NASHVILLE PUSSY The Middle East, Cambridge, Mass., April 29, 1998

It all started innocently enough: a fan vaulted up on to the stage at Cambridge's Middle East and handed an aluminum tin full of birthday cake to Nashville Pussy bassist Corey Parks. Parks, a six-and-a-half-foot-tall vixen who looks like a cross between actress Uma Thurman and a biker chick from hell, with her inked-up arms, skin-tight knee-length jeans, high-heeled black boots, tank top and cowboy hat, blushed a little as a small group of audience members broke into an impromptu chorus of "Happy Birthday."

But just minutes later Parks was back in character, towering over the crowd, devilishly hammering her bass, and occasionally stepping forward to deliver a swift kick to the head of anyone who stepped out of line as Nashville Pussy tore through the first of fifteen super-premium high-octane rockers, fusing Motorhead metal with the arena bombast of Seventies cock-rocker Ted Nugent. (The name Nashville Pussy is taken from the rant the Nuge delivers before "Wang Dang Sweet Poontang" on his classic Double Live Gonzo.)

Parks wasn't the only one getting confrontational -- or the only white-trash bombshell on stage. To her left were redneck-romancing singer/guitarist Blaine Cartwright, who growled, grimaced, kicked, punched and hocked a serious loogie in the face of one unruly patron during the course of the show, and his wife, lead guitarist Ruyter Suys, whose red vinyl pants and bra ensemble left little to the imagination, especially when she leaned back mid-solo while Cartwright, who looks like the unholy spawn of Molly Hatchet and Lynyrd Skynyrd, inserted a Bud bottle in her ample, beer-soaked cleavage and then held the bottle while she sucked on the neck.

Not to be outdone, Parks calmly laid her bass down in front of her amp in the middle of one tune ("Fried Chicken & Coffee"), lit a small torch, took a generous swig of grain alcohol, carefully brushed her hair back out of her eyes, and proceeded to spit two Gene Simmons-size fireballs into the crowd. Think of it as a punk parody of Jerry Springer's Too Hot for TV without any talk-show moralizing or teary-eyed confessionals.

Despite -- or perhaps because of -- all the theatrics, which included a crowd-silencing long french kiss between Suys and Parks, and audience baiting, Nashville Pussy still rocked. Hard. Drawing mostly from their full-length debut, Let Them Eat Pussy (Amphetamine Reptile), which came out in January, and feeding on the menacing energy of the crowd, they expertly recycled the kind of boogie-blues garage-rock riffs that generated heavy metal and Southern rock in the Seventies, covering the old J. Geils Band hit "First I Look at the Purse" and the Nuge's "Wang Dang Sweet Poontang" along the way.

"You obviously don't have any real rock and roll bands around here," Cartwright sneered after he stopped the band in the middle of "Go Motherfucker Go" to have one unruly fan thrown out of the club. And you'd have to guess that by Cartwright's standards that statement would probably be applicable just about anywhere in the world.

MATT ASHARE