Rediscover: Lunachicks: Babysitters on Acid

With both Ilya Chaiken’s Lunachicks documentary Pretty Ugly and a fantastic new album by ‘chicks guitar legend Gina Volpe just released, what better time to revisit the band’s volatile 1990 debut, Babysitters on Acid? In 1989, rhythm guitarist Sindi Benezra said of the band that “We’re not socially conscious. We’re more like socially UN-conscious, like passed out on the floor.” Babysitters on Acid is that philosophy, or non-philosophy, molded into dirty, grungy, flamboyant punk rock. The band quickly fell out of love with the album, citing No Wave alumnus Wharton Tiers’ smoggy production and British label Blast First’s unreliability – Babysitters… wasn’t released outside of Europe for a decade and the band didn’t get paid – but in its very roughness and crudity, it’s perhaps the Lunachicks album that most perfectly distils the chaos and humor of the band’s wild spirit.

Indie hipsters who felt in ‘91 like grunge was a music industry hoax could point to Lunachicks, among others, as evidence; especially if said hipsters had, a couple of years earlier been the kind of metal nerds who religiously bought the Hard and Heavy compilation videos. For those too young or too cosmopolitan to remember, in the UK in the ‘80s there was no MTV, so the promo videos for bands that didn’t get in the charts were packaged up along with bits of shows like Headbangers Ball and their European equivalents and sold as VHS cassettes, often with wildly inappropriate lineups; say, Slayer, Poison, Candlemass and Yngwie Malmsteen, plus a few clips of unknown, up-and-coming bands. They were great. Rewinding to that Sindi quote; why would anyone think a band like Lunachicks was socially conscious anyway? Because, in 1989, the band appeared in one such video – Hard and Heavy Vol. 5 in fact – in a feature about the briefly fêted pre-grunge genre, “scum rock.” To quote singer Theo Kogan, also from that interview, “Scum rock is meant to be ‘Socially Conscious Underground Music,’ right? I would say we’re socially conscious in the fact that we make fun of everything but we’re not like trying to make some kind of statement or doing good for the world.” Indeed not; a year later the band released Babysitters on Acid. And a year after that it was pretty clear that, despite their visual flair and pop-culture-kitsch glamour, the oddball punk-glam-‘scum rock’ of ’89, like the music of the Melvins or Butthole Surfers, was all but indistinguishable from grunge. But when the gold rush came, Lunachicks, like those bands, were just a little too outré to really benefit from the – sounds unpleasant but why not? – grunge explosion.

Regardless of prevailing trends and subcultures, Lunachicks in 1990, looking and sounding like some weird John Waters-on-LSD hallucination of Girlschool dressed as the Sweet, were resolutely their own thing, even though aspects of that thing would gradually leach into the mainstream. Ahead of the curve with their obsession with kitsch ‘70s fashion and pop culture, the references that litter Babysitters on Acid – The Brady Bunch, Cookie Monster, What’s Happening!!, sex, drugs, violence, Jesus and conformity – were then still freshly putrid, and the album sounds as life-affirmingly snotty, funny and confrontational now as it did then. As Sindi also said in that same 1989 interview: “Our songs are about people we love and people we hate and TV shows we love and killing people.” That pretty much sums up the lyrical content of Babysitters on Acid. Musically, the sound is simple but not tediously so. Sometimes, as on the title track, the band sounds like an updated Runaways, at others, like “Glad I’m Not Yew” among many, there are traces of New York hardcore, at their best the band’s music is infused with ‘70s heavy rock. For something so apparently elemental, the Lunachicks sound is flexible, and the album easily holds its own alongside vaguely similar but far more critically acclaimed releases of the era by bands that the ‘chicks never seemed to be compared with, like Babes in Toyland’s Spanking Machine or L7’s Smell the Magic. For whatever reason, the Babes and L7 were embraced as grunge while Lunachicks were not. Still, hardly a cause for complaint; a band so determinedly thrusting their middle finger in the face of commercial success is never really supposed to be in the Top 40.

Anyway, it’s fun to believe that the reason Lunachicks escaped the grunge scramble/trap that vacuumed up and spat out half of the world’s underground punk rock groups is because labels liked their grunge bands scruffy and anonymous, whereas every member of Lunachicks was a star, especially onstage. Even on record and with the only visuals being the cover and Munsters font logo, the band rocks; Theo’s voice is indomitable and above all loud, but always – even if sometimes just – on the right side of musical. Guitar-wise Gina and Sindi provide tight, heavy Johnny Ramone riffage, but made sparkling by their deft-sloppy timing and Gina’s characterful ‘70s rock-style solos which sometimes – “Mabel Rock” is as good an example as any – have the flavor of early Kiss. Onstage, bassist Sydney Silver, credited on the album as “Squid Syd” was a focal point but on record she mostly blends with the guitars, except for a few examples like “Pin Eye Woman 665” and “Sugar Luv” where her coarse, heavy tone and surprisingly bluesy playing comes to the fore. The band’s original drummer Becky Wreck was hard-hitting and adaptable and makes the transitions from high velocity punk to groovy garage rock to plodding, elemental heavy rock with ease and flair. But though individually great, what gives Lunachicks and Babysitters on Acid its feral, sweaty soul is the band as a band.

The album comes in several flavors. At the fast/heavy end of the spectrum, there are “Born 2B Mild,” “Glad I’m Not Yew,” “Complication” and “Cookie Core”, which all have a kind of Agnostic Front grit, albeit with an entirely different kind of personality, while “Makin’ It (With Other Species)” is essentially pure bestiality-themed hardcore, but for the musicality of Theo’s voice. “Octopussy” and “Sugar Luv” are doomy and monolithic, while “Theme Song” is sprawling and metallic but best of all are the ‘70s-influenced, glam-edged rock songs, “Mabel Rock” and the album’s opening track, “Jan Brady” being the standouts. It’s kind of sad – though not uncommon – for the first song on a band’s first album to be about as good as they ever get and Lunachicks are one of those bands. “Jan Brady” is Lunachicks at their most gloriously deranged and goofy – whereas the band’s lyrics were often deliberately moronic, “Jan Brady” is both moronic and articulate, in a highly amusing way; opening with Theo bellowing in her most imperious Glenn Danzig manner, “I am Jan Brady/ And you must believe that/ Or forever perish in your doubt!” A legend should have been born, but instead, the band carved out a little niche for themselves, produced a few good albums, did a lot of touring and then, without ever splitting up, just fell into inactivity.

Babysitters on Acid isn’t quite the masterpiece one would like – it’s an untidy, uneven album – but it is the perfect distillation of the loveably unique cartoonish, aggressive, playfully wild and chaotic spirit of the Lunachicks. It isn’t perfect, but it’s all of the reasons that people are still interested enough in the band to make a documentary about them 30 years later a viable project and not just some weirdo’s wayward labor of love.