Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (51 page)

RIOT MOMS AND OTHER ANGRY WOMEN

When you consider that slightly more than half the people in the world are female, the idea of classifying “women in rock” as a sort of specialty genre seems absurd. Still, popular music reflects the culture in which it arises, and there has been a definite male dominance in rock. So while in an ideal world “women in rock” would have long ago been accepted as a given, the growing equality of the sexes in music continues to be newsworthy. And certainly it is one of the defining stories in rock music of the ‘90s.

But the fact that women in the past decade have made a larger contribution to rock and related genres than ever before is simply a matter of statistics. What’s more interesting is the proliferation of music that, on one level, speaks directly to women’s experience and on another, more esoteric level seeks to express, in a purely sonic language, a feminine nature and sense of creativity. While there are certainly more distant examples of female-oriented music, punk rock offered a philosophy that proved particularly inspiring and fertile for women. By placing itself defiantly outside the mainstream culture and purporting to throw out all the rules, punk presented itself as a natural arena for women to empower and define themselves. Patti Smith, who came out of the pre-punk downtown New York / CBGB scene of the mid-‘70s, was a crucial first step and has provided a powerful role model for women in the post-punk world of rock. Though she never claimed a kinship with Smith, Lydia Lunch emerged out of the same scene with a similar poetry-and-rock approach. But where Smith tends to be universalist in her writing – speaking equally to men and women – Lunch has been confrontationally female-oriented with words that target sexual abuse, gender inequality, and her own (female-specific, she’d claim) inner torment.

Taking shape around the same time, but across the ocean in England, the punk-rock explosion spearheaded by the Sex Pistols gave birth to an even more accomplished succession of female bands. X-Ray Spex, one of the earliest female-led punk bands in London, mocked the expectations society has for little girls and the consumer culture that manipulates them. The Slits started out in a similar vein, but soon developed to a point where they transcended punk’s musical limitations and began to define a post-punk sound that was characteristically female in sound and structure. The Raincoats, meanwhile, progressed along a nearly identical course as their friends the Slits, but lasted longer. At their best, the Raincoats rose above their punk roots to make a music that was a completely intimate expression of their own female creativity: detailed and rhythmic, nonlinear and open-ended, flowing and richly textured.

Jean Smith, Mecca Normal:

I started listening to a lot of punk bands from London, specifically the ones with aggressive women in them. The Raincoats, Slits, X-Ray Spex, Poison Girls, Crass, Frightwig. All those bands were monumentally inspiring for one thing, and would certainly be the reason I started feeling confident enough to express the ideas I was shuffling through: political and feminist concerns, anarchist concepts, general social ideas from a dissatisfied prospective.

Of course, these groups were not inspirational only to women. Regardless of gender, the music they made belongs in the company of the best post-punk had to offer:
Wire
,
Public Image Limited
,
Gang of Four
, and so on. Indeed, everything written about those bands in the chapter on British post-punk also applies to groups like the Slits and Raincoats. But for their role in setting a precedent and providing a model for “riot grrrl” groups like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, grunge-oriented bands like Hole and Babes in Toyland, and even for distinctly female musical voices such as Tori Amos and P.J. Harvey, these groups deserve a chapter of their own.

LYDIA LUNCH

Carla Bozulich, Geraldine Fibbers:

She has a really commanding presence. She’s a really articulate storyteller. She gets into the side of being a woman that I find really excellent, where a woman lets somebody think they’re in control because they get off on that, but the woman really knows it’s not that way at all, that she’s really in control. We have a song called “Song About Walls” about being in a situation where the girl is playing that game with her boyfriend. It’s an interesting dynamic Lydia Lunch brings to light really well. And it’s something I obsess over, so that’s one reason I love Lydia Lunch.

Since she began as a teenager over two decades ago, Lydia Lunch has been a nearly constant source of the angriest, most pained and cathartic outpourings in the worlds of music and poetry. Lunch’s earliest music earned her a position as one of the first and strongest female voices in post-punk and experimental rock, and her subsequent career as outspoken radical feminist poet and all-around angry woman has made her the ass-kicking aunt to riot grrrls everywhere. More directly, her fearless examination of taboo subjects and personal traumas has made her an important role model to women rockers of the ‘90s such as Courtney Love and Kat Bjelland of Babes in Toyland.

