Jeff Spevak

@jeffspevak1

More than three decades later, they’ve all ended up as different people, all in different places.

Rod Swenson was the Yale-educated conceptual artist, underground music promoter and gadfly of the New York City experimental theater scene who created the Plasmatics. Today he spends most of his time in Arizona, his head buried deeply in acronyms. DARPA, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. And CESPA, Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action. “Heavy, theoretical stuff,” he says.

Wes Beech was the Plasmatics’ guitarist. Today he lives in a suburb of Detroit, married with a family. He does some music production, some songwriting, very little rocking. He works in music retail, selling guitar strings and amps to the next generation of stars.

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Wendy O. Williams was the teenager who felt there was something out there bigger than Webster, N.Y. And she did indeed find what she was looking for, as the rebellious, envelope-pushing singer of the anarchy that was the Plasmatics. Uncompromising in her Mohawk haircut, wielding chainsaws to destroy televisions, strategically placed shaving cream or electrical tape keeping her one step ahead, most of the time, of the local police department’s definition of public decency.

Like Swenson and Beech, Williams did move on to another, much-different life after the Plasmatics. But perhaps Swenson and Beech were better at sorting through the clashing personal and social dichotomies that ultimately caught up with her. They will be here for Sunday’s induction of Williams into the Rochester Music Hall of Fame. She will be absent, having taken her own life in 1998.

“Yeah, I was surprised,” Beech says. “It was a sad thing. The world is a smaller place without her.”

A sad thing, but not a surprise to Swenson. He knows why she did it.

“She left notes,” Swenson says. “She’d tried before, she always left notes.” Williams had attempted suicide twice, in fact, before succeeding. “Pages of notes,” Swenson says. “They’re very sad, they’re very moving.”

Williams never did anything without a reason, whether it was to blow up a Cadillac onstage or walk into the woods behind the Connecticut home that she shared with Swenson, to be among the animals that she fed and loved, before putting a gun to her head and pulling the trigger, shattering the quiet of the woods.

Swenson will accept the induction for Williams. Beech will play in a musical tribute, with Cheri Currie of The Runaways singing the words that Williams walked away from years ago. Also being honored at Sunday’s 7 p.m. ceremony and concert in Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre are saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis, Eastman School of Music Director Howard Hanson, soul-rock band The Rustix, jazz vibraphonist Joe Locke and James Rado, the creator of the Broadway musical Hair.

Williams is the most-provocative inductee in the five years of the Rochester Music Hall of Fame, although others might argue that Hanson’s alleged anti-Semitism makes him a strong contender. But Williams is also the most-misunderstood inductee. As Beech says, “There is the on-stage persona, and the off-stage persona.”

She was the first woman to appear on the cover of Kerrang!, the British heavy-metal music magazine. That was the same month she was featured on the cover of Vegetarian Times. “Those were both her,” Swenson says.

The Plasmatics were revolution, but the band was also evolution. The music evolved from raw punk to more-complex hard rock to thrash-rock. The times were evolving as well. And to survive, the individual members of the Plasmatics had to deal with those changes.

It’s uncertain as to who is winning today, but the Plasmatics are no longer in the fight. Swenson finds peace and intellectual challenge in Arizona. “I study the technology of prehistoric cultures who really were the first people in our country,” he says. “It’s a way of working with the soil, the earth. A very basic thing that takes me out into the beautiful parts of the Southwest.”

He’s also been a senior theoretical consultant with the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. “The relationship between physics and biology,” Swenson says. DARPA is on the front line of nerve interface work, which some day may allow an artificial arm to replace one that a soldier lost in battle. And robots to fight our battles, DARPA is looking into that as well.

If this is work that seems a contradiction with his early life, the answer is maybe yes, maybe no.

“The physics, theoretic stuff for DARPA, I did it for myself, really,” Swenson says. “For the same reason that I did anything that I ever really did. I find something interesting and I try to figure something out.

“I was an abstract expressionist as a teenage painter, before I finally lost the idea of representation, that the painting was of something,” he says. Instead, “the painting became something, and the process was the thing.

“Art, if you will, speaking for itself, rather than too much explaining about it.”

Swenson calls himself “an experimentalist” of the mid-1970s Times Square scene. “I saw that as a laboratory, where you could do some very interesting things,” he says. “Experiments in music and visuals and sounds and theatrical performances. It looked like a great place to do some things. And Wendy showed up in my life at just the right time, for both of us.”

The time was 1976, when Williams responded to a classified ad, placed by Swenson, auditioning performers for one of his surreal experimental theater groups called Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater.

“We were almost done for the day, I was getting ready to leave,” Swenson says. “She called and insisted, ‘You’ve got to give me a chance, you’ve got to see me.’ We waited for her. She was just different. She had a small suitcase, everything she had was in it. She had a gold Buddha under her arm, and there was this dancing thing she did, to Jimi Hendrix’ ‘Foxy Lady,’ but with her own voice on this scratchy tape. I remember, she emptied her suitcase upside down on the floor and started showing me things, and wouldn’t stop. It was amazing. I wasn’t even sure what to make of it. I said, ‘We’ll see what we can do.’

