3. SuckdogDrugs Are Nice
I didn’t discover Suckdog until I was in high school, but it totally spoke to my experiences that I had with girls growing up – my Fisher Price cassette player was so important. I did a series of pieces about it before I Abused Animal, a piece called ‘Termas: Moaning On Linda’. I had a friend called Linda when I was eight or nine, and hers was the opposite of my family. She had a single mom that had different boyfriends, her house was much more loose, you could get away with loads of shit. So I would go spend the night with her, and we would get out the Fisher Price and we would go into her closet and we would lie on top of each other and moan, and record it. I wish I had these tapes.
What happened to them?
My family lived in West Virginia and they lived in an apartment complex and the owners of the apartment complex burned it down for insurance money – there were so many mementos – including this whole series of cassettes that my family made of me talking, and doing songs and stuff. I was always recording things on cassettes like this.
Linda and I had this thing – we didn’t really totally understand it but there was a sexual dimension to it. So for this Linda piece I had a mannequin that was Linda, and I really thought of her as Linda, and for the performance I had steel and vocals, and I recorded music that was Linda’s music. And so the performance was Linda on stage, and between us a table with the Fisher Price tape player, playing her part, and then me playing along with that. I still draw from that period of my life, and Suckdog was a reflection of these kind of recordings, the goofy slumber party energy that happens between young girls. That cover brings it all back, it really encapsulates that energy.
