Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

by Carrie Brownstein

  During a gas stop, Tim came back from the station with a copy of Time magazine. Sleater-Kinney was in there, our record reviewed. Here we were in the middle of the country, in the middle of nowhere, just four of us in a stinky twelve-passenger van, and we could read about ourselves. This was not underground or provincial, but substantial, like a territory, like a country, like America. We climbed back into the van and drove to our next show.

  Our success was more critical than commercial. We seemed to appeal to cultural influencers and pundits but we were too scary for the mainstream, our songs too strange. It was unnerving to have a spotlight on us, especially as Corin and I were struggling offstage. She was dating Lance and very much in the blissed-out state of being in love. Meanwhile, Janet and I, in a fit of righteousness and ridiculousness, had inexplicably banned him from all the shows on the Dig Me Out tour. This only made their relationship stronger and the two of them more resolute as a couple; it was them versus us, them versus the world. I don’t exactly know why we banished Lance, except perhaps that we were scared of any outside influence or distractions. We wanted the fire to stay insular and didn’t want his opinion, one that clearly mattered to Corin. Lance’s exile made Corin angrier, pushed her further away. Resentment grew.

  We did a handful of shows in the Pacific Northwest and in England, opening up for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. The Blues Explosion were a swaggering trio of dark-haired men led by the dashing and bellicose Jon Spencer. They played deconstructed, blown-out blues music that sounded tight and garbled, like it had been sucked through a straw. They were self-referential in their songs, every tune a lit-up marquee for themselves. The guys in the band were kind, jocose, intelligent. Jon was a physical performer and I took notes. He was a rubber band onstage, taught, wiggly, unpredictable. I give him credit for teaching me to stretch before I played. I liked the way the performance had an athletic, workmanlike quality to it, a feat to execute and to land.

  Playing with JSBX was also the first time we were placed in a context that took us outside our Pacific Northwest heritage. They were from New York, with a decidedly hipper, more urbane fan base. One evening we were mistaken by a backstage security guard as groupies and nearly not let into our own dressing room. When we took the stage that night, Corin said, “We’re not here to fuck the band, we are the band.” At our show opening for JSBX at La Luna in Portland, I grew agitated at their crowd’s indifference toward us and kicked the microphone stand into the audience. Jon voiced his dissatisfaction at my puerile behavior, more aware than I was that there is a difference between conjuring a sense of danger and actually harming someone. But I wanted our shows not just to be galvanic, I wanted to destroy the room. More than that, I wanted to obliterate myself, to unlock and uncork the anger, to disappear into the sound and into the music. In subsequent years when I kicked my legs out toward the crowd or swung my guitar close to the heads in the front row, it was about trying to physically harness the moment, to crash into strangers in a horrible but ecstatic impact, a shared bruising.

  The shows on the Dig Me Out tour were getting bigger. But Corin and I were fighting harder. It came to a head in Austin. Janet and I had ganged up on her, vilifying Lance as if he were an interloper. At our Houston show, Corin and I fought in the dressing room, and just before we got onstage I called her a bitch. Right as the house music was turned down, I leaned over to apologize, hoping to salvage our onstage chemistry, and Corin said, “Get the fuck away from me.” The mic was on. We started the show. I don’t know if anyone heard. I was always so relieved to be in a band whose music could obliterate the before, tear through the moment and rip it to shreds. So that insult came and went, at least onstage. But after the set ends, you have to return to whatever state you were in. The animosity and sadness can only be suspended.

  Corin and I were barely speaking. When we pulled off the highway to look for a hotel that night, she got out of the van at the off-ramp and started walking. No phone, no tour itinerary. She found her own hotel.

