Final Years and Tragic End

This is exactly right Double Elvis . The thing about AI for business , it may not automatically fit the way your business works . At IBM, we've seen this firsthand , but by embedding AI across HR, IT, and procurement processes, we've reduced cost by millions, slashed repetitive tasks, and freed thousands of hours for strategic work. Now we're helping companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business . Let's create smarter business , IBM . Refresh your yard this summer with fourth of July savings from the Home Depot. Choose your power starting at ninety nine dollars with tools from trusted names like Riyobi and Milwaukee. From backyard get togethers to end of summer upgrades, Fourth of July savings on cordless tools deliver the power and mobility to keep up with every job without slowing you down. Power on the go is here and summer projects are easier than ever with the Home Depot. While supplies last, see store online for details. Shellvy Power Nitro Plus fuels every drive from the Pacific Coast Highway to the Sierra Peaks with a fuel like no other. It contains active coating ingredients that clean and protect for longer lasting engines. That means more protection with active ingredients for longer lasting engines. Shellva Nitro plus Premium gasoline, engine performance that lasts. Chances are you're not far from a shell station. Find it using the shell app. Formulation unique to Shell compared to minimum detergent gasoline with continuous use of shell vow nitro plus and gasoline direct injection engines. Actual effects and benefits may vary. See shell. Us slash more dash protection for more information. This episode contains content that may be disturbing to some listeners. Please check the show notes for more information . Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis The story of Wendy Oilliams is shocking. She was a sex show dominatrix turned rock and roll front woman who blew up cadillacs on stage . She also smashed TV sets with a sledgehammer and cut guitars in half with a chainsaw. And she did so with nothing but electrical tape or shaving cream covering her bare breasts . Her stage show was so violent and so sexual that she was banned from clubs and blacklisted by promoters. In one city, she was beaten so badly by local police that she suffered a broken nose and a concussion . Like our best rock and roll outlaws, Wendy O Williams was provocative to her core , as provocative as a com actually, although I'm not sure I can go as far as to say that she made great music. Did she? Did she not? I don't know, but I do know that the music at the top of the show here that was not great music. That was a preset loop from a melatron called Times Square Titillation MK one . I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to All My Life by KC and Jojo . And why would I play you that specific slice of Jodice adjacent cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on April sixth, nineteen ninety eight , and that was the day that Wendy O. Williams' life came to a tragic end in the woods of a small Connecticut town . Worlds away from the urban mayhem that defined her career for so long . On this episode, exploding cadillacs, sledgehammers, chainsaws, sex, violence, rock and roll , and Wendy O'Williams I'm Jake Brennan and this is The Screaceland From a young age, Wendy Orlene William s knew that her life would be an uphill battle , because the life that she wanted to live was by definition a resistance . She felt no obligation to be polite or to placate , nor did she desire to be pacified as a mindless consumer. Her life was a life of revolt . But Webster, New York, the town outside Rochester, where she grew up was built to quell uprisings of the mind, the body and spirit. A non conformist like Wendy had the odds stacked against her from the jump , and the battle that she would fight for her entire life began where many battles begin at home . Mitch Rider's voice screamed through the turntable's lone speaker, loud and distorted . It was as inspiring and life affirming as the rest of the house was dull . And before you could say fi fi five fu faux fum , this small bedroom in sleepy upstate New York had been transformed into a gritty street scene. Mitch Rider's Detroit wheels were turning fast and loose, kicking up dirt, coughing up smoke, splattering the canvas of post war America with a lust for life. And sixteen year old Wendy O' Williams was throwing herself around the room, singing along into a hairbrush . She may have been physically here in her family home , but in her mind, she was somewhere else. A place where you weren't told what to think or what to do or what to buy . A place where you weren't defined by your automobile or your television set or even by the clothes you wore . The only problem was that place was temporary, at least for now . The Devil with a blue dress forty five was only halfway done when the door to her bedroom suddenly flung open . Big rumbling footstep s announced the arrival of Wendy's father . He stormed across the room to the turntable, and he tore the needle from the record. He ripped the record off the platter , and with his hands firmly gripping the forty five on either side , he snapped it in half. Imagine that. Imagine you're just chilling in your bedroom back in the nineties or whenever early two