In the article about Cris Williamson in Allmusic, William Ruhlmann offers this concise introduction: “Just as baseball historians can only speculate about how players in the old Negro leagues would have fared in the absence of segregation in the major leagues prior to the arrival of Jackie Robinson in 1947, so music historians may ponder what status Cris Williamson might have assumed if she had emerged at a time when admitted homosexuals were not subject to exclusion from major record labels. By the 1990’s, openly gay women artists Melissa Etheridge, Indigo Girls, and k.d. lang were able to maintain major-label contracts and sell records in the millions (although none of them had proclaimed their sexual orientation when they were signed in the 1980’s).” A profile of tennis legend Billie Jean King on Meet the Press this month reminded me that, in 1981, she was publicly “outed” by a former lover; she lost all of her corporate endorsements within 48 hours. Twenty-five years later, on August 28, 2006, the home of the U. S. Open grand slam tennis tournament was renamed the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. The nation has clearly come a long way; at least as surprising as the rapid march of marriage equality across numerous states is the recent capitulation of the Republican Party on any pushback against gay/lesbian issues, much as the Democratic Party gave up on capital punishment many years back. * * *
Cris Williamson grew up in Deadwood, South Dakota as the daughter of a forest ranger; their home had no electricity, so her phonograph was of the wind-up variety. The Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon in Deadwood is the place where Wild Bill Hickok was gunned down during a poker game; the cards he was holding – a pair of aces and a pair of eights – became known as the “dead man’s hand” thereafter, particularly (as in this case) when the cards are all in the black suits. My father and I each had a shot at the saloon many years ago while much of our family was on a Western tour.
After moving to Sheraton, Wyoming, Cris Williamson began performing on a local radio station. Three listeners who were impressed with her remarkable talent spearheaded the formation of a small record company, Avanti Records that released her first album in 1964, The Artistry of Cris Williamson when she was just 16. After all 500 copies were sold out, two more albums followed, A Step at a Time (1965) and The World Around Cris Williamson (1966). Her full-fledged debut album, Cris Williamson was released on Ampex Records in 1971; her vocal stylings were so similar to those of Judy Collins that Cris was sometimes called “Judy Jr.”. After Cris Williamson acknowledged that she was a lesbian, however, she was quickly relegated to the sidelines.
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Another lesbian singer-songwriter Meg Christian once interviewed Cris Williamson, and this connection led to the creation of Olivia Records, the foremost record label in what became known as “women’s music”. Their first release was a single in 1973, with Meg singing the Carole King/Gerry Goffin song “Lady” on one side and Cris singing her own song, “If it Weren’t for the Music” on the other.
Olivia Records was conceived as a recording company that would be geared to gay women, but as discussed below, it was more than just that. The title of the label’s very first album, I Know You Know (1974) by Meg Christian is not hard to figure out; nor are the implications of the best-known song from this album, “Ode to a Gym Teacher” (written by Meg and performed live to an enthusiastic audience). However, women’s music is not overtly sexual, or at least I have never heard any that was. For the most part, the romantic songs are addressed to the lover; as with Melissa Etheridge, the gender is beside the point, lending the music appeal to all listeners.
There is a strong feminist stance in women’s music, however; and that was largely absent from the music scene in the mid-1970’s, Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” (1972) notwithstanding. Besides her own fine compositions, Meg Christian reinterprets a Rolf Kempf song, “Hello Hooray” as a feminist anthem, with some new lyrics that she added. The song had been included on one of Judy Collins’ best albums, Who Knows Where the Time Goes (1968). Jimmy Webb is not a songwriter where one would expect feminist sensibilities, but Meg reworks his song “The Hive” as a tale of female oppression – not at all the way that Richard Harris performed the song several years earlier. Meg Christian also covers one of Cris Williamson’s songs, “Joanna”; a single lyric in “Joanna”, “I need to touch you” was the only hint of lesbianism on the Cris Williamson album.
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The Changer and the Changed (1975) was Olivia Records’ second album release, and this album by Cris Williamson quickly became the biggest seller in women’s music, eventually selling 500,000 copies. Allmusic gives the record its highest rating (five stars), and Stewart Mason has a rave review on the website: “The simple but rich arrangements set Williamson’s glorious voice and piano against strings, flute, and Jacqueline Robbins’ jazz-inflected fretless bass, giving the album a timeless sound and putting the focus entirely on the songs and Williamson’s elegantly passionate performance of them.”
Behind the scenes, Olivia Records started to put the full weight of its philosophy into place on this album: To the extent possible, their work was to be in women’s hands from start to finish. As in most fields during this time period, women were regularly excluded in the music industry from working as backing musicians, producers, arrangers, engineers, etc. Thus, besides performing on guitar, Meg Christian produced The Changer and the Changed; other contributors later released women’s music albums, such as Margie Adam. June Millington, previously in the all-female rock band Fanny, provided backing vocals and also played drums, acoustic and electric guitar, slide guitar, and keyboards; Millington shows up on later Cris Williamson releases also. In all, Allmusic lists 50 people in the credits for The Changer and the Changed, with the vast majority being women.
Cris Williamson and Meg Christian celebrated the 10th anniversary of the founding of Olivia Records by holding a joint concert at Carnegie Hall with several other women’s-music stalwarts, as documented in the double album release, Meg/Cris at Carnegie Hall.
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In addition to her numerous women’s music albums, Cris Williamson had an interesting side project in 1982 with a children’s album called Lumière. Entitled “a science-fantasy fable”, the album is primarily a forum for Williamson’s songs that are tied together with a simple fantasy that turns out to be a dream. The album won a prestigious Parents’ Choice Award.
Tret Fure, a multi-talented women’s music artist was the engineer on the Cris Williamson album Lumière, as well as providing musical backing; the two became domestic partners. Fure has more of a hard-rock edge to her music than most of the genre’s artists; she grew up in the Midwest and became a professional musician when she was 16. Tret Fure performed on one of Spencer Davis’s early solo albums, Mousetrap (1972) and also wrote the opening song on the album, “Rainy Season”. Her first solo album, Tret Fure (1973) was produced by Lowell George of Little Feat; and she later toured as the opening act for several major rock bands that included Yes, the J. Geils Band and Poco.
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Probably the best known of the women’s music artists is Holly Near, although she is even more familiar as a left-wing political activist. Holly Near grew up as a “red diaper baby” of committed leftist parents in Northern California and auditioned for Columbia Records when she was just 10 years old. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Holly Near appeared in several films, including Slaughterhouse Five and The Todd Killings, as well as television shows like All in the Family, The Mod Squad and The Partridge Family.
By the way, there might be a few out there who remember a song by the controversial punk rock band the Angry Samoans called “The Todd Killings”; if I remember right, they performed the song on New Wave Theatre one night.
After touring with Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden in their “Indochina Peace Campaign” in 1971 and 1972, Holly Near began writing songs and performing in the Los Angeles area. Unable to land a record company deal, she released her debut album in 1973, Hang in There on her own label, Redwood Records (which she started a few years before Olivia Records came along). She often toured with Olivia Records artists and performed on some of their albums, including The Changer and the Changed; but her early albums were released on Redwood.
In 1983, Holly Near teamed up with Ronnie Gilbert, formerly with the legendary folk group the Weavers, for the first of several albums. The duo also collaborated with another former Weaver, Pete Seeger plus Arlo Guthrie in a group called HARP, named after the initials in their first names.
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Women’s music performances became natural additions to gay and lesbian gatherings of all types and sizes; before long, Woodstock-style women’s music festivals began to take place as well. The most prominent is the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival – “womyn” is an alternate spelling of “women” without having to say “men” – and this one is still being held annually since its founding in 1976, although it is evidently more of a women-only, clothing-optional camping event now.