  So much of the music we played was about peril and subsequent survival, but things had started to feel unsafe between us. Instead of our relationship and friendship being the antidote to our hurt, it was another element that added to the music’s volatility, which made the shows exciting but made touring and being in the band as emotionally charged as our songs. We came to a fragile truce. I didn’t want to lose Corin; it wasn’t worth it. It was scary to think that we had journeys outside the band. The Hot Rock would speak to that. I consciously worked on being not just a creative partner but also a friend to Corin, a dependable ally and a confidante. Eventually, when Corin and Lance got married, I was the one she asked to give their wedding toast.

  —

  In the winter of 1997, we set off to London to begin a six-week tour, our first ever of Europe, to promote Dig Me Out. Helium, a band from Boston featuring the fantasy-driven lyrics and inventive guitar playing of Mary Timony, would open for us nearly the entire time. There were five of them and five of us. We bonded immediately and were inseparable for the remainder of the trip.

  Tour started with a heap of excitement and a shaggy-haired English tour manager named Shane. “Think of me as your mother, your sister, your friend, your lover,” she said to us right out of the gate. Her face was gaunt, a contrast of bony protrusions and deep creases. Incessantly calling us “dear” and “hon,” she was somehow both Keith Richards and a full-time nanny. Or, rather, she was maternal toward me and Corin. With Janet, on the other hand, Shane was brusque, treating her like the hired help—a workhorse, a mule charged with helping to carry the load. Meanwhile, Corin and I were coddled—she wouldn’t let us lift a finger. The disparity in how Shane approached us was becoming internecine for the band. After a spate of shows in France, including a night in Paris during which we drunkenly roamed the streets and Corin vomited in a cab and was kicked out by the driver before she could retrieve her fallen passport, we fired Shane. This was before the formation of the European Union, when each border required documentation. Now not only did we no longer have a tour manager, but one of us was unable to travel on to Spain.

  Corin and our friend Chad, who was ostensibly along to sell merch but was more of a party planner, stayed behind in France to pay a visit to the U.S. consulate. They would meet up with us in Barcelona once the new passport was sorted. Meanwhile, Janet drove me and only me, along with all the equipment, in our rental van from England. With the steering wheel and gear shift on the right-hand side, we traveled precariously along the mainland-European highways, ones oriented like U.S. roads. Only two-thirds of a band and minus a leader, we felt as lopsided as our vessel.

  In the end, it turned out that our madcap drive to Barcelona was for naught; we arrived in the city to find that, due to lack of ticket sales, our two Spanish shows had been canceled. With nothing but time, we suddenly found ourselves on holiday in Spain, visiting unscheduled but breathtaking cities like San Sebastián and missing our loved ones, with whom we had never traveled to places like this and possibly never would.

  When tour started up again, back in France no less, we were introduced to our new tour manager, Camile. A Dutchman with frizzy hair the color of orange soda, he had a penchant for walking around in nothing but a towel. But Camile could speak four languages, helpful when crossing borders, and he took charge of the band and tour without being divisive. Plus, compared to Helium’s beret-wearing, 1960s-era Paul McCartney look-alike of a road manager, who serenaded Janet over karaoke (with a Wings song) and French-kissed her in the hallway of a German hotel, Camile’s steadiness and professionalism were a relief.

  The tour stretched on for weeks. To this day it is the longest single tour I’ve ever been on and certainly the most debauched. Chad and I watched porn in our shared hotel room at night, which aired for free and was the only thing we could understand without the aid of subtitles. We lay in our underwear in adjoining twin beds, half turned on, half wanting to make out, but inst
ead talking about how we missed our girlfriends back home. Along with Helium, we would go to late-night dance clubs after playing shows during which we’d slammed a round of whiskey shots delivered to us onstage before the encore. In Hamburg we went to a peep show where a dancer made this offer to Janet: “I’ll lick your pussy, twenty dollars.” (Janet declined.) We smoked cigarettes and weed, when available, ate copious amounts of chocolate and cheese, and fell asleep mostly tipsy if not outright drunk. On one long drive, in a fit of giddiness and in the spirit of sisterhood and spreading cheer, Corin and I convinced Janet to throw a mixtape out the van window. It was a cassette she’d been listening to nonstop, made for her by a friend, a boy she was trying to no longer have a crush on. That boy was Elliott Smith. I still think about that tape, flung, and how I urged it to be so. Gone.

  Since I had never before traveled to Europe, I tried to make the most of the trip, treating it like both a vacation and a reconnaissance mission. Despite not going to sleep until three or four a.m., when the tourist destinations opened in the mornings, I would cram in an hour or two of sightseeing before we had to leave for the next city. I climbed up and down the roughly five hundred steps of the Cologne Cathedral and the four hundred steps of Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Barcelona (only upon completion of the ascent did I realize there was the option of an elevator); both endeavors caused cramping and limited mobility the next day. I went to the Anne Frank House, the Louvre, Sacré-Coeur, the Kunsthalle, and museums ranging from the British to the Van Gogh to a marionette museum in Switzerland. I bought art books and keychains, wine and postcards. I purchased prints of buildings and animals, rolling them up and stuffing them into shipping tubes that I had to keep track of for the rest of my travels. Only one, a nineteenth-century illustration of a giraffe from the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, made it home. It hangs in my bedroom to this day, the only keepsake from my valiant effort to binge on culture, to see and experience Europe in a nearly sleepless watercolor-like daze, wondering if I’d ever get a chance to again.

  —

  People often ask me about groupies on tour, about whether I had random and meaningless and super-hot sex. The answer is no. To all of it. We never had groupies. Writing that sad little sentence, I wish we had, just so instead I could have written, “Yes, of course we had groupies! Endless, countless numbers of groupies. A cornucopia of groupies, groupies coming out of my ears, groupies for days.” Sure, we had fans who displayed emotions similar to a crush or were effusive enough to want hugs or to bring us gifts, who might even be bold enough to ask us on a date or perhaps scream “I love you” from the relative anonymity of a dark theater. But no one who waited outside the venue after the show or who we ran into later in the night at a nearby bar was someone any of us might end up going to bed with. Call it lack of opportunity or lack of imagination, but, to be honest, it was mostly lack of interest. Corin was with Lance from the Dig Me Out tour on, and Janet and I were in relationships on and off for most of our touring and band life.

  But I’ll admit, for the sake of seeming even a little less pitiful, there were two times I made out with people on the road. The first was in that summer of 1998 when Sleater-Kinney was finishing up the touring cycle for Dig Me Out in Europe. We were in Glasgow, which we’d flown into for a stretch of UK dates. We had a lot of friends who played music in that city, so we met up with members of Belle and Sebastian, Mogwai, the Yummy Fur, and Bis at a local bar. We danced and drank and sat around a big table laughing and talking until late. We were beyond drunk, all of us. Someone had handed out shots of Aftershock, a cinnamon-flavored and candy-red alcohol. I watched my friends getting handsy and loose with one another, leaning in, staying too long, staring too hard. When the bar closed, we all stood out on the street awaiting taxis. And it was there, in front of everyone, that I made out with a guy from one of the bands; he had a shaved head and looked like a footballer. I climbed into the taxi alone. Back in my hotel room, the room dipped and wobbled; I threw up repeatedly in the middle of the night. I was so hungover the next day that I couldn’t get out of bed until we left for our show in Edinburgh at three o’clock in the afternoon.

  I’ve seen pictures from that debauched event: my face is puffy, shiny, and bright red atop my body, like an emergency vehicle light; my eyes are glazed. If getting drunk to the point of vomiting is what it takes to be brave enough to put my mouth against an acquaintance and colleague in front of all our mutual friends, I’m going to say it might not be worth it.

  The next time I had a dalliance on tour, there was some improvement in my overall decorum, though that might have been part of the problem as well.