“We put her in for a few days and she just excelled. Playing multiple parts, making costumes with me, which she also did for the Plasmatics. She started going with me to rock clubs while I was shooting other things.

“But the Bohemian scene was getting old and stale at that time. And we kind of wanted to do something way over the top.”

A rock band. And the process would be the thing.

“The Plasmatics was a created band,” Swenson says. “But created around Wendy O. Williams as a vehicle for her, and as a nucleus of an idea, and a thing for both of us after we met each other and had this amazing chemistry. We were kind of different sides of a coin, with different roles in this.”

Her role, the outrageous lead singer. His role, the manager, boyfriend and confidant.

“The first night that we spent together, she spelled it out for me,” Swenson says. “She viewed herself as coming from a small town where she felt very out of place. She wanted to wear different clothes, she wanted to do things differently. She had issues at home and at school. When she left, she was heading out into a world with very few resources and zero contacts. It was a very heroic thing to do. She’s not the only person who did that. But in her circumstances, it was very heroic and very courageous, how basically what she wanted was to live an authentic life, without knowing what it is, life. She didn’t want to become the person, the kind of conformist, cookie-cutter person people wanted her to be.”

Williams had once appeared in the Peanut Gallery of The Howdy Doody Show. She’d played clarinet in the high school band, before running away at age 16. Hitch-hiking to Colorado, “She did the hippie thing for a while,” Swenson says. “She lived in Boulder in a tent, in Florida on the beach, she sold macramé that she made. She went to Europe and was a cook in a macrobiotic restaurant.”

But Williams returned from Europe having not found what she was looking for. Until she saw, discarded on the floor of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Swenson’s show-business magazine ad for Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater.

“She just came alive in that environment, in a way she found some place she had been looking for since she left home,” Swenson says. “It was amazing, how fast she came alive.”

Birth of a band

A year later, the Plasmatics were born. Williams was demolishing pyramids of televisions and simulating sex acts with sweaty microphones in clubs for a couple of years before the band released its first album in 1980, New Hope For the Wretched.

“People looked at us as a novelty act, but we were serious musicians,” Beech says. “She was a consummate professional, always working on her craft, working on the show. She would work out hours every day, she would run six miles a day. She was a total vegetarian, totally into health food. When we were on the road, she always made sure the band was well fed. No processed meats, no white bread.”

“From the time we met, neither of us did drugs,” Swenson says. “She didn’t drink, she didn’t smoke.”

But could a band born out of art-theater aesthetics ever be taken seriously? Was it all about the shock value?

“I think it’s absolutely not true,” Swenson says. “To do what we did, and a lot of it was especially for Wendy, the amount of personal risk it took is something that couldn’t have been done if it wasn’t coming from something we were very passionate about, besides just being outrageous.

“In graduate school, I was questioning what art was. Then I came upon neo-Dadaist, the idea of doing something just for the sake of being contrary. The reason for doing it was you were basically challenging the status quo. With the idea that conformity itself at a point becomes very disabling in a society and a culture.

“Following blindly in a conformist way, we felt it was a very healthy thing to challenge that. Growing up, Wendy felt very thwarted, sometimes picked on, very much an outsider. People tried to constrain her by punishment, to not be who she was. A part of it was being a female who was very creative and strong in her way, and she had a difficult childhood in that regard. She didn’t have a place to let that out, and do something with it.”

The personal risk caught up to the Plasmatics in 1981, when she resisted arrest on charges of indecency during a show in Milwaukee. Williams and Swenson were badly beaten by police, hospitalized and jailed.

“After that it was kind of scary, you were always looking over your shoulder,” Beech says; he wryly notes that there was a topless dancer bar across the street from where the Plasmatics were playing that night. “It was the Reagan era, kind of a dark period for the country. Artists were being suppressed. This was pre-cellphones, pre-internet, we were looked at like we were from Mars. If we walked into a McDonald’s in Mississippi, it was like time would stop, people would come out and stare at us.”

This notoriety hadn’t escaped the notice of Gene Simmons, and the Plasmatics were asked to open for Kiss on its 1982 tour. This would seem to be a match made in hell. Williams had taken a tough stand against sexism in rock. Simmons, Kiss’ bass player, was a notorious sexist. But as Swenson explains it, both bands would benefit from the tour. Kiss, now hugely popular, needed the Plasmatics’ edgy street cred. And the Plasmatics’ anarchistic message would spread to an entire new audience.

Simmons also wanted to produce the Plasmatics’ next album. That became W.O.W., a solo Wendy O. Williams release. Beech played on it, as did the members of Kiss. Williams received a Grammy nomination for Best Female Rock Vocal; she lost out to Tina Turner.

