. "Yeah, Paul Frank is making hand- bags in my name, I'm being asked to host all these shows, and I don't get it, because I'm a dork. I'm just some dork from the South Bay who couldn't make it in San Francisco." We stop for tea to soothe Sabrina's ragged throat. She tops the cup off with some Wild Turkey, poured out of a pewter hip flask, and talks about Cookie's place in the pantheon of post grunge Seattle. "We don't really know any of the hipsters, because we're not on a label", she explains. "Everybody knows that we're cool, though. I mean, we're not cool enough to actually play with the Murder City Devils, but they know who we are. But we do all right, because we play our asses off. I mean, we came up from the gutter, just from nowhere. So, it's awesome to be where we are." Where Cookie are, of course, is everywhere. Cookie have the kind of gig schedule that would drop most bands, and they're also set to release their second CD, "Sweat Soaked and Satisfied", a veritable jukebox of raunchy drag racing rock hits. I ask Sabrina who makes the dough in Cookie-land. "Cookie is pretty much me, because I'm the jobless fucker. Tommy Sparks (drums) teaches kids, and Jayme Layme, besides being an awesome guitarist, works in high- end software for films. He made a killer ten minute documentary on Zeke. I hope he does one on us, someday." What about Miss Liberty, though? Does Sabrina have an alter ego? " I was a tree dog", she admits. OK... But what the fuck is a tree dog? "I trimmed and cut trees, you know, chipper, dump-truck, chainsaw." Rather manly work for the punk Patsy Cline. "It was. Then I got to the point where I actually ran the crew. At first they doubted I could do it, but we turned out to be the best buds. I could handle all the shleppy, shlocky comments they could dish out, and give it right back to them. It was fun. That was my last job, back in California." No Seattle chainsaw wielding, then? " Look at me, I have blue hair. What else can I possibly do, except rock?"
7.30.01 - 11:45 AM
Heaven's Burning - "Free Agents" (www.heavensburning.com) I don't really care, because they're cute, but I think these chicks might be up to some, uh...God Rock. At least, they thank their savior, Jesus, right off the bat. And not in that Roadsaw "Thank you sweet fuckin' Jesus for getting us across the border without any cops checking the trunk' sort of way, either. The thing is, this sounds garage-y, and I may not be an expert on the genre, but I'm pretty sure garage rock is firmly in the devil's territory. Yeah, I know they have Christian Black Metal, but that's too stupid to even contemplate. Who knows, then, what lurks in the breasts of Heaven's Burning ? All I can tell you is that, although they don't rock at all, they jangle brightly, if that's your thing. Stiff Neck Roy (www.stiffneckroy.com) are definitely Satanists. All the songs on "Greatest Hits", smell of brimstone and bad intentions. Recorded live in the studio, SNR sound like a redneck Head of David, a poor white Big Black, if you will. Kind of like having buckets of black mud poured on your head, and then being knuckled in the mouth for complaining. Heavy. Speaking of the devil, along comes Box Car Satan (www.boxcarsatan.com) with "Days Before the Flood". Imagine some old blues man tossed down an elevator shaft with fizzing bottle rockets strapped to his chest, howling like a broken toothed dog all the way down. Psychedelic? No, psychotic...There are several ways to wear your black rock and roll t-shirt. You can just let that shit hang, like the stoner rock cats, or you can cut it at the belt buckle and roll up the sleeves like me and Gunsn'Roses. King Rat (http:jump.to./kingrat) tuck their shirts in, and I bet they shine their boots, too. Young , tough, and with something to prove, these rodents are all about tattooed knuckles and hard luck women. The 13 (natch) tracks on "Beautiful Songs For Ugly Children" take on the jail- time raunch swagger of Social Distortion and the rootsy punk buzz of early Soul Asylum in equal gulps. King Rat could go either way, really. They sweeten this sound up a little, and it's Warped tour all the way, with skateboard endorsements and Rancid chicks for groupies. Or, they could put on some cowboy hats, suffer a few scars, and give the Supersuckers a run for their money. Let's hope they spend a little time drinkin' in Tucson, losing at poker with Willie Nelson on the radio.
