Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir [Paperback]

Lisa Crystal Carver (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1932360948 | ISBN-13: 978-1932360943 | Publication Date: October 12, 2005

In this eye-opening memoir, Lisa Crystal Carver recalls her extraordinary youth and charts the late-80s, early-90s punk subculture that she helped shape. She recounts how her band Suckdog was born in 1987 and the wild events that followed: leaving small-town New Hampshire to tour Europe at 18, becoming a teen publisher of fanzines, a teen bride, and a teen prostitute. Spin has called Suckdog's album Drugs Are Nice one of the best of the '90s, and the book includes photos of infamous European shows. Yet the book also tells of how Lisa saw the need for change in 1994, when her baby was born with a chromosomal deletion and his father became violent. With lasting lightness and surprising gravity, Drugs Are Nice is a definitive account of the generation that wanted to break every rule, but also a story of an artist and a mother becoming an adult on her own terms.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Shock-performance artist Carver (Dancing Queen) offers a spunky, well-fashioned memoir devoid of self-pity but heavy on moral-of-the-story hindsight. Carver grew up in Dover, N.H., with a sickly mother, but spent her 15th year with her father in California, when he got out of prison for murder. His hard-knock lessons "shame and shock [her] out of everything [she] knew to be and think," so that when she returned to Dover, she was transformed and fearless. Meeting "scum-rocker" GG Allin inspired her and a friend to start a "band," Suckdog, and join the wave of atonal, angry prankster gigs then in vogue (it was the late 1980s). Connected to the DIY underground, a cassette-trading society that eliminates the need for producers, seed money, even talent, Carver met and married French music rebel Jean Louis Costes; together they achieved notoriety with their outlandish performances (one act involved her peeing in a litter box). Other jobs include publishing the early zine Rollerderby, which segues into an infatuation with the troubled neo-Nazi Boyd Rice. Carver had Rice's child, born genetically disabled, and the family collapsed when Rice revealed himself to be an abusive alcoholic. Carver slides into a chirpy concluding regeneration, while the overall ride of this iconoclast is surprisingly tame.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"Carver's observations are dead-on and she tackles everything with a sharp, clean honesty." -- Chicago Reader

"The 31-year-old married mother from Dover may well be the country's supreme cultural anthropologist: part literary provocateur, part social analyst. She's been called everything from this decade's ultimate underground Renaissance woman to America's horniest optimist. Hunter S. Thompson in a miniskirt." -- Boston Magazine

"When Newt Gingrich wakes up sweating in the middle of the night with a hard-on and a sense of nameless dread, the face that he sees might be Lisa Carver's." -- Time Out New York

"With her tart writing and unswerving devotion to lowbrow culture, Carver sound like Camille Paglia channeling both Tonya Harding and Liz Phair." -- Dwight Garner, Details

Shock-performance artist Carver (Dancing Queen) offers a spunky, well-fashioned memoir devoid of self-pity but heavy on moral-of-the-story hindsight. Carver grew up in Dover, N.H., with a sickly mother, but spent her 15th year with her father in California, when he got out of prison for murder. His hard-knock lessons "shame and shock [her] out of everything [she] knew to be and think," so that when she returned to Dover, she was transformed and fearless. Meeting "scum-rocker" GG Allin inspired her and a friend to start a "band," Suckdog, and join the wave of atonal, angry prankster gigs then in vogue (it was the late 1980s). Connected to the DIY underground, a cassette-trading society that eliminates the need for producers, seed money, even talent, Carver met and married French music rebel Jean Louis Costes; together they achieved notoriety with their outlandish performances (one act involved her peeing in a litter box). Other jobs include publishing the early zine Rollerderby, which segues into an infatuation with the troubled neo-Nazi Boyd Rice. Carver had Rice's child, born genetically disabled, and the family collapsed when Rice revealed himself to be an abusive alcoholic. Carver slides into a chirpy concluding regeneration, while the overall ride of this iconoclast is surprisingly tame. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. -- Publishers Weekly

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press (October 12, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932360948
• ISBN-13: 978-1932360943
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #610,411 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars slippery deep beauty you have to hold, October 20, 2005

By 

Jill Soloway "Jill S" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir (Paperback)

You know how sometimes a book is a friend? You ignore your family and your work and getting sleep because you've just met a brand new best friend? That's how nice the book Drugs Are Nice is. Are. Line after line after wow after whoa after no way, she lived this and came out of it funnier and smarter and even more able to distill beauty, dripping it in perfect drops across her uterus-wrenching prose? Seriously? Seriously. Lisa Carver makes me want to write, and every time she writes another book, it gets better, which means I have to get better, which means we all do.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Drugs are nice are nice indeed, October 10, 2005

By 

JT "ManyHands" (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir (Paperback)

Right after "Good Vibrations", a little song called "Pennyface" is my favorite song of all time. Every once in a while i hear it on a mix tape and think, "what ever happened to Lisa Suckdog"? I was in a bookstore yesterday when I saw some familair words in pink lettering on this book's spine and was staggered with vague memories. Reading the copy on the back cover I was truly enticed and figured that for a few bucks it would be worth finding out "whatever happened". I guess she never really went away and has fascinated a bunch of people younger than I and this isn't even her first book. Nevertheless, in those great days before some loser named Kurt signed a big money contract, Lisa Carver was among a dingy pantheon of musicians (or whatever) who were truly fascinating, inspiring, and confounding to me. I would not have guessed however that reading a memoir about one of the dingiest in the pantheon - glorious Pennyface notwithstanding - would be so fascinating, inspiring and confounding as well. Her story is much more interesting than I would have guessed and she tells it with surprising eloquence and verve. Any time she writes about her father is particularly riveting. As for her life in the underground world... Those days... those days were incredibly fun and mysterious. But her book reminds me that they were also desperate - emotionally and fiscally - and perilous. The person who wrote this book 'got' at a young age that she could stare down the nightmare and come back for more just for the sheer aliveness of it all. And that aliveness is all we have.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book DID make me want to burst into flames!, October 15, 2005

By 

Rachel Wakefield - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir (Paperback)

There aren't that many drugs in this book - Lisa's whole way of thinking and living are the drug. Her writing, especially in her fabulous magazine Rollerderby, has always been intoxicating. When you drink it, you enter the secret twisted world just under the surface of the normal-seeming one, where everything is fascinating and sexy and on fire. In Drugs Are Nice, she takes that passion for exploring weirdness and turns it on herself, and you know it's going to be entertaining but it's also a serious and genuine study of an amazing life. From a uniquely messed-up relationship with her drug dealer father, to becoming the star of the underworld, to her nightmarish time with industrial musician Boyd Rice and having a child with serious health problems - every chapter of this book seems like the climax. Every chapter is full of characters too intriguingly warped to have been made up. It's the history of an underground movement, and the Boyd Rice part is a horror novel that you can't put down until the horrible end. But the best thing is that over the course of the book you are watching Lisa slowly become human, watching her come to understand what motivates her and develop a heart that can love. You end up quite moved as well as burst into flames.