Skip ahead a few years and there is a new version of trying to have a relationship while being a touring musician: this time, the person is the best thing you’ve ever had. This woman is your age; she is smart and talented and kind and all your friends love her—you joke that they love her more than they love you. (You think this might still be true to this day.) Your methodology of making it work with this one is togetherness. She joins you on tour, she travels the world alongside you, you feel like a team. You swim with her in the fjords of Norway, you lie beside each other on the sand in Miami Beach, you walk the streets of Mexico City taking countless pictures of each other and of the sights; there is a brightness to it all. And yet there is also a glare, an irritation, causing you to blink and squint. When do you ever get to be alone? To think, to read, to reflect, to not have to be “on,” to do nothing, to just . . . be. This version turns out not to be working either; there is not enough separation between you and her. She needs her own version of a life, to be her own protagonist. You move with her to California, she has a fellowship at Stanford. While living in the Bay Area, you write songs for The Woods, songs about America, freedom, longing, depression, suicide. You start to shut down, and off. You both move back to the Northwest but you feel doomed. It is one of your hardest breakups, a real tearing away—throwing away—of comfort. The Woods is out and though you don’t know it yet, it’s going to be your last album for a long while. For over a decade. So you don’t get to write songs about this person; there are no more melodies to write. Without putting it to music, you have to figure out why you couldn’t make this one work.
CHAPTER 13
THE HOT ROCK
The recording of The Hot Rock was an enervating experience. It sucked us dry. We had decided to work with producer Roger Moutenot, who recorded Yo La Tengo’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, an album all three of us admired. Our other albums had been recorded in a matter of days, but we scheduled three and a half weeks at Avast! Recording Co. in Seattle. In some ways, those first three albums felt like purges: we’d just go into the studio and bang out the songs; it was all about capturing a feeling, a crude aural bloodletting. But Moutenot was a producer. He labored over amp sounds and mic placement. And the songs were strange. Whereas Dig Me Out had a singular voice, the songs on The Hot Rock had two competing narratives, like a conscious and subconscious battling it out. Each song told two stories, the guitars each played a lead. All that was coherent and blunt about Dig Me Out atomized on The Hot Rock.
It’s a labyrinthine record, sad, fractious, not a victory lap but speaking to uncertainty. The opening line of the first song (a song without a real title—“Start Together” was a working title referring to the fact that we literally started together, as opposed to I don’t know what, staggering in at different times) was “If you want, everything’s changing.” And it felt like it was.
Whereas the band all stayed together when we’d recorded Dig Me Out, this time around Corin and Janet lived in separate rooms at an unassuming and generic extended-stay hotel. Meanwhile, I made myself a temporary resident at the Crown Hill home of Ben and Kathy Goldfarb and their three children. I was friends with Kathy’s sister, who had made the recommendation. Yet again, the band was dealing with a limited budget, and I was still young enough that the idea of crashing for free at someone’s house for nearly a month felt acceptable. While I grew closer to my hosts—taking their kids to plays and the zoo and eating breakfast with them before they left for school, talking with Ben and Kathy late into the night, trying yet again to create a sense of family and belonging—I rarely saw Janet or Corin outside of the studio. We arrived at Avast! each day with a sense of trepidation, not knowing the prevailing mood or what anyone was thinking or feeling.
A great source of the fissure and insecurity was that Roger thought Corin was the star of the band—and certainly I would never deny Corin’s importance, or that her voice was part of what defined or made this band—but we’d always been a trio. He was delicate with her, careful. Janet and I often felt like the backing players. Nonetheless, Moutenot loved my guitar work and he procured some of my favorite sounds, clean and distinct. He was definitely given the most challenging of our material—only a handful of those songs had a singularity, most of them sound schizophrenic, but he found a way to make that disjointedness sound pretty, or at least listenable. In the end, The Hot Rock succeeded in assuaging our worst fear, which was that we’d try to replicate Dig Me Out but ultimately fail. Instinctively we knew that to avoid this trap and skirt comparisons to our last record we had to create something completely different and unexpected. The critics couldn’t fall back on, “This sounds like Dig Me Out except for . . . ,” because it didn’t sound like it at all. Though I knew we’d assembled a different beast, I remember leaving the studio with little sense of what we had done.
