Published in 2002
220 pages
Lisa Crystal Carver (born 1968), also known as Lisa Suckdog, is an American writer known for her writing in Rollerderby. Through her interviews, she introduced the work of Vaginal Davis, Dame Darcy, Cindy Dall, Boyd Rice, Costes (her ex-husband with whom she performed Suckdog), Nick Zedd, GG Allin, Kate Landau, Queen Itchie & Liz Armstrong to many. A collection of notable articles from the zine was published as Rollerderby: The Book.
She started touring with the performance art band Psycodrama when she was 18 years old. It was also at this time that she became a prostitute, which has been a major theme in her writings over the years. She began touring with Costes a year later, and would also tour without him when he was in France. She toured the U.S. and Europe six times, the last time in 1998. The noise music soap operas included audience interaction including dancing and mock-rape of audience members.
Carver is the also the author of Dancing Queen: a Lusty Look at the American Dream, in which she expounds upon various relics of pop culture past, including Lawrence Welk, roller rinks, and Olivia Newton-John. In 2005, Soft Skull Press released her newest book, Drugs Are Nice, detailing her early childhood and later romantic relationships with Costes, Boyd Rice and Smog’s Bill Callahan. In addition to writing her own ‘zines and books, Carver has also written for various magazines (including Peter Bagge’s comic book Hate) and kept a fictionalized journal about her sex life for the website Nerve. The online Journal at Nerve was subsequently published in book form as The Lisa Diaries: Four Years in the Sex Life of Lisa Carver and Company.
What is this book about?
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.
