When Is the Next Art Show at the Wayne County Art Center
J ayne County is explaining the term "wrecking", which was a popular pastime among the more than confrontational drag queens of Atlanta, Georgia, in the 60s. "Simply deliberately trying to freak out the regular people, the solids every bit we called them," she laughs. "Shaking people out of their normality, just trying to meet what nerves we could push. They need their nerves twisted once in a while.
"We used to do things like get into department stores and ride up and down the elevators just screaming, you know, belongings up women'due south wearing apparel and proverb, 'Look at this! He's going to adore me in this!' One of our big wrecks was going into the men's room at the Greyhound bus station, a bunch of us queens, perchance four or v. The men were at the urinals with their you-know-whats out and we'd start screaming, 'Ooh, look how big it is! Look at that one! Oh my God, I think I had that one last night! How is your wife in bed, darling? I'd exist a lot better!' The guys would be rushing to become their zippers up, so uncomfortable with u.s.a. in there."
Mayhap understandably, wrecking was not an activity without its risks in the deep due south of the 60s. "It's a wonder nosotros didn't become killed, a wonder nosotros didn't become in more trouble than we did," she says, speaking past phone from Atlanta. "We did get shot at. They would really come by in their trucks and shoot at us for the fun. You could hear the bullets flight past your head – shhhhhhw! Oh yeah, they wanted to kill united states. Only I call up, because people were then shocked, they usually didn't have fourth dimension to remember about pain the states. They were merely too busy being shocked. By the time they got over it, we were gone and they'd be wondering what the fuck happened."
Information technology was all a long fourth dimension agone, when Jayne County was however Wayne County, formerly Wayne Rogers, the son of working-class parents, who took to wearing makeup at school and graduated wearing lipstick. "I can't really hide what I am very well," she says. Canton'southward story afterwards took her from Atlanta to New York; from the Stonewall riot to the transgressive demimonde that gathered effectually Andy Warhol'due south Manufactory; from glam rock to punk, where Wayne eventually became Jayne, the earth's first transgender stone'northward'roller. It'due south one of the near extraordinary sagas in rock history: you read her recently republished autobiography Man Enough to Be a Adult female with your rima oris hanging open, not least considering, throughout it all, County never really stopped wrecking. No matter where she fetches up, she somehow manages to terminate up shocking not just the solids, merely the other people intent on shocking the solids.
It took some effort to sally as the outrageous ane in Warhol's late-60s circle, but County managed it. New York'south absurdist fringe theatre company the Theatre of the Ridiculous had already staged plays featuring necrophiles and a character based on John Wayne who apparently "gave nascency to a baby out of his asshole while doing poppers" – but even they balked at staging County's play, which came with the thought-provoking title Wanker: Fascist Rhapsody. The glam scene was big on decadence and ambiguous sexuality, but information technology clearly wasn't prepared for County singing You Gotta Go Laid to Stay Salubrious (And I'chiliad the Healthiest Girl in Town) while clad in a clothes fabricated of condoms.
Punk dealt in wilful offence, but at least some punks seemed to draw the line at County's ring the Electric Chairs and their signature song (If Y'all Don't Want to Fuck Me) Fuck Off. During a functioning at CBGBs music club, 1 of Canton's fellow musicians began shouting homophobic insults at her, an action he presumably regretted when Canton broke his shoulder with a microphone stand in response. Record companies, she sighs, "had no thought what to practice with me at all. It was just too across their understanding."
She arrived in New York penniless – her belongings were lost en road – surviving on "the kindness of strangers" until she got an apartment with young man drag queens Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn, later namechecked in Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side. Through her work with the Theatre of the Ridiculous, she attracted the attention of Andy Warhol ("Miss Warhol loved the wrecking; she was a troublemaker, she wrecked people with her art") somewhen catastrophe upwards in the cast of his play Pork, as a grapheme called Vulva Lips. It was a succès de scandale when it transferred to the Roundhouse in London in the summer of 1971, attracting both horrified reviews and the attention of David Bowie, then planning his reinvention as Ziggy Stardust.
