You can get the essence from the song titles and may not really need the recordings themselves, though the recordings are excellent: Boogie 'Til You Puke, "Dozin' and Droolin'," "Dare to be Fat," Heartbreak of Psoriasis, "Hicktown Pizza Hut Woman," Liquor Store Holdup in Space "Too Sick to Reggae," "My Wig Fell Off," "When You Date the Undead," Christmas at K-Mart. In a bold advance, Root Boy Slim pointed out that "when you turn 17, I'll just be 32," and concluded "I'm not too old for you." The closest he came to a love song went like this, summarizing a whole cultural epoch: "You made my mood ring sweat."
When I first saw you tonight
Could not believe my eyes
Got my mood ring smokin'
Twice the normal size
Drank three tequilas
Just to calm me down
Damn thing splode
Spread my mood around
"Please believe me, I'm a sex addict with a capital X," he declared on his last record, in 1991. But that was the least of his problems.
Around 1974 and '75, Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band was the hottest thing in DC, maybe the hottest thing to come out of DC since Duke Ellington, though operating on a different artistic level. He went from zero to beloved and ubiquitous in the DMV very quickly. He had a wild stage show, almost a revue, with all sorts of costumes and people onstage, though the shambles were underpinned by a tight band playing soul and blues and funk, with backup singers and horns. He packed every place he played every time, with lines out the door. Pretty soon, "reprehensible" was a genre in DC, and similar acts and spin-offs started emerging, though maybe they weren't as strong. The one I remember most clearly was called "Dr. Goodfoot and the Toxic Socks."
The Sex Change moment was a cultural interregnum gap, or maybe yawning moral void. The hippies seemed over, and groups like the Grateful Dead were passé by then. We were a long way from Woodstock. The ideals of the peace movement or the culturally transformative meanings of rock music had played out. There was a new cynicism, especially in DC, reflecting both the personality of Richard Nixon and what we learned from his downfall. Meanwhile, all of us recovering hippies were appalled to see what was happening to rock music, from the perfect surfaces of the Carpenters or Fleetwood Mac to the "art rock" or ELP or Yes. The punk reaction hadn’t arrived to revivify, re-politicize, or fundamentalize the form. "I used to be a radical," Root Boy declared. "You know something changed my mind. It was a billy club to the head." That’s where we were at.
"Boogie 'Til You Puke" wasn't "All You Need is Love," and neither was it "Anarchy in UK," but despite the Rootster's limitations as a singer and writer, it was a similar crystallization of its moment. Perhaps it was connected somehow to some other degenerate, profoundly reprehensible rock of that period, for example the careers of Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, or even Millie Jackson.
We DC kids were proud of the Root Boy phenomenon, and knew it was just the beginning when it was reported that Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band with the Rootettes had signed with Warner Bros and gotten a $250,000 advance for the first record. We didn't see that too much in DC, which had a roots rock scene and a lot of blues and bluegrass, but not much in the way of rock stars (though go-go was rising). Anyway, the local-boy-makes-good story maybe hadn't been instantiated since Nils Lofgren and his band Grin got signed out of Bethesda a few years before.
I knew people who knew people (eventually my step-brother performed with him under the stage name "Dizzy Rush," for example) and I can report what DC thought it knew. The Warner Bros. album took forever to come out. People immediately found it disappointing: it was solid or excellent and well-produced blues and funk and it had those hilarious lyrics. But it was a betrayal: too slick and fully-finished to capture the wild unpredictable stage shows we all knew. It made no national waves, and Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band with the Rootettes didn’t turn out to be Bethesda's next Grin. People said he spent the whole advance on drugs in a few months. He retrenched to DC on smaller labels, smaller venues, smaller bands, and kept going through a few more records until his death in 1993. At that point, I might’ve been surprised from the obits to learn that he’d still been alive, and I missed the last LP (Six) until... last week.
But we were wrong about that first record. From here, it really sounds great, and has all the vitality of the best r&-b-type records of that era. It's crunchy organic and hilarious. It represents his sound: he liked to set up a bluesy riff or structure and then repeat and repeat and repeat; I think the genre is best described as funk. It doesn't sound dated, really, except for maybe the brand of sexuality. And it’s alive. All six LP's that exist are in a similar vein and of mixed but similar quality (I'd particularly recommend Zoom).
Foster MacKenzie III lived a wild and literally schizophrenic life. He was a frat brother of George W. Bush at Yale, but also later tried to climb the White House fence searching for the center of the universe. He'd driven cabs and collected trash for a living, we heard. He'd been in "St. E's" mental hospital, and then played the Cellar Door. He dressed in drag, or as a magus, and wore funny sunglasses. He achieved a pretty good intersection of creativity and madness, though "So Young, So Hip, So Lame" isn't exactly Vincent Van Gogh or Friedrich Nietzsche. But the sheer unpretentious transgressiveness, its joyous wrongfulness: maybe that was the best we could muster at that degenerate moment.
Young DC in the 1970s was down with Rootboyesque extreme decadent excess and all-day-everyday substance abuse. Predictably, there was a wave of overdose deaths. Maybe that caused the backlash when a cohort of young DC went 'Straight Edge" with Minor Threat in 1980. The not-always edifying spectacle of Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band (and the Rootettes) may have helped cause Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins, growing up somewhere near Georgetown, to swear off. "I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't fuck. At least I can fucking think": that was an anti-Root lyric all around.
In other words, he turned out to be very influential.
Resounding: The Bellamy Brothers
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell
