(Jeremiah Cornelius describes the genesis of one of the great lost collaborations of post-Che Underground San Francisco.)
“Sister Heat is on slow drip — Someone blew her fuses”
A critical, high-concept description of my input to “Sister Heat” is “The Damned cover Bauhaus” — both of which were inspirations and targets for satire. The resulting style is a sub-genre of Glam that I call “Mock Bombastic” – A hallmark of both Romulus Johnson’s Deep Six and King Therapy, which were to follow in the next years.
The words for this song were written during a whirlwind of confusion that seems temporally located in the first half of 1985. It was conceived of as one of a dozen or so songs that I’d penned for a vaguely imagined power-trio. The ingredients for this concoction were a rooted in my revulsion at the general idea of intravenous entertainment — and a specific dismay at the introduction of a couple of young ladies to the pastime. Add large doses of imagery from Michael Moorcock books, half-digested Nietzsche and a steady diet of histrionic rock performers, and you get the kind of song that Dave Rinck hates!
All of this was very much unrehearsed. The music and recording came together in a couple of hours — start to finish — when the “power-trio” manifested itself in the person of David Fleminger! He was, and is, absolutely brilliant at taking a musical idea in collaboration and developing it into a fully-realized song. Somehow, a few days after my arrival in the Bay area from San Diego, we had this bounced to cassette from the Tascam four-track.
Musically, both of us were consumed with “Width of a Circle” from Bowie’s “Man Who Sold the World” — there is more than a nod to this in structure of “Sister Heat,” and some of the sounds. This was done with both affection and humor. Dave could be Mick Ronson and Trevor Boulder. I love listening to his bass — which I almost overlooked at the time. Myself, I was smitten by recent performances by both Hair Theatre and Doctor and the Medics. I think all of that might be pretty obvious!
— Jeremiah Cornelius