Women’s music artists for the most part are not particularly political or polemic – with the exception of Holly Near, and even she is normally not focused on gay/lesbian issues – so non–lesbian-identified performers have dropped by from time to time. Tracy Chapman is perhaps the most prominent; she was at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival during her meteoric rise to the top of the charts with her hit album Tracy Chapman (1988). The lead single “Fast Car” was a Top 10 hit in both the U.S. and the U.K.; and Tracy Chapman won a clutch of Grammies in 1989 also. Remarkably, Michael Collings, a contestant on the television series Britain’s Got Talent performed the song in April 2011; and Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” re-entered the U.K. charts and attained the same #4 peak as it had in 1988.
Tracy Chapman is from Cleveland, Ohio and was given a ukulele by her mother once she noticed her talent at a young age; she was writing songs by the age of 8. Tracy’s performance of “Fast Car” during the nationally televised Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute led to its quick rise up the music charts. Tracy Chapman’s biggest hit song, “Give Me One Reason” wasn’t released until 1995, though it had been part of her concert repertoire for many years, including a performance on Saturday Night Live in December 1989. To date, Tracy Chapman has released eight albums, and she has recorded duets with a host of prominent musicians that include B. B. King, Eric Clapton, Luciano Pavarotti, Buddy Guy, and Dave Matthews.
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Melissa Etheridge is the first successful rock musician who is well known to be a lesbian. Melissa is from Leavenworth, Kansas and took up the guitar at age 8; she was performing in country music groups during her teenage years and later attended the Berklee College of Music. Melissa Etheridge sent a demo recording to Olivia Records in 1985 (they turned her down), and she also performed in lesbian bars in the Boston area while she was in college. However, Etheridge has never made an issue of her sexual orientation one way or the other, so she was not widely known to be a lesbian when she was signed by Island Records in 1986.
Melissa Etheridge’s first 6 albums have been certified Platinum, with her biggest seller being Yes I Am (1993), where the title is an evident confirmation of the rumors of her being a lesbian.
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Melissa Etheridge has had a solid career over the years along with a devoted fan base. Except for her Christmas album, Melissa’s other 11 studio albums have all made the Top 25 on Billboard – including her 2012 release 4th Street Feeling – and have also charted in several other nations. Her 2001 album Skin was written after the breakup of her longtime relationship with filmmaker Julie Cypher that included two children fathered by David Crosby via artificial insemination; writing for Allmusic, Kerry L. Smith says of this album: “If ever there was a perfect breakup album, this is it.”
Melissa Etheridge had a memorable appearance at the 2005 Grammy Awards, where she performed “Piece of My Heart” in a tribute to Janis Joplin. She was slick bald at the time due to chemotherapy for breast cancer (from which she recovered); and the boldness of her appearance there – some years before Robin Roberts’ shorn locks on Good Morning America – only endeared her further to the American public.
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Melissa Etheridge’s male counterpart in the rock world, Elton John has been openly gay for many years and is the largest selling recording artist of all time. His tribute to Princess Diana, “Candle in the Wind 1997” alone has sold 33 million copies, more than any other single in history. This song opens with the words “Goodbye English Rose” and is a rewrite of a song called “Candle in the Wind” from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973) that was in honor of Marilyn Monroe.
Though there are other prominent openly gay and lesbian celebrities – Ellen DeGeneres comes immediately to mind, plus any number of actors and actresses – I am aware of no other household names among active rock musicians. While Melissa Etheridge and Elton John remain beloved performers, the same could be said of Liberace back in the 1950’s (though of course, he was not openly gay). Most other lesbian and gay rockers are well outside the mainstream – not that there is anything wrong with that.
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This is not to say that there aren’t other prominent lesbian rock musicians; but for the most part, that fact was not known about them when most people were paying attention. Lesley Gore brought girl-group vocal stylings to the airwaves as a solo artist while she was still a teenager; in part this was accomplished by sometimes double-tracking her vocals, but her throaty singing is strong enough to stand on its own.
Lesley Gore’s first album, I’ll Cry If I Want To – the second line in her #1 hit song “It’s My Party” – collects numerous songs about crying, including her own answer song, “Judy’s Turn to Cry”, plus competent covers of pop songs of the day like “Misty” and “Cry Me a River” that most early-1960’s albums are saddled with. There are numerous other gems nonetheless in Gore’s early career. One of Lesley Gore’s best songs is the proto-feminist anthem “You Don’t Own Me” from her second album, Lesley Gore Sings of Mixed-Up Hearts; her other two hits from that album, “She’s a Fool” and “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” are also top-notch. “California Nights” reached the Top 20 in 1967; the song was co-written by Marvin Hamlisch as was “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows”.
These two albums were produced by Quincy Jones, one of the best in the business – Michael Jackson’s Thriller is only the best-known of his production efforts – and a talented jazz artist and bandleader in his own right with a Renaissance-man career that dates back to the early 1950’s.
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While she had never any other major hit songs, Lesley Gore continued recording, and she also appeared on the final episode of The Donna Reed Show in 1966. Her other acting credits include two episodes of the Batman television series in early 1967 as one of Catwoman’s minions.
In 1980, Lesley Gore wrote songs for the movie Fame, including “Out Here on My Own” that was co-written with her brother Michael Gore; he won an Academy Award for Best Original Song for the title song, “Fame” (the lyrics were written by Dean Pitchford).
In a 2005 interview, Lesley Gore acknowledged that she was a lesbian who had been in a committed relationship since the early 1980’s. Also in 2005, she released the critically acclaimed album, Ever Since.
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Janis Ian is a singer-songwriter who was only 13 when she wrote and recorded her first single about an interracial romance (perhaps the first song about that topic ever), “Society’s Child (Baby, I’ve Been Thinking)”. The history of this song is bathed in controversy, and “Society’s Child” was released three different times between 1965 and 1967; ultimately, the song reached #14 on the charts in the summer of 1967 and eventually sold 600,000 copies. Years later, the President of Atlantic Records, Jerry Wexler publicly apologized to Janis Ian for refusing to release the single and returning the master recording to her; “Society’s Child” finally came out on Verve/Forecast Records.
Janis Ian might have remained a most remarkable one-hit wonder had she not taken up other controversial issues – as related by Wikipedia, “adolescent cruelty, the illusion of popularity, and teenage angst” – with her biggest hit song “At Seventeen” (1975). The song and the accompanying album, Between the Lines both reached #1 on the Adult Contemporary Singles and Hot 100 Albums Billboard charts, respectively, with much less drama than had befallen “Society’s Child”. What's more, Janis Ian won the Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Performance – Female that year, beating out Linda Ronstadt (whose breakthrough album Heart Like a Wheel had been nominated), as well as Olivia Newton-John and Helen Reddy.
Janis Ian has continued to release albums; Allmusic lists 21 studio albums. She publicly came out as a lesbian in 1993.
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Alt-country star k.d. lang has had an angular, androgynous persona since her first public appearances in the late 1980’s; she publicly came out as a lesbian in 1992 and has been one of the more activist among popular musicians. The band that k.d. lang formed, the Reclines started out as a Patsy Cline tribute band.
The 1992 album by k.d. lang, Ingénue was a departure from her country-flavored earlier albums like Angel with a Lariat and Absolute Torch and Twang and includes her best known song, the startlingly fantastic “Constant Craving” plus another remarkable track, “Miss Chatelaine”.