thousands and you're staring up at your cranberry' psoster on the wall or playing Liz Fair's exile and guyville on your stereo, whatever it is. Maybe you had a Depech mode poster. Maybe you're listening to nine inch nails downward spiral at high volume, whatever it was. Imagine that your dad or your mom breaks down your door, tears the poster off your wall, rips the CD from your CD player, forbids you from listening to your music in their house, forbids you from doing the kinds of things a teenag er is supposed to do, which is, in a word, to rebel . Wendy O Williams may not have equated listening to Mitch Rider in the mid nineteen sixties with rebellion , and she simply may have just liked the raw sounds of the rock and roll song more than the dulcet tones of another Mitch, Mitch Miller, or whoever the hell her parents were into. Regardless , it was an early indicator that Wendy O' Williams was different , just like another incident a year prior , when she was arrested in town for sunbathing in the nude . The goal of the arresting officer, like her father's goal, had me toant shame her, to put her in a box just like everyone else. But it didn't work. The shame, the arrests, the broken record, even the prescription drugs that her parents tried to get her to take , nothing could silence Wendy's opposing force. Because there was no other choice . That was a reality that Wendy now made crystal clear . I'd rather be dead than be zombified in the world you're living in. This is what Wendy allegedly told her parent s right before she left home. At just sixteen , she was a runaway, a no man , determined never to look back . She hit ched a ride out west, landing in Colorado, and then south to Florida. She traveled abroad to Europe , finding work as a bartender and a dancer. She bounced around like this for years , and in her downtime, she combed the pages of Timothy Leary's psychedelic experience as well as books on tantric yoga and any and all transmissions from the fringes of so called normal society. But life is a non conformist had its struggles . For one, it didn't pay enough . So Wendy stole. She used counterfeit money and when she was caught, arrested, given a slap on the wrist and released , the authorities sent her packing back home to the United States . Just another child lost looking for people like her , the freaks out there willfully violating cultural taboos. The artists and eccent rics , truly authentic and truly transgressive types. In nineteen seventy six, at twenty seven years old, Wendy O Williams landed in New York City when Times Square was about as authentic and transgressive as it got . Boston had the combat zone, and New York City had Times Square . A spot for drugs, sex, and all other manner of illicit activity too shocking and deprave for polite society. Here was ground zero for prostitutes and pimps . Here were peep shows , derelicts and dealers . And here was where Wendy O Williams met the man who would change her life forever . Captain Kink in the bowls of a rundown b urlesque home, where the neon lights guide the way into the throbbing sights and sounds of urban titillation. It's Captain Kink's sex fantasy theater. Watch as Captain Kink and his troop profurious perform ers save the day by making your deepest, most hardcore fantasies come to life . There, running down Broadway, staring inside a crumbling theater with sticky floors and even stickier seats. It's a bird. It's a plane. It's Captain Kink . I shit you not. Captain Kink was the dude's name. Captain Kink was the gnome dismut of Rod Swanson, a yale graduate who told the establishment that they could stick their masters of fine arts degree up their tight, disapproving ass , and then went and put his education to use on the mean streets of nineteen seventy's Times Square. It was Rod, AKA Captain Kink, who had the last laugh, however, and by nineteen seventy six, he was laughing all the way to the bank . Captain Kink's Sex Fantasy Theater, a live show in which performers staged absurd comic vignettes that included scenes of live sex became a local sensation . In the rundown theater that Rod rented, exceeded one hundred fif andty, and soon he was selling out all one hundred and fifty seats . Five shows a day, seven days a week. It's a lot of kink . Now , true to his production name, Rod did all this by exploiting other people's fantasies and their kinks. But when it comes to kinks, you know, it takes all kinds. Some people like to be humiliated, some like to do the humiliating, some like pain, some like feet, some like simple pleasures like butter in their ass and lollipops in their mouth. I don't know, man. And there's also grown men who like to pretend that they're babies. I'm serious. Zeth, who works here at Double Lovis used to own a retail store that sold among other things bab y stuff, long story. He told me once about these dudes who would call and get a female employee on the line and ask, Do you have cloth diapers? And when the female employee replied yes, they did, the man would ask for details like, What materials are they made of ? And how much liquid do the diapers hold? And what about diaper creams? Can you describe how you would apply those? So I'm not kidding. That's told all of this to me. Anyways, I'm digressing big time here. Anyhow, just to finish this story, after being told by the employee how to