Pussy Galore - Exile On Main Street [Bootleg of 1986 cassette only release]

Pussy Galore proves the slippery slope argument hammered down by anti-rock n’ roll conservatives who found the music to be of the devil and felt it necessary to attack it in order to protect their precious nuclear families, white flight and a slew of other hidebound institutions, frameworks and morals. This force of commie hating nut jobs thought, ‘who needs Ike Turner when there’s Glenn Miller’. Well hey, ‘who needs the Rolling Stones when there’s Pussy Galore’.

With Exile On Main Street (1986), Pussy Galore (a name that alone strikes terror into squares, even though it’s reference to the James Bond flick Goldfinger softens the crassness a bit) completes the lineation or more appropriately the downward spiral of rock n’ roll into the debauched depths of devastation and destruction by covering the Rolling Stones notorious 1972 album. You only have to listen to the first fifteen seconds to understand that the predictions and fears of 1950’s anti-rock n’ rollers were dead on when Cristina Martinez irritably shouts out, “Hello. I hate your fucking guts. Fuck you. I hate your fucking guts. I hate your fucking guts. I hate your fucking guts. I hate this fucking machine. I don’t know how the fuck to use it. I hate your fucking guts. I’m going to make my own fucking music”. And so you have it, less then fifteen years after the Stones released Exile On Main Street, this is where rock n’ roll squatted, like an untrained dog taking a shit in an Evangelist neighbors front yard.

Exile On Main Street reads like a hobo rummaging through a dumpster; throwing shit everywhere, eating rotten fish and licking the insides of old beer cans. The recording quality is atrocious, their instruments are out of tune to the point of no return, naughty words clutter and blur the original lyrics and melodies and when the tape begins to hiss and screech, it’s as though booze was poured into the already broken recording equipment. Yet Pussy Galore’s re-visionary effort harps upon all the best qualities of rock n’ roll—the ‘fuck you mom and dad, I’m drunk, on heroin and noisier than your divorce court’ attitude. Whether you love it or loathe it, Exile On Main Street is one of the most politically incorrect albums you’ll ever hear, and that alone entitles it at least a little respect. It's also a significant document because it bears all the pulpy fruits of the extraordinary noise to follow in its wake, that of Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion and Royal Trux.

In line with Pussy Galore’s over-the-top lo-fi aesthetics, Exile On Main Street was originally released as a double-cassette that was limited to 550 copies. However, it has been bootlegged and reissued on vinyl, so now you can experience it on a black spinning plate of Satan, fornication, and substance abuse like the lost days when records where hidden under mattresses alongside pornography magazines and dime sacks! While I watch Exile On Main Street whirl round my record player, I wonder what happened to bands like Pussy Galore, Mission of Burma, Crass, Hüsker Dü, Mudhoney and so forth? These groups shat out an unadulterated vigor that is now being spoiled by fashion-obsessed hipsters. These current underground replacements are one-dimensional travesties, as is the case with such acts as Chairlift, Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah!, Of Montreal, and The Arcade Fire. It took rock n’ roll three decades to descend to the gutter the way Pussy Galore did, it’s time for another plunge.

P.S. I take back my dirty shit talking. Give me the Rolling Stones and Pussy Galore!

Bardos Freedoom