“SEX SELLS”
Inside Buckcherry’s lascivious Crazy Bitch.
Buckcherry’s decadent, monstrously catchy crowd favourite Crazy Bitch started life in 2002, four years before it appeared on Buckcherry’s album 15 and turned their dwindling prospects around.
“What happened was that Josh [Todd, vocals] phoned me one day and sang these lyrics,” then-guitarist Keith Nelson tells us. “Actually, he was hoping I’d be out and that he would get my voicemail. I guess Josh was hoping to shock me by leaving this singing message. Anyway, I went away and came up with this funky riff, and the next day we met and had the song finished. Like a lot of the best stuff it was done very quickly.”
At the time, the band appeared to be falling apart. Three members had quit following the release of their 2001 album Time Bomb, and they were without a label – which, it turned out, ended up working to their advantage.
“We were down to being a duo for a while,” Nelson recalls. “That meant we just got on with writing songs. And because there was no label breathing down our necks, we had nobody ‘suggesting’ what we should do.”
The band demoed the track, and then thought nothing more of it, until they went into the studio to record 15.
“We decided to do Crazy Bitch, just so we had it done properly. We weren’t even sure it would go on the album, but eventually it did, and it’s become one of our most popular songs.”
There was some controversy, however, notably a lawsuit involving a teenager who appeared topless in the original music video. The band’s lawyer stated that the claims were “bogus”, and she’d obtained access to the over-18-only shoot using a fake ID. The case was settled, but the song still got some flak.
“It was never meant to be misogynistic,” Nelson says, “but that was the way a lot of people saw it when the album came out. But since then I’ve heard that so many women love it. You’d be amazed how many girls have Crazy Bitch as their MySpace theme. Something like that is really gratifying, because it means that females are in on the joke as well. So anyone out there who still thinks we’re sexist, talk to the girls who go around calling themselves the Crazy Bitch. They understand, even if you don’t.”
Whatever your stance, the actual song – all bluesy, slinky guitars and a hard-partying chorus that’ll bounce around your head for decades to come – speaks for itself.
“It amazes me how something so simple and easy to write has become so important to our fans,” Nelson says. “I suppose it proves that sex sells.”