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The Plasmatics wreck shit on ‘Solid Gold,’ 1981, plus Wendy O. interviewed by a ventriloquist dummy!
11.20.2015
09:29 am
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Solid Gold was an acutely ‘80s syndicated pop music variety show that set itself apart from similar offerings with the utterly baffling Solid Gold Dancers. The show was conceived at the tail end of the disco era, and so along with the usual hodgepodge of mimed and live music performances, the show featured disco-inspired dance accompaniments—no matter what kind of music was being featured. It was silly and often wildly inappropriate, but sufficiently distinctive that the phrase “Solid Gold Dancers” still conjures images of vapid glitz even to people who never saw the show.

It’s hard to say whether it’s a relief or a cryin’ goddamn shame that those dancers didn’t accompany the Plasmatics, but either way, the very fact that that appearance even happened is amazing. This was in 1981, the year that multiple arrests for indecency made the band’s singer Wendy O. Williams notorious outside of underground music circles, and Solid Gold was a broad appeal, all-smiles show that usually aired during the family hour. (I myself was an avid watcher at age nine, the age at which Solid Gold turned me on to a little band called Blondie. That and my discovery of DEVO that same year set the stage for a great deal of weirdness to come.) But despite the general family-friendliness of the program, nothing particularly set this performance of the Metal Priestess track “Black Leather Monster” apart from any given Plasmatics show except for a lack of breast exposure. Williams shrieked, danced suggestively, and chainsawed an innocent Les Paul while the band made a spastic punk spectacle of itself. And the segment is followed by a preposterous and wonderful interview—Williams chats (or rather, haltingly reads cue cards) with ventriloquist Waylon Flowers’ famously raunchy dummy Madame.
 

Billboard Dec 19, 1981, page 8

Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that the band is here introduced by the show’s co-host at the time, the Bee Gees’ youngest brother Andy Gibb (the other co-host was 5th Dimension singer Marilyn McCoo). This may seem as odd a juxtaposition of punk filth with squeaky-clean pop as their booking on the show itself, but Gibb’s spotless image was a pop pretense. He would soon be fired from the show on the grounds that his apparently monstrous cocaine binges made him a frequent and unpredictable absentee from shooting.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Plasmatics destroy the stage with an exploding Cadillac
Insane footage of The Plasmatics annihilating the stage on German TV show, ‘Musikladen’ in 1981

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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11.20.2015
09:29 am
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