Over her career, k.d. lang has collaborated with many prominent musicians from Roy Orbison, to Dwight Yoakam, to Tony Bennett, to fellow Canadian artist Anne Murray. She first came to prominence during a performance at the closing ceremonies of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary; in 2010, k.d. lang performed Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” at the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
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I believe I was in Indianapolis when I picked up a local tabloid newspaper and first read of a band called Sleater-Kinney – Allmusic says of them that they are the greatest punk rock band of the 1990’s and 2000’s – though I honestly don’t remember much about the article and interview except that they are an all-female rock band.
Singer/guitarist Corin Tucker was one-half of the early riot grrrl duo Heavens to Betsy when she met a classically trained pianist named Carrie Brownstein. Brownstein was so impressed by Tucker’s band and other bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile (which had previously been Corin Tucker’s own influences) that she became a guitarist and vocalist herself and started a band called Excuse 17. Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17 were often at the same gigs, and the two women originally started Sleater-Kinney as a side project. As can be seen, there is no one named Sleater or Kinney in the band; the name is taken from Sleater Kinney Road (off Interstate-5), where one of their early practice spaces was located.
Once Lora MacFarlane (who was originally from Australia) was hired as their permanent drummer, Sleater-Kinney quickly put together their first album, Sleater-Kinney, an indie-rock masterpiece that came out on Chainsaw Records in 1995. The rough-cut nature of this album only gave a hint of the glories to come as Sleater-Kinney refined and enriched their sound in future albums. Chainsaw Records had been started by Donna Dresch who was in yet another Pacific Northwest punk rock band, Team Dresch.
Sleater-Kinney released a second album on this label, Call the Doctor which brought the band greater renown; this is probably around the time that I read the article on the band in Indianapolis. Shortly thereafter, Sleater-Kinney was signed by a record company headquartered in the heart of riot grrrl territory in Olympia, WA having the delightful name of Kill Rock Stars. With Janet Weiss as the new drummer (originally in Quasi), each of their four albums for this label seemed better than the last, culminating in One Beat (2002).
Writing for Time magazine in July 2001 for their salute to the best in America in the new millennium, rock critic Greil Marcus named Sleater-Kinney the nation’s best rock band.
In 2003, Sleater-Kinney toured as the opening act for Pearl Jam, and that is when we were able to see them in New Orleans. Their experiences playing in large arenas led to their first album for Sub Pop Records, The Woods. Unfortunately, Sleater-Kinney announced a hiatus not long after its release, though there are rumors of an future reunion for the band.
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Sleater-Kinney is not a “lesbian band”, nor are Bikini Kill, L7, Heavens to Betsy, Excuse 17, or most of the other riot grrrl bands I know of. Excuse 17 is actually classified as a “queercore” band by Wikipedia, a more overtly gay/lesbian offshoot of punk rock that emerged alongside riot grrrl, and in many of the same places.
The term “queer” began to gain currency in the early 1990’s, and not only because homosexuals desired to reclaim the long-time slur. By this time period, the sexual minorities of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and trans-gendered individuals were aggregated under the unwieldy acronym of LGBT. Eventually “queer” became the umbrella term that “gay” had never quite managed and covered not just these identified sexual minorities, but also anyone whose sexual identity was malleable, or whose sexual predilections were frowned upon regardless of which gender(s) were involved, or who didn’t like the little boxes that others insisted they should fit into – or indeed anyone who chose not to be identified with the rigid heterosexual mores of the larger society.
The idea that riot grrrl and female queercore rock bands must be lesbian (or at least bisexual) probably comes from the power of their brand of punk rock, coupled with their strongly feminist stance – with the latter dating back to the women’s music days. It is indeed almost impossible to imagine these musicians leaving a concert venue and going off to be a happy homemaker in the suburbs. But things are not always what they seem. Thus, these rock bands on the margins, along with their fans could share a club and a stage and a love for music and a political philosophy without worrying about who is going to bed with whom. There are, after all, more important things in life than that.
Returning to Sleater-Kinney, Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein dated briefly when the band was first started – Carrie now says that it was for “a second” – and this fact was expanded in Spin magazine to indicate that the two, if not the band as a whole were bisexual. The magazine story caught the two women off-guard; they were not offended by the labeling – mostly they were upset that no one had ever asked them the question; people just made assumptions. In 2012, Carrie Brownstein verified in an interview that no one in Sleater-Kinney is lesbian, although Corin Tucker self-identifies as bisexual.
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For me, Sleater-Kinney has transcended all of these categories. Their songwriting is simply brilliant and as varied as anyone I can think of. What Sleater-Kinney can do with their guitars (and without a bass guitar in sight) is a revelation. Corin Tucker’s lead vocals aren’t everyone’s cup of tea (they tell me), but they suit me just fine, and those of Carrie Brownstein do as well. I have little doubt that I have played One Beat more than any other album that has been released in the current century; my second favorite among their albums (at the moment at least) is their first, Sleater-Kinney. Original drummer Lora MacFarlane performs the vocals on the truly marvelous “Lora’s Song” on that album that reminds me of past UARB Fur.
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BOYSKOUT, this month’s Under-Appreciated Rock Band are pretty open about being a lesbian band – they used the term “rad queer band” in one interview. Though neither their Allmusic write-up nor the Bomp! Records packaging mentions this. the name of the last song on the album, “Girl on Girl Action” gives it away if you hadn’t already figured it out.
However, “queer” might be a better term than lesbian. When asked in a 2009 interview, “Are you lesbians? Bi-sexual? Are you just experimenting? Are you all like that or just some of you?”, bandleader Leslie Satterfield responded, “Yes”, then continued: “We don’t want to be pigeonholed into a stereotype. I for one have had relationships with men as well, but I don’t want to be labeled as ‘Bi’ or any other label. It really depends on the person for me.”
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Like the women’s music pioneers before them, there is hardly any sexuality on the Boyskout songs; and anyone can enjoy this CD, which sounds great on the first spin and only gets better over time. Even on “Girl on Girl Action”, the sexy mood of the breathey vocals is undercut by a very slow rendition of the iconic quote from the chorus of “Is That All There Is?”: “If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing / Let’s break out the booze and have a ball”.
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Even in the context of 1969 – one of the most eclectic years in the history of music (if I remember right, there was once a television program on the music in that year) – “Is That All There Is?” hit the record charts utterly out of left field. Particularly as performed in the version by Peggy Lee – who was previously best known for her hit “Fever” in the late 1950’s (with “Fever” later becoming probably the best known cover song by Madonna) – “Is That All There Is?” seems to come off like a 1940’s-style pop song. The verses tell of the singer’s growing disillusionment with life – first at a house fire, then at a circus, and finally at love – followed by the chorus (the only part that is sung): You can almost see her world-weary shrugs in the way that Peggy Lee sings those lines. In a final twist, the chorus is cut short before the last verse where the singer has decided that suicide is no answer either: “I’m not ready for the final disappointment”.
In a sense, “Is That All There Is?” is a grimmer retelling of the Joni Mitchell song “Both Sides Now” that Judy Collins released as a Top 10 hit the previous year; it had appeared on Collins’ 1967 album, Wildflowers. For all I know, that could have been the genesis of the song. The first recorded version, by New York disc jockey Dan Daniel was released in March 1968.
The song was written by the prolific songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. “Is That All There Is?” has little in common with their better known songs like “Jailhouse Rock”, “Hound Dog”, “Kansas City”, or the numerous hits by the Coasters; although songs that the two co-wrote with others, such as “Stand by Me” and “On Broadway” have some of the flavor of this song.
The piano work along with the arrangements on the Peggy Lee hit version of “Is That All There Is?” were by Randy Newman at the beginning of his career (he was also the orchestra conductor) – his debut album, Randy Newman came out in 1968 – and there is no doubt that this song was right up his alley.
