Slash Magazine, Vol. 3 #1
(12-6-79)

NERVOUS GENDER, FEAR, BRAINIACS AT THE ANTICLUB

Nervous Gender, cockroaches, Fear, cockroaches, the Brainiacs, and more cockroaches. It was sometime after the second round that I noticed that the spots on the bar were moving. Not only that, they had antennae! I slid over to the pool table where John Doe of X, Top Jimmy, and Derf of Fear toasted sportsmanship and racked-up for some eight ball.
The Brianiacs worked hard proving to be a lot more rowdy than their 45. They need to work up their stage presence, though, and I soon drifted back to the pool sharks.
Fear didn't crack too many jokes tonight because the fuses at the Anticlub could not withstand the onslaught of their artillery. Equipment kept breaking down. The band held onto their cool and spat in the face of electronic adversity. While everyone waited, the bar again exercised its magical spell, an uncanny magnetism that could've had something to do with the price of beer, a mere dollar a bottle. Soon pennies were wedged tightly in the fuse box and Fear, with Lee Ving, the vial of nitro-glycerin in combat boots, muscled their way through to the end of their set.
By the time Nervous Gender came on, the competency of those in the billiards area had degenerated in direct proportion to the number of beer bottles on the floor. On stage, Phranc looks like a 14 year old runaway from a boys' reform school. And when she wacks her head repeatedly in time to the synthesizers in "Gestalt", you wonder if she'll ever be fit to function in "normal society". But a place in genteel civilization is not exactly what Nervous Gender is aiming for.
The Anticlub is one of the best fun-dives in town ... despite the racial conflict generated by the insect population.
-V/D