Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

by Carrie Brownstein

  We brought the Gossip along with us on their first-ever tour, literally the first time they’d played outside of Olympia. The first show was at First Avenue in Minneapolis, a fairly large, well-established venue with a particularly high stage. I recall watching singer Beth Ditto own that stage within seconds of their set starting. They played exciting and unrelenting blues music at the time, suggestive, dancey, unabashedly Southern, queer, bold, and weird. Beth wasn’t even twenty-one yet on that tour. I drove them around Chicago, showed them the shores of Lake Michigan; they crashed in our hotel rooms. I loved being witness as they saw the United States for the first time, these three young kids from Arkansas. They made us goofy and happy. We had dares almost every night of the tour. They painted our faces with ridiculous makeup—Janet was a marionette, I had freckles, Corin was a doll. We lost bets and had to give embarrassing shoutouts involving crushes in the middle of the set. At one point there was a conga line onstage. The silliness was buoying, it staved off the tour tedium.

  The White Stripes were the band that really pushed the limits of what an opening band could do. You could still feel an electricity on the stage and in the air once they were done. It was in 2000, just a few months before they became one of the biggest bands around. It was the first time we brought a support act wherein you could tell some people in the audience were there just for them, that part of the audience didn’t give a shit about us even though we were headlining. But even then, even when the opening band was testing and trying us, we still had to play our set and prove that it shouldn’t have been the reverse. (Later, when the White Stripes were huge, they asked us to open a few shows in order to repay the kindness and we gladly did. Jack White remains gracious, generous, and one of my favorite performers.) We always wanted to bring openers that raised our level of playing and performance; we were honored and excited to do it.

  When the White Stripes were on tour with us, we played a show at Oberlin College in Ohio. The gig was in the student center, the kind of place where someone can order a slice of pizza only a few feet from stage and if you’re not playing loud enough you might even hear the customer’s name being called over the intercom. Backstage, Jack would entertain us with Loretta Lynn or Son House songs on guitar. He was a showman, always on, a peacock, but his prancing was never uninvited or unwanted. He always had a presence, a way of reaching the farthest corners of a room, that star quality of simultaneously sucking the air out of a space and giving it life. On this particular night we were confronted by the classic tour scenario: the promise of an after-party. It usually entails an intrepid kid approaching you and telling you about the event, how awesome it is going to be. He gives you his phone number or slips you an address on a piece of paper, which you often lose either on purpose or by accident. But this night we thought we’d give it a try. Often in small towns you feel slightly off the radar; this instills in you a sense of wildness and freedom, you feel inconspicuous, the vibe is casual. You’re much more likely to end up hanging out with fans at a local bar in Lawrence, Kansas, or Omaha than in New York or L.A.

  Corin was pregnant on this tour, so she wasn’t always up for after-show revelry, or really for anything other than crashing out. So we rode with White Stripes to the address we were given. We walked up to the house and immediately two guys walked down the stairs and greeted us at the door. “Who are you?” they asked accusingly. They obviously hadn’t been at our show. You’d think at Oberlin—a bastion of liberal arts education and hipness, a breeding ground for creative types spewing expression often for the sake of expression—that everyone would greet the bands that had just entertained their friends with open arms. We weren’t expecting the keys to the city (okay, town), but at the very least we thought we could count on a knowing nod, a thumbs-up and all the free alcohol we wanted. This wasn’t cotillion or prom or graduation that we were crashing—this was a party taking place in a wall-to-wall carpeted duplex with particleboard cabinets. Don’t people want to hang with musicians? Yet band life is full of humbling moments such as these. It was an outright rejection. We were told that the party was full, as if there were a legal capacity to which they were adhering and only so many rubbery vegan hot dogs and red Solo cups to go around. I often think back on those two guys who turned us away, wondering if they know they kicked Jack White out of their party—if they saw him later on TV or in a magazine and thought he looked familiar, if he reminded them of the tall guy who stood helplessly on their front lawn and then walked back to an outdated, beat-up van. To me, it’s the perfect distillation of the disparity between being onstage and being off. For all the power you command in a live context, all the myth and mythmaking that goes into that moment, elevated by the agreement between performer and audience, when you’re offstage, you’re shrunk down to human size, to the humility it takes to endure the quotidian.

