Recorded all over America and France, 1988 and 1989.

Stray Dogs I've Known
By Mary Ellen Carver

I was at Rachel’s mother Phyllis’s house, talking with Phyllis about religious philosophy and child-rearing and people. Rachel flashed the "Drugs Are Nice" album to me. On the cover were Helen and my daughter Lisa, both naked except little flower petals on the crucial parts – not very many petals, either. Lisa had dyed her hair black and Helen’s was white-blonde. I thought, “That’s not my baby.”

I told one person at work, and that person told everybody. They made a bronze nameplate for my desk that said “Mrs. S.D.” – a supposedly fond joke. I believe the name and the whole band was a parody of conventional artistic and musical expression. And after a while, a parody of itself. I didn’t look close enough to know well what was going on in the band. I’d had my nose rubbed in drugs by Lisa’s father, and I didn’t want it (my nose) now rubbed in these things my daughter was doing that I wouldn’t understand and couldn’t fit into. I tried to keep control for as long as I could, but by the time Lisa was fifteen, I had absolutely no control. Lisa played a GG Allin tape for me, and she said some things about his live performances. She admired him, so I thought Suckdog performances must have been similar. She called them operas. I tried not to know about them. I know that in most of them Lisa wore very little clothes. I know it was sexually explicit. I know there was some physical violence on stage. She got hurt one night and called me from a payphone and I wasn’t home. Still breaks my heart when I think about that. I saw a review of one of her shows and I don’t want to remember what it said. My generation was brought up to think of music as light-hearted entertainment. Lisa said, “That’s a good review, Ma.” It did say she was the best at what she was doing, but in my mind that’s like saying, “She’s the best at petty theft.”

Lisa and Rachel took an aversion to any clothes new or nice. Maybe it was a desire to recycle. There must have been a point to looking as awful as possible. Helen looked slightly better — she looked like she took some time selecting her clothes: they matched, they were clean, they were fairly contemporary. I hoped Helen was transitory in Lisa’s life because I thought she was emotionally a waste.

Helen and Lenny got in trouble in Dover and went to Portland, Maine. They got in trouble in Portland and went to Florida. I don’t know where they are now. I think Rachel grew up a lot. She got her G.E.D. and then went to college and got in environmental protection. She’s not entirely conventional, but now she has goals and her personality is very loving. I used to feel there was something twisted about Rachel. It got straightened out somehow.

I always thought Lisa would be all right. She makes fun of herself. She knows what’s going on. She’s very intelligent, but sometimes she’s so focused on creativity her practicality gets shunted. She recently moved to San Francisco and wants to be a grade school teacher. Or so she tells me. For the last seven years, she’s worked grunt jobs and put all the money into Suckdog and her magazine Rollerderby. Lisa will disagree, but I see Rollerderby as a guy she devotes herself to who isn’t going to be as faithful back. I saw Suckdog as a fling, a teenage fling.
10 August 1993, Dover, New Hampshire



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Suckdog Drugs Are Nice Liner Notes
by Thurston Moore

I remember growing up in Connecticut (early-mid ’70s) and going out in the woods with some friends and smoking Thai stick and drinking either Boone’s Farm or some concoction my buddy Scott would make from his parents’ liquor cabinet. It was equal parts gin, Jack Daniels, vodka, vermouth and pink lemonade, and was very mind-numbing. One of my best friends was this girl named Donna who was a total freak and would have sex with anyone and everyone. Except me. It was weird. I always wanted to and fantasized about it, but it never happened. We hung out a lot but maybe she thought I was too Catholic and pure and innocent or something. Her kid-sister was even wilder. I did start going out with this one girl who was totally into fucking and getting fucked up and that was cool. I wanted to live with her forever but she started going out with much more crazy dudes than me and I was insane with disillusionment. High school made a man out of me and right when I graduated I robbed a house with an infamous ex-con kid and fled to Michigan only to hitchhike back a week later. My mom paid all the fines and restitutions and I had to see a probation officer for a year. The kids I knew were going off to UCONN or some other dismal college locales or were becoming more involved with white trash nothingness. I got into Patti Smith and moved to NYC on borrowed money (from my mom, who was not exactly loaded) and never turned back. I connected with the sophisto-art rock underground and totally divorced myself from my small town New England memories. In the early ’80s I was in my twenties and was amazed and jealous of the hardcore uprising of suburban teenagers who sang songs about how their high schools were lame and how the local cops sucked and stuff. I would talk to the young Connecticut hardcore kids at gigs and rave about how it’s unfair this scene didn’t exist for me when I was that age – in the sticks. I don’t care anymore, but ithe influx of youthful, spontaneous, creative juice that was being networked across the States somehow validated my lost, nowhere past. The hardcore scene grew up and either became better or worse depending on the individual. The idea of being pro-alertness and anti-asshole, (straight-edge), was great but alien to my own earlier experience.

There were insane chaotic vibes and fucked hormonal contusions running rampant in those days – in the woods or up in each others bedrooms, laughing or losing control hysterically. When I first saw the cover of Drugs Are Nice, I knew right away what was happening. Lisa and Helen were in the same state of mind and creative undress I remember worrying through. And some of the tracks on the record were just them tripping on acid or drunk and giggling into a tape recorder. Fuck, we used to do that. In 1990 Lisa, with the culture of indie-rock at her service, put this wacked existence out as a fucking record. And there was a video of her and Helen Suckpuppy totally losing it in some New Hampshire attic, getting bombed, ripping up the Bible, serenading GG Allin, taking their clothes off, not giving a fuck about anything, and acting like girls I remember but always wondered what happened to. Lisa captured this exclusive life-moment and developed it into theater. I was lucky enough to see her take her world on the road when she appeared with her then husband, Costes, at CBGB’s. Costes is the ultimate French absurdist and the two wrote operas together and performed them at punk clubs! The mixture of personality and identity was fierce and mind-boggling and far more complex and intelligent than just a crazed New England girl being an accidental genius. That night was the only time I met her. She had cat whiskers and pajamas and big bear claw slippers and was running across the Bowery (hopping, actually). When she saw me at the bar she was sticking her butt out really far, like a ten year old and she meowed and said “Hi Thurston Moore.” WOW – and at the end of the show she stripped down and ran through the audience hugging people with pure insane affection. That was the last I ever saw of her. I talked to her on the phone the other day and she was telling me how she saw me walking up the street one time and she had to duck into an alley because she didn’t want me to see her with her glasses on. I think Lisa’s very beautiful, and completely fascinating. She’s a bit more grown up now and her empire as journalist (Rollerderby fanzine), and as a representative for a generation of supra-post-modern genius America is a total inspiration for old fucks like me. A woman of significant means, kill, kill.
—September ’93, New York City