Queen Vixen By The Balls

By Chris Rockson

During the late 1980's in NYC the Cycle Sluts From Hell reigned supreme, operating in a male-dominated world of heavy rock n roll. The band were fronted by four hard rocking lovelies, who went under the stage-names 'Queen Vixen, She-Fire of Ice, Honey One Percenter and Venus Penis Crusher' backed by a full-on heavy metal band.

Their shows were a mix of hard rocking and almost comedy lyrics, with just a splash of glamour here and there, innuendo-a-go-go and a sense of fun, sadly lacking in the male bands of the genre. They took themselves seriously, the sluts didn't, and fuck anyone that cared to disagree! They were a breath of fresh air!

Big hits with the obvious male audiences, the sluts gigged the same scene as the others, played shows with Joey Ramone, Danzig and toured in Europe with Motorhead in the early 90's. Sadly, they were short lived, but returned for a couple of re-union shows in the Big Apple during the late 2000's and then called it a day for good. Their most well-known song 'I Wish You Were A Beer' was even featured on MTV's 'Beavis & Butthead' show.

I caught up with Queen Vixen for a chat about her days with the sluts and to find out what she's up to today....sit back, crack open a coupla cold one's and enjoy the story of Queen Vixen.

Hey! How are you doing Raff?

Hi babe! I’m doing great.

It’s been quite some time since you played with the Cycle Sluts, what have you been up to?

20 years now, so a fair amount for sure. Let me think..,

After the Sluts broke up I formed a band called The Creeps with ex CSFH She-Fire (Virginia Staska), Lord Roadkill (Pete Lisa), and JoJo Tubeato from Missdemeanor. It was a great band with wonderful songs but we were a bit lazy and drifted apart after a time.

I always bartended to support the rock and roll habit, and I am bossy and organized, so bartending morphed into club management, most notably Coney Island High. Then Giuliani decided to wage war on anything interesting in NY, so running clubs became a total heartbreak and I had to think of something else. I moved on to general manage a magazine/printing company called POPsmear, now I’m working in fashion for Sex and the City stylist Patricia Field doing mostly administrative work, bookkeeping, project management and a little buying for her store on the Bowery. It’s a highly entertaining job, Patricia’s store is one of the last bastions of old school New York flavor left in retail right now. I think it’s just us and Trash & Vaudeville still waving the freak flag.

I am also writing, I am working on a book about my experiences, I have a blog called Miss Anthrope’s House of High Drama (http://darkladymissanthrope.blogspot.com/), and I’ll be putting on a reading series soon with my friend Zoe Hansen (http://lzhansen.com/). We want to mix writers reading their pieces with rock, drag and burlesque acts so you’re not just sitting on a folding chair listening to writer after writer droning on.

Your stage wear was eye-catching to say the least. Who designed the look, or was it something you came up with yourselves?

Oh, we came up with it ourselves, which was sometimes good, sometimes not so good. We had designer friends who would make items that we requested, or we would just cobble ideas together on our own. The cut offs over leggings were completely ours, or completely our crew, meaning our friends as well. Now I’ll see a version of it come back every few years in the malls and I chuckle to myself. If they only knew.


Looking back at the 1980‘s, and comparing it with today music scene in NYC, would you say that you (the band) were ahead of your time?

Well, we were very much of the time. But in some small ways yes. There have always been girl groups, so we can’t take credit for that. But there weren’t any heavy girl groups, and the whole idea seemed to freak a lot of people out, whereas now it’s standard business to put more than one female up front. People come to me and ask if I’m annoyed that no one gives us credit for preceding acts like the Pussycat Dolls, but I don’t think we have that right. Maybe Ronnie Spector does. I will say that there was an energy at the time that if you were female and in a band you had to be very serious and not too sexy in order to survive. We sort of blew that out of the water, we were ridiculous and sexy, and people either loved or hated us with a passion.

The subject matter of your tunes was described as “cartoon rock”, a view that I don’t personally agree with by the way....I thought your material was just pure fun fun fun, tongue in cheek, and played with attitude, who wrote it?

We all did, with Lord Roadkill writing most of the music. We would come in with lyrics and put them on top of whatever melody lines he would be working on. He is such a talent and never got the appreciation he deserved because he was willing to sit back and play behind 4 braying females. He refused to do interviews and didn’t like having his photo taken, but there would not have been a band without him.

We really did start out just wanting to have fun and not giving a shit whether the songs were correct in any way. You are right that it was very tongue in cheek. In my personal opinion our best writer out of the girls was She-Fire. She wrote all the trippy, heavy ones: Dark Ships, which is my all time favorite, Conqueress, Queen High Love. She’s a genius.

 

You toured Europe with Motörhead. What was that experience like for you?

Amazing. Exciting. Fun. Educational. Silly. Drunken. They were so generous and good to us and so much fun to tour with. Their road crew was very cool too. We were in heaven. Vas and I would look at each other every night and scream, “OH MY GOD! WE’RE ON TOUR WITH MOTORHEAD!” We watched every one of their shows and they would come on our bus with their bags to hang out on the longer drives. We partied way too much and got fat on European beer. Lemmy would say, “Girls, maybe it’s time to lay off the crafts table...” He never hesitated to tell us when we looked like shit.

You’re still friends with Lemmy I know, did you catch their NYC shows this time around?

I always catch Motörhead when they’re in town. Lemmy is getting on in years and I’m always afraid he’s going to stop touring, so now more than ever I feel that it’s imperative to see every show possible. And it never disappoints, it’s always a great show. I love the band so much, and I love him. He always takes very good care of me when he comes to town and spends a few private minutes with me alone before he lets everyone backstage. We don’t talk very often but I feel that we have always had a very real connection.