  In 2000, Greil Marcus named us the best rock band in America in Time magazine. The next morning on a talk show, Bryant Gumbel waved the magazine and asked incredulously, “Who is this band?” It felt unreal. We’d never had a radio hit or sold any amount of albums nearing the status of gold or platinum. In the larger scheme of things—population-wise—hardly anyone had heard of us, least of all the subscribers of Time. We had taken the accompanying photos for the article while on tour; it all had to happen immediately, so they hastily set up a shoot all the way in Scotland. When we flew home a few weeks later, the magazine issue had just come out. Here we were, “America’s Best Rock Band,” unloading our equipment that had been shipped home from overseas, that we’d just picked up from the airport by ourselves: drums, amps, road cases. We did not even have the help of a friend or crewmember to carry everything out of our van and into Janet’s basement, down rotted steps with very low headroom. You had to duck or you’d give yourself a concussion. “Best Band in America” and my back is about to go out again because I’m carrying a sixty-pound amp into a practice space the size of a pantry in which Janet’s aged marmalade cat had sprayed multiple times. It smelled like piss and dryer sheets. This was us having “made it!” We never stopped working. Most bands don’t.

  There is very little about being a working musician that is glamorous, which is why I have never understood people who get onstage and hardly even try. What else is there besides that moment? Why would you waste it? In the ’90s the term “slacker” was applied to a certain kind of breezy, laid-back male artist: Beck, Stephen Malkmus of Pavement, Rivers Cuomo of Weezer. These guys were understated, sneaker-wearing; they acted like they couldn’t be bothered and had a tossed-off coolness. Lyrics seemed to pour out of their mouths in profound, poetic drips. They made it look casual, like the stakes were low or nonexistent. I admired and listened to the music, and I think the perception and reception were different from their intent. But I also thought about what a privilege it must be to feel—or to affect—that entitlement; to be onstage, to play music, to get up in front of people and appear not to care.

  Recently I saw a band play on Saturday Night Live. It’s mostly one guy but he tours with 9+ people, all of them men. Every one of them wore T-shirts. If a group of nine women wore T-shirts on a national TV show, people would 1) ridicule them for not trying to look pretty, or 2) think it was an art project. At the very least it would be notable.

  Though the term “slacker music” (not one that these musicians put upon themselves, I should stress) has since disappeared, certainly the affectlessness remains, the gutlessness, in many bands and artists that have come since. Entitlement is a precarious place from which to create or perform—it projects the idea that you have nothing to prove, nothing to claim, nothing to show but self-satisfaction, a smug boredom. It breeds ambivalence. It’s as if instead of having to prove they are something, these musicians prove they aren’t anything. It’s an inverted dynamic, one that sets performers up to fail, but also gives them a false sense of having already arrived. I don’t understand how someone would not push, challenge, or at least be present, how anyone could
get onstage and not give everything.

  Sleater-Kinney had to prove ourselves all over again when we returned to the opening slot in 2003. By then we’d become accustomed to headlining most of our own shows, but Pearl Jam invited us to join them on tour. Eddie Vedder had always been kind toward Sleater-Kinney. I met him at one of our shows in Seattle in 1998, outside the Crocodile Café. Eddie walked up and stood in line behind me and Corin. He introduced himself to us and said he felt like he was standing next to Jagger and Richards. It’s a compliment a girl doesn’t hear too often.

  When the invite came, we didn’t hesitate. Bob Lawton knew that exposing our band to a bigger audience that would never know us otherwise was crucial. We felt like Pearl Jam was the right band to do that with. The financial offer was generous, the timing was right, and they were good people, like-minded Northwesterners.

