Suckdog: Worst album ever?
Or challenge to the D.I.Y. ethic.
A review of Suckdog's Drugs Are Nice

by James Hippie

Before discovering the relative joys of being a recluse and buying music via mail order, I used to shop at one of those indie hole-in-the-wall record shops staffed with teenyboppers and aging hipsters that even the most rabid High Fidelity fan would want to firebomb back to the Jazz Age.

You know the type. Smarmy, amorphous blobs of tattooed sexual indeterminism staring down their pierced noses at you, and making snide remarks about your purchase if it isn’t the absolute-up-to-the-minute-cutting-edge-flavor-of-the-week fad that all the other glue-sniffing hep kids are listening to that very second.

And when they’re not mocking you for your clothes or your hair or your incredibly bad taste in music, they’re back in the storeroom writing obnoxious comments all over the covers of albums that they hate, because it’s not enough that you should have to put up with these mouthy little bastards while you’re in the store—you need to carry their pithy and sarcastic remarks home with you as an enduring reminder of what an utterly clueless loser you are for buying such incredibly uncool shit!

Anyway, one day several years ago, I was in one of those indie hellhole stores and came across an album called Drugs Are Nice by the band Suckdog. It immediately caught my eye because it had a pair of pimply, trashy-looking girls on the cover reclining topless on a bed strewn with dead flowers. I was pretty much sold on the album at that point, but then I saw the handwritten sticker that some effete cash register jockey had placed on the cover that read “THIS IS THE WORST ALBUM EVER MADE,” and I knew right then that it was going home with me.

See, I had been in my fair share of incompetent bands over the years and thought I knew a thing or two about bad music. Rather than deter me, this warning acted as a kind of dare; surely the CD couldn’t be as bad as that band I was in where our singer had to scream through a vacuum cleaner attachment like a megaphone because we didn’t have a PA system. Or that other band where no matter what song we played, it always came out sounding like Flipper’s “Brainwash” played on the wrong speed. Nothing could be worse than that! So, amidst the mocking laughter and eye-rolling of the prepubescent Fashion Nazi counter help, I bought Drugs Are Nice and took it home to see if it really was the worst album ever made.

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The sticker was pretty much right on the money. It was bad. It was really bad. It was bad in ways that I didn’t know music could be bad. In fact, I wasn’t sure if it was really music at all and not some Symbionese Liberation Army auto-hypnosis indoctrination tape that had been pressed by mistake. It was poorly recorded, an incomprehensible, grating, screeching noise that was as confusing as it was annoying. And it is an amazing album precisely because of those reasons.

Drugs Are Nice is the brainchild of Lisa Suckdog (née Carver), who, along with her band of assorted freaks and sex deviants, toured the states and Europe under the moniker Suckdog, bringing an interactive brand of performance art meets trailer park peep show extravaganza to the largely indifferent masses.

Lisa sings like that nasty girl from your high school that guzzled cough syrup for breakfast and screwed all the hoodlum punk rock guys, while fronting a band of phencyclidine-addled Shaggs devotees. She's shrill, loaded, and out of control. Or at least she is on the songs that contain actual music.

Most of what pass for songs here are disjointed spoken-word ramblings, and skull-piercing girlish shrieks and howls that come across like a group of seventh grade acid casualties playing “Bloody Mary” at a slumber party gone awry.

Nothing you have ever heard could prepare you for this strange and disturbing aural onslaught. Even the Germs in their earliest and most amateurish incarnation worked in the traditional garage band format. I made the mistake of listening to this album one night when I was particularly stoned. Between the weird discordant chants and the druggy girl intoning “Chaka Kahn, Chaka Kahn” over and over again, I became convinced that Lisa or one of her teenage devil-girls was calling my name, which was enough to scare the hell out of me and make me want to sleep with the lights on (and you can bet I never made that mistake again).

This is the type of music that Squeaky Fromme and Sandra Goode would have made if they had split from Charlie to pursue solo careers, and I have my suspicions that Lisa and her cohorts were similarly immersed in occult-like round-robin group sex scenes and midnight backward-spins of The White Album when they recorded this. Even the album cover and record labels are decorated with those horrible squiggly drawings that people make when they’re on LSD.

