GOF 004 1983
Confessions of a Shit Addict
Sadistic Gossip
Mary Davis Kills Mary Davis Kills
Confessions of a Shit Addict
Sadistic Gossip
Mary Davis Kills Mary Davis Kills
This cover image and the scans of the tape sides below are taken from Hal McGee's personal copy of Confessions of a Shit Addict. The cassette j-card shows Leslie's address when she lived at 159B Bartlett Street in San Francisco. Confessions of a Shit Addict was recorded and originally released probably Late Summer 1983, when Leslie still lived at 1405 Van Ness Avenue, #407.
Editor's Note:
The audio transcription is taken from Hal McGee's personal copy of the cassette that he received from Leslie Singer, probably in 1984. McGee's copy of Confessions Of A Shit Addict was dubbed onto one side of a 60-minute Normal Bias Maxell LN cassette, with the second side left blank and labeled "Audience Participation Side". The audio itself is about 32 minutes, and it is presented here in one continuous 32-minute program, just like it is on McGee's copy. Some copies produced by Singer were dubbed onto 30-minute cassettes with the program split onto the two sides of tape.
Below we will split the 32-minute program into three parts so that you can easily follow along as Leslie describes the recordings.
The audio transcription is taken from Hal McGee's personal copy of the cassette that he received from Leslie Singer, probably in 1984. McGee's copy of Confessions Of A Shit Addict was dubbed onto one side of a 60-minute Normal Bias Maxell LN cassette, with the second side left blank and labeled "Audience Participation Side". The audio itself is about 32 minutes, and it is presented here in one continuous 32-minute program, just like it is on McGee's copy. Some copies produced by Singer were dubbed onto 30-minute cassettes with the program split onto the two sides of tape.
Below we will split the 32-minute program into three parts so that you can easily follow along as Leslie describes the recordings.
Leslie Singer's LISTENING NOTES for Confessions of a Shit Addict
A tape chock-full of nuts, with more repetition than any song by The Fall, tape manipulations and sonics not to mention songs about literary figures, film directors and fashion designers. A common thread here is artists who died young: by pistol, (Vladimir Mayakovsky), by motor vehicle (Albert Camus), and by overwork and unhealthy lifestyle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder). And then there is the fashion designer Calvin Klein who is alive and well today!
I recall that I got the distinctive sound character of the first four songs by just saturating everything with reverb and I cranked up the gain on the mixing board. I may have also experimented with playing a music track through a headphone speaker with a microphone in front of it to get some really weird compression and feedback.
I recall that I got the distinctive sound character of the first four songs by just saturating everything with reverb and I cranked up the gain on the mixing board. I may have also experimented with playing a music track through a headphone speaker with a microphone in front of it to get some really weird compression and feedback.
“Dead Poets Don’t Shave Their Heads” — inspired by the Russian Futurist/Marxist poet, Vladimir Mayakovksy (1893- 1930) and the famous photo of him with a shaved head. His poem “Talking with the Taxman About Poetry” and plays like “The Bedbug” critiqued the Soviet system.
“Camus' Car Crash”- Albert Camus, the great existentialist writer who didn’t consider himself an existentialist. I read The Stranger in high school and loved it. My mother, a Smith College graduate who majored in French, saw me reading the book which I had borrowed from the library, stuck a $50 bill into the book as a gift/reward/thank you to me for reading it on my own (it wasn’t a class assignment.) This was during one of her manic highs in the late 1970’s when she liked to spend the family savings. Thank god I looked at the book before returning it to the library and pulled out the $50 bill. That is a lot of $ now and really a lot of dough for a 16 year old back in 1979. I’m sure that I bought records with it. Later on in the mid ’00’s when I was going through a heavy Mark E. Smith Fall phase, I read Camus’ The Fall. Now I’m skimming the recent Brix Smith Start autobiography with focus on her Fall years. Oh, did I mention that I use a loop of that classic car crash sound effect that everyone including me has used and can’t stop using? I think that the lyrics are very influenced by John Lydon and PiL: “Camus' Car Crash, he crashed, he died, this is not a disco song".
