The band repeatedly sold out the venue, with The Plasmatics helping to give Irving Plaza national recognition and launch it on the path to becoming an established rock venue in New York City. Rod Swenson soon made a deal to book what was then a little known polka hall called Irving Plaza from the Polish War Veterans who ran it at the time. The group quickly outgrew CBGB’s, largely because there were no intermediate rock venues to play in New York City at that time. They had lines stretching around the block and brought more fans into CBGB’s during this time than any other band in its history. From playing a single weekday night, they moved quickly to playing repeated stands of four nights straight with two sold-out shows each night. Williams record ever recorded.įrom their initial gig at CBGB’s, The Plasmatics quickly rose in the New York City Punk Underground scene of the time. Guitarist Wes Beech joined the group he would become, after Wendy, the only permanent member of the group playing or touring behind or involved in the production of every Plasmatics and Wendy O. The band quickly realized they needed another guitarist to hold them together musically. The earliest version of the band was a three piece put together with a strong emphasis on visuals. Wendy and Rod began auditioning potential band members in 1977 and, in July 1978, the “Plasmatics” gave their first public performance at what would later become the rock shrine CBGB on New York City’s Bowery. The earliest known photo of the Plasmatics taken in the 1970s. She answered the ad and applied for a job. The issue lay open to a page with an ad in the casting calls section for Rod’s theater. standing for Orlean and her initials spelling “WOW”) after Wendy happened upon a copy of Show Business Weekly someone had discarded on the bus station floor. Williams (her actual birth-given name, the O.
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He began a series of counter-culture projects which, by the mid-70s, found him in the heart of Times Square producing experimental counter-culture theater as well as video and shows with the likes of the then-little-known bands The Dead Boys, The Ramones, Patti Smith, and others. In 1977, Rod Swenson, who received his MFA from Yale where he specialized in conceptual, performance, and neo-dadaist art, held the view that the measure of true or high art is how confrontational it is. Bassists and drummers rotated frequently over the years.
Williams, guitarists Richie Stotts and Wes Beech, and manager Rod Swenson. The core of the band consisted of vocalist/front person Wendy O. The Plasmatics’ career spanned five studio albums. The band’s influence can best be felt in many female rock vocalists and bands that have came out in the last 20 years, most notably Courtney Love and many of the Riot Grrrl bands such as Bratmobile and Bikini Kill.
The influence of the group’s innovative mix of punk rock and heavy metal pioneered the music genre known as crossover punk. The band changed almost half its members with each album, and had over 17 different members playing with it over the 10 years that Wendy performed. She received a Grammy nomination for one of them as Best Female Rock Vocalist. William’s and the Plasmatics’ career (1977-1988) spanned seven albums, several of which were released as Wendy O. The group was banned in London where they were labeled as anarchists, and riots followed in Zürich and elsewhere. Williams was arrested multiple times and was seriously beaten in Milwaukee by the Milwaukee police before being charged with public indecency. In addition to chainsawing guitars on stage, blowing up speaker cabinets and sledgehammering television sets, Williams and the Plasmatics blew up automobiles live on stage. The band was a controversial group known for wild live shows that broke countless taboos as part of an assault on American popular culture. The Plasmatics were an American punk metal band, formed 1977 by Yale University graduate and radical anti-artist Rod Swenson with Wendy O.
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