Originally published in Rave-Up #18 (1990)
Interview by Devorah Ostrov
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| Faster Pussycat (publicity photo) |
"You're pretty, but what makes you special?"
Taime Downe, an employee at Retail Slut and frontman for fledgling LA club band Faster Pussycat, hurled this rude compliment at a friend of mine as she walked down Melrose Avenue.
When she couldn't come up with a witty retort, he smirked and sauntered off — having made his point, I guess. And thus, I began biding my time for three long years, waiting for an opportunity to interview Faster Pussycat so I could turn that question on Taime himself (and ask about their records and stuff).
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| Brent & Eric in ROCKbeat magazine |
So, I was mildly vexed when nice guy Brent Muscat called Rave-Up HQ for this interview. But I asked him, anyway...
Q: You're pretty, but what makes you special?
"I like that question," laughs Brent, before he confidently dives in: "I think I have a good personality. I like to think I'm semi-intelligent. I have a good imagination, and I think I'm creative."
The cutie-pie guitarist also mentions that he's attracted to girls with good personalities. "Sometimes, you meet someone with a perfect body and a beautiful face," he says, "but there's nothing inside because they've never had to develop a personality."
Faster Pussycat's strong sophomore album, Wake Me When It's Over (the title of a 1960 comedic romp and a possible comment on the trials and tribulations of the recording process), was released by Electra Records last August. Since then, the guys have been playing club dates to promote the LP, but they'll soon be embarking on a major US tour as openers for fellow LA glam/trash merchants Mötley Crüe.
Brent is very excited about the upcoming tour, calling it the band's "first big break." Perhaps surprisingly, that comment is meant to include their support slot on Alice Cooper's 1987 (pre-"Poison") tour.
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| Faster Pussycat on the cover of Screamer magazine - May 1990 |
According to Brent, supporting Alice was "great for us, but it wasn't a lot of exposure. There's a big difference between playing in front of 2,000 people a night and playing in front of 30,000 people a night [the projected average audience for Mötley Crüe]. Especially when the 2,000 people are hardcore Alice Cooper fans, and they don't really care about who's opening up. I'm hoping that the Mötley Crüe crowd are gonna be a little more into us."
The group that took its moniker from a Russ Meyer's cult flick and worked especially hard at developing a bad-boy image based on (real or imagined) debauchery and depravity, also seems untroubled by any form of lyrical censorship from the record company.
Wake Me When It's Over might be a touch more bluesy/boozy than the band's 1987 eponymous debut, but it's definitely no less sleazy. "I've got you buckled to the floorboards/Got you screaming like a pooch on a leash..." sings Taime on the LP's primly titled opening track, "Where There's a Whip There's a Way."
Elektra really didn't have a problem with their lyrics?
"There's stuff that Elektra maybe doesn't like," admits Brent, "but we were like that when they signed us. So it's like, they knew what they were getting."
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| Early flyer for Faster Pussycat (and the Zeros) at the Country Club in Reseda, CA. |
"We have a really good manager," Brent adds. "He might say, 'This is a super good song. If you change this one word, maybe it can be on the radio.' Then, we have to decide if that's important to us or not."
Has it ever been important enough to them to change a song's lyrics?
"Not really," he insists.
The group has, however, received its fair share of finger-wagging from the P.M.R.C. (Parents Music Resource Center, headed-up by Tipper Gore). And while some might say the criticism is well deserved, Brent notes that Faster Pussycat fans have quickly jumped to their defense.
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| Wake Me When It's Over (Elektra Records, 1989) |
"I've seen a letter this girl wrote to Tipper Gore," he says. "She wrote, 'When Faster Pussycat talk about sex, it's a sexual thing. It's not a bad thing.'"
"Actually, I don't think she'd read our lyrics 'cause there's some real dirty stuff in there," he chuckles. But in general, Brent agrees with the letter writer. "It's true. When Taime sings about stuff, it's mostly from his personal experience. And a lot of the stuff that sounds nasty doesn't really mean nasty stuff."
He points to "Slip of the Tongue" as an example: "You could take that to mean something really nasty, and sometimes when we play it live, Taime will say it's about, er... [Brent pauses to giggle because he's a nice guy and has probably just realized he's telling this story to a girl] ...eating pussy. But it's really about people talking shit about each other; people talking behind your back and getting you in trouble — 'With a slip of the tongue/I'm in deep shit!'"
