Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

by Carrie Brownstein

  Despite the no-frills approach to recording, the songwriting on Call the Doctor brought in characteristics that came to define our sound. On the title track, Corin and I each sang a melody on the chorus. She was louder than me, so her vocal was the lead by default, but we never really considered one a background part to the other. It was a conversation we were having: she had her perspective and I had mine. Or I was emphasizing her point, retelling it even as I was singing along with her. And our guitars did the same thing, augmenting and counteracting each other. We would get to the chorus, and intuitively you’d think this is the time for us to all sing together, that there should be a cohesion, but instead we would split apart. It was almost an anti-chorus. We weren’t trying to form a solidarity with anyone but ourselves. Could you sing along to Sleater-Kinney? Sometimes. But we’d just as likely shout over you. And good luck trying to sing along with Corin. Trust me, I know. It’s nearly impossible. As a listener you have to decide what to follow in the song, which vocal, which guitar.

  This way of writing and of singing was something we tacitly understood. We never discussed it; we never mentioned countermelodies. We didn’t want to sing harmonies. Our songs weren’t pretty, nor was our style of singing. It sounded scarier to not sing together, rarely allowing the listener to settle into the music. Everything inside the songs was constantly on the verge of breaking apart—Corin’s voice, the narrative, the guitars, so few moments provided any respite at all. If we did sing together on the chorus, it was only after a strange, uncomfortable verse. Yet the result was forceful; it sounded like a tightly bound entity, fragments clinging to each other for dear life—if you pulled one thing apart, it wouldn’t even sound like a real song. It was a junkyard come to life.

  Corin was working at Kit’s Camera in the Olympia mall, and many of the songs on Call the Doctor address feeling objectified, being watched, as if you’re living your life for yourself but with the awareness that it’s not just for you, there are other people taking notice, observing. It’s a disorienting duality and a tiring scrutiny. So much of working customer service is about self-erasure, subjugating and then selling yourself in order to sell the product, merging with the commodities until you feel like one. Like many young women, we felt like we were on display. Lyrically, the songs read like someone setting off an alarm, trying to transform victimization into power. These are not subtle songs: “They want to socialize you, they want to purify you / They want to dignify and analyze and terrorize you,” Corin sings on the title song, followed by “All your life is written for you.” Then on “I’m Not Waiting,” Corin takes on the role of a voyeur: “Go out on the lawn, put your swimsuit on,” she snarls before she reverts to the role of a young girl and sings, “I’m not waiting till I grow up to be a woman.” It’s an audacious cry, desperately trying for womanhood to be an act of self-possession as opposed to an invitation. But the idea of not waiting until one grows up implies that there is hardly any age that is too young for a woman to be sexualized. “Your words are sticky, stupid, running down my leg.” The song has a foreboding creepiness, as if the male gaze and the language that augments it carry an implicit objectification; the power and hurt of words and images are indistinct from the tactile.

  For “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone,” I had driven over to the practice space by myself and written the verses, the guitar part, and the vocal melody. As I often did, I left the chorus open for Corin to sing. “Joey” was really the first song that set a precedent for what would become our habit of meta-songwriting, where we were in a band writing about being in a band, singing about singing. I feel the need to point out that our intent was different from those classic rock songs about being on tour. This isn’t us singing about roadies, drugs, and groupies, about watching movies on the bus, about ramblin’ on and “takin’ care of business.” We were in dialogue with ourselves; we responded to and addressed the fans, the critics, and even our own work. Later songs such as “Male Model” or “#1 Must Have” explained the earlier ones (“I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone,” “Little Babies”), discussing what we had already done and why we had done it. There was a sense of substantiation, of clarification.

  Joey Ramone was a performer who embodied both gawkiness and grandiosity. He was simultaneously awkward, with his spindly legs and his hair falling into his face, and larger than life. This contradiction seemed to be an ideal metaphor for my own relationship to performing and music: part of me wanted to own the stage, while the other part of me remained uncomfortable with such power.

  I suppose some people are born with the certainty that they own sound or volume; that the lexicon of rock music is theirs to borrow from, to employ, to interpret. For them, it might be nothing to move around onstage, to swagger, to sing in front of people, to pick up a guitar, to make records. I set out from a place where I never assumed that those were acceptable choices or that I could be anything but an accessory to rock ’n’ roll. The archetypes, the stage moves, the representations of rebellion and debauchery were all male. When Sleater-Kinney first began, it seemed to me that the only way to get a sense of rock ’n’ roll was to experience it vicariously. The song was about stepping into someone else’s shoes as a means of exploring both my fears and aspirations. I wanted a glimpse of the absurdity, the privilege, and the decadence that hadn’t been inherently afforded to us. “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” was a test for ourselves, to see what it felt like to give yourself the smallest amount of power, and to put that power on display, to be unafraid and unafraid of yourself. So in Sleater-Kinney, we sang a lot about a world that we wished we could access without the added explanation or justification. We sang about playing and performing, as if in singing about it, we could really live it, free of judgment or the feeling that we were interlopers. We would project ourselves into a song where we couldn’t be impeached. We were stating our validity for the record over and over again, staking our claim, then having to explain it, then drawing yet another line in the sand. In our songs about music, we created our own, new, malleable versions of us, ones that our earnest, overly explanatory selves could pretend to inhabit. Because we felt like outsiders—both in Olympia and Portland, to some extent, but also at festivals and in the mainstream world—we often wrote about rock music. We wrote and played ourselves right into existence.