County was signed to Bowie's management visitor, Mainman, and began writing songs with her ring Queen Elizabeth (named non after the monarch, but a young man drag queen back in Atlanta), who frequently played with New York Dolls. But Queen Elizabeth's live performances were so shocking, they succeeded in upsetting even New York's burgeoning gay liberation movement. "They were horrified by me because they didn't want people to call back 'gay' meant being like me on stage, rolling around licking dildos and sitting on toilets and pretending to shit using canis familiaris nutrient. It freaked them out then much, they pulled the plug on my shows. They said: 'We will not accept New York University turned into a 42nd Street smut show.' They were afraid that someone was going to recall that they liked that stuff, too."
Mainman seemed equally baffled almost what to exercise with County, funding and filming an extravagant 1974 alive show – Wayne County at the Trucks, the title a reference to a notorious New York cruising area – then failing to release the film and album. The latter finally emerged in 2006, a startling document of glam at its most raw and confrontational. "They used to say, 'You've seen David and you've seen the Dolls, just Wayne County is the real bargain. He'south doing information technology out of real life, out of real creatures that live out there and are part of the undercurrent of our culture.'
"I couldn't go anywhere for a long fourth dimension because people were too freaked out by me. I wrecked them too much. They had no idea how to marketplace me. I mean, my friend [lensman] Leee Black Childers used to say, 'Just promote her as some kind of horror prove!' They promoted Alice Cooper equally a horror show, so maybe I could have been promoted every bit a different kind of horror evidence."
When punk arrived, says County, "it made a infinite for me": not so much in America, but in Europe. Most visiting New York punks were horrified past the British interpretation of the movement, with its gobbing and violence, only County loved it. "It was more of a show, more than visual. In London, they accepted me – the first time I played the Roxy, it was a mob scene, literally lines effectually the block. Yous were expected to exist not just on the border, just over the pinnacle, then it was a bang-up infinite for me to practise what I did, to become all the attention I needed. It was unbelievable."
The Electrical Chairs fabricated three albums. Inevitably, a band whose oeuvre included Fuck Off, Toilet Love and Mean Motherfuckin' Human being never crossed over into the mainstream, with County's influence only really becoming articulate years later: whenever they played in Liverpool, a immature Pete Burns – later on to find fame every bit the frontman of Dead Or Alive - was "ever correct at the front, watching my every move".
County toyed with the idea of gender reassignment surgery, just decided she was happier "being in between or beingness neither". "A very modernistic concept," she says. "Information technology's more than accepted now, only back then it was considered extremely radical to want to exist both sexes, to be a combination of both, or to be neither. You have and so many identities now that seem to be growing … at that place'southward so many in-betweens, and so many dissimilar versions of what a homo or a adult female is. Anyone that tells yous they're all man or all male is lying."
After the Electric Chairs broke up, Canton moved to Berlin, working in theatre and films and, for a time, doing sex piece of work. "That was a very off-the-gage thing. Some of the girls were doing it, my friend Miss Alison was doing it, and I wanted to be cool and brand a picayune actress money. Information technology was quite a learning feel, really, nigh men and their have on things, how they react in sure sexual situations. Most of the men were married, wives and kids at home. It was their chance to kick upwards their heels."
These days, she says, she has "become kind of mellow", although her most recent musical output – a unmarried with fellow Atlanta trans artist Am Taylor called I Don't Fit in Anywhere, complete with a video that depicts Canton transforming a church congregation into a riot of boozing, smoking and oral sex – doesn't really advise as much. She moved back to Atlanta to wait afterwards her bilious parents and stayed, working as a visual creative person – she's exhibited in New York and London – and living the life of "a happy old maid, with no man to drive me crazy".
Sometimes, County says, she looks back on the events recounted in Man Enough to Be a Woman and thinks: "Information technology'south similar I've got a kind of double and they did all that while I'm but sitting here, reading about it." Other times, the old Jayne County makes herself known. "I still to this mean solar day practise a little wrecking without even knowing I'm doing information technology." She laughs. "I have a bad trend to talk too much when I'g out shopping. Sometimes I'll say something actually outrageous to myself and brand the person shopping next to me really nervous. I get a big thrill out of doing that."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/may/18/shot-outrageous-life-jayne-county-first-trans-rocknroller-electric-chairs-memoir
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