What about "Where There's a Whip There's a Way"? Is that an amusing metaphor too?
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| Faster Pussycat |
"No, that's pretty straight to the point," states Brent. "But at the same time, Taime isn't telling people they should do that. It's just his little bondage fantasy. It shouldn't be taken seriously. When I first heard the lyrics to that song, I was laughing! 'Gonna sign that filly up for the rodeo...' It's just ridiculous!"
Brent's personal favorite songs on the new LP are "Pulling Weeds" and "Little Dove," both of which he co-wrote with Taime. On the latter, he employs a talk box — the weird tube-like apparatus that Peter Frampton made so irritatingly famous back in the '70s.
Annoyingly, Brent won't tell me what he's saying into the talk box (he "prefers to leave it to your imagination"), but he acknowledges that Frampton Comes Alive was one of the first records he ever bought. Although he'd rather give Aerosmith credit for the inspiration: "Joe Perry has always used one. He plays it on 'Sweet Emotion,' but he doesn't make a big deal out of it."
Brent didn't include it as a favorite, but the Faster Pussycat tune getting the most attention at the moment is "House of Pain," penned by Taime and guitarist Greg Steele. The power-ballad about a young boy's abandonment by his father is the latest track from the LP to be issued as a 45 (it follows the raucous "Poison Ivy"), and an emotional black and white video for the song (directed by Michael Bay) has been picked up by MTV.
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| Publicity photo from Faster Pussycat's debut album cover L-R: Mark Michals, Brent Muscat, Greg Steele, Taime Downe, Eric Stacy |
The intensity of Taime's vocals on "House of Pain" leads one to believe the song is autobiographical, which to a certain extent it is. "Taime grew up with his dad not around a lot," explains Brent. "It was just something he felt about his dad."
He emphasizes, "I think it's a really cool song because when most bands write a ballad, it's gotta be on the radio and it's gotta say, 'I love you baby... I miss you so much... I won't forget you...' Which is great, but for me, I think 'House of Pain' is cooler because it feels more real."
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| Brent Muscat is a ROCKbeat Metal Pinup |
"Cryin' Shame," also written by the Downe/Steele team could likewise be classified as a ballad, although its gruesome storyline sets it way outside standard ballad territory.
"To me, 'Cryin' Shame' isn't a ballad," says Brent. "It's a very scary song. It's a true story. Taime and Greg read this book called Say You Love Satan." (Written by David St. Clair, the book chronicles the grisly murder of a teenager by his friends.)
"I didn't read it," Brent continues. "I'm not really into that kind of stuff. But they were like, 'Wow!' It was really shocking to them. How could these kids kill another kid? It's kind of written from the point of view of the kid who died. What was he thinking about?"
Plagued by personal and professional problems for the last couple of years, recording a second album sometimes seemed impossible.
"There's a lot of positive things happening to us now," states Brent with obvious relief. "But there was a period between this album and our first one where we thought we weren't going to do it. We kept thinking, 'God, why is this happening?' When we were down on our luck, something else [bad] would happen."
Graphically portraying the band's feelings of frustration over their (hopefully) past problems is the LP's strange cover art which portrays a man screaming. But Brent refuses to tell anyone who it is or why they're screaming.
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| "House of Pain" b/w "Slip of the Tongue" picture sleeve 45 released in Germany - 1989 |
"Someone thought it was Jimi Hendrix," he offers. "Someone else thought it was Sly Stone. To someone, it's a guy screaming 'cause he's having an orgasm. To someone else, he's getting his fingers chopped off."
"It's anything you want it to be," Brent says with a noncommittal shrug I can see on the other end of the phone line. But there is a motive behind their madness, and it has to do with being viewed as legitimate musicians.
"We wanted people to look at the cover and say, 'What are they doing? What does that mean?' Rather than, 'They look good, but can they play?' That's what happened with our first album. With this album, we wanted people to see that we're a serious band and listen to our music."
Which neatly brings us back around to the start of this interview. Faster Pussycat is pretty, but what makes the band special?
"We don't take ourselves seriously," firmly states Brent. "We have fun with it. There's a million people out there who are in bands. There's a million guys who play guitar. A lot of people get carried away and think they're rock stars. I don't think I'm the greatest person in the world, just because I play guitar. Being in a band isn't so important; we remember that."
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| Faster Pussycat - "Just the Facts" |
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