apply said creams and how much liquid a diaper could hold and even more detailed instructions on cleaning soiled diapers . I know gross and after having done all of this while simultaneously giving the false impression that they were placing a huge phone order in the neighborhood of two or three thousand dollars , the dude with the kink about shitting of pants or whatever would suddenly get off of his kink and then the call would just abruptly end . Anyways , kinks they come in all kinds. That's what I'm saying. And back in the seventies, you could get off on this or particularly any other type of kink for a price over in Lower Manhattan at another experimental theater group called The Project . But at Captain Kinks, there was no pretending you're a baby type stuff. There was just the newly arrived Wendy O Williams who had joined Captain Kink's cast as the troop's resident dominatrix. She was blond , she was hot, and she got off on getting other people off, and she got off knowing that what she did pissed other people off as well. And when people pissed her off, when some paying customer decided to put his hands on her. She got off of the pain that she was able to dole out on them, being a true dominatrix and all. Her clinched fist meeting the saddle shaped area of Samacho Fucko's nose, the nasal root, as it were, hearing the the bone or cartilage or whatever was in there crackle and splinter and collapse and watching the blood spurt and then trickle down Macho Fucko here's quivering lip. Well that intoxicating mix of sex and violence that helped boost Wendy O Williams' notoriety . And the more her notoriety grew, the more she irritated the status quo , which is , well, that's what really made her happy. When the looming Democratic Convention in nineteen seventy six put pressure on the New York Police Department to clean up the streets , an antivice campaign resulted in Wendy being arrested eight times in a twelve week period. But she didn't care if she was handcuffed and hauled off to a holding cell because it was validation that what she was doing was working. She was getting under people's skin , but still, Rod Swenson, AKA Captain Kink, could see the writing on the wall. It was only a matter of time before their show would be shut down for good, before Times Square went from the combat zone to Disneyland . So Rod and Wendy needed a more legitimate business venture through which they could continue to kick against the pricks, so to speak . And they only had to look down the road to know what that would be . In the Bowery, punk rock was taking shape at CBG 's. But what came next would have made Wendy's Mitch Rider loving sixteen year old self proud because she was about to become a singer and a band , not just any band, a band that would push punk and rock and roll to a new extreme of violence and sexuality . A band that would become , by definition , the resistance Support is available twenty four seven with VerboCare . We're here day or night , ready whenever you need help because a great trip starts with the right support Okay , not so fun fact . Autoimmune skin conditions are actually on the rise . Cases are climbing nearly twenty percent every year. I know terrible opener for a podcast ad. But here's the thing. I'm Holly Fry, and our skin exists precisely because of stats like that. Because more people than ever are living with conditions like psoriasis and hydrodinitis supreativa, and most of them are doing it alone, without answers, without community , without anyone to tell them what the heck is actually going on. You know, not that many people knew about it and I felt kind of alone like Am I an outcast? That's where we come in. We talk doctors. We talk appointments that are well, a disappointment. We talk about the flare ups and the breakthroughs. Then we dive deep into the wild, occasionally gross, always fascinating history of how humans have tried to understand our skin over the centuries. Spoiler alert , we did not always get it right. Listen to season three of Our Skin, a Personal Discovery Podcast on the I Heart Radio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I spoke with Sergei Gosh, Heineken's chief AI officer to learn how the company is brewing up new workflows with AI. If you can connect all the different applications , all the platforms, remove fragmentation, scale very quick. That's what we call the best connected grower. That's where IBM is really partnering with us. Crack a callbo and listen to our full conversation at iBM dot com slash smart . These days, Pier sixty two on the Hudson River in New York City is the site of a skate park, a carousel , and a lush entry garden designed by one of the city's preeminent public garden designers, Lyndon Miller. In other words, that is, if New York's tourism agency is to be believed , it's a family friendly space. But back on september twelfth, nineteen eighty, Pier sixty two was the site of chaos , violence, and near total destruction. Let me set the scene . Along the edge of the pier, a makeshift concert stage five feet high and built out of plywood . Screaming fans crowd the perimeter and watch from the rooftops of nearby buildings as a helicopter touches down. Inside the helicopter are the members of one of the hottest punk bands in town at the moment, the Plasmatics. One by one, the plasmatics emerge in their typical