We asked Miranda July to film a video for the song “Get Up,” the closest thing we had to a single, though by mainstream standards it sounded like something from a distant planet. On a brutally cold morning, the ground stubborn and unyielding from frost and freeze, we gathered outside Olympia at the farm of Vern Rumsey from the band Unwound. Despite having wanted to make a record decidedly different from its predecessors, it wasn’t until the twenty or so young women who had gathered to be in the video first heard “Get Up” blasted through the stereo that I realized achieving that goal might be jarring to our listeners. Gone, at least for the moment, was the unrelenting throttle; in its place was weirdness and wonder. It was no less intense, but its melodic interstices, its winding and dual storytelling, allowed the listener to find places to sit within the songs. If Dig Me Out had been a punch, The Hot Rock was the reach of a desperate hand. We hoped people would latch on.
The video is as strange and avant-garde as anything we’ve ever done. Miranda’s vision and sensibility were perfect for interpreting the song and the band at the time. A group of girls hold hands and walk through a field, picking Janet and Corin and me up from where we lie in the tall grass. There are flashes of light, of meteors. Corin’s lyrics vacillate between the metaphysical and the primal. The video expresses an interior landscape of hope, promise, and mystery. Any major label at the time would have rejected it immediately; it was more art gallery than MTV. It was the first video we would show the world.
—
Barely a week into the Hot Rock tour, I was enjoying a rare moment of downtime at Amoeba Music on Haight Street in San Francisco, digging through a bin of records, when I reached toward the middle of the stack and was struck by a feeling of electricity in the middle of my spine. I remember thinking, This couldn’t possibly be good.
As we continued on to L.A. and then started heading east along the bottom of the country, it got to the point where I flinched every time the van ran over a pothole or a bump. The relative smoothness and steadiness of the highway offered a reprieve, but when we entered a city, I would wince and cry every time we rounded a corner. I felt like a fragile eggshell in the backseat, frustrated that I had to be coddled. There is little room for vulnerability on tour—it’s very much about survival. And one person’s weakness is annoying, a burden for everyone else. All the energy and attention felt diverted toward me, focusing on my back, how I was holding up. It wasn’t a position I wanted to be in, nor to put anyone else in.
By the time we reached New Orleans, I was in horrible pain. My upper spine felt brittle, like it might just split in two. Every brick we drove over as we passed through the French Quarter sent a jolt of pain through my body. Backstage at the Howlin’ Wolf, I hung from the doorjamb. I was doing this because a club employee had recommended it, to elongate my spine as much as possible. Everyone I met was suddenly a back expert. Do this, don’t do that, take this, don’t take that, knot yourself into a pretzel, reach up like you’re trying to pet a cloud, squat, bend, lie down, sit. The discussion and input became as agonizing as the pain itself.
We had never played in New Orleans, excep
t years before at a house party. This was our first proper show in a city we all were eager to perform in. But three songs into the show, I couldn’t play another note. My guitar felt burdensome and crushing. I turned around to Janet; I was crying. That was it. We walked offstage.
Our plan was to rent a Lincoln town car—ostensibly more comfortable than our van, with a couch-like backseat I could lie on to convalesce—and drive to Athens, Georgia, where our next show was. The van and our crew went ahead. I felt like a baby, callow and infantile, being chauffeured by my bandmates. We drove the eight hours to Athens, where Corin read aloud to me while I bathed at the hotel. Generous as her act was, this wasn’t tour—this was charity.
