NASHVILLE PUSSY: Let There Be Rock (2022)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

“IS IT bikini weather yet?” Nashville Pussy guitarist Ruyter Suys asks late in the interview. “That’s going to make my packing even easier!”

If you think that’s just a joke, you might not be that familiar with Ruyter Suys or Nashville Pussy. For the last 26 years, she has rocked the hell out of stages and clubs around the world just about as hard as it’s possible to do so, sometimes wearing not that much. It’s a look as brazen as her Ted Nugent-inspired band name and as honest and raw as the music they play. Speaking from home a week out from their upcoming whirlwind tour of Australia, Suys is as disarming as she is wild on stage. She pulls her voluminous blond locks back from her face, lights a cigarette and laughs. A lot.

“We’re going to cram a whole country’s worth of jams into five shows,” she says of their first Australian sojourn since 2017. It’s a quickfire visit that will include a now-not so secret appearance at Sydney’s doomed rock and roll bar, Frankie’s Pizza by the Slice. Nashville Pussy will be the last band to ever play there when it closes its doors for good sometime on Monday morning.

“We’ve only gone there to drink,” Suys says, “so I don’t know what it’s going to be like. I’ve never seen a live band in there. I don’t know where they’re going to have us play.”

Without needing to guess too much, it’s likely to be bedlam, and Nashville Pussy are the perfect band to bring the house down. The stage is small, but the crowd is likely to be way beyond the posted 400 capacity by the time they play: “By the time we go on, people will probably think we’ve already played,” Suys says with a laugh, making a pretty good assumption about what the state of some punters will be by then. “Do you know if we’re actually allowed to destroy the place? Should we bring baseball bats?”

Baseball bats and wrecking hammers may not be necessary once Nashville Pussy has finished with the place. Their reckless and ebullient mix of psychobilly, Southern rock and heavy metal might just be enough to start bringing the walls down all by itself, although hopefully while people aren’t still inside.

Ruyter Suys declares an affinity with Australia thanks to a shared love of rock and roll.

“We’re cut from the same cloth, Australia and us. We’re going to be stepping into familiar territory. Australia is known for… you guys play an open A chord more than anybody in the world! We’ve been on a massive Angels kick recently. Stevie Wright is like a god!”

“Speaking of The Angels,” she says a little later as the conversation heads back that way, “we played Marseilles when [we were on the radio] in Marseilles… we didn’t play it ourselves, we got them to play it… the DJ had never heard of it, and we were like, ‘How could you have not heard of it? Are you an idiot?’” She laughs yet again. “We shot a video for She Keeps Me Coming and I Keep Going Back in Marseilles, on the top of a tour bus driving through all the streets, so we have a love/hate relationship with Marseilles!”

Nashville Pussy aren’t the only American rockers with a healthy appreciation for one of our greatest bands. Cheap Trick has a special relationship with The Angels that goes back decades. A casual mention of Rick Nielsen is met with enthusiasm from Suys.

“He is a brilliant guitar player,” she enthuses. “I didn’t realise, until I saw Cheap Trick live, that I understand all the choices that guy makes on stage. Except for throwing picks out incessantly. He’s got to stop doing that! He misses riffs by stopping to throw them into the audience, but watching him play I was like Oh, good choice. Oh, that’s an interesting choice too! It’s just juicy watching him play. I love him on the albums but live… Wow! He’s something else, man.”

That in turn led to a warm reminiscence about one occasion they hung out together, and a photograph from the night she’s still trying to get from Scott Ian of Anthrax.

“We got to hang out with Cheap Trick, Alice Cooper, Gene Simmons… maybe Paul Stanley was there? …And Scott Ian one time backstage at the House of Blues. It was so bizarre. We had gone there to see Cheap Trick, and we had played there really recently, so the staff recognised us and got us to come on back, and Gene Simmons was saying, ‘Come on back to the green room’. Alice Cooper was sitting there really sad, because he didn’t get to watch the All Star baseball game, and Blaine had, so I said ‘Go talk to Alice!’ and our drummer Jeremy talked to Bun E Carlos… It was so bizarre. Scott Ian has a picture of me and Gene Simmons and Rick Nielsen together and I keep bugging him to get it to me.”

That’s just one of a likely thousand stories that Ruyter Suys could tell after half a lifetime on the road. Playing the last ever night at Frankie’s is definitely going to be another, and at least they won’t have to queue for hours to experience it. That’s a perk of being in a rock and roll band, despite any of the downsides.

“This is a stupid lifestyle choice,” she says with another hearty chuckle. “How much money are we making from doing this? Oh my God, my body is fucking broken… and then you get on stage and it’s like ‘Phwoaaar! This is what life is all about, and what would I do anything but this?’ It’s the greatest thing possible.”