Peggy Lee won the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for “Is That All There Is?”, and the song was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
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If I had to guess, I would imagine that Boyskout heard “Is That All There Is?” as performed by PJ Harvey for the soundtrack of the film, Basquiat (1996) rather than the Peggy Lee hit version of “Is That All There Is?”. Past UARB Thomas Anderson once perversely said that his favorite singer-songwriter is Iggy Pop; and there seems to be no other category in which to place Polly Jean Harvey either. Harvey grew up on a sheep farm in Yeovil, England; her father worked in a quarry, and her mother was an artist. She learned to play the guitar and saxophone at an early age and was a backing musician in her teens.
Polly Jean Harvey formed a trio in 1991 called PJ Harvey with Steve Vaughan (bass guitar) and Robert Ellis (drums). They became a sensation on the indie-rock circuit, with their debut album Dry (1992) and particularly Rid of Me (1993) being released to wide acclaim. I don’t have Harvey’s early albums yet, though I do have 4 Track Demos that show the material on Rid of Me in a different format. While the intention was to present the PJ Harvey songs in a less abrasive form than the original CD, it is hard to conceive of demos being noisier and at the same time more complete than on 4 Track Demos; normally, a demo is laid down in an unadorned, often acoustic manner in order to establish the copyright and to provide a backbone for the finished track.
By this time, the original trio had broken up, and Harvey was now on her own; but she continued to release her albums under the name PJ Harvey with her full name Polly Jean Harvey given in the credits.
My favorite PJ Harvey album thus far (and also the first one that I purchased, though I had heard about her for years), Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea (2000) is drawn from a six-month sojourn in New York City in 1999. I had been thinking that the album was her response to 9/11; it was actually released before that horrific date, but there is a sense of impending doom on many of these songs, particularly on “One Line” and her duet with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, “This Mess We’re In”. PJ Harvey’s thrilling video for “This Is Love” is what originally grabbed me; the song has the memorable lyric: “I can’t believe life is so complex / When I just want to sit here and watch you undress.”
For years, I couldn’t play Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea often enough or loud enough. The opening track, “Big Exit” became the song that I lived by for a long time: “I met a man / He told me straight / ‘You gotta leave / It’s getting late’ / Too many cops / Too many guns / All trying to do something / No-one else has done” (though I heard the last line as “I’m trying to do something no one else has done”).
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By the way, there are no boys in Boyskout, just like there are no girls in the Lazy Cowgirls – but, oh, if you think outlaw country is a treat (as I do), you should hear the outlaw rock that Pat Todd and the boys lay down in their albums, from Tapping the Source onward.
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Okay, enough detours; let me get back to the UARB. In 2001, Leslie Satterfield (guitar and vocals) was offered the opportunity to be the opening act for her favorite rock band, an Olympia, WA experimental duo called The Need. Unfortunately, she didn’t yet have a rock band to do the job and only three weeks until the concert; so she quickly recruited several friends, first drummer Caroline Mills – they were in a band together though I am not sure the name of it. China Lajczock (keyboards and most of the lead vocals) had been working in a coffee shop, and the other bandmembers met Hannah Reiff (bass guitar) by buying her a drink on “dollar drink night” at a dive somewhere.
While the band was being put together, they saw a news story about a gay troop leader who was being forced out of the Boy Scouts; so they figured that having a lesbian band take the name Boyskout would really offend them. Happily, the ban on openly gay Boy Scouts was finally lifted as of January 1, 2014.
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Boyskout initially put out a single on clear vinyl in 2003 on Isota Records, “Secrets” b/w “Pictures from the Moon”. Their music caught the attention of the Bomp! Records label Alive Records, which included two Boyskout songs on their compilation album, The Sound of San Francisco. The two songs were “Secrets” and “School of Etiquette” – of these three early songs, only “Secrets” is on the Alive CD, even though the name of the CD is School of Etiquette.
Boyskout recorded their first album in April 2003 and November 2003 with the assistance of Daniel Dietrick on bass guitar and keyboards, The producer is Jeff Saltzman; in the same year he produced the debut album Hot Fuss for the Killers, another successful entry in the Garage Rock Revival of the early 2000’s (the band’s name is taken from the nickname of rockabilly pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis, “Killer”).
I have previously written of The Sound of San Francisco and quoted nearly all of Mick Farren’s liner notes for that album; this is the first (though not the last) UARB to be drawn from the roster. My tribute to Mick Farren is coming up later this year; his death last year upset me as much as any I can think of from the music world since that of John Lennon.
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The debut album by Boyskout, School of Etiquette came out on Alive Records in January 2004. Mark Jenkins with the Washington Post has written of this album: “If some CBGB’s Frankenstein had managed, circa 1977, to transplant Patti Smith’s sensibility into Blondie’s garage-band pop, the result would have sounded something like BoySkout’s School of Etiquette. Outfitted in such New Wavey accessories as sneakers and skinny ties, this lesbian-rock quartet revives such Smithian motifs as drowning and the erotic appeal of outlaws, but with girl-group bounce. School of Etiquette may not be genteel, but it is impeccably arranged.”
BoySkout’s music is more new wave than riot grrrl; other ingredients are old-style punk sensibilities plus a love of catchy pop tunes, and it seems clear to me that the bandmembers have been enjoying their Sleater-Kinney albums. The songs have an underlying current of angst and suspicion coupled with a sense of fun. For instance, the anxious music on “Secrets” creates a feeling of foreboding underlying these lyrics: “She told you all my secrets / She knew them all so well / She told you all my secrets / . . . She promised not to tell . . .”
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School of Etiquette includes another song called “Back to Bed”; Leslie Satterfield thinks that a playful video for this song was misunderstood. In a 2009 interview for an online magazine called The New Gay, she was asked about “inter-band dating”. After acknowledging that there was some – at one point, Boyskout put a stop to the practice since it was causing so much tension in the band – Satterfield then went on: “One of the members that I really loved and felt like was a really great member for our first record was this girl Hannah [Reiff]. In one of our videos – everyone was like, ‘Oh, all the BoySkouts are kissing each other.’ That really wasn’t true. Hannah and I made out, but we were dating at the time.”
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In early 2004, Boyskout relocated to New York City and were evidently a hit on the local music scene, though they returned to the Bay Area later that year. A Summer 2004 story posted on neonnyc.com raved about the band: “If ever there was a group destined to be a New York, New York outfit, Boy Skout (alternately known as Boyskout and BoySkout) is it. We caught them for the first time at Pianos as a trio – their keyboardist/vocalist [China Lajczock] having recently departed. And we had heard that the transition to a threesome had punked them up a bit more.” Leslie Satterfield had become the lead vocalist at this point.
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Boyskout had a successful appearance in 2006 at South by Southwest (SXSW); Wikipedia describes the event as “a set of film, interactive, and music festivals and conferences that take place every spring (usually in March) in Austin, Texas”.
Enthused by the reaction, and desiring a follow-up to their first album, Boyskout recruited two acclaimed record producers, David Schiffman – who had worked with Nine Inch Nails, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, and Jimmy Eat World – and Donny Newenhouse (Film School, the Coachwhips).
Their second CD, Another Life was released on Three Ring Records later in 2006. Besides Leslie Satterfield, the other bandmembers were evidently Christina Stanley on keyboard and violin and Ingrid Dahl on guitar; the male sorta-member, Daniel Dietrick was still playing bass guitar.
Writing in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Tomas Palermo wrote: “The songs I’ve heard . . . are as refreshing as local underground music can get.”
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As time went on, bandmembers came and went, with Leslie Satterfield being the mainstay for Boyskout. In about 2008, Boyskout appeared at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and were on the bill at Phasefest in 2009 – described on their website as being “an annual Queer music and arts festival dedicated to the development, exposure and interaction of queer and queer-allied musicians and artists, both national and international”.