“My Calvins”- In the early 1980’s there was a strict dress code for female employees not only in the financial world but also in “soft industry” such as the art magazine business. No pants allowed, not even designer pant suits. Women had to wear skirts or dresses, panty hose and heels. At FCA Asset Management, women were allowed to wear pants on Casual Dress Day Fridays. I could wear jeans but they had to be designer jeans such as those from Calvin Klein. This song celebrates the freedom that Brooke Shields and Calvin Klein were able to give me at least on Fridays. This freedom was impacted by the rumors that were swirling around SF that Calvin Klein had AIDS. This was 1983. As we all know now Ronald Reagan and his administration were ignoring the AIDs crisis and refused to even acknowledge its existence during that time.
Editor's Note: below is the Calvin Klein TV commercial that Leslie sampled in her song "My Calvins".
“Camus' Car Crash”- Albert Camus, the great existentialist writer who didn’t consider himself an existentialist. I read The Stranger in high school and loved it. My mother, a Smith College graduate who majored in French, saw me reading the book which I had borrowed from the library, stuck a $50 bill into the book as a gift/reward/thank you to me for reading it on my own (it wasn’t a class assignment.) This was during one of her manic highs in the late 1970’s when she liked to spend the family savings. Thank god I looked at the book before returning it to the library and pulled out the $50 bill. That is a lot of $ now and really a lot of dough for a 16 year old back in 1979. I’m sure that I bought records with it. Later on in the mid ’00’s when I was going through a heavy Mark E. Smith Fall phase, I read Camus’ The Fall. Now I’m skimming the recent Brix Smith Start autobiography with focus on her Fall years. Oh, did I mention that I use a loop of that classic car crash sound effect that everyone including me has used and can’t stop using? I think that the lyrics are very influenced by John Lydon and PiL: “Camus' Car Crash, he crashed, he died, this is not a disco song".
“My Calvins”- In the early 1980’s there was a strict dress code for female employees not only in the financial world but also in “soft industry” such as the art magazine business. No pants allowed, not even designer pant suits. Women had to wear skirts or dresses, panty hose and heels. At FCA Asset Management, women were allowed to wear pants on Casual Dress Day Fridays. I could wear jeans but they had to be designer jeans such as those from Calvin Klein. This song celebrates the freedom that Brooke Shields and Calvin Klein were able to give me at least on Fridays. This freedom was impacted by the rumors that were swirling around SF that Calvin Klein had AIDS. This was 1983. As we all know now Ronald Reagan and his administration were ignoring the AIDs crisis and refused to even acknowledge its existence during that time.
Editor's Note: below is the Calvin Klein TV commercial that Leslie sampled in her song "My Calvins".
“Fassbinder Had a Good Set Designer”- this song is about my reaction to one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s later films, Veronika Voss. I had a rather bratty and negative reaction to that film. Poor Rainer, he and his group of amazing actors made so many amazing films that he ran out of steam there at the end of his life which wasn’t very long. He died at age 37! Later, in the 1990’s, when I began to work on video projects with the art critic/painter, Laura Cottingham, I began to have a deeper appreciation of his films. I now think that he is one of the greatest artists of the 20th-Century. Laura’s 2005 BFI Films book on Fassbinder’s film, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, is dedicated to me. It is a great book about a great film. If I ever make it back to Germany (as the Ramones said “It's a Long Way Back to Germany”), I want to go to Munich and put white roses on Fassbinder’s grave.
Then we get to the next section:
Electric guitar/vocal versions of “Dead Poets Shave Their Heads”, “Camus' Car Crash” (this sounds almost Americana), “My Calvins" (this sounds like an outtake from the Fall’s Grotesque album, which I didn’t care much for upon its release but liked better later on during my heavy Fall phase), and “Fassbinder Had a Good Set Designer.” With these versions the lyrics really come through.
Finally, we get to the Mary Davis Kills Mary Davis Kills section
This is audio recorded during the one and only Mary Davis Kills Mary Davis Kills show at Ollie’s at 4130 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland on July 22, 1983. The band was Clara Lusardi AKA Klara Lusardi AKA Klara Lux on guitar, and me on guitar and lead vocals.
The section begins pre-show with Clara and me talking to a male audience member about Brett’s crazy animal movies, and how they got Psychodrama busted by the DC cops. I’m now rather disturbed as to how blithely she and I are discussing the content of these films and the judicial aftermath of them. The callousness of youth… Meanwhile the Fall song, “The Man Whose Head Expanded” plays away in the background.
