I
had a dream the
other night: There were fuzzy bunnies leaping over a thumbnail crescent moon in
a beautiful, azure sky. The bunnies were being chased willy-nilly through
fields of pink daffodils, where little blue smurfs bantered about little blue
smurf-things and a golden unicorn grazed in a dappled, sunlit field. In the
background, I could hear children giggling and the most gorgeous music I’d ever
heard wafted in on a cool ocean breeze, redolent with the scent of honeysuckle
and Aunt Bea’s steaming apple pies.
And then the dream began to change: I heard someone yell “Pull!” and fuzzy
bunny number one exploded in a shower of bone fragments and singed fur. A
gentle rain pattered down around me, bright, bright red and when I caught some
on my tongue, it tasted like a mouthful of dirty pennies.
The smurfs were no longer blue. In fact they weren’t really smurfs after all.
They looked more like Elvis’ evil twins, white-trash sex dwarves manhandling
guitars and doing unspeakable things to the unicorn, who grunted soundlessly in
pain and dismay (although those watery equine eyes told a different story). The
children were screaming now, and the air smelled like Pine-Sol and sweaty vinyl
upholstery with funny little stains on it. The crust of Aunt Bea’s pie was
roiling like a miniature stormfront. Those weren’t apples in there. No way.
Uh-uh.
Abruptly I woke up. I have these sorts of dreams a lot these days. I blame
them entirely on the Flametrick Subs and their cohorts in sin, Satan’s
Cheerleaders. I can’t wait for bedtime these days, lemme tell ya….
Every Wednesday night now, for going on a full year, local psychobilly
graverobbers from hell, the Flametrick Subs, have been taking Paul Sessums’s
Black Cat lounge and turning it into a combination of White Trash Deluxe and
Russ Meyer’s secret fantasy playground. Fronted by rhythm guitarist/songwriter
Buster Crash, lead guitarist Clem Hoot’s insanely tight, six-stringed
flailings, and rounded out by a thundering, whiplash rhythm section in the form
of Peggy Suicide’s upright bass stylings and Johnny Cat’s busted-soul standup
drumwork, the Subs have managed to parlay some of the sickest, meanest,
nastiest psychobilly swamp-rock into a working near-legend. Austin is a town
that loves to sin, and the Subs and their shimmying backup dancers, Satan’s
Cheerleaders, sin like they mean it.
“It’s difficult to come up with a working definition of what we sound like,”
says Crash, “but a good one is — if the Cramps were from Texas.” Adds lead
guitarist Clem Hoot, “It’s a hoedown. More than that, really. We’re definitely
a live act, although we’ve just cut a CD.”
The CD in question, Amaze Your Friends With X-Ray Glasses, came about
as a result of the band’s incendiary Emo’s performance at this year’s SXSW. Set
for a November release on Teen Rebel Records out of Miami, Florida, the CD is
crammed with sick and wrong tales of white-trash debauchery and Bad Girls Gone
Worse. “The term psychobilly has been bandied about so much lately,” says
Crash, “that it seems to encompass a very broad range of things. If you’re not
traditional rockabilly, like High Noon, and you’re not a grunge band, if you
fall somewhere in between that, then you’re psychobilly. Not that we consider
ourselves a grunge band. I hate those guys. I break ’em like fucking twigs.”
Crash continues: “What I’ve discerned about it, the rockabilly scene here in
Austin, and probably in other places too, is that’s there’s a division. You’ve
got your traditional rockabilly cats and then there [are] the people who are
really more open to permutations on that theme. To some people, like, say High
Noon, if it’s not 1954 or earlier, it doesn’t bear listening to. They think
we’re speed metal. And that’s a quote.
“I personally like the whole shebang. I listen to and absorb everything — at
least in modern rockabilly music — from the Cramps to High Noon. I like it
all, but unfortunately, there seems to be some sort of rift between the
crowds.”
