Real Detroit, June 1999
The Electric Six (formerly The Wildbunch) is GOING BYE BYE!

by Ben Lefebvre

On July 1, 2025 the Electric Six (formerly The Wildbunch) —Dick Valentine, The Rock & Roll Indian, M. Cougar, Surge Joebot, Disco and their slavebot, M.O.E.S.H.A.—are scheduled to be cryogenically preserved at an undisclosed laboratory in Canada. They will be playing their last show of your lifetime at the Magic Bag on Saturday, June 19—at least until the band is thawed on the eve of August 2, 3041, when they will then resume normal operations. So on May 25, the band took time out from their preparations to have a talk with REAL Detroit.

Swaggering in like they owned the place, guitarist Disco flagrantly knocks over a chair just to say “look at me—dangerous. Don’t touch.” The point was well taken. Only then would the members of the Electric Six (formerly The Wildbunch) take their seats around the table. When asked to give a brief history of the band, they answered that they were contracted in mid-winter 1984, then trained in an undisclosed location in Canada for several years, during which time they learned several lethal moves, “We played our first two shows on the 51st anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings to divert attention away from Associate Activity,” says lead singer Dick Valentine. “All subsequent performances and recordings have been smoke-screens for classified events.”

That’s all well and good, but I have to remind myself that, in addition to being a political force and covert operation, the Electric Six (formerly The Wildbunch) are also musicians in their own right. I ask them  who they would say influenced the band musically. According to M. Cougar, “Insanus, KISS, Roxy Music, Devo, REM, Kraftwerk, Vanilla Ice, Roky Erikson, Rammstein, Alice Cooper, Talking Heads, Can, Pere Ubu, Captain Beefheart, MC5, Getaway Cruiser, Wall of Voodoo, The Troggs, Keiji Haino, and Heino, they all influenced us a lot.

“But Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, Madonna, Courtney Love, Sleater-Kinney, Jody Watley, kd lang,  Alanis Morisette, Natalie Imbruglia, The Go-Gos, The Bangles, The Spice Girls, Pazport, and Enya—none of theses artists influenced us at all, musically.”

But what did the Electric Six (formerly The Wildbunch) hope to accomplish with their music? Entertain? Shock? Inform? Sexually excite?

“We wanted to be number one on Dial MTV for sixty-seven straight weeks,” says M. Cougar in regards to the bands goals. “Thanks to the kids, we have now just done that and now we must sleep for one thousand years.” But a thousand years? Why so long? He goes on, “The political influence that we have to obtain today through larceny and assassinations will be ours legally and through popular vote. With actors and professional wrestlers now starting to obtain political power, one can only imagine what kind of power that we,  musicians, can assume after 1000 years.”

Next, our conversation comes to the state of rock ‘n’ roll in general, and the question that’s been in everyone’s mind since Dick Valentine’s much ballyhooed run in with Corey Haim’s band in L.A.

“Dick,” I ask, “if the Electric Six (formerly The Wildbunch) ever had a musical encounter, say a battle of the bands, with Corey Haim’s band, what would you foresee the outcome being?”

The singer, sitting with his feet on the table, merely looks at me with disinterested eyes, pops a peanut into his mouth and then says coldly “If we battled Corey Haim’s band we would rock him so hard that he would have no other recourse but to resume his deadly use of heroin.” He levels this sentence upon Mr. Haim’s head as someone else might comment on the weather. A chill runs through this reporter’s blood. One of the other band member uses this time to comment on the sad state of sex in rock ‘n’ roll, more specifically on how Corey Haim seems to get “more” than they do. (“More” food? “more” clothes? “more” candy? this reporter can’t quite follow the street-slang that these bandmates seem to use so effortlessly.) “The women who avoid us today will sex us up nightly when we awaken in the future,” he muses. “They will naturally be more passive, susceptible to lies and untruths and will lose all self-control at the slightest twang of our electric rock.”

“To conclude,” says Rock & Roll Indian, cutting this reporter off in mid-sentence, “we hope that your readers will join us on June 19 at the Magic Bag for what is to be a celebration of the last three years, and more so, a celebration of what is to come. We do not fear the future...we live it. We are the future. They will be witness.”

At that each member rises from the table and goes to whence he came, Disco politely picking up the chair he knocked over on the way in, as if to say, “look at me—polite. But still don’t touch.” Truly, they are a Electric Six (formerly The Wildbunch).