eye catching guitar. The guitarist Richie Stots, wears a white French maids out'f it with a white tutu to match. His Mahawk is inspired by Travis Bickle, who, four years later, still haunts the filth and the scum of this city. Another guitarist, West Beach, is dressed in a tuxedo with fat streaks of eyeblack drawn across his cheeks, like a linebacker ready to eat shit on the gridiron. No one in the crowd knows that the instruments that they're about to play are cheap and disposable, a kind that are made to be destroyed . Nor does anyone watching know that sitting just beneath the stage are giant oil drums cut in half and filled to the brim with gasoline , waiting for a spark. The band plays hard and fast. They're like the Ramones on speed if you can imagine that. After a few songs, their lead singer, Wendy O Williams, her blonde hair highlighted with streaks of shocking pink, puts on a motorcycle helmet and runs off stage to an idling cadillac with its driver's side door ripped off. She slips behind the wheel and feels the engine purring. She puts it in gear, the crowd roars. The cadillac surges forward, approaching a plywood ramp that leads up to the stage. The caddy gets closer, and Wendy's bandmates are scattering now. She sinks her foot into the gas pad , even closer, and now she bails from the caddy, and as her body hits the pier, the car races up the ramp, just as the fuse is lit, and the oil drums filled with gasoline explode. The cadillac soars into the air, passing through a giant fireball that is now engulfing the stage and all of the band's instruments. And when it lands, it does so with a thunderous crash right into the Hudson River . One year prior in nineteen seventy nine, at the palladium on fourteenth Street, the plasmatics blew up a Cadillac on stage for the first time . It nearly killed Wendy Williams . What happened was they didn't think to tie down the hood , so when the charges went off, there was the expected explosion, the fire, and the smoke. But then the Caddy's hood rocked justet into the air, and it landed with a thud right next to where Wendy stood. But being nearly flattened by the smoldering hood of a Cadillac car, it didn't frighten Wendy , none in the least. She and the man for merly known as Captain Kink, Rod Swenson, had designed the plasmatics to be as extreme and as provocative as possible . This wasn't Keith Moon driving a Rolls Royce into a pool. This was blowing up caddies and Mercedes Benzes and Mustangs and Chevy Novaks. This was smashing TV sets with a sledgehammer. This was slicing a less paw in half with a chainsaw This was shooting down a lighting rig with a sawd off shotgun. Actually, there were blanks in the shotgun, and the lighting rig was rigged to fall on cube but still get the point . But nevertheless, Wendy did all these things live on stage night after night, taking great pleasure in destroying objects that indicated one's social or economic status. Well, actually the Les Paulson weren't real Les Pauls. They were like cheap knockoff models , paints to look like less paws, which was the point. Fuck your expensive guitar, end your materialism, kill your television, blow up your fancy automobile, the plasmatics led by the sexually provoc ative Wendy O' Williams who often took the stage in little more than a pair of skin tight leather pants and pieces of electrical tape over her nipples and who simulated sex acts with a sledgehammer thus blurring the line between sex and violence , the plasmatics were truly a non conforming , anti commercial , anti capitalist force. There are plenty of bans out there who claim to be on a similar trip . Take a band I happen to like a lot, the Strokes, for instance. It's great to see the strokes out there, melting faces at Cochella and using their platform to hard sell a politically charged message of non conformity. But if I want to go buy a ticket to see the strokes, it's gonna cost me about five hundred bucks. And that's before the fees. How is that non commercial? How is that anti anything ? Give me a fucking break. I love the strokes, and I don't mean to pick on them, but like the majority of the mainstream bands out there right now, they're simply cosplaying as non conformists. And look, I'm complicit in this too. I'm a hypocrite, just like the rest . I like anti conformity, but I also like the comforts of having my podcast be distributed by a major media network. Okay? I'm not gonna, you know, I get it. My point isn't that I'm righteous, my point is that Wendy O Williams and the Plasmatics actually were the real deal . They were arguably the most non conforming group of the entire New York City punk movement of the late nineteen seventies, and that is saying something, okay? While plenty of ink has been spilled over the years about the Ramones and television and blondie and Patty Smith, including here on this podcast , the plasmatics get bubkus when it comes to props in the history books. And this was a band that was selling out CBG's on theB regular and when they outgrew CBs, they started selling out Irving Plaza in the palladium. Even more impressive, they did all this without a record contract because as popular as they were, and although people were lining up for block s to get into their shows, no record label would touch them. They were just too dangerous, they were too provocative, they were too