Speaking in the 2009 interview in The New Gay, Ingrid Dahl says of the band: “Right now we’ve been adjusting to new members. Boyskout is very transient, members come and go a lot. We’re all in different projects. We’re only playing 4 or 5 shows a year. Playing Phasefest is a big deal. We’re not even playing Brooklyn where we have a pretty strong fan base. We’ve declined tours with bands. We’re all in new projects.”
Evidently Boyskout broke up shortly afterward; a 2010 story on the band mentioned that.
Cris Williamson grew up in Deadwood, South Dakota as the daughter of a forest ranger; their home had no electricity, so her phonograph was of the wind-up variety. The Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon in Deadwood is the place where Wild Bill Hickok was gunned down during a poker game; the cards he was holding – a pair of aces and a pair of eights – became known as the “dead man’s hand” thereafter, particularly (as in this case) when the cards are all in the black suits. My father and I each had a shot at the saloon many years ago while much of our family was on a Western tour.
After moving to Sheraton, Wyoming, Cris Williamson began performing on a local radio station. Three listeners who were impressed with her remarkable talent spearheaded the formation of a small record company, Avanti Records that released her first album in 1964, The Artistry of Cris Williamson when she was just 16. After all 500 copies were sold out, two more albums followed, A Step at a Time (1965) and The World Around Cris Williamson (1966). Her full-fledged debut album, Cris Williamson was released on Ampex Records in 1971; her vocal stylings were so similar to those of Judy Collins that Cris was sometimes called “Judy Jr.”. After Cris Williamson acknowledged that she was a lesbian, however, she was quickly relegated to the sidelines.
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Another lesbian singer-songwriter Meg Christian once interviewed Cris Williamson, and this connection led to the creation of Olivia Records, the foremost record label in what became known as “women’s music”. Their first release was a single in 1973, with Meg singing the Carole King/Gerry Goffin song “Lady” on one side and Cris singing her own song, “If it Weren’t for the Music” on the other.
Olivia Records was conceived as a recording company that would be geared to gay women, but as discussed below, it was more than just that. The title of the label’s very first album, I Know You Know (1974) by Meg Christian is not hard to figure out; nor are the implications of the best-known song from this album, “Ode to a Gym Teacher” (written by Meg and performed live to an enthusiastic audience). However, women’s music is not overtly sexual, or at least I have never heard any that was. For the most part, the romantic songs are addressed to the lover; as with Melissa Etheridge, the gender is beside the point, lending the music appeal to all listeners.
There is a strong feminist stance in women’s music, however; and that was largely absent from the music scene in the mid-1970’s, Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” (1972) notwithstanding. Besides her own fine compositions, Meg Christian reinterprets a Rolf Kempf song, “Hello Hooray” as a feminist anthem, with some new lyrics that she added. The song had been included on one of Judy Collins’ best albums, Who Knows Where the Time Goes (1968). Jimmy Webb is not a songwriter where one would expect feminist sensibilities, but Meg reworks his song “The Hive” as a tale of female oppression – not at all the way that Richard Harris performed the song several years earlier. Meg Christian also covers one of Cris Williamson’s songs, “Joanna”; a single lyric in “Joanna”, “I need to touch you” was the only hint of lesbianism on the Cris Williamson album.
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The Changer and the Changed (1975) was Olivia Records’ second album release, and this album by Cris Williamson quickly became the biggest seller in women’s music, eventually selling 500,000 copies. Allmusic gives the record its highest rating (five stars), and Stewart Mason has a rave review on the website: “The simple but rich arrangements set Williamson’s glorious voice and piano against strings, flute, and Jacqueline Robbins’ jazz-inflected fretless bass, giving the album a timeless sound and putting the focus entirely on the songs and Williamson’s elegantly passionate performance of them.”
Behind the scenes, Olivia Records started to put the full weight of its philosophy into place on this album: To the extent possible, their work was to be in women’s hands from start to finish. As in most fields during this time period, women were regularly excluded in the music industry from working as backing musicians, producers, arrangers, engineers, etc. Thus, besides performing on guitar, Meg Christian produced The Changer and the Changed; other contributors later released women’s music albums, such as Margie Adam. June Millington, previously in the all-female rock band Fanny, provided backing vocals and also played drums, acoustic and electric guitar, slide guitar, and keyboards; Millington shows up on later Cris Williamson releases also. In all, Allmusic lists 50 people in the credits for The Changer and the Changed, with the vast majority being women.
Cris Williamson and Meg Christian celebrated the 10th anniversary of the founding of Olivia Records by holding a joint concert at Carnegie Hall with several other women’s-music stalwarts, as documented in the double album release, Meg/Cris at Carnegie Hall.
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In addition to her numerous women’s music albums, Cris Williamson had an interesting side project in 1982 with a children’s album called Lumière. Entitled “a science-fantasy fable”, the album is primarily a forum for Williamson’s songs that are tied together with a simple fantasy that turns out to be a dream. The album won a prestigious Parents’ Choice Award.
Tret Fure, a multi-talented women’s music artist was the engineer on the Cris Williamson album Lumière, as well as providing musical backing; the two became domestic partners. Fure has more of a hard-rock edge to her music than most of the genre’s artists; she grew up in the Midwest and became a professional musician when she was 16. Tret Fure performed on one of Spencer Davis’s early solo albums, Mousetrap (1972) and also wrote the opening song on the album, “Rainy Season”. Her first solo album, Tret Fure (1973) was produced by Lowell George of Little Feat; and she later toured as the opening act for several major rock bands that included Yes, the J. Geils Band and Poco.
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Probably the best known of the women’s music artists is Holly Near, although she is even more familiar as a left-wing political activist. Holly Near grew up as a “red diaper baby” of committed leftist parents in Northern California and auditioned for Columbia Records when she was just 10 years old. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Holly Near appeared in several films, including Slaughterhouse Five and The Todd Killings, as well as television shows like All in the Family, The Mod Squad and The Partridge Family.
By the way, there might be a few out there who remember a song by the controversial punk rock band the Angry Samoans called “The Todd Killings”; if I remember right, they performed the song on New Wave Theatre one night.
After touring with Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden in their “Indochina Peace Campaign” in 1971 and 1972, Holly Near began writing songs and performing in the Los Angeles area. Unable to land a record company deal, she released her debut album in 1973, Hang in There on her own label, Redwood Records (which she started a few years before Olivia Records came along). She often toured with Olivia Records artists and performed on some of their albums, including The Changer and the Changed; but her early albums were released on Redwood.
In 1983, Holly Near teamed up with Ronnie Gilbert, formerly with the legendary folk group the Weavers, for the first of several albums. The duo also collaborated with another former Weaver, Pete Seeger plus Arlo Guthrie in a group called HARP, named after the initials in their first names.
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Women’s music performances became natural additions to gay and lesbian gatherings of all types and sizes; before long, Woodstock-style women’s music festivals began to take place as well. The most prominent is the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival – “womyn” is an alternate spelling of “women” without having to say “men” – and this one is still being held annually since its founding in 1976, although it is evidently more of a women-only, clothing-optional camping event now.
Women’s music artists for the most part are not particularly political or polemic – with the exception of Holly Near, and even she is normally not focused on gay/lesbian issues – so non–lesbian-identified performers have dropped by from time to time. Tracy Chapman is perhaps the most prominent; she was at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival during her meteoric rise to the top of the charts with her hit album Tracy Chapman (1988). The lead single “Fast Car” was a Top 10 hit in both the U.S. and the U.K.; and Tracy Chapman won a clutch of Grammies in 1989 also. Remarkably, Michael Collings, a contestant on the television series Britain’s Got Talent performed the song in April 2011; and Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” re-entered the U.K. charts and attained the same #4 peak as it had in 1988.
