It was an extreme way to start, but I learned later on how hard it can become to unsettle yourself, to trip yourself up, and I think that’s a good place to write from. It’s important to undermine yourself and create a level of difficulty so the work doesn’t come too easily. The more comfortable you get, the more money you earn, the more successful you are, the harder it is to create situations where you have to prove yourself and make yourself not just want it, but need it. The stakes should always feel high.
Stephen drummed for us in his living room as we began working on songs that would become our first record. Many of those earliest tunes didn’t even have names. We called them “Last Song,” “Slow Song,” as if it were enough to merely have a song, a band. Titles? Who needed them. These were crude, blunt stabs with cookie-cutter structures. We didn’t do any editing—the first idea was the only idea. There was no best, worst, or better, just raw attempts. We didn’t modify or agonize. The chords and melodies were written, the structure was a container for what was less of a song and more of an attitude. We filled up these shapes with riffs and screams and yelps. I was not self-conscious about the writing process; I wrote rudimentary but melodic leads over Corin’s crunchy three- or four-chord progressions. She sang whatever melody first came to her. The notion of simple or complex didn’t really matter as much as sound. I guess you’d call that punk, but I also think it’s just a matter of creating without the watchful eye of an audience or outside expectations in one’s head. These weren’t amazing songs, but they would form the foundation for our writing process, which was to create a single sonic sound with two guitars, two conversations. Corin was shy in person but confident and earnest onstage; I was introverted and overly cerebral, using playing as a means to get out of my head. Together we felt bold enough to be amplified.
What we lacked in deliberation we made up for in tenacity. We played guitar during the day and jumped onstage at night in pubs, opening for the Cannanes. Stephen wore ski goggles behind the drum kit, as if to make himself incognito. We played fast and out of tune; our sets lasted about four songs. I could never hear my voice in the monitor, whereas Corin flooded the system with her singing.
Despite my lack of sophistication or maturity, I was headstrong. My sense of possibility and certainty made me focused. I had blinders on. I was a sprinter—there were no long-term goals, I just knew I’d run as hard as I could in any situation. I’d learned that as an adolescent, to keep moving, to not be dragged down. The best word to describe it is “scrappy.” I still feel that way today. Put me in a situation and I will find my way out of it or through it, I will hustle and scramble. I hate losing. Only later do I think about how it looks from the outside, and then I get stuck in a cycle of shame or anxiety—but in the moment, I rarely could see beyond it, I really could fight. I didn’t think much about how it looked from the outside, or how I looked.
I strummed, I played. I let the music shake me and awaken me and then we’d be done, we’d leave the stage. And I’d return to being sheepish and stiff, overly concerned. The music really did feel like a cloak. And slowly I could wear that cloak—that confidence—in other settings, in conversations, at dinner parties or events, in school. (At Evergreen, I was too nervous to speak up in class. I knew what I wanted to say but didn’t know how to interject or insert myself in a conversation. By the time I got up the nerve, my voice would be shaking, so even if I was saying something relatively innocuous or factual, I sounded like I was full of passion, emphatic, on the verge of crying. It was humiliating and my professors often noted my lack of participation.) It took a very long time to catch up with my performer self, to draw from that strength.
—
Corin had been in touch with her friend Ian, who was a fanzine writer and musician, and she’d asked him about finding someone to play drums for us in Australia. We knew Stephen was only a temporary solution. Ian put us in touch with Laura MacFarlane, who lived in Melbourne and played drums in the Sea Haggs. On what was essentially a blind date, we decamped for Melbourne, where we met our drummer. We hadn’t actually listened to any recordings on which she played drums; again, verbal testimony and vouching were enough. Somewhere, we knew, we had a bandmate.
Laura had dimples and an infectious, conspiratorial laugh. She was a sprightly, elfin Scot who had grown up in Perth and played drums and guitar and sang. Unlike the ruddy surfer Australian stock, her hair was dark and her skin was light. She had a way of darting through a room.