  Our first show with Pearl Jam was in Denver, on April Fools’ Day. We’d been playing the fist-raising, call-to-arms songs off One Beat on our own tours in clubs and theaters around the world, but now we would perform in sports stadiums and arenas. Without giving it a second thought, Corin criticized George W. Bush from the stage. It was almost the first thing she said to a crowd of over fifteen thousand, at the Pepsi Center, people who had little or no idea who we were. To fans in the nosebleed section, we probably looked like ants, which was also how significant we were to most of these Pearl Jam listeners.

  Calling out George W. for his warmongering was something our crowd would have practically expected from us. By April 2003, support for the dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was starting to dwindle, especially in the more left-leaning urban centers and cities. And one area where support for our then president was securely and almost universally out of favor was in the politically homogeneous indie rock and alternative music circles. Sleater-Kinney probably could have burned Bush in effigy or torn apart a life-size replica of him at the end of our sets and the crowds would have cheered, taking home destroyed doll remnants as souvenirs.

  Pearl Jam, it turned out, played music to all kinds of people. Their fans were both rural and urban, Republicans and Democrats, and everything in between. The band was touring with their album Riot Act, which featured an excoriating song called “Bushleaguer.” In Denver the song, or perhaps it was the George W. Bush rubber mask that Eddie pulled on, drew boos from the crowd. Yet five minutes later, that same sports-cap-wearing man with upper-arm hair and a cross around his neck who had booed Eddie would be tearing up, enacting a human seat belt on his eyelinered girlfriend and singing along to “Black.” Here was the mainstream.

  We had a lot to learn.

  When you’ve only been on van tours—we wouldn’t tour in a bus until The Woods—pulling up to a venue where professional sports teams play is humbling and intimidating. When we arrived to soundcheck in our fifteen-passenger Ford Econoline, it looked like we should be showing up to restock napkins at a concession stand or refill a vending machine. (And just at one stand or one machine, otherwise we would be driving a semi truck.) Everything around us was bigger and more formidable than our vehicle. The insignificance was acute.

  Pearl Jam had multiple buses and semis, a private plane, a lighting rig, countless racks of gear, a mixing and monitor console, a separate recording facility and mixing board for documenting each show, a chef, a personal trainer, guitar and drum techs, and a general crew of over forty people.

  Our three-person crew would load our two amps and one drum kit onto a stage the size of the entire venues we’d been playing up until that point. We set up our gear in front of a wall of beautiful vintage amps, high-tech gear, drum and piano risers. Each member of Pearl Jam came with not simply his own equipment but his own section, his own world. From up there on the stage it resembled consecutive dorm rooms, each guy’s area affixed with personal touches and mementos. It was exciting and grand, larger than life.

  —

  Though I had no reservations about touring with Pearl Jam, elitism was a stubborn habit to kick. A small part of my brain retreated to my younger self, reminding me that in certain circles Nirvana had been considered the cooler, more authentic band. Nirvana’s music dragged you across the floor, you felt every crack, every speck of dirt. Their songs helped you locate the places where you ached, and in that awareness of your hurting you suddenly knew that the bleakness was collective, not merely your own. In other words, it’s okay to feel like a freak. And in high school, and for much of my adult life, maybe even now, I had, I do.

  So, I’ll be honest, I wondered whether I could like Pearl Jam’s music, not just the hits I knew might stoke my high school nostalgia, but the entirety of the band, their sound, their thing. Their songs had solos—multiple solos! They had ballads to take the room down a bit and anthems to bring the room back up; they possessed a mastery in a genre in which I had become accustomed to scoffing at mastery as an automatic equivalent to or indication of quality. Also, they seemed normal. And bubbling up from the formative years that shaped my relationship to outsider art, which I loved and related to, I still held on to my skepticism of normality. The greater mental hurdle was whether we wanted to—or were capable of—playing in front of the Pearl Jam audience. For as sweet as those guys were, their audience felt alien. It was mainstream, for one, and perhaps not ready or willing to make sense of three women making a racket, with no bass, very few solos, and an angularity not easily digestible. But we felt it was an opportunity we shouldn’t pass up; it would be a challenge, and we had not been an opening band for a long time.

  Any leftover snobbery about Pearl Jam changed after the first show.

