...did you know there once was a band called Sharon Stone's Pussy?  God Bless the Internet.   I have prepared this bio:

   Like many bands, this brilliant appellation thru which they achieved their greatest fame was not their first, and many others had been tried before they struck that curly blonde gold.  It seems their name at the time of their first recording was The Reverend Billy Beaver and the Cuntry Cleavers, but they’d been called many things over the years, struggling for recognition as an untried talentless rock band, and some were none too pleasant.  The reference to a reverend was somewhat confusing, they found, but since there was also no actual Billy Beaver, the guys could never understand why some people were confused.  But the confusion and their frequent name changes, not to mention their appalling lack of musical skill did combine to keep their exposure and fan base low in the early years.  Things began to change for them in 1990 when their new manager, Abraham "Hollyweird" Shaggerstein suggested they update their "thing" when they came to him...but I’m getting ahead of myself.

   The band of funloving troubadours the world would one day come to know as Sharon Stone’s Pussy started out very humbly amongst the orange forests and strawberry thickets of Central Florida.  Four friends from highschool got together to live the modern American dream of riches and honor without working hard every day after school in the garage of  William Arnold “Lick” Stevenson, the guitarist and spiritual and creative center of the band, since he had the only place they were allowed play in.  Before everyone called him Lick, he called himself Billy Beaver, because that was more pleasant than his father’s nickname for him: “Big Pussy”. (Ironically, the circle would square itself many years later when the band would for a few crucial weeks be called Big Pussy and the Lips.)  On bass was pencil-thin Guar Uze--his real name--his dad was an important immigrant juggler from Donunnerstan, his mother a gifted circus stiltwalker.  It was said that Guar was born two months premature while his mom was working, and that the drop nearly killed the li’l fella.  On drums was Stew “the Gnu” Newsome, a good kid from a good home with good people, his mother insists, despite all the convictions and the firestarting as a juvenile.  The lead singer was a tone-deaf poseur named Michael Smharmason, who later cleverly respelled his name, launching a whole trend in pop music, he said.   His ego was pumped up to unsustainable levels even by the 10^th grade, due to years of focused self-esteem-building projects in his school district.  His high opinion of himself would later get him into a lot of trouble. 

     After a year or so of annoying the neighbors--an impressive achievement considering that the neighbors were a welding shop, a junkyard, and an animal rendering plant--the band added the brother and sister team of Harold and Rosalind Lipschitz as backup singers, and so early on the historic lineup was complete.  They had first called themselves Pipe, and this became PipeLips with the addition of the backup singers.  Later, they were Bongwater, 16+1, Afterbirth, Rugged, December’s Children, KableKar, and Bilge, but despite the catchy names the gigs just didn’t come.  They went through a “dark” period beginning in late ‘88 and through 1989, after the election of George Bush Sr. as president, choosing names like Dead Blue Baby, Rape Victim, and Vomitstain, but that didn’t seem to work either, so one day while watching tv coverage of the Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart sex scandals, Lick had the brilliant inspiration to combine religion and sex and southern culcha’ and that night The Reverend Billy Beaver and the Cuntry Cleavers was born.

   That name stuck for a while, although due to regular spelling mistakes and the aforementioned personnel confusion, they did eventually seek something a little catchier and more direct, going with Big Beave and the Cleave for a while, then Big Beaver Lips, and they were using Big Pussy and the Lips just before meeting Dishonest Abe.  Billy's Beaver Cleaver was another short-lived nom de grunge that lasted only long enough for a one-and-a-half song EP entitled “Rainbow Tarpit” (cassette release only) and an aborted three-date tour opening for the opening act for the opening act for the famed Polk County FL, psychedelic-punk-gospel-thrash-metal band, Strawberry Lawnmower.  This belated early success was abruptly brought to an end by tragedy, however, and a subsequent week-long spiral into something like madness for the six remaining members of the band’s original quartet.   The sad story of the loss of their first, worst, and most beloved manager, Howey "Home Boy" Knair--du Schitt, is a tale too gruesome and tragic to tell...

It seems Howey "Home Boy" Knair--du Schitt was struck by a thought while at work one day and though he immediately forgot what it was, he was so stunned by having had a thought that he was stopped cold in his tracks and, lost in amazed  near-contemplation, was 92% decapitated by the Hobart 2200 industrial chicken-plucker he normally operated with steady hands and quiet confidence.  

Modern emergency medicine miraculously saved his life, and he lived on in a near-vegetative state for almost a week, rising to consciousness just long enough to spell out what had happened with his alphabet soup letters, since he couldn’t very well eat anything.  Just when it looked like he might survive his horrible mangling, he died, accidentally, rolling over in bed one night before the stitches had set.

The Reverend Billy Beaver sang at his funeral, accompanied by one of the Lips.  Rosie was too upset to perform, but Harry joined BB for a song they said was inspired by ‘Home Boy’, called “Chicken Plucker Blues”.  His friends, in honoring his memory, vowed never to think again, which resolution was all too easy to keep, as most of them had yet to ever try such a thing in the first place and had no wish to shame their families by being the first of their clan to so foolishly tinker with the dark side...

Renamed The Big Beaver Cleaver, the fellas and Rosie, sequestered in their grief, produced what many cynics and 80s haters called the EP of the decade, “Homey DO Play Dat” in Lick’s garage, with a live a cappella rendition of “Chicken Plucker Blues” on the B side.  Dedicated to their late manager, it was a three-song “epic newpunk dirge-romp”, according to StinkFinger magazine, and literally doubled the group’s previous creative output.  Media outlets throughout the Southeast promptly and almost unanimously ignored it, rapidly fueling its underground legitimacy.