Editor's note:
"Brett's crazy animal movies" is a reference to a film depicting/simulating Brett Kerby having sex with a goat that Psychodrama showed during one of their performances in the D.C. area in 1982, during the time that Leslie was a member of the first incarnation of the band.
Later, in the second incarnation of Psychodrama, Brett Kerby and Rob Lippert were arrested by the DC area Vice Squad for "indecent performance" for a June 1983 Psychodrama performance.
Then we go into the performance section that gets very conceptual. Only the beginning and ending of the songs are included on the tape. The songs played are introduced as: “Andy Warhol” (“I Wish I was Andy Warhol"), “Jackson” (“I Think About Jackson Pollock”), “Marshall” (a song about Marshall McLuhan), “Tennessee" (“I Feel Sad about Tennessee Williams”) and then we go into a total noise version of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” which was a big hit during that time. Clara was a big Bowie fan. Now I’m surprised at the applause that each song received. The crowd was up for some fun and Mary Davis Kills Mary Davis Kills delivered it to them that night.
Editor's Note: The original versions of "Andy Warhol" and "Tennessee" can be heard on the Diary of a Shiteater cassette, and "Jackson" on I Think About Jackson Pollock.
After this I went back to doing Girls on Fire and Clara moved on to a regular new wave goth band.
As I recall our set was very short--20 to 25 minutes which would've been about seven or eight songs.
Ollie's was quite a scene. We performed in the back room/auditorium space. I think that Clara got us the gig through a friend of hers, KD. KD played bass in Fake Stoneage, the third act on the bill. Helen Holt was a solo synth performer with slides behind her. KD had a nice apartment in Berkeley where we hung out before the show. She served rice crackers with mozzarella cheese and fresh tomatoes. It was very nice of her to host us. Clara's brother Francis was there visiting from Italy. He kept talking about how beautiful the light was in California. As I recall, Clara told me that KD had been in the legendary Teddy and the Frat Girls aka Sheer Smegma with Cookie Mold. Cookie had some connection to Ricky Williams of another legendary SF early post-punk band, The Sleepers. I always thought that Teddy and the Frat Girls started in SF but it turns out they started in Florida and then Cookie and Spam X (that could've been KD) moved to SF and the single got re-released by Alternative Tentacles.
Here is a link to an article at Tiny Mix Tapes about Sheer Smegma (Teddy and the Frat Girls).
It was my first live performance in the Bay Area. All things considered, it went pretty well. I remember that while KD looked new wave (very similar to gal in the middle of the Sheer Smegma pic), the other band members had long hair. They were all very nice. The music was more like prog-rock into new wave. One of the guitar players kept cock-rocking out with his guitar. It was hard to tell if he was being ironic or not. Someone in the audience afterwards commented on that to his face. He just smiled and shrugged.
I think that Clara came up with the initial idea for the name, Mary Davis Kills Mary Davis Kills in response to me wanting to call the group, "Girls Who Hate Women." (I just noticed that one of the reviews from that era refers to "I Think About Jackson Pollock" as being by Girls Who Hate Women so I was playing around with that name off and on. ).
Clara thought that name was too overtly misogynistic and people wouldn't understand my punk feminist irony. It was based on either graffiti that she saw somewhere "Mary Davis Kills" or she knew someone by the name of Mary Davis. I think that it was my idea to repeat it in homage to Gertrude Stein.
The section begins pre-show with Clara and me talking to a male audience member about Brett’s crazy animal movies, and how they got Psychodrama busted by the DC cops. I’m now rather disturbed as to how blithely she and I are discussing the content of these films and the judicial aftermath of them. The callousness of youth… Meanwhile the Fall song, “The Man Whose Head Expanded” plays away in the background.
Editor's note:
"Brett's crazy animal movies" is a reference to a film depicting/simulating Brett Kerby having sex with a goat that Psychodrama showed during one of their performances in the D.C. area in 1982, during the time that Leslie was a member of the first incarnation of the band.
Later, in the second incarnation of Psychodrama, Brett Kerby and Rob Lippert were arrested by the DC area Vice Squad for "indecent performance" for a June 1983 Psychodrama performance.