Most of Drugs Are Nice sounds like the bad audio recordings of my friends and I getting loaded and watching Kung Fu Theater when we were 14, but I didn’t release that stuff as an album. I could have, but I didn’t. And you didn’t either. Lisa Suckdog did, and that’s the point.

Every spiky-haired ne’er-do-well worth his or her skull rings will give the Do-It-Yourself approach to music lip service in between watching episodes of Making the Band and trying to transcribe and learn the latest Sum 41 smash hit. But how many people would actually record and release an album as brazenly hellish and unlistenable as this? Not many, because it would take a lot of balls to put your name on a record this bizarre and anti-social, and most don’t have the mettle for that kind self-immolation and abuse.

Drugs Are Nice fails in every traditional sense as music; you’re not going to find anything on this album that even remotely resembles conventional musical structure or arrangement, songwriting, or the God almighty “hook.” Hell, it doesn’t even have the common courtesy to rock in that plodding, masturbatory way that even the most inept BTO cover band can pull off.

But these very failures make Suckdog a sort of litmus test for the DIY ideology. If there is any validity in the DIY ethic (and similarly, if there’s any validity in flying the DIY banner when you’re just a lazy scenester copping someone else’s musical style and quirks), then Drugs Are Nice is the ground zero of this philosophy: outsider music played by real outsiders; lysergic-curdled freaks that make the Lou Reed feedback opus Metal Machine Music look like a piss-take fraud perpetrated by a burnt-out intellectual dilettante.

While the rest of us nascent underground musicians were patting ourselves on the back for our pseudo-rebellious individuality while shamelessly ripping off the shopworn antics of Iggy, Johnny, Darby, et al., Lisa slipped in through the backdoor with an album that sounds like a Halloween sound effects record made by drug-damaged deaf children and emotional cripples, but completely original in its indecipherable self-absorption and insular creepiness. This is why it ultimately manages to succeed in spite of itself.

So is it art? No, not really. It's not even good. Hell, it’s barely even music in any recognizable form. This is crude, ugly, sinister noise that has no precedence outside of the plagues of Biblical revelation. It’s terrible in every conceivable way, and in a sane world, it probably shouldn’t even exist.

But it is a lot of fun to listen to. I pull the album out and give it a spin maybe once or twice a year and it’s always a memorable experience: Drugs Are Nice will clear out a room faster than even the Swans' Young God EP, or Richard Harris' Love Album. And if you kids think that Marilyn Manson scares your stodgy and hopelessly square parents, just let them catch you listening to the song “Alligators Lurking”; they’ll have you crated up and shipped off to the heavy metal deprogramming summer camp in no time flat, I guarantee you.

Drugs Are Nice is unlike anything that has been recorded before or since, and that alone makes it worth hearing. This album doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is: an agglomeration of no-fi noise, and wailing made by a group of jacked-up teenagers taking their stab at infamy by creating something uniquely and horrifyingly their own.

Rather than give you an ego-boost for your supreme musical prowess and justification for all those years you spent kneeling at the alter of Ron Ashton, listening to Drugs Are Nice should make you feel ashamed for not doing something more interesting with your life and music. And isn’t that exactly what good music should do?

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Reader Comments

From: Heather Harris
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003

My completely unloaded interpretation of Lisa Suckdog's "Drugs Are Nice" embraces her zeal to make percussion out of every object in her household, i.e., banging on tables, cutlery, toilet tissue, etc., while waltzing around warbling. This is my "Paul Is Dead" theory, and it's mine. I love this album.

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From: Tony R. Boies
Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2003

Worst album ever? I thought so too when I first heard it. You listen to it and you wonder "what the hell is this?" and if you never heard anything more about Lisa Suckdog, you would retain the memory of listening to a really weird, bad album (probably just once).

But Lisa followed it up with the much-more listenable "Little Flowers Dying" (about the depressing circumstances of her marriage break-up, and more) and toured a few times performing low-budget, violent and howling "operas" co-written with her estranged husband Costes. She can't sing and she can't dance, but Lisa, the poor white trash harlot from New Hampshire, captivated audiences like a seasoned carny. I was impressed enough to put together a tribute album to Suckdog, gathering together some great treatments of that "no-fi noise and wailing". Thurston Moore bought a cassette copy. Thurston, it's on CD now!

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