Nice ‘n’ Sleazy: 10 Disreputable American Albums

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The word “sleaze” has a strange history which has left it with a number of meanings. In the UK, it has become associated with political corruption, and has recently been brought back into service as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer continues to let down our old school by accepting inappropriate gifts and services from some very shady political wheelers and dealers. Sex and money, those old political bartering tools, equal sleaze. It’s a very “media” word.

But sleaze is also a quality that comes to the fore in a certain strain of rock music, one the Americans have always brought off better and best. Alice Cooper, The New York Dolls, Aerosmith, this is big-time sleaze, excess in all areas, live-fast-die-young-and-have-a-good-looking-corpse-style sleaze. The British had their moments, most noticeably during the glam rock period from the early to mid-1970s. Bowie, Slade, T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, The Sweet; all these bands featured members that responsible parents of the time would not wish near their daughters, or sons, in this precursor to the gender-swapping madness we see today. Even Elton John and Queen had a decent sleaze rating. But it was largely manufactured sleaze, pop music PR. Well, except for Freddie Mercury who, despite being a British national institution, was a sleazebag of the first order. But real sleaze? You have to live it as well as dress up in its livery.

I once saw what I consider London’s sleaziest band, Thee Hypnotics. They are the dark side of sleaze, terrible junkies with sunken eyes who somehow manage to summon up an evil, shape-shifting version of the blues. Offstage, they were unapproachable and sullen, their eyes giving away their narcotic hungers. They were Nice ‘N’ Sleazy, as British punks The Stranglers put it. Now they were a sleazy band, the only group I ever saw that you could smell from the audience. They also had their run-ins with heroin, and it showed. Heroin will be present throughout my top 10, and it is the drug most associated with street-level sleaze.

I wanted trashy Americana but I didn’t want big names, sleazy or not, so no Iggy Pop, Prince, Ramones, not even The Cramps. I was after eclectic sleaze, not the stuff you can buy in any store. I was on the lookout for something more authentic, and more obscure (my chart features just two artists who could even be vaguely considered mainstream), and so I looked Stateside for my sleaze. You might not know some of these bands so, if you favor indie/alternative rock (as I believe the young people call it), you might find some tarnished gems. If you do know them, you are a card-carrying sleaze merchant. Welcome aboard.

The word “sleaze” has a range of definitions, some of them most appropriate to the exact strain of music I was striving to catch: Immoral, sordid, corrupt, contemptible, shabby, slovenly… Well, quite. That is the taste by which sleaze is to be enjoyed, as I hope you enjoy this tawdry and disreputable bunch.

10. Rancid – …And Out Come the Wolves

This is what comes of being a bunch of punks in the hippie heartland of Berkeley, California, in the early 1990s, having huge and comedic mohawk haircuts, and only ever listening to The Clash and ska. Actually, Rancid are far from obscure, sales making them one of the biggest US punk bands, not quite up there with the execrable Green Day but not far off. …And Out Come the Wolves is their third album, released in 1995. It’s completely irrepressible, just this side of cartoon punk at times, and is not really music that benefits from being sober when you listen to it.

Sometimes you know exactly which singer some vocalists grew up imitating. In the UK, you know that Brett Anderson, singer with 90s indie kings Suede (pretty sleazy) grew up singing Bowie songs into his hairbrush-cum-microphone just as you know that Bryan Ferry, late of Roxy Music (sleaze with class), would have had an LP of Noël Coward on his record-player as a boy. Well, Tim Armstrong, Rancid’s lusty vocalist, must have worked on his Joe Strummer impersonation night and day. This is sleaze at full pelt, an irrepressible album.