violent, too sexually explicit, and they did things on stage that were illegal in at least half of the music venues in the country , but it was outside the country where Wendy O' Williams and the Plasmatics would eventually find support . In october nineteen eighty, one month after the PR sixty two stunt, the band released their debut album New Hope for the Wretched on Stiff Records in the UK . Now Stiff was co owned by a like minded musical provocateur named Jake Riviera. Jake Riviera was a guy who told a sing er songwriter named Declan Patrick Allowishes McMahnis to change his name to Elvis Costello. And the entire reason he did this was because Elvis Elvis, Elvis Presley, that is, had just died at the time, and announcing onesel f as Elvis at that particular moment in time was not only bad taste, but it pissed off a whole bunch of people . And this is kind of the point. Jake Riviera, like Wendy O'Williams, was in the pissing people off business . Now, this record, new hope for the Wretched, it really pissed people off. David Frick gave it a one star review in Rolling Stone Magazine at the time, calling Wendy a miserable singer who is all but drowned out by the moronic bamalama of the band . Is that a word? I love that word, Bamalama. I gotta say, David Frick here , he wasn't wrong. The allure of the plasmatics and a Wendy O Williams has never really been about the music. It's about the spectacle, it's about the shock , which was exactly Wendy's intention. She was using her music, her art, to provoke, to prod , to make comfortable people uncomfortable, which was the exact same thing she had done to her father with that Mitch Ryder forty five all those years ago . Now it was just being done on a much larger scale, and that scale was then magnified at the start of nineteen eighty one when the plasmatics appeared on an episode of the TV show Fridays , which aired on the ABC Network. Now, part of Wendy's notoriety was her past history as a performer at a Times Square sex show. Her manager, Rod Swanson, AKA Captain Kink , was not seen as an industrious Brian Epstein type of manager. He was becoming known at this time as Wendy's Pornspengali. Remember that this was the early eighties. This was right as the vilification of rock and roll as a pornographic and or satanic vice was reaching its apex just a few years from Tipper Gor and the Parents Resource Music Center and all that. This was the climate in which Wendy and the Plasmatics made their national television debut . This was the climate in which Wendy stripped down to her bra, covered herself in whipped cream , and suggestively thrust a Toro chainsaw through a splintering less palm . To the easily offended, to the pearl clutching consumer types, to the middle of the road normies , Wendy O' Williams was their worst nightmare , savage and depraved right there on their television sets . And they were her target audience . But just as she had targeted them , soon , they would target her and deliver a response that was even more shocking and more violent than one of Wendy's notorious stage shows could ever be . We'll be right back after this word, word, word Okay , not so fun fact . Autoimmune skin conditions are actually on the rise . Cases are climbing nearly twenty percent every year . I know terrible opener for a podcast ad. But here's the thing. I'm Holly Fry, and our skin exists precisely because of stats like that, because more people than ever are living with conditions like psoriasis and hydrodinitis suprativa , and most of them are doing it alone, without answers, without community , without anyone to tell them what the heck is actually going on. You know, not that many people knew about it and I felt kind of alone like, am I out ancast? That's where we come in. We talk doctors. We talk appointments that are, well, a disappointment. We talk about the flare ups and the breakthroughs. Then we dive deep into the wild occas,ion ally gross, always fascinating history of how humans have tried to understand our skin over the centuries . Spoiler alert , we did not always get it right. Listen to season three of Hoursin Sk, a personal discovery podcast on the IHR Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello hello, I'm Malcolm Globwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM, I sat down with Alone Cohen, who leads research and development at UFC to discuss the complexity of using technology to analyze fight data. With kick to the head . It makes contact with the outset of my arm, which I brought up. In our world, that's a blocked strike . Yeah . But teaching a computer what exactly that means and when and how. Like when my arm is up, that's a block, when my arm is down and hits my shoulder, that's not. It's those nuances that proved incredibly difficult for machines to be able to handle for a very, very long time. That is until IBM entered the Octagon . Listen to the full conversation at iBM dot com slash smart docs . When I scrap myed car and they parking garage, I was worried that it could be a long process to take care of it, like a landscaper's first day trimming a hedge maze. I have definitely already been here . Now was it left, right or right left ? Well, maybe I'll cut a path out and find my way back later . But it wasn't like that. I filed a claim in under two minutes on the Geico app, and they handled it from there. It