Tracy Chapman is from Cleveland, Ohio and was given a ukulele by her mother once she noticed her talent at a young age; she was writing songs by the age of 8. Tracy’s performance of “Fast Car” during the nationally televised Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute led to its quick rise up the music charts. Tracy Chapman’s biggest hit song, “Give Me One Reason” wasn’t released until 1995, though it had been part of her concert repertoire for many years, including a performance on Saturday Night Live in December 1989. To date, Tracy Chapman has released eight albums, and she has recorded duets with a host of prominent musicians that include B. B. King, Eric Clapton, Luciano Pavarotti, Buddy Guy, and Dave Matthews.
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Melissa Etheridge is the first successful rock musician who is well known to be a lesbian. Melissa is from Leavenworth, Kansas and took up the guitar at age 8; she was performing in country music groups during her teenage years and later attended the Berklee College of Music. Melissa Etheridge sent a demo recording to Olivia Records in 1985 (they turned her down), and she also performed in lesbian bars in the Boston area while she was in college. However, Etheridge has never made an issue of her sexual orientation one way or the other, so she was not widely known to be a lesbian when she was signed by Island Records in 1986.
Melissa Etheridge’s first 6 albums have been certified Platinum, with her biggest seller being Yes I Am (1993), where the title is an evident confirmation of the rumors of her being a lesbian.
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Melissa Etheridge has had a solid career over the years along with a devoted fan base. Except for her Christmas album, Melissa’s other 11 studio albums have all made the Top 25 on Billboard – including her 2012 release 4th Street Feeling – and have also charted in several other nations. Her 2001 album Skin was written after the breakup of her longtime relationship with filmmaker Julie Cypher that included two children fathered by David Crosby via artificial insemination; writing for Allmusic, Kerry L. Smith says of this album: “If ever there was a perfect breakup album, this is it.”
Melissa Etheridge had a memorable appearance at the 2005 Grammy Awards, where she performed “Piece of My Heart” in a tribute to Janis Joplin. She was slick bald at the time due to chemotherapy for breast cancer (from which she recovered); and the boldness of her appearance there – some years before Robin Roberts’ shorn locks on Good Morning America – only endeared her further to the American public.
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Melissa Etheridge’s male counterpart in the rock world, Elton John has been openly gay for many years and is the largest selling recording artist of all time. His tribute to Princess Diana, “Candle in the Wind 1997” alone has sold 33 million copies, more than any other single in history. This song opens with the words “Goodbye English Rose” and is a rewrite of a song called “Candle in the Wind” from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973) that was in honor of Marilyn Monroe.
Though there are other prominent openly gay and lesbian celebrities – Ellen DeGeneres comes immediately to mind, plus any number of actors and actresses – I am aware of no other household names among active rock musicians. While Melissa Etheridge and Elton John remain beloved performers, the same could be said of Liberace back in the 1950’s (though of course, he was not openly gay). Most other lesbian and gay rockers are well outside the mainstream – not that there is anything wrong with that.
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This is not to say that there aren’t other prominent lesbian rock musicians; but for the most part, that fact was not known about them when most people were paying attention. Lesley Gore brought girl-group vocal stylings to the airwaves as a solo artist while she was still a teenager; in part this was accomplished by sometimes double-tracking her vocals, but her throaty singing is strong enough to stand on its own.
Lesley Gore’s first album, I’ll Cry If I Want To – the second line in her #1 hit song “It’s My Party” – collects numerous songs about crying, including her own answer song, “Judy’s Turn to Cry”, plus competent covers of pop songs of the day like “Misty” and “Cry Me a River” that most early-1960’s albums are saddled with. There are numerous other gems nonetheless in Gore’s early career. One of Lesley Gore’s best songs is the proto-feminist anthem “You Don’t Own Me” from her second album, Lesley Gore Sings of Mixed-Up Hearts; her other two hits from that album, “She’s a Fool” and “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” are also top-notch. “California Nights” reached the Top 20 in 1967; the song was co-written by Marvin Hamlisch as was “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows”.
These two albums were produced by Quincy Jones, one of the best in the business – Michael Jackson’s Thriller is only the best-known of his production efforts – and a talented jazz artist and bandleader in his own right with a Renaissance-man career that dates back to the early 1950’s.
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While she had never any other major hit songs, Lesley Gore continued recording, and she also appeared on the final episode of The Donna Reed Show in 1966. Her other acting credits include two episodes of the Batman television series in early 1967 as one of Catwoman’s minions.
In 1980, Lesley Gore wrote songs for the movie Fame, including “Out Here on My Own” that was co-written with her brother Michael Gore; he won an Academy Award for Best Original Song for the title song, “Fame” (the lyrics were written by Dean Pitchford).
In a 2005 interview, Lesley Gore acknowledged that she was a lesbian who had been in a committed relationship since the early 1980’s. Also in 2005, she released the critically acclaimed album, Ever Since.
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Janis Ian is a singer-songwriter who was only 13 when she wrote and recorded her first single about an interracial romance (perhaps the first song about that topic ever), “Society’s Child (Baby, I’ve Been Thinking)”. The history of this song is bathed in controversy, and “Society’s Child” was released three different times between 1965 and 1967; ultimately, the song reached #14 on the charts in the summer of 1967 and eventually sold 600,000 copies. Years later, the President of Atlantic Records, Jerry Wexler publicly apologized to Janis Ian for refusing to release the single and returning the master recording to her; “Society’s Child” finally came out on Verve/Forecast Records.
Janis Ian might have remained a most remarkable one-hit wonder had she not taken up other controversial issues – as related by Wikipedia, “adolescent cruelty, the illusion of popularity, and teenage angst” – with her biggest hit song “At Seventeen” (1975). The song and the accompanying album, Between the Lines both reached #1 on the Adult Contemporary Singles and Hot 100 Albums Billboard charts, respectively, with much less drama than had befallen “Society’s Child”. What's more, Janis Ian won the Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Performance – Female that year, beating out Linda Ronstadt (whose breakthrough album Heart Like a Wheel had been nominated), as well as Olivia Newton-John and Helen Reddy.
Janis Ian has continued to release albums; Allmusic lists 21 studio albums. She publicly came out as a lesbian in 1993.
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Alt-country star k.d. lang has had an angular, androgynous persona since her first public appearances in the late 1980’s; she publicly came out as a lesbian in 1992 and has been one of the more activist among popular musicians. The band that k.d. lang formed, the Reclines started out as a Patsy Cline tribute band.
The 1992 album by k.d. lang, Ingénue was a departure from her country-flavored earlier albums like Angel with a Lariat and Absolute Torch and Twang and includes her best known song, the startlingly fantastic “Constant Craving” plus another remarkable track, “Miss Chatelaine”.
Over her career, k.d. lang has collaborated with many prominent musicians from Roy Orbison, to Dwight Yoakam, to Tony Bennett, to fellow Canadian artist Anne Murray. She first came to prominence during a performance at the closing ceremonies of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary; in 2010, k.d. lang performed Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” at the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
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I believe I was in Indianapolis when I picked up a local tabloid newspaper and first read of a band called Sleater-Kinney – Allmusic says of them that they are the greatest punk rock band of the 1990’s and 2000’s – though I honestly don’t remember much about the article and interview except that they are an all-female rock band.