  No matter how much crew a band or musician takes on tour, whether they travel in relative luxury or squalor, whether someone else tunes their guitar for them or switches pedal settings from the side of the stage, the bottom line is, at some point, it’s just people onstage playing music, doing a job. And for the best of these performers, among whom I count Eddie Vedder, there is no holding back, no wasted moment.

  What I discovered was that Pearl Jam’s music was soaring. Vedder’s lyrics spoke to pain and anger but offered a way out; there was a hopefulness to them, they came from a singer who wanted to live, to be alive. By the end of the tour, Sleater-Kinney was joining Pearl Jam onstage for the encore, singing and playing along to Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” and “Harvest Moon.” The band shared the experience, made it about us and about their fans.

  Vedder felt a true kinship with me and with my band. He was a punk and agitator who had ended up in one of the world’s most popular groups. And each night he managed to relay tremendous generosity and openness. At the end of the first and longest tour we would do with them, he gave me his custom Gibson SG Special. I play it to this day.

  I love being a new onlooker, a convert. To become a fan of something, to open and change, is a move of deliberate optimism, curiosity, and enthusiasm. Touring with Pearl Jam allowed me to see how diminishing and stifling it is to close yourself off to experiences. It was a tour that changed my life.

  —

  It turns out that if we hadn’t toured with Pearl Jam, we probably would not have made The Woods. We walked onstage each night with the stakes high, which is a hard place to return to for a band that’s been around for nearly a decade. But we were unknown here—we felt brand-new, untested, unloved. It forced us to turn inward, to focus on why we played and how we played. We had to listen to one another, to count on one another as the source of joy and givers of the only rewards. We had to find intrinsic value in what we were doing, to not rely on the audience to compensate for any of our own lack of energy or drive or desire. And certainly there were Pearl Jam fans who liked us, who walked back from getting their hot dogs and beer and who eventually looked up from their conversations to watch a song or two.

  I waited for those moments each night. The daylight was fading, it felt like the real concert was happening after us, but we had to make it real
each night, to bring to what was so clearly not the main event an intensity that would raise the audience’s eyes to us. Without the help of lights or cheers, we inserted ourselves into the landscape. And a few people took notice. By the time we finished, there would be people standing, watching, listening. Since few of them knew our songs, we had no one to please, and we started jamming at the end of the sets, just for ourselves, partly to get people’s attention, to make something so long and drawn-out as to foment discomfort, to defy expectations, and partly to surprise ourselves as much as them, to keep it interesting for us. And in deconstructing our own songs, we found that we were building something anew: a trust in what we were as a band and what we could still become.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE WOODS

  Opening for Pearl Jam enabled and emboldened us, and it instilled in us a desire to write songs that had improvisational moments built in. So on The Woods there are moments that break apart, disintegrate, allow the opportunity to rebuild. Instead of approaching a song as something small, we started big, and we carved smallness and detail out of a broader canvas. I don’t know if we could have envisioned that broadness if we hadn’t played on a big stage, heard our sound echo around an amphitheater. And that’s how we got from One Beat to The Woods. It’s what made us a better live band and reminded us that it could feel uncertain, and that sense of uncertainty was how we were going to create something better.

  Sleater-Kinney was nearing the decade mark of being a band. It felt like we knew our capabilities, that they were approaching something finite and fixed. And our audience knew what we were capable of, what we were going to sound like, who our label was; the people who didn’t like us would continue to not like us, and the people who liked us would feel the same, ad infinitum. I could imagine that the journalists had already written their reviews, like the obituaries on deck for the nearly dead; someone could just plug in the name of our latest album and the review would be done. I didn’t want to be the Mr. Rogers of music, where we could open a closet and see the same ten sweaters, and everyone would know what we were going to wear since there was a predetermined set of choices. None of us were that excited about that anymore. I don’t want to know what’s going to happen. As frightening as that is in real life, it’s a crucial aspect in creativity. Being predictable is boring, and it’s also disheartening and uninspiring. We needed a sense of rediscovery, for the audience and for ourselves.