  Even with subsequent records, “Joey” was always a reminder not to take what we had for granted, not to create from a place of smugness or entitlement. We were confident, for sure, but we were aware of how uncertainty fomented a sense of having to prove oneself, how it fostered an urgency.

  This is where we were starting to grapple with something we would grapple with for the rest of our time as a band: that there was always a sense we were going to have to defend and analyze what we were doing. Why are you in an all-female band? Why do you not have a bass player? What does it feel like to be a woman in a band? I realized that those questions—that talking about the experience—had become part of the experience itself. More than anything, I feel that this meta-discourse, talking about the talk, is part of how it feels to be a “woman in music” (or a “woman in anything,” for that matter—politics, business, comedy, power). There is the music itself, and then there is the ongoing dialogue about how it feels. The two seem to be intertwined and also inescapable. To this day, because I know no other way of being or feeling, I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman in a band—I have nothing else to compare it to. But I will say that I doubt in the history of rock journalism and writing any man has been asked, “Why are you in an all-male band?”

  —

  On the last day of mixing Call the Doctor, Corin and I lay on the floor and listened while John played the album back in its entirety. I remembered thinking that we had made a decent record, that I hadn’t heard anything that sounded like this before. I don’t think I ever really felt that way again about one of our records, simply able to enjoy it without any hyper- or self-criticism. Call the Doctor is not our best rec
ord, but it was the last one written before any sense of external identity or pressure. When I heard it back, it felt like anthems we’d written for ourselves.

  —

  Right after we recorded Call the Doctor, we asked Laura to leave the band. The logistics of her living in Australia seemed insurmountable, and there were tensions as well. As a hypochondriac, I was having difficulty with the fact that she’d somehow picked up scabies and was crashing in our apartment. More important, Laura was a songwriter and bandleader at heart, and a talented one. We sensed she wouldn’t want to be behind the drums for long, but we had no interest in changing the dynamic of the band. Naturally, Laura was upset, so in the spirit of kindness and open dialogue, a mutual friend of ours suggested that we have a mediated conversation in order to air our grievances. This talk was mediated not by a professional but by a dyed-black-haired metal music fan named Stacey D/C. Suffice it to say, despite our best intentions, there were still a lot of hurt feelings. In hindsight, perhaps we should have paid for a legitimate interlocutor. Dirty deeds done dirt cheap.

  During this time I broke up with Corin. We were on a hike at Mount Rainier. It was a sunny day and the views were exquisite, but we were both crying. I spent most of the time staring at my feet and the path. After we talked, we were trapped in this new reality of separateness. The outdoors felt like the smallest room, tight and stifling. We still had to make the long walk to the car and then drive another few hours back to Olympia. I didn’t know how to be so entwined with someone: in a band, in a relationship, in the same apartment. Selfishly, naively, I wanted nothing to change. I wanted to still be close to Corin, for there to be continued trust and joy and for the music to be an extension of those very things. In reality, it would be much more brutal and heartbreaking.

  We toured for Call the Doctor with Toni Gogin on drums. Toni was a Portland punk kid, soft-spoken, with short, spiky hair, a sensitive tomboy. She played guitar and drummed a little and we had toured with her other group, the CeBe Barnes Band. We booked the tour ourselves. We’d go over to K Records (whose capacious headquarters doubled as a reference library) and someone would hand over a list of addresses and phone numbers, with contact names if we were lucky. Not everything on the list was current, especially in less-visited cities like Fargo or Lincoln—some venues were already closed by the time you called, likely only open for a few months, just a VFW hall or warehouse where some kids put on shows for a summer. For the most part, and especially when trying to set up all-ages shows, you were dealing with someone your own age, a student who booked events at their college, young people who were running a space. We rarely played bars or 21+ shows. We were getting paid around $350 per show at most, and that was for the college shows where they’d cut you an actual check. We played Yale to four or five people. The campus is walled off, so we literally stood outside the gates ringing a bell to get in. We felt like the hired help. Toni slept in the van that night and got booted off the lot by security.

  We scraped by on merch money. (“Merch” is short for “merchandise”: T-shirts, records, posters, hoodies, hats. And in the case of really savvy artists: dog sweaters, bibs, keychains, laser pointers, and limited-edition coffee.) Donna and Chainsaw had underestimated how many albums we’d sell, so our record was sold out just about everywhere. We couldn’t afford hotels—we were sleeping on floors in strangers’ houses, and on long drives we’d catch up on sleep in the van. In the back of our vehicle we had built a loft with a dual purpose. One was to create a lockbox of sorts for the gear, so that if someone broke into the front of the van, they couldn’t get to the musical equipment. But the storage space didn’t go all the way to the ceiling, so on top was a precarious perch of sorts where one of us could sleep. It was extremely dangerous, speeding down the highway, one of us loose in the loft, inches from the roof, on a dusty foam mattress covered in a sheet we never bothered to wash, mixed in with extra luggage, T-shirts boxes, and stray used Kleenexes.

