Garbage Days Revisited #63: Smashed Gladys - "Social Intercourse" (1988)

 

"You're a Jezeballerina lookin' for a band to play!" - Smashed Gladys - 17 Goin' On Crazy

I've mentioned in a few other GDR columns how sometimes the best music from the sleaze rock era came from bands who deliberately played it as ridiculously OTT as possible. Similar to Cats In Boots, New York natives Smashed Gladys are another example of this and Social Intercourse is one of the most gleefully dumb but enjoyable examples of bonehead sleaze-rock from the '80s. And trust me, the competition in that area was pretty fierce.

The group were formed out of the same primordial soup mid-'80s Big Apple scene that spawned fellow GDR alumni Uncle Sam, Circus of Power and the Throbs (indeed, original Smashed Gladys guitarist Roger Ericson would leave the band shortly before this album to join the latter). The group were fronted by Sally Cato who had a truly ferocious screech of a voice which made you wonder if she was the long lost daughter of Noddy Holder and Suzi Quatro.

Smashed Gladys' gimmick was basically to mix the crunch of early '80s rock with the gleeful OTT swagger of '70s glam rock (so they really were a glam metal band in the purest possible sense you could argue!). The group would put out a self-titled indie album in 1985 (Cato may or may not have starred in the video for Motley Crue's Too Young To Fall In Love around the same time) featuring an, erm, singular take on T-Rex's Metal Guru which brought them to the attention of Kiss' Gene Simmons who got them a major label deal with Elektra who released their second and, as it turned out, final album Social Intercourse in 1988.

Right from the album cover (a cartoon of Cato entwined with a skeleton whose legs are making the peace sign), Social Intercourse is a gloriously no-brainer sleaze rock album but the key is that instead of coming off as cringy, your main reaction when listening to it is to grin. I mean, come on, it's got songs called Legs Up, Hard To Swallow, Lick It Into Shape and Dive In The Dark on it, it's pretty clear we're not listening to Tool here. Despite that, it's still got plenty of great moments on here - lead-off single 17 Goin' On Crazy is a full on singalong Slade/Sweet style glam stomper and Eye Of The Storm kicks in from its gentle opening to a killer '80s metal riff fest. Even Ozzy Osbourne makes an appearance on the track Cast Of Nasties but it still didn't save the album from bombing.

It's Sermonette, the closing track which sums up the album in all its dumb glory with its chorus of "Wham! Bam! Here I am!/I tell ya honey, I give it all I can/Not for the cash/Not for the fame/Gettin' some ass is the name of the game/WE DID IT...WE DID IT...WE DID IT...TO GET LAID!" Even the final sound of the record is the "TO GET LAID!" line playing into fade-out.

Suffice to say that Social Intercourse was not the million seller that someone at Elektra clearly thought it would be when they signed the band and Smashed Gladys were gone from the label pretty quickly and had split by the time the '80s wound to a close. As I've mentioned, Roger Ericson went on to join the Throbs and jump from one divebomb into oblivion to another while fellow six stringer Bart Lewis would go on to join Michael Monroe's band in the early '90s. Cato would go on to be an acclaimed graphic designer and I remember reading an interview with her in the late noughties where she came across as looking back on Smashed Gladys with a mixture of fondness and slight embarrassment from her more lofty position in the art world.

Sadly, Sally would suddenly pass away in 2020 and last year brought the news that the remaining remembers of the Cast of Nasties had got together to polish up the demos that would have made up the group's third album. There's been a couple of singles released from it so far on Golden Robot records (current home of Love/Hate, the Steve Riley version of L.A. Guns and Hardcore Superstar) and they've sounded decent enough so it'll be interesting to see what it sounds like. Anyway, Social Intercourse - it most certainly ain't big or clever but it's one of those albums that always puts a smile on my face when I listen to it if I'm feeling a bit down in the dumps. And let's face it, that's exactly what the best sleaze rock should do.