Standout track: Time Bomb

9. Afghan Whigs – Gentlemen

A band whose members meet in jail is always going to score highly on the rock ‘n’ roll sleaze scale. Afghan Whigs were one of the bands who saved the rather too grungy (for my taste) 1990s, and I saw them two or three times when they visited the old Astoria Theater in Tottenham Court Road, demolished now, like a lot of London’s old music icons. Founder member, singer, and guitarist Greg Dulli is our first junkie on parade, Rancid having seemed to have stuck to booze, probably strong cider for punk credibility. Dulli was a thug with a band to match, all hailing from a city which even sounds sleazy, Cincinatti.

Their fourth album Gentlemen came out in 1993. It is a ferocious tempest of punk, soul, and R&B with just a hint of psychedelia, two jangling guitars while the bass often climbs around the scale, and they had a good, tub-thumping drummer. Musically, Afghan Whigs were down and dirty and very sleazy, and Dulli’s skanky tales of losers on drugs are the perfect libretto. Here, for example, the antagonist is crooning to his girlfriend about the joys of having a drink together:

“Angel, I’m sober. I got off that stuff
Just like ya asked me to.
Angel, come closer, so the stink of your lies
Sinks into my memory.
She said baby, forever.
But I don’t like to be alone.
So don’t stay away too long…”

Some couples just have it all, don’t they?

Standout track: Fountain and Fairfax

8. Smog – A River Ain’t Too Much to Love

Bill Callahan began as an experimental artist before finding his musical persona with more conventional, guitar-based songs. I am still going through a bit of an odyssey with him, but A River… is so much a part of one particular summer for me (do you ever get that with albums? They are little time machines that take you back) that it’s been around in my musical life for 20 years. I also came across Callahan again with the movie Dead Man’s Shoes, for which Callahan provides some of the soundtrack and which I reviewed here at Counter Currents.

Callahan tells introverted tales from an over-full heart, and appears entirely drug-free, although it feels a little grubby to search with the term “Is Bill Callahan a junkie?” You feel like a hick detective rifling through a nice guy’s diary. The least sleazy of the albums featured, but actually one of the two albums that prompted me to put the list together. So, nice guy makes achingly beautiful album without the assistance of smack. It shouldn’t sound like a positive review, really, but there we are.

Standout track: Rock Bottom Riser

7. Royal Trux – Thank You

Now, if it’s junkie business you want, then it’s Royal Trux you need. Neil Hagherty was the 17-year-old guitarist with Washington DC punk band Pussy Galore in 1987 when he met Jennifer Herrema, 15 and homeless. Eventually relocating to San Francisco, the couple formed Royal Trux, whose chaotic career tags them as one of those “influential” cult bands. “If everyone who heard The Velvet Underground started a band, everyone who heard Royal Trux started reaching beyond their grasp, musical or otherwise”, was one music-press opinion. Herrema set the seal on the band’s legendary drug use when she appeared, along with English reprobate supermodel Kate Moss, in a series of posters for Calvin Klein which started the “heroin chic” controversy in the 90s, all those skinny birds with sunken eyes and xylophone ribcages. A lot of these albums seem to come from the 1990s, I note, from which we must conclude that it was a rather sleazy decade.

Royal Trux reformed a few years ago, Hagherty and Herrema no longer a couple but still alive after their battles with the needle, but it is their early trash aesthetic which places them in the sleaze pantheon.

Standout track: Map of the City

6. Guided by Voices – Alien Lanes.

Ah, the wonderful American genre of lo-fi. Alien Lanes is yet another 90s album, released as it was in 1995, and Guided by Voices formed in Dayton, Ohio, almost a decade earlier. The album features 14 songs in half an hour, and some tracks make the average Wire song seem to last as long as Freebird. The effect is not unlike The Who’s TV-ad-sized songs on A Quick One While He’s Away. GBV also – again reminiscent of British band Wire – excel in absurdist song titles: They’re Not Witches, Big Chief Chinese Restaurant, My Valuable Hunting Knife. You can’t beat a good, meaningless title.