  In an Olympia alleyway. Getting ready to leave on the Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17 tour with (left to right) Corin, CJ Phillips, Tracy Sawyer, and Becca Albee.

  Tour is a strange beast. What constitutes comfort and cleanliness is relative. In 1996, I was twenty-two. I slept on couches that had been purchased at Goodwill or hauled in from the sidewalk. I made a bed on any number of surfaces with unknown, unsavory provenances. I showered in plastic stalls mottled with mold, and borrowed shampoo, toothpaste, and even towels. I never wore slippers. At night, we’d haul in the foam mattress from the van, which we had nicknamed “P.M.” for “pube magnet,” since all it did was collect small stray hairs that would be carted back to the van and stick with us for the remainder of tour. From the stage we’d politely ask for a place to stay, a humbling process that negates any sense of coolness or respectability.

  On U.S. tours I would read novels about the states through which we were passing, trying to populate the vastness—the long stretches of green and brown and grays—with characters I could grow to know and love. Willa Cather kept me company in Nebraska and the upper Midwest. I read Joseph Mitchell essays about the Bowery and tales from James Baldwin’s Harlem before arriving in New York. Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms accompanied me through the South. For the West Coast I brought along Joan Didion essays and the writing of Wallace Stegner. Books grounded me, helped me to feel less alone. Technically I was around people all the time on tour, but I often felt estranged from my bandmates, unknown. Perhaps this was depression, a murkiness that distorted and disabled connection. I drifted in and out of this darkness, pulled away, then reappeared.

  In Atlanta, after playing a show during which a gaggle of topless women took over the stage during our set, we ended up at a house owned by a gregarious rockabilly dyke named Rizzo. She must have stayed at her girlfriend’s that night because we let ourselves into her house. Inside were two pit bulls, one of which was in heat, bloody towels on the kitchen floor. I slept under a leather S&M-clad mannequin hung from the ceiling in the bedroom.

  Another option was to crash at the promoter’s house or with the opening band. I rested my weary head on unwashed pillows in beds we were lucky enough to get because someone’s roommate was out of town. We slept in dorm room bunk beds after college shows or on industrial sofas in the common areas of university housing. But mostly we slept on floors, rolling out sleeping bags a few inches from one another, no privacy, no distinction between one grimy human shape and another, stinky breath and feet and snores and twitches all merging into a feral pile; it was an endless, slovenly slumber party.

  Tour is the aspect of being in a band that many people assume is the most glamorous. Perhaps you imagine a private jet filled with champagne and puppies, backstage areas with white leather couches and ornate lamps, an on-call barista, a masseuse. And, yes, all this is possible, but it will cost you. Though I know of bands that travel with exercise machines, personal chefs, fitness trainers, and Persian rugs, most musicians—even ones headlining major festivals and selling out large-scale shows—have a goal of making tour profitable. They’d rather spend money on production and design, on bringing extra musicians, on lighting and sound rigs rather than, say, a chocolate waterfall in their dressing room.

  During the early years of touring I came to the realization that we were just as much movers as we were musicians. After all, without the benefit of a crew, essentially what we did each night was pack and unpack, load and unload, and lift heavy objects from vans into rooms and then back into vans. The plainness of those actions, the bluntness, is so much of what I remember about Call the Doctor. The album took what is rote and routine and made the motions desperate, alluring, a trap. We blamed the simplification of our identities and the outside world’s doubt in our abilities not only on sexism but on a paucity of imagination. We were monsters, we weren’t like you. We might have been movers but we were coming to steal what you thought was yours.

  CHAPTER 9

  MEDIATED

&nb
sp; Even though we were playing tiny shows, tumbling across the country in a petri dish of a van, Call the Doctor was attracting the attention of both audiences and critics. Robert Christgau came to our sparsely attended Bryn Mawr show to interview us for a feature in the Village Voice. I stood next to him in the back of the room while the opening band played, discussing college and what I was studying (sociolinguistics), trying to impress him more with my intelligence than with requisite rock slickness or aloofness, neither of which I possessed.

  We took the photos for the Voice in the venue bathroom, Corin, Toni, and I pressed up against one another in a side hug, ragtag and baby-faced, in thrift-store coats, with uneven dye jobs and gelled, unwashed hair. We didn’t know how to pose except like in photobooth strips, or like pictures we’d seen in magazines or books. We tried out various looks—angry! coy! confused! Sometimes I think the best you can ever feel in a photo shoot is like a sexy clown. We were more in the cute vein—or just weird—huddled together in the early confusion and excitement of it all. It was 1996.