“I’m really not into playing particular roles just because you’re a certain age or have a certain position in life,” says Lois Weiss, an early middle-aged jazz radio station account executive. “I’m an atypical person, and always have been.”

Is she ever!

Rare is the mother—and, one imagines, slightly rarer still the Jewish mother—who’d allow the fruit of her womb, her elder daughter, to listen to heavy metal in the home. Rarer still’s the Jewish mother who’d acquiesce to the fruit of her womb joining a heavy metal band and spending a fortune in local S&M haberdasheries on spiked and studded accessories—especially when the band’s called Bitch.

Rarer still’s the Jewish mom who wouldn’t positively rend her garments with grief and shame on noting that the heavy metal band’s stage show calls for the fruit of her womb to recline on stage with her legs spread wide to allow a long-haired Gentile guitarist from Texas to pretend to violate her with the head of his guitar. Rarest possible is the Jewish mom, who, having somehow survived all of, the foregoing, actually assumes the group’s management, for Pete’s sake.

Real, real rare is Lois Weiss!

“I’ve been in the entertainment business much of my life,” the rare Ms. Weiss explains, “doing bookings, doing public relations, working with entertainment firms. The only standard I’ve ever had is excellence. If what’s done is done poorly, then I don’t care if it’s country or Top 40 or gospel—if it’s bad, it’s bad. But if it’s good, I’m thrilled, and what Bitch does, as far as heavy metal (about which I make no value judgements) is concerned, is good.

“As far as Betsy herself is concerned, for me it’s a marvelous example of a character that’s been created, that’s been developed and perfected. She does her part very well, the band does its part very well, and that’s all I’ve ever asked for—excellence.

“As far as the S&M concept of the band, it’s show-biz. I don’t care. It’s fun! I don’t make any moral judgements. You’d probably like me to tell you that I disapprove of it morally because I’m Betsy’s mother, but that isn’t true. It’s like a dirty joke. If it’s funny, then it has validity. If it isn’t funny, then why bother? I don’t care about the subject matter.

“When you’re looking at a market with hundreds of bands falling in and out every month, you need something that will grab people’s attention. Like Gypsy Rose Lee said, ‘You gotta have a gimmick.’ ”

When I admit to Lois Weiss that I’m unable to believe that she wasn’t at least a little, uh, perturbed by the spectacle of her daughter seeming to be violated by a guitar, she concedes, “I was never particularly fond of that particular part of the act (since elminated from the group’s repertoire)—I am a feminist, after all. But people take all sorts of sexual roles, and they’re all valid, as long as they don’t involve hurting someone else.”

When she isn’t performing, rehearsing, or recording with Bitch, the rather sullen Betsy’s a part-time secretary for a computer consulting firm. “I’ve got my boss chained to his desk,” she says. Lois chortles dutifully. Betsy’s got a repertoire of three or four Quotable Quips that seem to appear in every article that’s written about Bitch, and her mom chortles dutifully after each of them, as though hearing them for the first time.

“Three-fourths of the people who work with me have seen us,” Betsy continues. “They all love it, since they’re all kinky anyway. They’re very supportive. They give me a lot of strokes. They all encourage me and tell me that the band’s going to make it. They know I’m not going to be a secretary forever. ”

She doesn’t want the group’s audiences to be intimidated, but entertained. “It’s enticing for them and it’s erotic,” she claims, “but it’s also fun. We’ve been referred to as heavy metal burlesque. That’s a good description, I think. When they see Ozzy Osbourne bite the head off an animal, it’s more, ‘Oh, my God!’ and everybody getting freaked out. But I don’t think anybody really gets freaked out by our show.”

Asked if she herself is really kinky, Betsy, a former member of a cute and vivacious L.A. ska outfit called the Boxboys, quips, “Well, I’ve got some great bedposts at home.” Lois titters dutifully, but Eleganza won’t let her off so easily. “It’s part of us enough to make it believable on stage,” she concedes. “The audience wouldn’t believe it unless you believe in what you’re doing. It’s got to be in everybody somewhere in order for it to come across on stage. I mean, I don’t go around beating the shit out of guys walking down the street, but it’s something that’s crossed everybody’s mind at one time or another.”

Eleganza won’t let her off so easily. “Yes or no,” I demand, snarling like Mike Wallace. “Does sadomasochism figure in your own sex life or doesn’t it?”

“What the hell?” sighs Our Bets. “Yeah.”

Not terribly convincing though she may seem to Eleganza (admittedly in daylight in the living room of her mother’s home in North Hollywood, rather than on stage, in the harsh, cruel light of Super Troupers), Our Bets has nonetheless struck no less venerable an authority as the proprietor of Los Angeles’s best-known S&M brothel, The Chateau, as convincing enough to want to recruit. “When we were taking some pictures there,” Betsy relates, “this guy came up and actually told me what my hours would be. He seemed to think that I could clean up. And I don’t mean with a mop.” Lois giggles dutifully.

Traditionally, Betsy’s done most of her shopping in the heavy metal boutiques of tawdry Hollywood Blvd. But “these days,” she notes, “you can find spiked and studded stuff even at Judy’s (a middle-of-theroad young women’s chain) and the Broadway (a staid department store chain)!”

These days, though, “spiked and studded stuff” is no longer all that Bets is in the market for. “I’ve been trying to glamour up the image with rhinestones,” she reveals. “I’m tired of looking like every other person in heavy metal. It used to be I was the only girl in town who got studded out, but now every girl in town is doing it.”

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 43

Lois’s mother—Betsy’s grandmother—is also said to regard Bitch as pretty bitchin’.

In closing, I’d like to note that it was fine and exciting when Prince alone was spinning around in his long coat while playing the guitar, but when Billy Idol’s guitarist ripped the move off for the “Rebel Yell” video! millions cringed,

Now Steve Van Zandt—modern pop’s most blatant proof of the endurance of the Bob Dylan’s Valet Effect (whereby someone without appreciable genius is subsidized by a major recording corporation apparently solely on the basis of having spent a lot of time in a superstar’s backup band or entourage)—and that peroxideblonde-Mohawked black fellow who used to be in the Plasmatics do it to death in the latest Little Steven video. Now sick to death of men in long coats spinning around while playing their guitars, Eleganza cries, “Enough already!” And urges you to do likewise.