Then we go into the performance section that gets very conceptual. Only the beginning and ending of the songs are included on the tape. The songs played are introduced as: “Andy Warhol” (“I Wish I was Andy Warhol"), “Jackson” (“I Think About Jackson Pollock”), “Marshall” (a song about Marshall McLuhan), “Tennessee" (“I Feel Sad about Tennessee Williams”) and then we go into a total noise version of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” which was a big hit during that time. Clara was a big Bowie fan. Now I’m surprised at the applause that each song received. The crowd was up for some fun and Mary Davis Kills Mary Davis Kills delivered it to them that night.
Editor's Note: The original versions of "Andy Warhol" and "Tennessee" can be heard on the Diary of a Shiteater cassette, and "Jackson" on I Think About Jackson Pollock.
After this I went back to doing Girls on Fire and Clara moved on to a regular new wave goth band.
As I recall our set was very short--20 to 25 minutes which would've been about seven or eight songs.
Ollie's was quite a scene. We performed in the back room/auditorium space. I think that Clara got us the gig through a friend of hers, KD. KD played bass in Fake Stoneage, the third act on the bill. Helen Holt was a solo synth performer with slides behind her. KD had a nice apartment in Berkeley where we hung out before the show. She served rice crackers with mozzarella cheese and fresh tomatoes. It was very nice of her to host us. Clara's brother Francis was there visiting from Italy. He kept talking about how beautiful the light was in California. As I recall, Clara told me that KD had been in the legendary Teddy and the Frat Girls aka Sheer Smegma with Cookie Mold. Cookie had some connection to Ricky Williams of another legendary SF early post-punk band, The Sleepers. I always thought that Teddy and the Frat Girls started in SF but it turns out they started in Florida and then Cookie and Spam X (that could've been KD) moved to SF and the single got re-released by Alternative Tentacles.
Here is a link to an article at Tiny Mix Tapes about Sheer Smegma (Teddy and the Frat Girls).
It was my first live performance in the Bay Area. All things considered, it went pretty well. I remember that while KD looked new wave (very similar to gal in the middle of the Sheer Smegma pic), the other band members had long hair. They were all very nice. The music was more like prog-rock into new wave. One of the guitar players kept cock-rocking out with his guitar. It was hard to tell if he was being ironic or not. Someone in the audience afterwards commented on that to his face. He just smiled and shrugged.
I think that Clara came up with the initial idea for the name, Mary Davis Kills Mary Davis Kills in response to me wanting to call the group, "Girls Who Hate Women." (I just noticed that one of the reviews from that era refers to "I Think About Jackson Pollock" as being by Girls Who Hate Women so I was playing around with that name off and on. ).
Clara thought that name was too overtly misogynistic and people wouldn't understand my punk feminist irony. It was based on either graffiti that she saw somewhere "Mary Davis Kills" or she knew someone by the name of Mary Davis. I think that it was my idea to repeat it in homage to Gertrude Stein.
Review by Mykel Board from his "More Tapes Laying Around" section of Graham Ingels' Castanets cassette review column, OP Magazine, "W" issue, May-June 1984. It is interesting that Board states Leslie's address as #309, which was the first apartment at 1405 Van Ness that she lived in — not #407, which was where the first four GOF tapes were recorded.
poster for July 22, 1983 performance by Mary Davis Kills Mary Davis Kills (Singer and Lusardi) at Ollie's in Oakland
As I recall the Ollie's show poster was a collaboration between Clara and me. I picked the image, a still from a Jim Dine Happening, The Car Crash and enlarged it. Clara did the lettering.
pic of Leslie from the Madness Lives compilation booklet, published by Walls Of Genius, 1985
GOF GEAR
I ended up selling my Fender Stratocaster (see the Early GOF page) guitar to Rob Lippert of Psychodrama when Brett Kerby and I drove off to San Francisco in October 1982. My main guitar was a tobacco sunburst Silvertone that I bought for $50 from my high school friend, Mary Zanone.
In my Psychodrama and GOF days, I put the guitar directly into a small Peavey PA system that we used for vocals as well. Right before Brett and I left for SF, I bought a Peavey mixing board. I think that it might have been a Peavey 801 or something similar, from a friend of Rob's who was in the Virginia noise scene. It was an eight channel board with fantastic reverb which I smothered all over the GOF stuff. I used that mixing board with an Orange amp head. I had gotten the Orange amp head back when I had joined a new wave band for about one gig.