The following morning I went to a walk-in emergency clinic. Within minutes of examining me, the doctor told me I had torn ligaments in my upper spine and that if I didn’t stop playing and touring, I would only further injure myself. I was relieved, but I also felt like a kid who was about to get in trouble. I had to tell everyone what the doctor said. Our booking agent had to cancel the rest of the shows. Janet and Corin suddenly had an expanse of time ahead of them, unstructured and unplanned, with no financial gain. I had let everyone down. We’d have to reschedule.
The next day I was on a flight home. I spent the following three weeks on my back, lying on my hardwood floors watching movies, seeing the action from that low-down, sideways perspective. I would go from the floor to a bathtub filled with Epsom salts and back to the floor. I would ice, then apply moist heat, then lie motionless. Friends brought me food. My cat Hector perched on me like furniture. It was unglamorous and anticlimactic. It wasn’t Patti Smith breaking her neck because she fell from the stage, it was me rummaging for records and snapping like a twig. It was the first time that my body rebelled against the touring lifestyle, though it certainly would not be the last. I’m sure it was an amalgamation of stress and perhaps the change from my lighter Gibson SG to a much weightier hollow-body Rickenbacker.
But that shouldn’t really matter. I felt ridiculous. And the injury changed the momentum and started a precedent of me always having a problem on tour. Touring for me just meant another visit to an emergency room. I’ve been to doctors and hospitals all over the world: Berlin, Leicester, Denver, Seattle. This, by the way, is not a brag.
CHAPTER 14
HELP
There are many good reasons to get a manager—such as having someone to help you negotiate with record labels, or do damage control when a recalcitrant band member bails—but we thought most didn’t apply to us. We weren’t irresponsible or uncommunicative. We genuinely liked one another and therefore didn’t need a middleman to rescue us from the terrible task of having to talk to one another. And we weren’t drug addicts or alcoholics. Those are the artists or bands who can’t survive without a manager, and whose manager acts as pseudo-parent or even babysitter. We had started out doing everything on our own, from booking tours to sending out our records to be reviewed. And though we eventually had a label and booking agent, we were successful without having to employ a larger, potentially cumbersome team; eventually it became more difficult to imagine integrating someone into our infrastructure whom we’d all like and respect. Plus, it seemed inconceivable to give someone money for a job we were capable of doing.
But there are also much less dire reasons to have a manager, reasons that may have been useful to us but that we willfully ignored, or were just too stubborn or parsimonious to try. At a certain point, you have your label, and the five to ten people at the label with whom you work; you have your foreign labels and their personnel; you have your publishing company, your PR firm, a booking agent, a lawyer, an accountant. The manager is a very useful point person, someone to act as a veritable funnel, an organizer and translator of information, making it easier to make well-informed and stress-free (or less stressful) decisions.
Sleater-Kinney never allowed ourselves that luxury. We divvied up tasks among ourselves, from taxes to travel arrangements. We were three very capable people who liked the various business roles, so taking on this added responsibility for the most part didn’t feel like a burden. But there were also times when we needed help, and it would have been advantageous to have someone uniformly on our side. Three is a volatile number for a creative endeavor and partnership. It’s always uneven. It requires equality in order to achieve steadiness. When there is synchronicity and harmony, it’s electric, a condensed energy, impenetrable. But more often than not it’s two against one, an incessant ganging up, with the dominance and alliances constantly shifting. I talked with Corin about Janet, Janet and I talked about Corin, and Corin and Janet talked about me. As unified as we were onstage or (mostly) during recordings, we had disparate opinions about success and compromise, varying values and goals. A fourth, outside person might have been the voice of reason, someone to tip the scales in a more defined direction, to provide the clarity we couldn’t always see from our cylindrical world.
Corin, Janet, and I had formed such a stubbornly insular unit of a band that there were very few music-business people we trusted, and even fewer whom all three of us agreed on. Only two people made it through the tough exterior and our collective agreement.
