When Plasmatics’ Wendy O Williams blew up a car on stage: “It was worth it”
To be considered one of the “wildest” women in punk, you’d probably have to earn the title with notoriety. Just like Ozzy Osbourne once claimed to be the “conductor of mayhem”, Wendy O Williams always saw music as a conduit for aggression towards the right people. “Give me money or give me action, and I’ll take the action and adventure every time,” she once said.
But Williams was never out to wreak havoc for the sake of it. Like many punk pioneers, her anger and frustration stemmed from the feeling of powerlessness against authority, systems, and anything that oppressed people without a voice. To her, defining “violence” in a manner that held the right people accountable was what it meant to be punk, not earning the title for shouting where it counts.
“I’m an excessive person,” she once explained. “Talk about violence, what’s going on in Nicaragua? What’s going on in El Salvador? That’s violent. What are they doing to the planet with chemicals and acid rain? That’s violent. I’m striking out at an icon that has no life. There’s a big difference between what has life and what doesn’t. I mean, I’ve been a vegetarian for 16 years.”
Williams always knew what it meant to live on the edge, whether that meant literally as a means for survival or musically, with what she had to offer to the rest of the world. Running away from home at the young age of 16, music wasn’t her initial choice when it came to expressing herself, and only crossed her path when it was suggested to her by her manager and then-partner, Rod Swenson, who unknowingly floated an idea that changed her life.
Her band, Plasmatics, were cut from the same cloth as many revolutionary forward-thinkers earning their start at the CBGB’s, though earned a reputation not solely on the basis of sonic excellence but shock factor. Obviously, there was some proficiency there, too, but for the most part, Williams and her group took the anarchy of some of punk and rock ‘n’ roll’s biggest scandals and made a mockery out of it, sometimes taking things like chainsaws and sledgehammers on stage to blur the line between art and destruction.
Sometimes, this also included blowing up cars during performances. One particularly tone-changing moment was when kicking off their tour in the 1980s, Williams drove a Cadillac towards the stage, jumping out just seconds before it exploded and destroying the equipment as a statement against capitalism and commodity fetishism. She apparently later focused on this sentiment, arguing that “it was worth it because it showed people shouldn’t worship [things].”
Williams’ nonchalance in the face of anarchy went on to inspire names like Debbie Harry, who once recalled how much of “a big deal” Williams was, because she “showed her tits and she blew up cars on stage and broke TVs”. She was her own conductor of mayhem with a purpose, bringing symbols of commercialism on stage just to show the world how ridiculous it was to buy into pretence and vanity, when you could have something far better.
While much of this attitude came at the expense of her own commercial success, such trivial matters never really concerned her, which is incidentally what cemented her position as a true punk pioneer. In her world, it wasn’t about music that smashed global records, but setting the record straight when it came to the sorts of things we should care about, or the types of attitudes that define who we are.