  In 2005, there was a woman I had a crush on, Melissa, an artist who lived in Los Angeles. We had been sending text messages and talking on the phone for the few months since we’d met briefly in Portland. And there came to be a sort of inferred agreement that we’d hang out when Sleater-Kinney played in L.A. during The Woods tour. After the concert and as planned, Melissa and I ended up back in my hotel room, which, luckily, I wasn’t sharing with anyone else. Perhaps I had even optimistically asked for the “single.” (We shared rooms on tour in order to save money. But because of an odd number of band and crew, we had a single room that we kept in rotation among Corin, Janet, and myself so that we each might have some alone time. It was appropriate to request this room if, say, your significant other was visiting or, as in my case, you were single and hoping to experience your first legitimate tour hookup.) But here was the problem: Melissa and I had never really spent time together in person. And we were both shy. So, instead of getting back to the room and throwing her on the bed, or her throwing me on the bed, or us mutually throwing ourselves onto the bed, we talked. We talked about our families, our work, our friends, our childhoods. As I grew more tired I kept thinking, How much more information about former pets’ names and our parents’ college experiences might need to be discussed before we touch tongues? Apparently, a lot more. At four a.m., I put on my pajamas and sat on the bed. By now it seemed obvious that Melissa and I were going to embark on something less like the film 9½ Weeks and more like a sleepover I’d had at age nine and a half. When at last we had shared every detail of our existence short of our Social Security numbers, we stopped talking. We were lying down at this point, facing each other, our bodies almost touching but not quite. Then, it happened. I’m not certain if it was intentional or if we merely bumped into each other’s faces as we fell asleep, but as the morning light crept in through the cracks in the curtains, our lips touched. An hour later, the alarm went off.

  Those are my tour hookup stories.

  Suffice it to say, being single while in a band is not the recipe for opportunity that one might think; rather it is often a recipe for loneliness. But having a relationship is not easy, either. Being on the road, recording, doing press tours, so much of a musician’s life involves distraction and distance; it requires a total recalibration of what constitutes home and stability. Finding a partner who understands the vicissitudes of travel is challenging. A nomadic life fosters inconsistencies and contradictions within you, a vacillation between loneliness and needing desperately to be left alone. To someone who misses you, and whom you miss, bridging that space between togetherness and apartness, literally and figuratively, can be brutal.

  Here’s one way not to go about attempting to diminish the distance: Obsessively call your girlfriend, who is eleven years older than you, crying and telling her you hate being on tour. Rack up more than $1,000 in pre–cellphone calling card fees on various payphones because you are hopelessly in love, willing to ditch everything for this person, and paranoid that she will go back to dating men while you are away. Get so worried that you walk into a family-run restaurant—perhaps the only restaurant—in the town of Lokev, Slovenia (population: around 1,000), ask to borrow their cordless phone, and call your girlfriend some more (sticking them with an international long-distance bill). Write lugubrious, handwritten
love letters that compare thee to a summer’s day. Drive your bandmates crazy by quoting your older girlfriend all the time and only reading books or listening to music that she has recommended. Now your bandmates are practically begging you to dump her. But, guess what, she dumps you. Of course she does. This girlfriend, who also plays music but who is not as successful as you in this field, you think she wants to hear how sad you are to have an album that is blowing up?! She doesn’t. Months later you are still angry and confused and for the first time very, very heartbroken. You freak out and drive to her house one morning and place a bag containing every letter she ever wrote you on her doorstep. Then you write songs for what will become The Hot Rock, songs about a love that is so airless, it’s suffocating. Songs about wanting to steal your heart back from someone you feel never deserved it. And thus begins a cycle, of falling in love and then getting hurt, or hurting someone else by falling out of love with them. About trying to maintain closeness despite geographical disparities, then finding inspiration from all the ways you feel splintered and separate, hurt and broken. So, this is one version, and not a pretty one, of being young and in a band and trying to be in a relationship. This is the version in which being gone and busy eats at you because you are scared of being left even though you are the one who is technically always leaving.