In the year since the Subs have been slotted as regulars at the Black Cat, the
hump-day crowds (test your white-trash I.Q. on that one why dontcha?) have
mushroomed from a few starving psychobilly fanatics to a huge, swollen
Sin-O-Rama free for all, frequently spilling out onto the street and sucking in
unsuspecting passers-by like maggots to a dead raccoon. (And I mean that in the
very best sense of the phrase.) Much of this groundswell in popularity falls
squarely on the heads of Satan’s Cheerleaders, a beyond-sexy triumvirate of the
devil’s own backup squad. They shimmy, they grind, they ooze giggly evil in
such quantities that rumor has it Paul Sessums had to hire someone just to mop
up the sticky little puddles of lust left over after every gig. Forget about
lipstick on your collar — you’ve got sin-juice on your shoes.
Currently made up of Shayne Wallis, Brandi Soules, and Nicole Labry, the
Cheerleaders act as a visual stimulant to the band’s snakeskin melodics. “I
went home one night and said a prayer that maybe we’d have Satanic cheerleaders
at our next show,” says Crash, “and lo and behold, there they were, Halloween
Night, 1995. If you can’t dazzle them with your musical abilities, throw some
tits and ass on the stage and they’ll stick around.”
 Shayne Wallis and Brandi Soules photograph by Johnny Medina |
complete with “666” emblazoned on their, um, “robust chestal regions,” horns on
their heads, and black and red pom-poms, the Cheerleaders are juicy, squirmy
eye candy for the Damned Generation.
Wallis: “When an audience comes to see us, I want them to be confused. I want
them to feel like somebody tied them up and gave them that date-rape drug. They
should wonder if we’re serious or not. If they leave scratching their heads and
sweating a lot, then we’ve done our job.”
While not officially part of the band, the Cheerleaders remain integral to
the lascivious, unholy, decidedly un-Christian nature of the Flametrick Subs
Experience. “The band stands on its own, really,” asserts Wallis. “They’re
great by themselves, and they certainly don’t have to have us there, but we’re
just sort of a dark little bonus you get when you pay your cover charge and
walk in.”
Imagine what Jerry Lee Lewis would have done had he had Satan’s Cheerleaders
behind him in his glory daze. Well, okay, it’s probably easier to imagine what
The Killer would have done to Satan’s Cheerleaders, but that’s a whole
other line of debauchery. Suffice to say, on any given night, the Subs are
mind-numbingly bizarre, the Cheerleaders are drop-dead gorgeous, but put ’em
together on the same stage and you’re going to hell satisfied.
Lip-licking, blood-drinking good fun, boring Christians be damned.
“As I told my mom,” says Wallis, “in this day and age, people like Bad Girls,
and by no means are they going to come and see `Jesus’s Cheerleaders.’ If you
want to be a Bad Girl onstage and you want to be a cheerleader, what better
than Satan’s Cheerleaders? And if we were going to be backing the Devil’s
football team, what would his number be? 666, of course. See, it all makes
sense if you just stop to think about it….”
Buster Crash: “In my humble opinion, rock & roll and Satan have always
kind of gone hand in hand. You take the two apart and you get music without the
`rock & roll,’ and then if you try to throw God into the mix, you end up
with crap. Every time. Just ask Amy Grant. I mean, even Chuck Berry, that old
shit-eater, or the Rolling Stones…. We just advertise it a little more.”
Which begs the question: How does Austin’s local Southern Baptist community
feel about all this hell-raising?
“We haven’t really had much trouble from the Christians yet,” says Crash, “but
boy, we can’t wait ’til we do. My buddy John wants to dress up in sackclothes
and Birkenstocks and head down to the Drag to round up a bunch of those
Pentecostals and tell ’em, `Boys, I’m with you 100 percent! Have you seen
what’s going down at the Black Cat on Wednesday nights? They’ve got nubile
young girls cheering for Satan himself!” Hell, we could get a bunch of people
protesting out front. Good for business. It worked for Malcolm McLaren,
anyway.” n
The Flametrick Subs celebrate their one-year anniversary Halloween night at
the Black Cat.
This article appears in November 1 • 1996 and November 1 • 1996 (Cover).