So the GOF set up was the Peavey mixer, the (curious) Orange amp head, the Silvertone and a beat-up no name white electric guitar that John Hricko gave me. That guitar ended up getting smashed to pieces during a performance of The Runaways’ "Cherry Bomb" that I gave circa 1987 or so. (I had seen The Runaways support the Ramones at DC's Warner theater. One of the best and most memorable shows that I ever saw.) Killer (her real name is Debbie), in addition to getting the Silvertone, got the mixer and the Orange amp. Killer had played with an early incarnation of Christian Death. Then she went on to being a tech with Fender and then a sound person for Chicks on Speed. In the '80's she also played in a goth/new wave band with Klara Lux (Mary Davis Kills Mary Davis Kills).
I ended up selling my Fender Stratocaster (see the Early GOF page) guitar to Rob Lippert of Psychodrama when Brett Kerby and I drove off to San Francisco in October 1982. My main guitar was a tobacco sunburst Silvertone that I bought for $50 from my high school friend, Mary Zanone.
In my Psychodrama and GOF days, I put the guitar directly into a small Peavey PA system that we used for vocals as well. Right before Brett and I left for SF, I bought a Peavey mixing board. I think that it might have been a Peavey 801 or something similar, from a friend of Rob's who was in the Virginia noise scene. It was an eight channel board with fantastic reverb which I smothered all over the GOF stuff. I used that mixing board with an Orange amp head. I had gotten the Orange amp head back when I had joined a new wave band for about one gig.
So the GOF set up was the Peavey mixer, the (curious) Orange amp head, the Silvertone and a beat-up no name white electric guitar that John Hricko gave me. That guitar ended up getting smashed to pieces during a performance of The Runaways’ "Cherry Bomb" that I gave circa 1987 or so. (I had seen The Runaways support the Ramones at DC's Warner theater. One of the best and most memorable shows that I ever saw.) Killer (her real name is Debbie), in addition to getting the Silvertone, got the mixer and the Orange amp. Killer had played with an early incarnation of Christian Death. Then she went on to being a tech with Fender and then a sound person for Chicks on Speed. In the '80's she also played in a goth/new wave band with Klara Lux (Mary Davis Kills Mary Davis Kills).
ADDITIONAL NOTES by Leslie about Confessions of a Shit Addict
Regarding the title "Confessions of a Shit Addict", and the previous Girls On Fire Cassette, Diary of a Shiteater:
My father would like to use colorful language and "shit-eating" was an adjective that he would use on a number of occasions as a put-down. Such as, he referred to the color of my Toyota pick up truck as being "shit-eating tan." My poor father, for all his talents and attributes, I think suffered from low self-esteem and it affected how he perceived the world as well as himself. So I was used to hearing the term. However, instead of an insult, I was using it more for shock value and to be provocative in keeping with the naive transgressive subject matter and song titles from my Psychodrama days. I think that there was also "conceptual continuity" going on related to Psychodrama's "300 Days of Sodom", the Marquis de Sade book, The 120 Days of Sodom, and the extremely disturbing film by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. In 1983/84, I somehow had to watch that film twice. Once with Clara (who worked at the Strand where it was being screened ) and then another time when FiFi Poopbutt (aka Ronna aka Ronnie Stafford) when he was briefly living in SF.
And then there was the Patti Smith song from Easter, "25th Floor" which contains lyrics like: "We explore the men's room. We don't give a shit." And then a whole spoken word section towards the end as "25th Floor" segues into "High on Rebellion" including: "the transformation of waste is perhaps the oldest pre-occupation of man. man being the chosen alloy, he must be reconnected- via shit, at all cost. inherent with(in) us is the dream of the task of the alchemist to creative from the clay of man. and to re-create from excretion of man pure and then soft and then solid gold." So all of this was swirling around in my head and manifested itself in those back to back album titles.
I chose Sadistic Gossip as a band title as I recall because there was personal drama involving Clara and some others folk on our scene with all kinds of gossip flying around. I referred to the gossip as being sadistic and then I though that would be a good band title. Now looking at it, I see some more conceptual continuity with the Marquis de Sade stuff.
Regarding the blank "Audience Participation Side", I think that I didn't want to wait to get that material out there. I guess that it was easier to buy 60-minute tapes and just get on with it than try to find 30-minute cassettes.