Meanwhile, the BBC, as they were hiply known amongst their fan, had re-gathered themselves and, realizing that only Los Angeles could fully appreciate their quality and realize their dreams, had pressed on, beginning an energetic go of it out in Californ-eye-ay.   And they steadily made progress, even while being ripped-off by a succession of smooth-talking yet somehow unscrupulous “managers”, their fan base growing exponentially every month so that after a full year of relentless gigging, and a good deal of gagging, and with time off for Lick’s recuperation following the electrocutions, (he did eventually stop the practice which brought him his nickname, or at least restricted it to his guitar, leaving the amplifiers alone), and the down-time while Mikill Smarm was awaiting trial (the girl never, um, “surfaced” to testify, so the charges were dropped), and also that month that Gnu was “just out for a walk” (he said), until finally they were able to count a record 128 people in the audience one happy evening at Sloppy Seconds, in Van Nuys, doubling their previous best showing the month before at the annual summer picnic for the Barstow Sanitation Department.  In an ironic coincidence that led Lick to be sure God was on their side, that was the very night that thru a hilarious mix-up the newest and final name of the band came about.  Apparently the young fellow assigned to place the letters in the bar’s marquee was obsessing about a scene in a movie he’d recently seen 27 times and distractedly spelled “Sharon Stone’s Pussy Tonight” on the sign, and so many showed up to hear the *former* Big Pussy and the Lips that, as Harry remembers, “You couldn’t even see the floor.   That was a first.”  One of those filling floor space was Abe Shaggerstein, or as his colleagues knew him, in a cruel pun on his "warm" personality, oversized mouth, and incessant preening: Prick Shagger.  And the rest, as they say in Hollywood, (and Van Nuys ever since that night), is history.

A history of disputes over missing drugs and missing receipts, missing royalties and missing groupies, missed airplanes, periods, comas, and missed gigs--most famously, the time in 1994 that Mikill, Guar, and Gnu completely spaced the band’s performance at the White House, occupying themselves instead for five hours with video karate and motorcycle racing at a mall arcade in Virginia.  A big fan of the Clintons, Lick was practically homicidal at this “gaffe”, and wouldn’t speak to any of them for almost two years. 

The band’s successes under “Hollyweird” were notable and notorious, but in fairness to Dishonest Abe, he took them to heights they’d have otherwise never earned on their songwriting and performing.  His deft management of their career included an invitation to play at one of the many Clinton inaugural balls, where the new president seemed to be a big fan, tho Hillary scowlingly kept her distance.  Abe kept the guys touring and recording for the next four years, which must be acknowledged as an impressive task, given the utter lack of natural talent for either enterprise among the band’s members, and the severe cocaine and whore addictions of several of them. 

While the big hits on the radio were extremely few and far between, those from cruel fate seemed to just keep on coming.  On election night 1996 Lick, in a moment of drunken celebration, fell off his wagon and made out with a rented Marshall 400-watt head, (big mistake--he was used to 100-watt amps) and this time not just recuperation but rehabilitation lay in his future.  While the band was thus “off the circuit”, the endemic problems of the rock and roll highlife came home to roost like a flock of ravenous black ravens:  Gnu quit several times, finally for good in December, to join Alien Milkmen, taking Guar with him; Harry and Rosie married, settled down and had a couple of misshapen kids, and gradually stopped making it to rehearsals; and then in early 1997 Mikill simply disappeared, never to be seen again.  Rumors flooded the music fan world, and persist to this day, that he bought an island paradise somewhere and has it stocked with enough cocaine and strippers to kill a dozen Kid Rocks a thousand times over, but New Billings, Montana police believe he wound up in a woodchipper.

The group de fois grace had come when Sharon Stone herself sued the band and Dishonest Abe for defamation of coochie, after one of the unfortunate incidents with naked homeless women, (a stunt that could only have been dreamed up by “Hollyweird”) went horribly awry and was widely publicized.  Abe sent the guys an email about the suit, saying “all the rest of your royalties would be tied up with it for years”, and immediately retired with his “tiny life-savings” to the Seychelles.  After ten long years of creative drought together, the band’s last full performance was in October 1996 on a rooftop in Van Nuys, in an all-acoustic jam of their greatest hits that was fortunately captured for all posterity on video.  Unfortunately the “unplugged” electric instruments were far too quiet to be heard on the recording, what with the airplanes landing at the Van Nuys airport across the street.   Alas, this historic concert was recorded on Sony Beta and no one had a Beta player, so the tape was left lying around, got used as a coaster, and was quickly ruined.  

As a footnote to this classic American tale of rags to bitches and back to rags, in the fall of 2003 Lick, although paralyzed from the nipples down by the election of George W. Bush, gathered the Lips, Harry and Rosie, Gnu’s illegitimate son Gnuer Finklebaum on drums, some black guy bass player, and a guy who looks just like Mikill Smarm would look today, according to the FBI’s forensic sketch artist, for a SSP Farewell Tour and retrospective 12-cd box set release, including 5 cds of original garage recordings from the mid 80s, 5 full 72-minute interview cds with each member of the band (the Lips shared one), a spectacular 5x7inch two-color fold-out poster, and a special bootlegged live cd from the “Naked Breakfast” tour, plus one brand-new song "Book Her, Curly" composed by Lick Stevenson especially for the reunion.  Thirteen dates were scheduled, but Lick died suddenly of an undiagnosed massive rectal aneurysm just before the tour was to start, and so it was that Sharon Stone’s Pussy was fucked by some bloody asshole for the very last time.

~ Matt Terry ~