Singer/guitarist Corin Tucker was one-half of the early riot grrrl duo Heavens to Betsy when she met a classically trained pianist named Carrie Brownstein. Brownstein was so impressed by Tucker’s band and other bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile (which had previously been Corin Tucker’s own influences) that she became a guitarist and vocalist herself and started a band called Excuse 17. Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17 were often at the same gigs, and the two women originally started Sleater-Kinney as a side project. As can be seen, there is no one named Sleater or Kinney in the band; the name is taken from Sleater Kinney Road (off Interstate-5), where one of their early practice spaces was located.
Once Lora MacFarlane (who was originally from Australia) was hired as their permanent drummer, Sleater-Kinney quickly put together their first album, Sleater-Kinney, an indie-rock masterpiece that came out on Chainsaw Records in 1995. The rough-cut nature of this album only gave a hint of the glories to come as Sleater-Kinney refined and enriched their sound in future albums. Chainsaw Records had been started by Donna Dresch who was in yet another Pacific Northwest punk rock band, Team Dresch.
Sleater-Kinney released a second album on this label, Call the Doctor which brought the band greater renown; this is probably around the time that I read the article on the band in Indianapolis. Shortly thereafter, Sleater-Kinney was signed by a record company headquartered in the heart of riot grrrl territory in Olympia, WA having the delightful name of Kill Rock Stars. With Janet Weiss as the new drummer (originally in Quasi), each of their four albums for this label seemed better than the last, culminating in One Beat (2002).
Writing for Time magazine in July 2001 for their salute to the best in America in the new millennium, rock critic Greil Marcus named Sleater-Kinney the nation’s best rock band.
In 2003, Sleater-Kinney toured as the opening act for Pearl Jam, and that is when we were able to see them in New Orleans. Their experiences playing in large arenas led to their first album for Sub Pop Records, The Woods. Unfortunately, Sleater-Kinney announced a hiatus not long after its release, though there are rumors of an future reunion for the band.
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Sleater-Kinney is not a “lesbian band”, nor are Bikini Kill, L7, Heavens to Betsy, Excuse 17, or most of the other riot grrrl bands I know of. Excuse 17 is actually classified as a “queercore” band by Wikipedia, a more overtly gay/lesbian offshoot of punk rock that emerged alongside riot grrrl, and in many of the same places.
The term “queer” began to gain currency in the early 1990’s, and not only because homosexuals desired to reclaim the long-time slur. By this time period, the sexual minorities of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and trans-gendered individuals were aggregated under the unwieldy acronym of LGBT. Eventually “queer” became the umbrella term that “gay” had never quite managed and covered not just these identified sexual minorities, but also anyone whose sexual identity was malleable, or whose sexual predilections were frowned upon regardless of which gender(s) were involved, or who didn’t like the little boxes that others insisted they should fit into – or indeed anyone who chose not to be identified with the rigid heterosexual mores of the larger society.
The idea that riot grrrl and female queercore rock bands must be lesbian (or at least bisexual) probably comes from the power of their brand of punk rock, coupled with their strongly feminist stance – with the latter dating back to the women’s music days. It is indeed almost impossible to imagine these musicians leaving a concert venue and going off to be a happy homemaker in the suburbs. But things are not always what they seem. Thus, these rock bands on the margins, along with their fans could share a club and a stage and a love for music and a political philosophy without worrying about who is going to bed with whom. There are, after all, more important things in life than that.
Returning to Sleater-Kinney, Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein dated briefly when the band was first started – Carrie now says that it was for “a second” – and this fact was expanded in Spin magazine to indicate that the two, if not the band as a whole were bisexual. The magazine story caught the two women off-guard; they were not offended by the labeling – mostly they were upset that no one had ever asked them the question; people just made assumptions. In 2012, Carrie Brownstein verified in an interview that no one in Sleater-Kinney is lesbian, although Corin Tucker self-identifies as bisexual.
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For me, Sleater-Kinney has transcended all of these categories. Their songwriting is simply brilliant and as varied as anyone I can think of. What Sleater-Kinney can do with their guitars (and without a bass guitar in sight) is a revelation. Corin Tucker’s lead vocals aren’t everyone’s cup of tea (they tell me), but they suit me just fine, and those of Carrie Brownstein do as well. I have little doubt that I have played One Beat more than any other album that has been released in the current century; my second favorite among their albums (at the moment at least) is their first, Sleater-Kinney. Original drummer Lora MacFarlane performs the vocals on the truly marvelous “Lora’s Song” on that album that reminds me of past UARB Fur.
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BOYSKOUT, this month’s Under-Appreciated Rock Band are pretty open about being a lesbian band – they used the term “rad queer band” in one interview. Though neither their Allmusic write-up nor the Bomp! Records packaging mentions this. the name of the last song on the album, “Girl on Girl Action” gives it away if you hadn’t already figured it out.
However, “queer” might be a better term than lesbian. When asked in a 2009 interview, “Are you lesbians? Bi-sexual? Are you just experimenting? Are you all like that or just some of you?”, bandleader Leslie Satterfield responded, “Yes”, then continued: “We don’t want to be pigeonholed into a stereotype. I for one have had relationships with men as well, but I don’t want to be labeled as ‘Bi’ or any other label. It really depends on the person for me.”
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Like the women’s music pioneers before them, there is hardly any sexuality on the Boyskout songs; and anyone can enjoy this CD, which sounds great on the first spin and only gets better over time. Even on “Girl on Girl Action”, the sexy mood of the breathey vocals is undercut by a very slow rendition of the iconic quote from the chorus of “Is That All There Is?”: “If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing / Let’s break out the booze and have a ball”.
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Even in the context of 1969 – one of the most eclectic years in the history of music (if I remember right, there was once a television program on the music in that year) – “Is That All There Is?” hit the record charts utterly out of left field. Particularly as performed in the version by Peggy Lee – who was previously best known for her hit “Fever” in the late 1950’s (with “Fever” later becoming probably the best known cover song by Madonna) – “Is That All There Is?” seems to come off like a 1940’s-style pop song. The verses tell of the singer’s growing disillusionment with life – first at a house fire, then at a circus, and finally at love – followed by the chorus (the only part that is sung): You can almost see her world-weary shrugs in the way that Peggy Lee sings those lines. In a final twist, the chorus is cut short before the last verse where the singer has decided that suicide is no answer either: “I’m not ready for the final disappointment”.
In a sense, “Is That All There Is?” is a grimmer retelling of the Joni Mitchell song “Both Sides Now” that Judy Collins released as a Top 10 hit the previous year; it had appeared on Collins’ 1967 album, Wildflowers. For all I know, that could have been the genesis of the song. The first recorded version, by New York disc jockey Dan Daniel was released in March 1968.
The song was written by the prolific songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. “Is That All There Is?” has little in common with their better known songs like “Jailhouse Rock”, “Hound Dog”, “Kansas City”, or the numerous hits by the Coasters; although songs that the two co-wrote with others, such as “Stand by Me” and “On Broadway” have some of the flavor of this song.
The piano work along with the arrangements on the Peggy Lee hit version of “Is That All There Is?” were by Randy Newman at the beginning of his career (he was also the orchestra conductor) – his debut album, Randy Newman came out in 1968 – and there is no doubt that this song was right up his alley.
Peggy Lee won the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for “Is That All There Is?”, and the song was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
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If I had to guess, I would imagine that Boyskout heard “Is That All There Is?” as performed by PJ Harvey for the soundtrack of the film, Basquiat (1996) rather than the Peggy Lee hit version of “Is That All There Is?”. Past UARB Thomas Anderson once perversely said that his favorite singer-songwriter is Iggy Pop; and there seems to be no other category in which to place Polly Jean Harvey either. Harvey grew up on a sheep farm in Yeovil, England; her father worked in a quarry, and her mother was an artist. She learned to play the guitar and saxophone at an early age and was a backing musician in her teens.