As I recall, I bought Maxell and Sony cassette tapes that I used to dub the Girls On Fire tape releases at the Tower Records that was located near Cannery Row/Ghirardelli Square in SF. Once John Hricko ditched worked to see an afternoon show by Sonic Youth in the Tower Records parking lot. I don't remember using Avanti tapes at that time but if I did, I probably bought them at the Woolworth's located at that time on Powell Street (this is now a GAP) or at the Walgreen's on Polk Street (this is still there.)
Regarding the title "Confessions of a Shit Addict", and the previous Girls On Fire Cassette, Diary of a Shiteater:
My father would like to use colorful language and "shit-eating" was an adjective that he would use on a number of occasions as a put-down. Such as, he referred to the color of my Toyota pick up truck as being "shit-eating tan." My poor father, for all his talents and attributes, I think suffered from low self-esteem and it affected how he perceived the world as well as himself. So I was used to hearing the term. However, instead of an insult, I was using it more for shock value and to be provocative in keeping with the naive transgressive subject matter and song titles from my Psychodrama days. I think that there was also "conceptual continuity" going on related to Psychodrama's "300 Days of Sodom", the Marquis de Sade book, The 120 Days of Sodom, and the extremely disturbing film by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. In 1983/84, I somehow had to watch that film twice. Once with Clara (who worked at the Strand where it was being screened ) and then another time when FiFi Poopbutt (aka Ronna aka Ronnie Stafford) when he was briefly living in SF.
And then there was the Patti Smith song from Easter, "25th Floor" which contains lyrics like: "We explore the men's room. We don't give a shit." And then a whole spoken word section towards the end as "25th Floor" segues into "High on Rebellion" including: "the transformation of waste is perhaps the oldest pre-occupation of man. man being the chosen alloy, he must be reconnected- via shit, at all cost. inherent with(in) us is the dream of the task of the alchemist to creative from the clay of man. and to re-create from excretion of man pure and then soft and then solid gold." So all of this was swirling around in my head and manifested itself in those back to back album titles.
I chose Sadistic Gossip as a band title as I recall because there was personal drama involving Clara and some others folk on our scene with all kinds of gossip flying around. I referred to the gossip as being sadistic and then I though that would be a good band title. Now looking at it, I see some more conceptual continuity with the Marquis de Sade stuff.
Regarding the blank "Audience Participation Side", I think that I didn't want to wait to get that material out there. I guess that it was easier to buy 60-minute tapes and just get on with it than try to find 30-minute cassettes.
As I recall, I bought Maxell and Sony cassette tapes that I used to dub the Girls On Fire tape releases at the Tower Records that was located near Cannery Row/Ghirardelli Square in SF. Once John Hricko ditched worked to see an afternoon show by Sonic Youth in the Tower Records parking lot. I don't remember using Avanti tapes at that time but if I did, I probably bought them at the Woolworth's located at that time on Powell Street (this is now a GAP) or at the Walgreen's on Polk Street (this is still there.)
Editor's Note:
In the second issue of William Davenport's Unsound magazine, 1983, Christopher Rankin reviewed Confessions of a Shit Addict, and it seems like his copy was dubbed onto a 30-minute cassette.
Feedback, psychotic screaming vocals, disturbingly unfamiliar sounds and refreshingly demented lyrics make up the first side of the tape. The painful 'Sadistic Gossip' (side 1) is an intense sound attack, like being strapped to the front of a freight train while having a bad acid trip. Side 2 is live Mary Davis Kills Mary Davis [sic] and it is almost as noisy and texturally full as side 1. If you don't have this tape, get it, an amazingly powerful work.
— CR
In the second issue of William Davenport's Unsound magazine, 1983, Christopher Rankin reviewed Confessions of a Shit Addict, and it seems like his copy was dubbed onto a 30-minute cassette.
Feedback, psychotic screaming vocals, disturbingly unfamiliar sounds and refreshingly demented lyrics make up the first side of the tape. The painful 'Sadistic Gossip' (side 1) is an intense sound attack, like being strapped to the front of a freight train while having a bad acid trip. Side 2 is live Mary Davis Kills Mary Davis [sic] and it is almost as noisy and texturally full as side 1. If you don't have this tape, get it, an amazingly powerful work.
— CR
review by Graham Ingels from his Castanets cassette review column in OP Magazine, "T" issue, November-December 1983
listing from the January 1985 Cause And Effect Cassette Distribution Catalog, written by Hal McGee
Hal McGee's updated review of Confessions of a Shit Addict, from HalZine issue #12, May 2018