was taken care of almost as quickly as it helps. It feels good to get help quick. It feels good to guide gal . January eighteenth, nineteen eighty one, Milwaukee, Wisconsin Rod Swenson leaned against the bar of the Palms nightclub and counted the money in his hand. Not bad for a sold out show, but not great either. For any other touring band, the take would be great because any other touring band didn't have the overhead that the plasmatics had, the TV sets, the Lespaul knockoffs, the Cadillacs , these things cost money , a lot of money. You might as well just set your money on fire seeing that, these things all eventually got destroyed, but then that wouldn't be a plasmatic show and even here in Cheastown USA, far from home , that's what the paying customers were expecting. That said, ordinances vary from city to city . So while one outrageous element of Wendy's act was allowed in some places, in others, it was prohibited . Tonight, for example, here in Milwaukee, Wendy had been for bidden from wearing the customary strips of electrical tape across her nipples , so instead, she covered her bare breast with shaving cream . And while there would be no exploding cadillac on the stage of the palms , the crowd did get to witness Wendy's handiwork with a sledgehammer , which she stroked provocatively before using it to bash TV set to pieces . Now the show was over, and her work here was done . And it was time to get into the van and drive to the next town . Wendy hollered to Rod that she'd see him outside , and then she walked out the club's front door, into the parking lot, where she was surprised to find , waiting for her , the cops . At least half a dozen plain clothes Milwaukee detectives . They leered at her, they taunted her. They stared at her with contempt and disgust. And they did so while informing her that she was under arrest for jerking off her sledgehammer during the show That could have been it. They could have put her in a police cruiser or a paddy wagon or whatever, taken her downtown and booked her. She wouldn't even talk shit about the Titty Bar directly across the street that she assumed at least a few of them frequented during after hours . But first , one of these plain clothes cops slipped his hand under her shirt and grabbed at her breast . And then another cop began to fondle her ass. Wendy pushed the cops away , and then she cocked her arm and threw a punch and caught one of them right in the jaw , which of course was exactly what they were hoping she would do . When the fist hits the woman's face , the knuckle rips into the cheek just above the third molar. And as the blood spurts from inside the woman's mouth, it does so at a forty five degree angle, splattering onto the freshly fallen white snow. And when the billy club strikes the woman's nose, the bone fractures , and more blood gushes out , and her body, thrown off its axis , spins around one half revolution before crashing to the ground. The size twelve men's shoes slam into her stomach and her ribs like mechanized pistons firing . And the bile sizzles there in the back of her throat, her diaphragm muscle spasms , and her lungs cease all expanding and contracting. The cop's knees come down on her back , holding her in place , and her bruised and bloody cheek goes numb against the snow and ice . And as the frigid air slowly returns to her lungs and she begins to breathe again , she feels the steel jaws of handcuffs snapped tight around her wrists . By the time Rod Swenson made it outside the Palms nightclub, Wendy was in the middle of a vicious attack at the hands of seven Mawa policeuke office . And when he tried to come to her aid, the cops then turned their attention to Rod , beating him so badly that he lost consciousness . Wendy suffered a broken nose, a concussion and two black eyes . She was charged not only with conduct prohibited in a licensed premises. That's the dirty sledgehamer thing, but also with battery to police and resisting arrest . Wendy and Rod were eventually released on bail , but word travels fast. And just two nights later, after a show in Cleveland, Wendy was arrested again on the same obsenity charge , but it was the Milwaukee charges that were the most concerning. Assaulting a cop was a felony. There was a distinct possibility that Wendy could do real time . Back in New York, benefit shows for her legal defense fund were held at Bonn's International Casino in Times Square. Not only a stone's throw from where Captain Kink once held court, but the same venue where the clash notoriously stuck at the ticket scalpers by staging an unprecedented run of shows . Incidentally, the clash were playing those very shows in the summer of ' eighty one at the exact same time that Wendy Rod and the rest of the band were sitting in a Milwaukee courtroom. So, while the clash sang about fighting the law, Wendy and the plasmatics actually fought the law. Wendy pleaded her case , and she did so authentically , not as the person that her lawyer or the judge wanted her to be. She was one hundred percent herself rocking this skunk hairdo and unruly black mohawk that was perched on top of bleached blonde sides . She was convinced that the Milwaukee PD had a vendetta against her, even though she couldn't prove it. But it was her word against the word of the Milwaukee police department, who, by the way, claimed