Playbill: Quintron and Miss Pussycat

Quintron and Miss Pussycat

Joel Orr, Houston’s preeminent purveyor of adult puppet theater, has confessed that Miss Pussycat is the inspiration behind his local group, Bobbindoctrin. The New Orleans-based artist and her partner Quintron have been titillating audiences for what seems like over a decade now with their high-energy happenings that fuse avant-garde puppetry with electronic-based dance music. Actually, a Miss Pussycat performance precedes a Quintron concert; there’s usually a tidy little (provocative yet cute) puppet performance before a break, and then Mr. Quintron comes on and proceeds to blow the roof off the joint (with the assistance of Miss Pussycat, of course). To describe the music, one must take a trip back to late-‘70s-early-‘80s New York City, when bands like Suicide, the Contortions and Kid Creole & the Coconuts were defining a short-lived art movement known as “No Wave,” a rebellious, confrontational and nihilistic faction that eschewed (and sometimes fostered) the more pop-oriented New Wave trend. Quintron came out of a similar Chicago scene before moving to New Orleans and hooking into the underground art world of Sin City, where he and Pussycat collaborated. After a tremendous period of national and local recognition, Pussycat and Quintron’s home base/show club, the Amazing Spellcaster Lodge, was all but destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. (They bounced back.) “Swamp Buggy Badass,” off their most recent album “Swamp Tech” totally tromps the humid, sweaty landscape of Louisiana with its infectious chorus “Bad ass ass-a-ass-a-bad bad / bad ass ass come on-a-come on.” With its insistent, throbbing club beat, supplemented by the scratching effect provided by the Drum Buddy, a light-activated, electronic instrument invented by Quintron, the song instantly induces head-banging—and in a concert environment, full-on, contact-sport dancing. In that live setting, the lithe, fueled-up Quintron channels eletctro-pioneers Suicide, writhing and raging behind his Hammond organ, occasionally tweaking his Drum Buddy (a la Jon Spencer on theremin—all dramatic-like), while Miss Pussycat provides the backup vocals with choreographed dance moves in tandem with another female performer, Coconuts-style, Like early Bobbindoctrin performances, when the local group opened up punk-rock shows at Mary Janes’s with weird, funny, existential puppet shows/situations that had the crowd chanting “Pup!” … “Et!,” Quintron and Miss Pussycat throw down the gauntlet for smaller club acts by cross-pollinating genres and performance styles into something wholly original and energizing. Long live rock and puppets! —Troy Schulze

Ouintron and Miss Pussycat perform Saturday, April 21, the Orange Show, 2402 Munger, 713-868-2101.