Melbourne proved to feel much more akin to the Pacific Northwest than Sydney. Sydney was beautiful, but it felt more sophisticated. Melbourne had a grittiness that was relatable. The music scene was more politicized, more youthful. We stayed at the house of a girl named Sam, who wrote a zine called Grot Grrrl. Everyone seemed to have their own version of Riot Grrrl and their interpretation of punk rock feminism; these created a shorthand. It was reassuring to come across what felt like a network of people finding their voices for the first time. Those individual expressions formed a collective force, one that may have been lacking in refinement but was deeply sincere. That lack of composure made it even more unapologetic, and even if that gumption was compensatory, I think it’s what scared people so much.
In those years I was in awe of the bravery I saw around me. I never quite felt brave myself then, but I watched a lot of fearless things happen. I could play at bravery in the songs, I could play at sexiness or humor, long before I could actually be or embody any of those things. Sleater-Kinney allowed me to try on so many roles. I think the music I both played and listened to, along with the unmasked, confessional writing in the fanzines, really created a vocabulary for me. Sometimes the works were smart or pithy, profound, poetic, and often they were really messy. But they formed a boundary and a foundation for a lot of girls who had been undone by invisibility, including myself. Girls wrote and sang about sexism and sexual assault, about shitty bosses and boyfriends, about fucking and wanting to fuck. They called out friends and relatives and bands and businesses, corporations and governments for what they felt were injustices. It was a very reactionary time. Each step felt like a landmine. On a personal level, and from those closest to you or in and around your community, you might get “zined” (the term for devoting pages of a fanzine to a person’s perceived racist, sexist, classist, ageist, transphobic, whatever-ist behavior). I became acutely aware of myself as a political entity, but while the discourse felt important, necessary even, it also felt stifling. The perimeters felt unclear, almost like traps. Those bolder than I set forth unabashedly and were willing to be called out, but I stuck to watching it happen, on the periphery of the dialogue as an audience member and supporter, too scared to commit something treasonous. Only in the early songs was I willing to emulate that sort of naming and blaming, reclamation and wound-sharing. I didn’t know how to really process those things in person.
Sleater-Kinney was never good at mythologizing. Earnest and unadorned, we were never self-effacing or apologetic, we just never thought to create a narrative other than the one we were living, never thought to heighten the story. The music was the only story. It really felt like a scratch or a scrawl—it didn’t have an intentional design but you could read into it, you could wonder about it; the mystery was in the plainness, the starkness.
Sometimes I wish we’d had an elevated sense of mythos, that we’d come up in another scene, like 1970s New York with Richard Hell and Television, the New York Dolls and Blondie; or David Bowie and glam rock in England; or the Mods; or even just picking a dress code or a way of amplifying the sense of time and place. I remember trying to think of a different last name for myself: Rachel? Kinney? Always we just ended up back at who we were.
It was so Northwest. All about the music. The ’90s had a monolithic feel, a sturdiness, realism as opposed to fantasy. In the punk scenes we came from, honesty was valued tantamount, or even more so than artistry. Even influencers and icons like Calvin Johnson or Kathleen Hanna—both
much more aware of persona than anyone in my band—were still brought back down to earth by their engagement with politics and ethics. Once you have to explain, or overexplain, what you’re doing, it’s hard to be larger than life. Every time you have to talk about it, you feel smaller, more accessible perhaps, but certainly not mythic.
At shows, we often felt too brash, too bawdy. Corin’s bravado was apt to court controversy, like the time in her hometown of Eugene, Oregon, when she yelled at a sound guy on my behalf that I couldn’t hear my vocals and he got so fed up that he shut off the PA. We played anyway, and despite the futility and comedic potential, we even sang into the mics, miming our outrage to the audience. I wore business-casual clothes onstage, dressed up as if for a job, as if I were mocking professionalism but also trying to emulate it. It was my version of putting on “nice clothes” because guests were coming over; I remained guileless for a long while in terms of stage clothes. What I was actually trying to do was pull off a Mod look from the ’60s or ’70s—the Jam, the Small Faces, the Who, early Stones—but instead of buying the clothes at cool London vintage stores, I was purchasing them (or stealing them, sometimes) from a shopping mall in Olympia. They were always loose-fitting, saggy-assed, made for an inelegant tomboy. Mostly, I didn’t want to be a girl with a guitar. “Girl” felt like an identifier that viewers, especially male ones, saw as a territory upon which an electric guitar was a tourist, an interloper. I wanted the guitar to be an appendage—an extension even—of a body that was made more powerful by my yielding of it.
