THE FLESH EATERS
The Flesh Eaters are an American punk rock and Rockabilly band, formed in Los Angeles, California, in 1977. They are the most prominent of the bands which have showcased the compositions and singing of their founder, punk poet Chris Desjardins, best known as Chris D. The band’s greatest success was in the early 1980s. Though a part of that era’s productive punk rock scene, their music was distinctive for its morbid lyricism and often for its sophisticated arrangements, as heard, for example, on 1981’s A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die. Desjardins’s poetry has been described as “wonderful bleeding collages of B-movie dementia, street crime, Mexican Catholicism and Dionysian punk spurt poetics”. (More from Wikipedia)
Hailing from Vincennes, Indiana, Pat Todd (vocalist), D. D. Weekday (guitar), and Keith Telligman (bass) headed for California to put a band together. They found another Indiana expat there, Allen Clark (drums) and began hitting the L.A. clubs as the Lazy Cowgirls. Of this early period, Todd says that they were playing countless shows for “no one, and people from work”. Chris Desjardins (former frontman of an art-punk band called the Flesh Eaters) lined them up a record deal with Restless Records, resulting in their self-titled 1984 debut Lazy Cowgirls. Fred Beldin gives the album a tepid review for Allmusic but closes with: “Despite an inauspicious start, the Lazy Cowgirls never made a bad record again, and those with a taste for intelligent but visceral rock & roll are urged to examine their catalog.”
(March 2017)