Polly Jean Harvey formed a trio in 1991 called PJ Harvey with Steve Vaughan (bass guitar) and Robert Ellis (drums). They became a sensation on the indie-rock circuit, with their debut album Dry (1992) and particularly Rid of Me (1993) being released to wide acclaim. I don’t have Harvey’s early albums yet, though I do have 4 Track Demos that show the material on Rid of Me in a different format. While the intention was to present the PJ Harvey songs in a less abrasive form than the original CD, it is hard to conceive of demos being noisier and at the same time more complete than on 4 Track Demos; normally, a demo is laid down in an unadorned, often acoustic manner in order to establish the copyright and to provide a backbone for the finished track.
By this time, the original trio had broken up, and Harvey was now on her own; but she continued to release her albums under the name PJ Harvey with her full name Polly Jean Harvey given in the credits.
My favorite PJ Harvey album thus far (and also the first one that I purchased, though I had heard about her for years), Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea (2000) is drawn from a six-month sojourn in New York City in 1999. I had been thinking that the album was her response to 9/11; it was actually released before that horrific date, but there is a sense of impending doom on many of these songs, particularly on “One Line” and her duet with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, “This Mess We’re In”. PJ Harvey’s thrilling video for “This Is Love” is what originally grabbed me; the song has the memorable lyric: “I can’t believe life is so complex / When I just want to sit here and watch you undress.”
For years, I couldn’t play Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea often enough or loud enough. The opening track, “Big Exit” became the song that I lived by for a long time: “I met a man / He told me straight / ‘You gotta leave / It’s getting late’ / Too many cops / Too many guns / All trying to do something / No-one else has done” (though I heard the last line as “I’m trying to do something no one else has done”).
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By the way, there are no boys in Boyskout, just like there are no girls in the Lazy Cowgirls – but, oh, if you think outlaw country is a treat (as I do), you should hear the outlaw rock that Pat Todd and the boys lay down in their albums, from Tapping the Source onward.
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Okay, enough detours; let me get back to the UARB. In 2001, Leslie Satterfield (guitar and vocals) was offered the opportunity to be the opening act for her favorite rock band, an Olympia, WA experimental duo called The Need. Unfortunately, she didn’t yet have a rock band to do the job and only three weeks until the concert; so she quickly recruited several friends, first drummer Caroline Mills – they were in a band together though I am not sure the name of it. China Lajczock (keyboards and most of the lead vocals) had been working in a coffee shop, and the other bandmembers met Hannah Reiff (bass guitar) by buying her a drink on “dollar drink night” at a dive somewhere.
While the band was being put together, they saw a news story about a gay troop leader who was being forced out of the Boy Scouts; so they figured that having a lesbian band take the name Boyskout would really offend them. Happily, the ban on openly gay Boy Scouts was finally lifted as of January 1, 2014.
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Boyskout initially put out a single on clear vinyl in 2003 on Isota Records, “Secrets” b/w “Pictures from the Moon”. Their music caught the attention of the Bomp! Records label Alive Records, which included two Boyskout songs on their compilation album, The Sound of San Francisco. The two songs were “Secrets” and “School of Etiquette” – of these three early songs, only “Secrets” is on the Alive CD, even though the name of the CD is School of Etiquette.
Boyskout recorded their first album in April 2003 and November 2003 with the assistance of Daniel Dietrick on bass guitar and keyboards, The producer is Jeff Saltzman; in the same year he produced the debut album Hot Fuss for the Killers, another successful entry in the Garage Rock Revival of the early 2000’s (the band’s name is taken from the nickname of rockabilly pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis, “Killer”).
I have previously written of The Sound of San Francisco and quoted nearly all of Mick Farren’s liner notes for that album; this is the first (though not the last) UARB to be drawn from the roster. My tribute to Mick Farren is coming up later this year; his death last year upset me as much as any I can think of from the music world since that of John Lennon.
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The debut album by Boyskout, School of Etiquette came out on Alive Records in January 2004. Mark Jenkins with the Washington Post has written of this album: “If some CBGB’s Frankenstein had managed, circa 1977, to transplant Patti Smith’s sensibility into Blondie’s garage-band pop, the result would have sounded something like BoySkout’s School of Etiquette. Outfitted in such New Wavey accessories as sneakers and skinny ties, this lesbian-rock quartet revives such Smithian motifs as drowning and the erotic appeal of outlaws, but with girl-group bounce. School of Etiquette may not be genteel, but it is impeccably arranged.”
BoySkout’s music is more new wave than riot grrrl; other ingredients are old-style punk sensibilities plus a love of catchy pop tunes, and it seems clear to me that the bandmembers have been enjoying their Sleater-Kinney albums. The songs have an underlying current of angst and suspicion coupled with a sense of fun. For instance, the anxious music on “Secrets” creates a feeling of foreboding underlying these lyrics: “She told you all my secrets / She knew them all so well / She told you all my secrets / . . . She promised not to tell . . .”
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School of Etiquette includes another song called “Back to Bed”; Leslie Satterfield thinks that a playful video for this song was misunderstood. In a 2009 interview for an online magazine called The New Gay, she was asked about “inter-band dating”. After acknowledging that there was some – at one point, Boyskout put a stop to the practice since it was causing so much tension in the band – Satterfield then went on: “One of the members that I really loved and felt like was a really great member for our first record was this girl Hannah [Reiff]. In one of our videos – everyone was like, ‘Oh, all the BoySkouts are kissing each other.’ That really wasn’t true. Hannah and I made out, but we were dating at the time.”
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In early 2004, Boyskout relocated to New York City and were evidently a hit on the local music scene, though they returned to the Bay Area later that year. A Summer 2004 story posted on neonnyc.com raved about the band: “If ever there was a group destined to be a New York, New York outfit, Boy Skout (alternately known as Boyskout and BoySkout) is it. We caught them for the first time at Pianos as a trio – their keyboardist/vocalist [China Lajczock] having recently departed. And we had heard that the transition to a threesome had punked them up a bit more.” Leslie Satterfield had become the lead vocalist at this point.
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Boyskout had a successful appearance in 2006 at South by Southwest (SXSW); Wikipedia describes the event as “a set of film, interactive, and music festivals and conferences that take place every spring (usually in March) in Austin, Texas”.
Enthused by the reaction, and desiring a follow-up to their first album, Boyskout recruited two acclaimed record producers, David Schiffman – who had worked with Nine Inch Nails, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, and Jimmy Eat World – and Donny Newenhouse (Film School, the Coachwhips).
Their second CD, Another Life was released on Three Ring Records later in 2006. Besides Leslie Satterfield, the other bandmembers were evidently Christina Stanley on keyboard and violin and Ingrid Dahl on guitar; the male sorta-member, Daniel Dietrick was still playing bass guitar.
Writing in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Tomas Palermo wrote: “The songs I’ve heard . . . are as refreshing as local underground music can get.”
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As time went on, bandmembers came and went, with Leslie Satterfield being the mainstay for Boyskout. In about 2008, Boyskout appeared at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and were on the bill at Phasefest in 2009 – described on their website as being “an annual Queer music and arts festival dedicated to the development, exposure and interaction of queer and queer-allied musicians and artists, both national and international”.
Speaking in the 2009 interview in The New Gay, Ingrid Dahl says of the band: “Right now we’ve been adjusting to new members. Boyskout is very transient, members come and go a lot. We’re all in different projects. We’re only playing 4 or 5 shows a year. Playing Phasefest is a big deal. We’re not even playing Brooklyn where we have a pretty strong fan base. We’ve declined tours with bands. We’re all in new projects.”
Evidently Boyskout broke up shortly afterward; a 2010 story on the band mentioned that.