Which bands are you listening to these days?

Oof. I am really boring and don’t pay attention to anything new. It’s embarrassing. My boyfriend jokes that I’ll only look out a very tiny window ranging from late 60’s to late 70’s, meaning all the classic rock: Stones, Zeppelin, Floyd, Cheap Trick, etc. I am definitely more of a rock girl than a metal girl: I’ll usually hit Queens of the Stone Age or Black Crowes on the ipod as go-to bands. Oh, and any hip hop I like is older as well - Wu Tang Klan or Public Enemy. You really have to jam something new down my throat before I’ll pay attention. Mostly it’s because every time I try to pay attention to new bands I find myself thinking, “Why do I want to listen to someone who looks and behaves as if he should be repairing my computer?” There’s no thrill or intrigue. I want my music sexy and larger than life and a little scary, not whining and unattractive, if you know what I mean. I feel bad for kids now, they don’t have any rock stars. But maybe that’s just my age showing?

Ever think the Sluts will reform (again)?

Never. Vas has Hanzel und Gretyl, Donna (Honey 1 Percenter) has a new project with Sean Yseult from White Zombie and Gini is a chef in Minneapolis. I think it’s usually undignified to try to recapture a time that has come and gone unless there is enough outside interest to do it in a really big way. We did do a reunion in 2006 with 3 of the girls and then another one in 2008 for the last Motherfucker NYC party, and the shows were killer and we had a blast. It was so much fun and we saw people we hadn’t seen in years. I was stunned at how excited people were when we walked onstage in 2006, we had to stand there for a minute and soak in the love. But that was enough for me. I’m a creature of comfort and glamour where I can get it, and I don’t want to lug gear or sit in a van in my dotage.

‘Wish you were a Beer’ was played heavily on the MTV circuit, and was featured on the Beavis’ and Butthead show too. Who played the instruments on the album?

Lord Roadkill on guitar, Bobby Gustafson from Overkill on second guitar. Our rhythm guitar player choked, he just panicked and stopped showing up while we were recording, the night he was supposed to record some major parts he opted to spend his time spray painting his name on the sidewalk outside his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, which was sort of classically our luck. So we asked Bobby to step in as a friend and he did a great job and ended up touring with us. Then it was Fernando Rosario on bass, he also played in Smashed Gladys, and we hired Thommy Price to play drums as we were out of a drummer at the time as well.

Side note - Beavis and Butthead didn’t feature us until after we’d gotten dropped with no official release in the states. So all that airtime came too late. I was back to pouring cheap beer for small time coke dealers and drunks in a really shitty biker bar. It was beyond depressing. Beavis and Butthead would come up on the television over my head and people would freak out and ask me why I was working. It was a dark time indeed.

You’ve just been on vacation right? Nice to be back in the city?

Yes. I come from a very beautiful part of Michigan, right on the water, it was actually voted most beautiful place in America on the Today show last week. So my boyfriend and I have been talking about moving there in 10 years because New York has become so uninspiring. But the truth is that as much as I need to escape the city and get some nature, I don’t fully feel like myself anywhere else.

Ok, so what inspires you, as a person and as a performer?

Truth of emotion, whatever it is. Pain, anger, happiness, doesn’t matter. I think if someone is writing or painting or singing from their core, from that deepest part of themselves, it connects to the deepest part of you. It can be comedy or tragedy, it just has to be real. One of the reasons I love writing is that I get to connect with people in ways that I hadn’t imagined. I thought I was just telling my stories when I started blogging, but all of the emotions and situations you think are your own are pretty universal. I just love that. It means we’re not as alone as we often think we are.

With music, I was never a true singer or musician. I’ve just got some charisma and I wanted attention and to be a part of this thing that I loved so much. When CSFH was happening I wasn’t mature enough to know what I was feeling or thinking onstage, I was too freaked out and insecure. So it was nice to do these reunions and feel present in my body and connected to the audience in a way that I wasn’t capable of when I was younger. That felt very inspiring.

With the recent closure of Don Hill’s, and what seems like the entirety of music venues in the city, are there any clubs left that still put rock shows on?

There are, but they are rarer now for sure, and I am probably the wrong person to ask. I am a Manhattan girl and many of the clubs are in Brooklyn now. I do go to Bowery Electric quite a bit to see shows, and Bowery Ballroom and of course Irving Plaza. I love that Irving Plaza has survived all these years. Most surviving venues are larger now, I don’t know any small clubs that feature bands regularly that aren’t in Brooklyn. Rock and roll isn’t the music of the 20-something generation anymore, and it seems like most of the people I see in my neighborhood partying on the weekends are frat boys and sorority girls who don’t give a shit what’s playing. You couldn’t get them to watch a band if you paid them. I’ve been out in clubs where the DJ will play 30 seconds of each song, just blasting through like he’s tuning a radio because everyone has a short attention span and music doesn’t mean anything to them. It makes me very sad. I think L.A. is probably more loving to it’s rock and rollers right now.

What is next for you? Do you plan on returning to rock n roll?

I would really like to get my shit together and get a book out. I don’t think I’ll be returning to rock and roll, but I’ll be a rock and roller until the day I die.

Finally, you are gonna be ship wrecked on a Desert Island, which three items would you grab from the sinking ship and why?

Hmm...my guy, because I enjoy his company and he can carry heavy stuff...a radio, so we have something to listen to...and a sweatshirt, because I’m always cold. How’s that?

Ha, nice one....Well, I have to say, it’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you, and I know there is still a huge interest in the UK for your band....hopefully, one day, we’ll get to see you on stage again....until then, you take care.

Thank you Chris! I’m so happy to hear that there is still interest. You can chat me any time.

Pic : M.Alago

Röckson