Swenson re-assembled the Plasmatics for Maggots: The Record, a thrash-rock opera about the development of trash-eating insects that escalate an ecological nightmare. The release party was at The Palladium in New York City, and onstage Williams used her chainsaw and sledgehammer to destroy a mock American living room. Kerrrang! called the album, “a work of genius.”

That was it for the Plasmatics. “The establishment, the powers that be, the dynamics of the establishment, whatever it was, had started to close in on us,” Swenson says. “It was always after us, in the way that people who didn’t want to put us on ignored us, and we had to duck and weave our way through the system.

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“Milwaukee wasn’t in itself a fatal blow. But we had mammoth legal bills. The police chief there was almost running his own government outside of the ordinary government, and they decided, ‘We’re gonna stop this woman, these people, here, right now.’ The legal expenses were more than our income for a year.

“We were in the middle of a maelstrom of our own creation.”

But they had forecast its arrival.

“We knew The Ramones in their later years, it was kind of sad,” Swenson says. “I saw Johnny coming off the stage with an expression on his face, that this was a job that he hated. Wendy and I decided early on, that’s one of the things we would never do. We didn’t want to do things that sold, we wanted to do things that were interesting, new territory.

“After you’re blowing up cars onstage, which is a complicated and dangerous thing to do, when somebody writes in a review that ‘the obligatory car was onstage,’ you know you don’t need to do that anymore.

“All things have life cycles. What we didn’t want to be was the old prize fighter who kept coming back. We didn’t want to lower the quality, we didn’t want to do the thing Wendy was asked to do: ‘Can you just give us a radio song?’

“When we got to a point like that, we decided we would stop. We said she was going on hiatus. But we knew she was going to stop.”

After the music

Stop. But do what for the rest of her life? Williams was only 38.

“I don’t think she knew,” Swenson says. “She did become an animal rehabilitator for a while. She protested the gratuitous testing of animals, especially for cosmetics. And the factory farming of animals. She saw animals as innocent victims of humans not being very compassionate or empathetic. Partly because she felt that way as a kid.

“At the end of the day, that was not enough for her.

“She felt success in her life, her very, very short life. She lived so intensely, in a way it was many lifetimes for a lot of people. The intensity level, not measured in days or years.

“Measure time any way you want. She felt she was living in a place that was real and authentic and meaningful. Leaving home and going on that quest, she believed she had achieved that.

“At the same time, she didn’t see the world having been changed a lot. When she worked in rehabilitating animals, she would see the same thing happening over and over again. She found that depressing. She had this feeling about the world, that it was going to hell in many ways, and silence is complicity. If you’re not out doing things, or tossing a wrench into the machine, you’re guilty, even without being involved in it.”

When Swenson came home on April 6, 1998, he saw Williams’ notes, and he knew what he’d find when he walked back into the woods. It took a while, but he found her at dusk. Williams was dead, she was just 48. On a nearby rock were broken shells from nuts, which she had evidently been feeding to squirrels before turning the gun on herself.

“I struggled with this for nearly four years, a way to keep her alive,” he says. “A part of what she said in the notes was she had stayed alive for me. She felt badly about having to leave. Having been to hell and back, you thought you were going to get old together, and …"

If she were alive today, Williams would be 65.

“She was determined not to get old,” he says, then pauses. “This is going to get hard for me.” He recalls how, besides the notes, Williams had left behind a small number of personal items. Something she’d taken the time to bake for him, and some seeds. He declines to say what she baked — a detail he prefers to keep to himself — but the seeds, they’re a metaphor. “She left me wishes for my happiness,” he says. “Those were seeds for my future.

“I’m married to a wonderful woman, my partner. I’ve been very blessed. I’m in a different part of my life, in that sense I’m like the luckiest guy in the world. I’m 70 years old, and after lying in a jail cell, my brains beaten in, I just feel eternally blessed. I have grandkids.

“I’m still with the world, in a different way. I think I understand the dynamics better than I did in the art phase, now that I am in the science phase.

“If Wendy were alive, seeing the kind of conforming, thumb-brigade beings with their thumbs connected to their iPhones connect to satellites connected to social media, programming people’s minds, her mind would blow. And not in a happy way.”

JSPEVAK@Gannett.com

If you go

What: The Rochester Music Hall of Fame induction ceremony and concert.

When: 7 p.m. Sunday, April 24.

Where: Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre, 60 Gibbs St.

Tickets: $35, $50, and $60, available at the Eastman Theatre box office, rpo.org, Wegmans and (585) 454-2100.

Plasmatics at Record Archive

The Plasmatics will participate in an in-store signing noon to 1 p.m. Saturday at the Record Archive, 33 1/3 Rockwood St. The Grammy-nominated punk band is in town to perform at the Rochester Music Hall of Fame ceremony on Sunday. Admission to the afternoon event is free. Call 244-1210 or visit www.recordarchive.com.