Big boozers, the band were seemingly untouched by the demon heroin, perhaps because founder Robert Pollard has been the one consistent member. Presumably, if the main man is clean he won’t put up with junkies in his band, like the late Mark E. Smith of The Fall. Perhaps Alien Lanes is all the better for its air of scuzzy cleanliness, if that isn’t too (oxy)moronic. Influences range from REM to The Beatles, immersed in a thrashy, fuzzy and often ill-recorded hash of punk and American garage rock.

Standout track: Always Crush Me. If someone hasn’t used this in a film, with its hypnotic, broken-music-box riff, they’ve missed a trick.

5. Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers – L.A.M.F.

The original messed-up kid, Thunders left The New York Dolls to start The Heartbreakers with fellow heroin addict, drummer Jerry Nolan. Thunders throws around recycled Berry riffs with gay abandon, along with his trademark choke where he sounds as though he is trying to throttle his guitar. To prove their junkie credentials, Thunders and Nolan even recorded a take on a Chuck Berry song, Too Much Junkie Business. It’s sleazy but it’s not camp, as this type of vaudeville sleaze often is. Thunders’ real name was John Anthony Genzale and he was of Sicilian descent. That’s enough to get you made in the Mafia, and the Mob are not camp. So just as Johnny wasn’t gonna wear no steeenkin’ dresses in The Dolls, so there’s no camp in The Heartbreakers, just a scuzzy hucksterism. The album’s two powerhouse songs, Born to Lose and Chinese Rocks, are actually not indicative of the album. I’d forgotten how much of it is pumped-up bubblegum music, psychobilly but with more distortion and a punk engine.

Chinese Rocks caused a rift with The Ramones, who claimed Thunders stole the riff from their song Commando. Note to musicians; If you are going to rip off your old flatmate’s songs, don’t put his name in the first verse when you come to record it:

“Somebody called me on the phone.
Said, hey, is Dee Dee home?
You wanna take a walk?
You wanna go to the park?
You wanna go get some Chinese Rock?”

Like two other junkies who achieved at least something lasting of note, Aleister Crowley and Alexander Trocchi, Thunders found rubies in the dust of his plight. But heroin was much bigger than him, and after Nolan died he went solo, releasing the beautiful but wretchedly amateurish ballad You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory. He eventually entered a hotel room he would never leave alive in New Orleans in 1991, and it was goodbye, Johnny Thunders.

Standout song: Born to Lose

4. The God Machine – One Last Laugh in a Place of Dying

This peerlessly titled album veers around from near-metal to violin-backed ballads to swampy blues, but the band is blessed with a blockbusting rhythm section, half the fun of this genre. The album was on Fiction Records, home of The Cure, and the song In Bad Dreams sounds more like the British Goths than they do themselves. This was released in 1994. A pattern is forming.

A short-lived band formed in San Diego, California, in the early 90s, the band only recorded two albums, of which One Last Laugh… was the second. It had a good critical reception, but its only claim to chart fame was the band rolling in at number 353 in Rock Hard magazine’s 500 greatest rock and metal albums of all time. But then it is also surprisingly ambient, in a gnarly way. There is a strange emptiness in some of the slower songs I also hear in other bands here, and I associate it with the large, lonely emptiness of a country the size of the US. Maybe it’s why Russian guitar music is way more melancholy than its Mediterranean counterparts. I hear some of this music as genuine Americana, rightly or wrongly. One Last Laugh in a Place of Dying is a Sunday morning album for people who had a really strange Saturday night.

Standout track: The Tremelo Song

3. Come – Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

I’m developing a theory about almost all my entries being from the 1990s. This was released in 1994. I saw Come in London a year or so after it came out, and they were outstanding. Like Afghan Whigs, two guitars interweave and does something to the blues that you can only achieve with a distorted mash of electric guitars. And Zedek’s lyrics are small and terrifying love stories, tense miniaturism with an eye for psychological detail Henry James would have been proud of. In Mercury Falls, it gradually becomes clear that some sort of relationship is under great strain, and to a whirling dervish riff, Zedek describes a tense emotional stand-off:

“Every time we say next time.
And every year we say next year.
Watch each other for a sign,
And spend another winter here.”