that the injuries Wendy had sustained were not the result of their brutality, but because she had slipped on the ice . And this straight up falsehood was soon proven to be a party line cover up when it was revealed that a photographer had been on site during the attack , and the picture shown during the trial clearly documented the cops beating on Wendy . As a result, the charges were dropped . But Wendy then sued the Milwaukee Police Department for millions of dollars , but she, too, would lose in the end. And I'm not just talking about the lawsuit , which, to be clear, she did lose. But all this publicity, the dust up with the cops, the arrests, the trial, the explosions and destruction, and dangerous stunts, would eventually make things much harder for Wendy . Clubs would turn her away. Promoters would refuse to work with her. The licensing board of Quincy, Massachusetts would suspend the operating license of a club where Wendy was booked to perform solely to prevent her from doing so . Not that it dampened the spirit of Wendy O Williams. Not yet at least . She lived a life of resistance, which meant that she did not back down . She was a non conformist, which meant that her actions and reactions did not align with those of the masses . The alternative would be to give in, to become zombified , as she once told her parents . And to become zombified, well, that was tantamount to death. It was a subject that was never far from Wendy's mind. A few months earlier, days before the PR sixty two stunt, she had purchased the seventy two Cadillac Coupe deville that she intended to destroy. The car's previous owner, when learning of Wendy's intention, said, I don't want my car to die. But Wendy's response was both simple and epithet . Everything must die, she said , but your car will be immortalized. Blood a bird aboard a bird of girl the bird of God a girl who filled a border and word abort and border and worth Fair warning guys . This is where the story of Wendy O Williams it starts to get really dark . I suppose the darkness was there all along from the very beginning, a darkness deep inside of her that she tried to keep at bay, aggressively, loudly, and often violently . But to paraphrase the great Brian Wilson, Wendy just wasn't made for these times , or rather she wasn't made for this world . And when she was no longer able to revolt against that world in the only way that she knew how, that's when she became consumed with the belief that she had no other way out of that world . So let me just say this is as hard for me to write about as it will be for you to hear about . But in order to understand where Wendy wound up, not just emotionally and spiritually , but also geographically and socially . We've got to talk about what happened in the years following her multiple arrests, her beating by police officers , and the ensuing court cases . In nineteen eighty two, Wendy and the Plasmatics released coup detas, their sole album on Capitol Records, believe it or not Signing to Capitol was a triumph for a band that couldn't get ninety nine percent of record labels to give them the time of day just a few years prior . But the album was a commercial flaw, and Wendy's controversial personality continued to precede her, and capital quickly dropped the band. Enter fellow musical outlaws Lemmy Kilmeister and his band The Guys and Motorhead who were riding high on their latest album The Most Excellent Ace of Speeds A big hit in their native UK . Pairing the plasmatics of Motorhead seemed like a good idea on paper, but the resulting EP, which featured Wendy and Lemmy duetting on the country chestnut Stand by your man was so poorly received that it caused Motorhead's guitarist fast Eddie to quit the band. Next up , Gene Simmons of Kiss . In nineteen eighty four, Gene Simmons was wearing that loved on look. This was the look of a man who had just come out of a four year relationship with none other than Diana Ross , a relationship he began while he was still dating Diana's best friend, Cher . But Jean Simmons also wore a look of desperation. The look of a man who had finally washed off all of his cartoonish makeup. Perhaps a little too late even. What I'm saying is he needed Wendy as much as she needed him. Kiss was losing their edge, and by producing an album for the plasmatics , Gene Simmons and Kiss had locked down some much needed credibility . However, the resulting album, Wow , was technically not a plasmatic alb um because due to a legal snuff too boring to get into here, it couldn't be called a plasmatics album. And because of this, Gene used whatever musicians he wanted to, most notably all four members of Kiss at the time Pa.ul Stanley, Ace Freely, Eric Carr and Jean himself under the pseudonym Reginald van Helsing. So Wow was not only the secret kiss album, but it was also the vehicle to lift Wendy O' Williams out of the punk performance art basement and into the big league penthouses with a big haired, leather studded hard rock sound. It even earned Wendy O. Williams her first and only Grammy nomination . But Wendy wasn't seeking out these trappings of success and fame . She didn't want the penthouses or the awards or even the accolades . Her mission was purer than all of that. She was here to remind anyone who heard her music or witnessed her live show that you didn't have to be like everyone else