The fatal flaw of goth music is that it's the least scary people possible trying to spook you out. I mean, who're you going to sit next to on the subway, a mental patient with scabs on his face, holding a coffee cup full of worms, or some pasty, anorexic kid with too much mascara? Right. So no one's going to cower and shriek from the black threads of gloom weaved by
Sins of Lust (www.sinsoflust.com), a youthful gang of electro dark-wavers from Atlanta, but their "Taste of Sin" demo is about as state of the art as death rock gets, with a trio of black vinyl -wrapped hotties moaning and chanting all ethereal-like, as the boys in fishnet shirts churn out
post - Sisters of Mercy cemetery glam, not unlike their vampiric brethren in Nosferatu or Rosetta Stone. Equally undead but with an added twist of Cain, on their new album "Vamp",
Mr. Underhill (www.mr-underhill.com) sound like a thinner, sexier Danzig crooning out the death blues, circa 1955. Evil is timeless, after all.
To Rule My Kingdom, You Must Use Fire
It's 102 degrees in Boston today. Sabrina and I stop at a car wash, dig through our pockets for quarters, and drop them all into the automated wash slot. The metal hose gushes with icy water. We wet ourselves down, and drink the rest. As we dry out on the hood of the candy apple Sebring, she tells me about the Cookie live experience.
"It's all about the pyrotechnics", she says. Explosions? Fireworks? "Yeah. That's Tommy Sparks, it's his thing. We've been doing it for a year and a half. Tommy's a genius when it comes to that stuff. He makes it himself. Like tuna fish
cans - those are our flash pots. It's awesome. Of course, that's something else we had to go through with the hipsters, like 'what's all that for? You guys don't need all that shit'. Well, you know what? When we blow something up, look away." Visual flair is something you find in most female fronted bands, and Cookie are no exception. "Well, girls are raised on dressing up", Sabrina says. "So there's the idea that things have to be visually good. Guys don't even know how to dress themselves." No kidding. Just look at what any given stoner rock band is climbing on stage wearing. Sabrina laughs. "But that's their appeal, isn't it? I love all those big fat greaseballs. C'mon, big daddy!"
"I was in that opera, Carmen, when I was 11 years old." Sabrina's recalling her pre-rock star days. "I played one of the town's children. I had one line, you want to hear it?" I tell her I do. "Silencio!" she trills, in perfect pitch. "That's the only Italian I know. Well, that and 'Ciao'." Although that was the beginning and end of her career in opera, her father was an accomplished singer. "There was always a piano and a guitar in the house", she says. "We had a very musical family. My brother is a dancer in the Oakland ballet. And no", she laughs, "He's not gay. You think rock is hard? Dancing is way harder. And he makes a big portion of his living from doing it. How cool is that?" I point out to her that she makes a living on stage as well, albeit a sweatier and more beer soaked one. "Oh yeah", she beams, "I'm a professional! Not a very expensive one, though. Once we played a gig for six dollars and fifty cents." I ask her how such a thing could happen. "Well, it wasn't all that bad. It was in San Diego, I think, some college town. Nobody showed up, there was like 12 people there. So we only made 7 bucks at the door. But hey, we made 200 bucks on merchandise that night, with only 12 people in the room, so they must have liked us. Before that, it was one of those nights where everybody was fighting for the last penny, like 'I need 50 cents for a Big Mac!' We got lucky." The Cookie t-shirts saved the day. "I'll lift the amps myself to get to the merchandise if we're desperate enough", she says. " I don't really like doing that, but I will if I have to. Sometimes,
though - some guy will be outside the show staggering around, going 'hey, I wanted to buy a CD!' and I'm like, 'You know what, buddy? You don't need a CD, you just need an omelet. Take your five bucks down to the diner!"
