Mascara scarred: Razor Boys add another notch to gutter glam’s streaked history
Razor Boys, 1978
In the tradition of record collectors forever digging for yet another cult-y sub-genre to decode, allow us here at We Never Learn HQ to pull out the ol' shovel and dig into "Revisionist Post-New York Dolls Gutter Glam of the End of the 1970s"
The New York Dolls spent most of 1972-74 defining proto-punk gutter glam rock, while also making it cool to be stupid sloppy (unlike that era’s British glam rock) and revel in your sleaziest tendencies. But the Stooges did that too a couple years earlier, refining it with Raw Power in 1973, which ends up being a perfect statement of sleazy gutter glam, so maybe the Dolls did do it first, by like a few months or something? Anyway, the sheer sonic scuzz of the early Stooges beat everyone to the punk punch, and so it was that punch particularly that predominated underground r'n'r evolution for a few years. Punk happened, and the Dolls drifted into the ether. Except for their makeup and clothing choices.
So while the general punk esthetic filtered it's way through all new rock from 1974 on, the Dolls' garish template, not to mention Kiss' concurrent foofy ways -- really, seriously, not to mention, because I loathe to give Kiss any more ink of any kind, and fuck those guys. Yeah, they have like 7 really fun tunes, but Jesus, Gene Simmons?! Enough already!! But there you have it, it's kinda undeniable -- those two NYC bands convinced up'n'comer bands who appreciated the pro-anti-muscial ability angle, but still liked tasty licks that their future was wrapped in spandex and mascara.
Razor Boys, 1980
With the Dolls neatly forgotten in the mainstream, Kiss became the face of the ridiculous cartoon pop that metal would soon become, but the little girly boys understood. Bands as big as Aerosmith and Van Halen, or as underground as the Imperial Dogs, Teenage Head, the Shit Dogs, and DMZ knew from whence their hairdo tips and trashy riffs came. Throw in a little of the innocent love of a fine vintage guitar hook and three-minute tunes -- rather than the stadium pomp, Led Zep posing that most hair metal of the ‘80s eventually took on -- and there's a neat little pocket there of non-pretentious, makeup-splattered, ripped jeans/silky shirt bands that peppered the otherwise non-glam end of the '70s rock underground. Well we won't go too deep here, but basically, the daddies of this presumed genre would seem to be the Hollywood Brats whose followers will place them even keel with the Dolls. Uh, no, 'cause their songwriting just ain't as memorable. But their recordings -- neatly gathered on Sick on You (Cherry Red, 2016) and in the bio, Sick on You: The Disastrous Story of the Hollywood Brats, the Greatest Band You’ve Never Heard Of (Blue Rider Press, 2016) -- and the slow-burn, historical revisionist appraisal casts them as influential enough.
By the mid-80s, these makeup streaks seeped into the wrinkles outside of the general underground punk gaze, as bands like Dogs D’Amour, Smack, and mostly Hanoi Rocks retained a semblance of street cred given their obvious Dolls affinity and ragged musical strutting.
And that side street is where Razor Boys inadvertently stomped around, unbeknownst to, well, almost anybody except their fanbase in hometown Atlanta. In their brief existence, they only released one single, and it’s comped here for the first time with other unreleased recordings, circa 1978, out now on HoZac Records.
While forming, I doubt this forgotten crew thought of themselves as anything more or less than a good time party rock'n'roll band in no need of a critical genre distillation. But time's critical distillations winnow bands like this down through the years into something of a proto-punk shouldabeen. To wit the liner notes and brief interview with leader Ronnie Razor, where he proudly states they were about the only punk-like thing going for miles. He worked up the band around 1976, after soaking up the usual Alice Cooper and Slade funster-snot stuff, and even got to see the Stooges and Dolls a few times. His voice and the crunchy riffs drop his band right into the nascent hard rock / punk rock drag races that were unwittingly going on and wouldn't really be settled until the mid-80s, where the pretty mascara and the politicized macho split off completely.
The Razor Boys' songwriting here does rival the Hollywood Brats; and thanks to the teen-sleazy topics and flailing drum roll/guitar sting cock fights, things really get nasty as it goes along, slicing a bloody line right into the "Here are 3 chords, go form a band" history book chapter. The liner notes’ claim that Razor Boys played with R.E.M. seem strange, since R.E.M. formed in 1980, and the band Razor Boys stopped in 1979. But boozy memories and faded timelines are all part of the winnowing. Not saying if this album had come out in 1978 it would've "changed everything," but it's one hell of a sharp-booted footnote.
For me, the raggedly silly gutter glam band of my winnow window was a tough Cleveland combo called the High Plains Drifters. Dragging their half-empty bottle of Jack around the early time slots at Cleveland punk shows circa 1985, they had one excellent self-released single, maybe a cassette (?), but otherwise disappeared.
There was also Sweet Pain, a Ms. Breck-indebted gang who aimed for Van Halen-like fame over Dead Boys-y cred, and missed both marks by a lot, but were a fun time live. They dished up one self-titled LP (Combat, 1985).
But it would follow that every mid-sized town had one of these: a band of 4-5 guys, probably the second band for most of them, weened on Kiss but welcomed by the local DIY pr punk dive because they couldn't get a gig at the clubs that might actually pay because they couldn't exactly replicate Kiss covers -- and thank god for that! Then one of them figured out maybe they could play "well" enough and joined some sad attempt at stardumb; the others got yelled at by their parents, never liked how mascara melts down into your eyes anyway, and took some job; and the singer thought he could write a movie script or get a gig in the rag industry and moved to NYC or L.A.
Life winnows on...