My look (Mick Jagger in sweatpants?) wasn’t trying to make a statement; the premise we all worked from was to be yourself, even if half the time I only knew who I was onstage. It makes for an interesting performance, attempting to both find yourself and lose yourself onstage. That’s a lot of pressure on a band, to encompass both menace and protector. But our audience seemed to feel that and need it, too. They found themselves in our songs, saw themselves, felt safe enough to let go only because we’d given them solid ground from which to step off. I’m not being self-aggrandizing—it meant the same to me.
—
The night before we left Australia, we recorded the ten songs we had written. Laura’s roommate Nick Carrol ran cables from the mixing board in his bedroom on the second floor through the hallway, down the stairs, and into the rat-infested, sawdust-covered garage where Corin and I had been both sleeping and rehearsing. With less than fourteen hours until we left the country, we played through the songs live and then tracked our vocals. We did one take, two at the most if we made a mistake we couldn’t live with. No overdubs, no redos. Giddy from hearing ourselves on tape and bleary with exhaustion, we sat on the couch while Nick mixed the record until dawn. Then he drove us to the airport and we flew home to America.
Back in Olympia, we remixed the record with Tim Green at the Red House and put it out on Chainsaw Records. It would be self-titled, simple. It was more of a document than an album. A time stamp. We had not quite built the band yet—that would come with our second album—but we had opened the box and pulled out the parts we needed in order to assemble Sleater-Kinney.
CHAPTER 8
CALL THE DOCTOR
Donna Dresch ran Chainsaw Records and was sort of a legend in the Olympia scene: a great guitar player, a shredder with long blond hair and a cool, timeless vibe. She had played with Screaming Trees, the Canadian punks Fifth Column, and Dinosaur Jr., which automatically made her someone you felt was blessing you with her presence. Donna had been to the outer edges of our scene and beyond. But she wasn’t a snob; she had a sweet diffidence. She had turned Chainsaw from a zine into a label as a way of putting out her own band, the incendiary Team Dresch, along with other bands she knew and loved. Donna was an out lesbian, had been for as long anyone could remember, and her band got lumped in with an offshoot of punk and indie called queercore. Those identifiers felt important at the time: people were staking out territory, constructing niches in a punk landscape that felt vast. Parceled out like land claims, punk was divided by city, by sound, and by indexers like gender and sexual orientation. But really Team Dresch was a rock band, and a superb one. They stood out for their chops and their fondness for solos and big choruses, all the conventional things that a lot of the punk bands weren’t really doing, at least not in Olympia. Team Dresch tore up the stage, allowing their listeners—who included a lot of young queer kids—to act out their audience fantasies in a way they maybe hadn’t been allowed to do, or felt safe enough to do, at other shows. As much as the person onstage is performing, so, too, is the audience.
Many of us looked up to Team Dresch, Corin and I included. They were a few years older; they had a lot of experience touring, recording, and putting out records. There was a real intention behind what they were doing, and the music came first. Plus, they were funny—one day they showed up at my and Corin’s apartment with a bag of sex toys they’d purchased in Seattle and demoed them in our living room, much to our embarrassment and amusement. They didn’t take themselves too seriously even though the stakes were high and their songs were heartfelt. We saw a lot of elements cohere in Team Dresch that we admired. They were bold yet accessible. You could listen to their songs as a guide to surviving, or you could just rock out.
