Wives Can't Be Beat
PICK ONE OF THE FOLLOWING
intros:
A. Brooklyn may have
Cyndi Lauper, and the Valley's got Julie Brown. But South Jersey's got Suburban
Wives Club.
B. Madonna's got a sexy
pout. Cyndi Lauper pumps iron. The Suburban Wives Club got dishpan hands, and
the irons they pump steam the wrinkles out of hubbies' slacks.
C. You wouldn't exactly
call them a garage band. A laundry room band is more like it.
D. They're a trio of
heavy metal hausfraus — an extra-strength dynamo of meaty, mighty moms...
...Did you choose? It
doesn't matter. Somebody somewhere has probably used them all in writing about
Suburban Wives Club.
It would be easy to
dismiss the Wives as just another novelty act. Mid-30s homemakers thrashing out
heavy metal ditties about life in the burbs doing the dishes, changing diapers,
stuffing their faces full of junk food at the 7-Eleven and fantasizing about
romance at the laundromat. Ho hum.
CITY PAPER — FEBRUARY 8, 1985 —
Baltimore
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What the Wives have going for them is a really
appealing honesty and a down-to-earth sense of humor. They really are Suburban
(East Philly, Pitman NJ), and leader/guitarist Reesa really is a Suburban Wife.
She really goes home to a hubby and Huggies after the show. She really did
continue to perform into the eighth month of her most recent pregnancy. Rock's
Phyllis Dillers, punk Erma Bombecks they are.
So what? What's the music
like?
I missed their recent
blow through town, but I've got their new 10-song cassette,
Heavy Iron.
No band in the world
wants to be called punk anymore, but there's a lot about the Wives' loud, dirty,
cheapo sound that fits punk's big gift to rock democratization. The question's
not Why but Why not? And do we need to discuss how the Wives' down-to-earth
humor, with its deep knee bends and dirty socks and supermarket blues, perfectly
balances Lauper's bag lady/Egg lady routine and Julie Brown's satire? And how,
when you add the Go-Gos and Joan Jett and The Pretenders, you get an American
rock scene where women are finally getting to express and act out some real
options?
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