What happened with Faster Pussycat was that they were too late. Their debut album didn’t get any attention so most of the world didn’t realize they arrived onto the music scene in 1987 along with Guns N’ Roses, the quickly rising Poison and newly reinvented Def Leppard (Hysteria turns 35 today), so when Faster Pussycat’s sophomore release Wake Me When It’s Over came out and their single “House Of Pain” got pasted all over MTV, the band looked like just another wannabe coattail rider with a power ballad that was sucking a dying music genre out of its last shred of mainstream lifeforce.
What’s ironic is that Faster Pussycat’s lead singer, Taime Downe was from Seattle and actually hung out with many of the musicians that would emerge in the early 90’s to destroy the public’s perception of glam rock. By 1992, music fans had moved on and Pussycat’s third album, Whipped was noticed even less than their first. Except for a few diehards who had too many extra cans of Aqua Net in the medicine cabinet to give up hope, no one real cared about a song like “Nonstop To Nowhere” anymore.
That’s a shame because had it come out in 1987, Pussycat MIGHT have survived a few years into the grunge era. It was a much more transient song and perhaps could have led them into a direction fans cared about before the entire genre of hair metal became a joke for a few years.
Pussycat’s next album wouldn’t get released 14 years later in 2006. They tour now and play small clubs but take a listen to this forgotten classic and think of what might have been if they had just wrote it a few years earlier.