8.01.01- 9:00 AM
Punk City - "Adventures in Punk City" (www.punk-city.com) Like Van Hagar never happened, Detroit's Punk City hit the ground running with a stunningly over-the-top flash metal racket, like a Panzer tank with a confetti cannon on top, shooting up the streets with pink streamers. "Adventures" sounds so much like the strutting intro to every Mammoth-era Van Halen song that you probably wouldn't even believe me if I told you that it wasn't actually Diamond Dave screaming "All right! Are you ready to rock and fucking roll?!" but that hardly matters. They still need you to answer the goddamn question. 6 months from now, every slightly slutty cocktail waitress in America is going to be sporting a Punk City half-shirt, so get with the program, punk. Barreling down a completely different track, 1880's "Guilt
Train" (Bootlick records) is one of the God-damnedest things I've heard in long time. Imagine shit-kicker redneck country, the coyote killing, moonshine swilling Hank Williams variety, played with authoritative ferocity by a southern stoner-metal band. Certainly, other bands have tried to tread down this precarious path, like Copperhead and Iron Horse; hell, even Blackfoot shook it down to hard city once in awhile, but all those cats are lightweights compared to the sheer hammer- down crunch of 1880. This record will get you so laid next time you blow through the southern territories. Texans
Iatan (www.iatantexas.bizland.com) have also got more than a shot-glass full of dixie in their sound. Their take on the rock has the sort of drunken swagger that the Black Crowes lost a few years back on their way to becoming a druggy jam band. Rednecks with slink, if you will, cowboys sipping something uptown. Fans of Zakk Wylde's southern rock band Pride and Glory will feel right at home in the smoky confines of the Iatan saloon. Who the fuck knows what their name means, tho.
Jane Doe (www.janedoe.com) take a wild stab at sultry fuck rock in this collection of career-spanning demos I've got here, but they miss the throbbing jugular thanks to the plucking bass lines and fat fingered synth chords that remind me of every sports-bar nightmare I've mistakenly stumbled into, where baseball games glare silently from giant screen TV's, and overaged frat boys play darts and goose each other. I think you know what I'm talking about. Circus magazine likes them, though, and was it not Circus that first reported that Nikki Sixx once fucked a chick in a coffin? They obviously know the score over there.
Gimmie Some Skin
Route 84 is a straight line for almost a hundred miles, so we get on it, and I crunch the pedal. As the backdrop of trees and metal barriers begin to blur, Sabrina tells me about one of Cookie's more triumphant moments. " We had a naked chick!" She yells over the engine's roar. "The last time we played the Break Room, that's this club in Seattle, this chick proceeded to take everything off. Like she was getting into the tub or something, not like a striptease at all. So she takes off all her clothes, and then she starts dancing around. I mean, this chick wanted me. So I had to do something." I feel a happy ending coming on. "Well, I wanted her to know that what she did was a damn good thing. So I just gave her a big fat kiss." Now, that's worth $6.50.
Even her current feverish state, Sabrina looks like a million bucks, so it's no wonder that she's recently taken up modeling as a side-line hobby. "People are always asking me to be in catalogs", she says. "The last one was for this on- line thing, although I don't know how 'on -line' it's going to be. I mean, it took hours getting this thing together. They had the stylists, the hair, the clothes. They figured, well, she's into rock and roll, so we're going to get her in more of a real setting, shoot her at a show. So the place they picked, I told them. I said, 'This is a punk rock barbeque, it's a real low- key affair. It's at a pub, they're serving beer, there's like 7 bands, I don't know if this is the kind of show you want to shoot at.' But they were like, 'No, no, this is what we want to do'. So they get all of us together, all these models and me, and we're all made up, and they put us in a shuttle and take us down there. They took some of the other girls and shot them in the back lot, which they thought was really cool, because it was very 'street', you know, rusty cars and dirt, and they're even getting some of these crusty, gutter punk kids in the shots.