Julie Butterfield was one of the first people I met in Olympia, where she had moved from Minneapolis. If you weren’t in a band in Olympia, you were running a label, and Julie had a small imprint called Skinny Girl that had put out a 7-inch single or two. Julie brought a refreshing and unprecedented sense of expertise and professionalism to Olympia; she had a big-city sensibility (when someone from Minneapolis has a “big-city sensibility,” you know how small Olympia is). In 1995, when Corin and I had finished recording Call the Doctor, we wanted to send it out to press people. So I contacted Julie, who gave me a printout with names and addresses and told me which writers might be amenable to our music. She was savvy and seemed in possession of information we couldn’t possibly have had access to otherwise—not without a fully staffed label or manager, not in a town that was essentially in a media blackout and that considered doing press almost an act of “selling out.” Julie became our publicist for nearly the entirety of our career. She was a good sounding board and always had our best interests in mind. She understood the context from which we came, not only our ambitions but where we weren’t willing to compromise. She was a friend and support system, an ally.
Bob Lawton showed up when Call the Doctor and our self-booked tour started to earn us wider recognition. He was the booking agent for Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo, both bands we looked up to. Bob was a real old-school New Yorker—he’d seen a lot, lived hard, and had the accent, stories, and sardonicism to prove it. We were an unlikely pairing. He wasn’t from our world; he didn’t know the preciousness or politics of Olympia or the Pacific Northwest, and he didn’t really care. This meant he unequivocally fought for us, and he didn’t feel limited by the unstated but very ossified and encoded rules of the punk or indie scene. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t ethical—he was. But he was driven and he instilled in us a sense of worthiness. He loved our music and he wanted people to hear it.
Bob was very opinionated, tenacious with the bookers at clubs, and he knew far more than we did. Before him, we would feel blindsided by events or next steps, whereas Bob could look at the coming album and the year ahead and assess exactly what needed to happen. As a booking agent he was pretty typical at the time: very full service, very philosophical. He wanted us to play smaller or medium-size venues and sell them out, to make sure there was a sense of urgency surrounding the show, a sense of discovery and exclusivity, so that next time we could play a bigger venue because everyone at that first show would tell their friends what they had seen. Bob had a deep connection to our band and he was protective of us. Over time he developed an almost avuncular affection for each of us individually, and we admired him and trusted him immensely. He booked us right up until he retired, just before The Woods.
Left largely on your own, you ofte
n turn on one another. Tour was taking its toll. I found it difficult to maintain friendships and relationships in the age of the postcard and the payphone. I spent much of my time trying to tether myself back to home, but often when I got home I found I had less to return to. Every gas station stop was an excuse to dial out from a grimy payphone, just to hear a few minutes of a familiar voice or at least their outgoing voicemail message to get you through the next three hours in the van. Returning home at the end of a tour, I would enter an airless house that had collected an eerie dust from misuse. Everything was exactly how I had left it, yet I felt like a stranger. That feeling of alienation was alleviated when I adopted two cats from the Olympia animal shelter. I named them Hector and Lyle. They provided an excuse to have someone stay at the house while I was gone, so when I came home there was evidence of the house having been lived in, comfort in the daily rituals I imagined took place while I was gone, someone had marked time. Most of all, there were two little creatures to greet me.
After a European tour where harsh words were exchanged and a plate of food was thrown, followed by a Chunnel ride during which Corin did not speak to me or Janet, we decided we might need to bring in some extra help. Enter Susan and Nina, a couple of therapists who were couples therapists, and also happened to be a couple. They tag-teamed their way through therapy sessions. Needless to say, they were in Olympia, and recommended to us by a handful of friends who were also seeing them. Susan was the taller, more formidable of the two—short dark hair, deep voice. Nina had short blond hair, bright eyes. They were sort of like good cop, bad cop. Susan was the tough-love counselor. Nina was the empath. They used their own relationship for examples, and as a result, details of their personal histories are permanently lodged in my brain. I’m not sure how useful it is to know that Nina was once married to a professional football player.
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl Page 14