Our drummer, Laura, flew over from Australia in the summer of 1995, and we set up shows along the West Coast. Our first show was on NE Alberta Street in Portland. Now known as the Alberta Arts District—littered with coffee shops, fancy dog boutiques, tea emporiums, and shops selling ice cream apparently worth waiting in line for—at the time it was mostly a Latino and African-American neighborhood with a handful of long-established businesses. Early in the stages of what is a typical gentrification pattern, white and/or punk queers and artists had started moving there for the cheap rent. We played a newly opened lesbian-owned café called Chez What? In the audience were Donna, Kathleen Hanna, Miranda July, our friends and people we looked up to. We played the songs off our first record with the aid—or perhaps hindrance—of a crappy, inadequate vocal PA. No soundcheck. Corin yowled over the drums and the amps we borrowed from the headliner, but my voice couldn’t rise above the cacophony. I had no sense of who or what we were as a band; we didn’t feel important, more that we had announced our arrival, that we were knocking on the door. Still, I had to concentrate to play and to feel comfortable. People bobbed their heads along to the music. We felt supported, nurtured, but unremarkable. Next we played a club called Moe’s in Seattle to about four people, which is such a small crowd that it’s hard to tell if you even need to play at all. It’s also one more person in the audience than is onstage. The formality, the mystery, any heightened sense of performance is sucked out of the room. But we ran through our songs anyway, smiling awkwardly in between, an awareness forming of the disparity between the sound of our music and what felt like our small, unassuming selves.
We borrowed Corin’s father’s VW bus for the tour through California, shoving drums and guitars and cables into drawers and cabinets otherwise designed for dishware and camping gear. There was no air conditioning—we misted ourselves with spray bottles of water—and we often had to stop on account of the engine overheating. That summer there were a series of Riot Grrrl “festivals” and “conventions,” which were mostly single shows featuring more than four bands and maybe a few people selling fanzines. One of the best aspects of Riot Grrrl was that anyone could adopt the term as their own—it wasn’t prescriptive. However, this ambiguity left room for a lot of interpretation. It was on this tour that I witnessed a girl with a tampon as a hair accessory and another with the word “Hippo” written across her T-shirt with a Sharpie. Reclamation had no bounds.
Chainsaw had put out a compilation record and booklet called Free to Fight, marrying punk and self-defense. We played some of these shows as well. Team Dresch were at the center of Free to Fight, but they brought along instructors, too, creating a combination of musical theater, martial arts, university
lecture, and rock show. No mixing of elements felt too conspicuous or incongruous; it was akin to a circus sideshow that was finally getting center stage, even if we were building that stage on our own, a few hours before the show began.
We asked Donna if she would put out our next record. Laura was heading back to Australia, so we needed to set up something quickly before she left. We managed to book a session with John Goodmanson, whom we had each worked with in Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17, and who had recorded the Bikini Kill and Team Dresch albums. There was a sense of inevitability to everything back then; it all was funneled through the same people, recording- or label-wise, an organism we all fed into.
We recorded Call the Doctor in five days.
John and Stu’s Recording was housed in a narrow wedge-shaped building on the edge of the Fremont neighborhood in Seattle. Nirvana had recorded Bleach there when it was Jack Endino’s place, Reciprocal. The small live room had high ceilings, carpet, dartboards and novelty record sleeves on the walls, and an old record player. The control room was tiny. There was no lounge area—you were either in the studio or you were outside, a claustrophobic and immersive experience.
We set up our amps and drums in the main room with no separation save for baffling. We didn’t think to adjust sounds or levels between songs or to switch out guitars for a different tone—we just played the songs through until we felt like we’d gotten a good take. We didn’t know any other way of recording. We had never worked with a producer before, and John was still coming into his own as one. He was a fantastic engineer, fastidious and fast, capable of harnessing energy and getting good sounds on the fly. He was like a documentarian at the time, present more to observe, capture, and facilitate than to change what we had or who we were. There was really nothing to contemplate anyhow: the recording was perfunctory, the songs were the songs, the sound was the sound, there was nothing to unearth or reveal through the magic of recording. We put some of our vocals through an amp to make them distorted. We doubled guitars on the choruses. John panned Corin’s guitar to one side and mine to the other. (If you listen to the album through a busted speaker or headphone, you can only hear half the song.) The whole thing felt as urgent as the title. What more was there to do?
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl Page 9
