- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- Spend the Night with the Trashwomen is about equal parts serious surf rock and put-on, with the instrumentals being probably the best part.
The Greatest Music
Ever Recorded!
The Trashwomen – Spend the Night with the Trashwomen (1994): As the legend of the Trashmen grew over the years, it is perhaps inevitable that somebody would create a band called the Trashwomen. Whereas the Trashmen are clean-cut Midwestern teenagers, the Trashwomen are apparently conceived with the term “white trash” in mind. Michael Lucas with the surf revival band the Phantom Surfers approached Tina Lucchesi and Danielle Pimm with the idea of having an all-female band to perform Trashmen songs as the opening act for their band for a 1992 show. Once the two located a guitarist – Elka Zolot – the Trashwomen were born. Zolot is a talented musician and songwriter, but that was not originally true of the other two women: Pimm became the bass player because she happened to own a bass guitar, while Lucchesi became the drummer because she happened to be dating a drummer. They had only 4 weeks to learn how to play their instruments before the show.
The Trashwomen started off as a lark or even a joke, with mean-girl attitude, thrift-store and leopard-print outfits, and a generous helping of sleaze. But they turned in a great opening set, and the Trashwomen started getting more requests for shows. The women began practicing weekly and writing their own songs; before long, they had a recording contract in hand. I have their debut album, Spend the Night with the Trashwomen, which came out on Estrus Records in 1994. They also released two other albums and two EP’s; the band broke up in 1996 while on tour in Japan but reportedly reformed in 2008, though I don’t know of any further recordings. Over the years, all three women have been in a variety of bands, before, during and after the Trashwomen period. The three women along with Rusty Quan released a single under the name the Count Backwards; later, without Elka Zolot, the other three were members of the Bobbyteens. Danielle Pimm was in another purportedly all-female band called the Brentwoods, though there was actually a man in the line-up as well. Elka Zolot was in Bitch Fight before the formation of the Trashwomen and was later the guitarist for Eight Ball Scratch. Tina Lucchesi is probably the busiest of the three; besides running Lipstick Records, she was also in several other bands, including Top Ten, the Glamour Pussies, the Deadly Weapons, and an all-female AC/DC tribute band called AC/DShe. Those are all just names in a list from what I know, but I do have an album by one of Tina Lucchesi’s bands – this time fronting an otherwise male group – called Tina and the Total Babes, one of the early Under Appreciated Rock Bands that I have posted about on Facebook. Spend the Night with the Trashwomen is about equal parts serious surf rock and put-on, with fun nicknames for all three bandmembers: Danielle “Lead Pedal” Pimm, Elka “Kitten Kaboodle” Zolot, and Tina “Boom Boom” Lucchesi. As with The Great Lost Album! by the Trashmen, the instrumentals are probably the best part of Spend the Night with the Trashwomen: “Marguya”, “Daddy Love”, “Nightmare at the Drag”, “Space Needle”, and “Quasimoto”. Their cover of Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” theme comes complete with the band’s own lyrics. Other treats are “Dates on Me”, “Justine” (originally recorded by Don and Dewey in 1958), and “I’m Trash”.