I don’t know if American indie lyrics have ever been anthologized, but I for one would buy a copy.

Diminutive songstress Thalia Zedek formed Come in Boston in 1991, and it was another short-lived career of just three studio albums, of which Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was the second. If you like your love songs with a little drop of poison, it’s a good album to play with the lights out.

Standout tracks: I couldn’t separate my two great loves from this album, so it’s a dead heat between the raucously fast, In/Out, and the grindingly slow, Let’s Get Lost.

2. Lou Reed & John Cale – Songs for Drella

“Drella” was the nick-name given to Andy Warhol by his entourage at New York’s Factory, and provides the clue to this oddly named album. It’s a hybrid of “Cinderella” and “Dracula”, and as a description of Warhol, it is acerbic and accurate. As for heroin, Reed wrote a song with that title during which he abreacts shooting up, so that answers that question. The whole Factory/Velvet Underground collaboration was fueled by the drug. The first ever example of the aforementioned heroin chic must have been Warhol’s resident Barbie Doll, Edie Sedgwick.

This is a brilliant album (I am told by Americans that only the English describe things as “brilliant”) which shows Lou Reed’s lyrical mastery and underlines the role John Cale played in giving structure to The Velvet Underground. Both vocalists do very good impersonations of Warhol, and the fictional interchanges show the mad web of tensions that was the Factory. Reed sings in Work:

“Andy sat down to talk one day,
He said, ‘Decide what you want!
Do you want to expand your parameters
Or play the museums like some dilettante?’
I fired him on the spot.
He got red and he called me a rat.
It was the worst word that he could think of.
I never seen him like that.”

A fitting monument to Andy Warhol, if you happen to like him, which I do almost against my better judgment.

Standout track: Warhol’s relationship with his mother is portrayed in miniature in Open House.

1. Idaho – This Way Out

I was staggering through the Bloomsbury area of London one morning in the mid-90s with what a good friend terms a “shining hangover”, when I saw a poster for an album. The tagline looked familiar, presumably a line taken from a review, and I thought I was having a hangover-induced déjà vu. Then I remembered. I had written it in a review of Idaho’s This Way Out, one of the most memorable albums of my acquaintance. Obviously, this was released in the 90s (1996). What a strange decade. Perhaps I have unconsciously chosen my soundtrack from that period, not a rewarding one for me otherwise. The tagline to the Bloomsbury poster, incidentally, read: “If Greg Dulli [noted above in Afghan Whigs] wrote songs for Pavement, they would sound like Idaho”. It sort of stands up still, which is more than I could do the morning I saw the poster.

Jeff Martin and John Berry formed Idaho in LA, usually the home of big-hair rock and faux sleaze, and proceeded to be lumped in with the “slowcore” movement along with the Likes of Red House Painters and Codeine. This Way Out is lazily constructed, played with strange guitar harmonics, and an E-bow effect that doesn’t exactly sound like an E-bow. It’s a ghostly sound, more of the haunted Americana noted earlier. The songs are sometimes fragile to the point of coming apart, and the lyrics veer from slacker laments to moments of great beauty:

“Wind a golden wire around my crown.
This lazy life, yeah gaze on by…
Say when my days are through.
Every sundown sweeps on by.
Ailerons and fire roads
Will cut their way to somewhere.
The junk will settle from the storm that’s mine.”

Another band troubled by heroin, they were supposed to support Come when I saw them, as noted above. Idaho pulled out as one of the band was “sick”. This is usually a generalized term, but has a very specific meaning in the context of rock music, particularly at the sleazy end of the street. A very valuable album to me personally.

Standout track: Sweep (I should like this played at my funeral, if that’s alright with everyone).

So, there we are. A different type of sleaze, one compounded from loneliness and despair more than glitter and swagger. As I say, if I’d put together a cassette of the songs noted, as we still did in the 90s, I would call it Haunted Americana.