They're loving it. So then it's time to get me on stage. It's the first song out, and the place explodes into a pit. This chick, she had her little light umbrella, she's got her light meter going. I'm going, 'Oh my God, this is going to be a nightmare.' Right away, her umbrella goes spinning into the air. Her camera flew into the air, I think she might have caught it, but she split her lip, and then she disappeared into the pit. I don't know, maybe she cracked into a million pieces and dissolved into the atmosphere. I mean, she was gone. I felt bad, so I went looking for her after the show. She was hardcore, man, she said she was fine. I don't know, she said she got some shots, but it didn't look like she got a thing, because the room erupted almost instantly. That was a weird shoot." I ask Sabrina if she likes being such a high profile rocker. "I don't think you choose it", she says with a smile, "I think it chooses you. I just go along for the ride."
Ed's voice crackles over the walkie talkie on the dashboard. He wants to know where I've been for the last 4 hours. I tell him that it's complicated. I ask Sabrina where she wants me to drop her off. "I just want to go to some bar where they serve hard liquor", she says. I take her to one.
For more information on Cookie, check out their website: www.cookiefactory.com
8.05.01 - 10:15 AM
Listening to Doom Metal on the road is a weird experience. I end up slowing down to 15 mph on the expressway, with a mile of angry motorists bleating their horns like surly goats behind me.
Abdullah (www.meteorcity.com) are a prime example of the genre, with riffs that chug and churn with a sluggish disgust, as if each guitar stroke hurts the poor bastard that's playing them. Their self-titled debut has that whole broken-spirited, sinners-crawling-to-Jesus-on -wounded-knees aura of rampant unease that defines Doom rock, and they add a little cross- eyed pseudo religion into the mix to just to make you more uncomfortable. You know, Eastern philosophy over piles of teeth, Muslims in the woods chanting in arcane tongues, saints drowning in seas of mud. Heavy, Jack. This record will never, ever get the members of Abdullah laid, but they may have actually achieved some form of dark art here, which will hopefully act as some sort of solace in their celibacy. One thing the chicks have always dug, though, is Iggy Pop. As Impaler once said, the motherfucker was bad before there was bad, and I imagine he will continue to be saluted for his peanut butter smearing, self lacerating antics and primal blues-punk roar long after we're all dead.
POP OD (www.staticrecords.com) is the latest tribute record to salute Jimmy Iguana. A few years back, there was an all-star, uber-hip Ig trib called "We Will Fall", which featured Joan Jett growling about bein' yer dog, which was a very fine rock and roll moment indeed. POP OD doesn't take such Hollywood glam tactics, however, as all the contributing artists are obscure, but at least they're all from the Detroit area, lending some Motor City
creedance to the affair. Half of the tracks are Stooges songs, of course, but only Agent 007, Red September, and the ever lovin' Trash Brats actually play the songs down and dirty like the originals. The rest could more accurately be called 'interpretations' rather than covers. There's the lounge Iggy, the new wave Iggy, the ambient Iggy, the spoken word Iggy; and while this may all seem rather upsetting to the stiff lipped purists among us, I think it's a fitting testament to a cat that spoke with a visceral truth to many different flavors of rock and roller. And it sure beats the latest hunk of rusty art metal that Iggy himself just released...I had been avoiding this
Oversouled record, "The End of Dreams" (www.madroad.bizland.com) for a while now, because the front cover has a statue on it, and nothing good is ever celebrated with statuary. Well, I'm not saying they completely broke the curve on this, but at least it's not the space-prog garden gnome music I imagined. Oversouled sound like Soft Cell belting out a few Alarm numbers. I know what you're
thinking - Marc Almond would never, in a million years, indulge in any bombastic working man's jangle rock anthems. Well, I didn't think so either, but here it is.
8.09.01 - 7:30 AM
Dear Jesus, please don't let me mouth off to any cops today. Matter of fact, just keep me the fuck away from state troopers completely, if you can.
9:30 AM
I get pulled over for speeding in Quincy. When the cop comes over to the window, I accidentally call him a motherfucker. He gives me a $205 dollar ticket. Jesus hates me.
Next Issue: Suckling honey with Queen Bee as my tattoos melt in the heat.