There are records you put on because you love them, and then there are records you put on because you need to remind yourself that the world still contains things that refuse to apologize.
Spider and I is Wendy O. Williams at the absolute edge of her creative life with the Plasmatics — a band that, by 1983, had already chainsawed guitars in half on television, blown up a Cadillac on New York Rocker’s front cover, and gotten Wendy arrested in Milwaukee for simulating a sex act onstage. The legal fees alone could have funded a small studio album. They nearly did.
A Band Running on Fumes and Conviction
By the time this EP was cut, the Plasmatics were essentially down to Wendy and Rod Swenson, her manager and creative partner who had built the whole mythology from a Times Square peep show idea in 1977. Richie Stotts, the guitarist in the tutu, was gone. Wes Beech had moved on. What remained was leaner, stranger, and — honestly — more interesting than most people gave it credit for.
The title track is a quiet, unsettling piece of electronic-tinged rock that sounds nothing like “Butcher Baby.” Nothing like what the Plasmatics were supposed to sound like at all. It’s slow. It breathes. Wendy sings it like someone who has decided to stop screaming because screaming isn’t the point anymore.
The production has that early-eighties synth sheen that aged poorly on almost every other record and somehow aged into something eerie here. It sounds like a building late at night when everyone else has gone home.
What Wendy Was Actually Doing
People wrote about Wendy O. Williams the spectacle for so long that they missed Wendy O. Williams the singer. The voice on this EP is controlled, deliberate, occasionally gorgeous in a way that catches you off guard. She was working with Swenson on the production, shaping something that sits closer to experimental rock than the punk-metal hybrid that made them infamous.
The band lineup at this point was skeletal. Studio musicians filled the gaps. The EP was recorded and mixed quickly, released on Stiff America — a label that understood a certain kind of unclassifiable music even when it couldn’t quite sell it.
There are only a handful of tracks here, and the album clocks in short. That’s fine. Some things don’t need to be long to land.
The Part Nobody Talks About
What I keep coming back to is the EP’s emotional register. The Plasmatics were supposed to be nihilistic, confrontational, anti-everything. And they were. But Spider and I sounds like someone sitting with something. There’s loneliness in it. Genuine, specific loneliness.
Wendy would release a solo album with Gene Simmons producing just two years later and get a Grammy nomination, which is one of the stranger sentences you can say about any career. She retired to rural Connecticut, ran a wildlife rehabilitation center, and died by suicide in 1998. She was 48.
The record deserves more than a footnote at the end of a “whatever happened to” paragraph. Put it on tonight. Let it sit with you in the quiet.