At age 14, Lydia Koch began running away from her parents’ home in Rochester to visit New York City. Escaping the sexual abuse she has since documented in her work, she found a scene where poets and punk bands intermingled and liberated themselves through expression. By 16, Koch had left home for good, taken a waitressing job at CBGB, and remade herself as Lydia Lunch. Soon, she’d hooked up with saxophonist James Chance and drummer Bradly Field, with whom she formed her first band, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks. Along with the bands Mars and DNA, which both practiced in the space where Lunch lived, the Jerks formed a new scene of like-minded friends interested in pursuing a more radical deconstruction of rock than what punk was offering. Before she’d turned 18, the “teenage Jesus” had landed in the center of an influential downtown movement she herself had named “no wave.”

Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth:

Punk rock was becoming something to be cynical about, you started hearing about how Macy’s was having a punk rock window, or how major labels thought the best way to promote this music was to call it new wave and make it less dangerous. And so you started having people like Lydia Lunch, who to me was super-influential, saying things in the local newspapers like, “Oh, I don’t really have time for Patti Smith, she’s a hippie. I don’t have time for
Television
because they play long wanky lead guitar songs.” Here was somebody my age coming to town, saying, “fuck that stuff, we’re into total destruction.” That attitude in general was influential.

While Chance soon departed to form his own no wave group, the Contortions, Lunch, Field, and a rotating cast of bass players continued bashing out what Lunch described as “aural terror.” Featuring Field’s one-drum percussion with Lunch’s noise / slide guitar and tortured vocals, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks songs like
The Closet
and
Red Alert
lasted little more than a minute or two, but offered a lifetime of emotional release. Dedicated to a “less is more” principle, Lunch’s band became known for its 10-minute live shows. Similarly, Teenage Jesus offered only minimal recorded work. In its four-year existence, the band put out two singles and an EP (produced by Robert Quine of
Richard Hell & the Voidoids
) and contributed four songs to the crucial no wave compilation,
No New York
.

Concurrent with her time in the Jerks, Lunch also played in a short-lived band called Beirut Slump. By 1980, though, Lunch was ready for a change in direction; disbanding both groups, she embarked on a solo career. In place of the Jerks’ numbing blows, her debut album
Queen of Siam
offered a mellow and murky cross between the
Residents
and lounge jazz, with Lunch as a relatively sedate torch (or was it torture?) singer. Though much of the music – including full orchestral pieces – was effective, Lunch’s vocals were not, and within the year Lunch had formed a new, harder-rocking group, called 8 Eyed Spy.

A quintet featuring bassist George Scott (who played with
John Cale
as well as the Contortions) and Beirut Slump / Jerks member Jim Sclavunos (now in Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds), 8 Eyed Spy presented Lunch as hard rock frontwoman on avant blues originals like
Swamp Song
and punked-out covers like
I Want Candy
(before Bow Wow Wow got to it) and
Diddy Wah Diddy
. With Scott’s heroin overdose in 1980, the band ended before it had released a record, though two posthumous recordings have appeared. Following an even shorter-lived turn in the unrecorded Devil Dogs, Lunch headed west to Los Angeles where she formed yet another group, 13.13.

After collaborating on a book of poetry with X’s Exene Cervenka (they’d collaborate again on a 1995 spoken-word album), the ever-restless Lunch left Los Angeles for Europe, where she recorded with
Einstürzende Neubauten
and collaborated with the
Birthday Party
on a number of projects. In addition to recording songs with the group (which later appeared on
Honeymoon in Red
), Lunch worked with the group’s guitarist Rowland Howard and wrote “fifty one-art plays” with vocalist Nick Cave.

Nick Cave:

She had quite an impact on our lives. Her scope, of doing readings and all of this sort of stuff, and moving out of just strict rock and roll music, had some influence as well.

In 1984, when Lunch was barely 23 years old and had already passed through a half-dozen music projects in nearly as many cities, she returned to New York to start her own company, Widowspeak, so that she could release the spoken-word material that was becoming a major part of her art. Here she entered into an even more intense phase of activity, writing and acting in the gritty East Village films of Richard Kern (The Right Side of my Brain with Henry Rollins, and Fingered) and making music with just about anyone who could catch up with her, including her lover Jim Thirwell (a.k.a. Clint Ruin, a.k.a. Foetus), members of X and Red Hot Chili Peppers, members of Sonic Youth (separately and collectively), Mars (on a soundtrack to one of Kern’s films), Rowland Howard (again), and Nick Cave (again) with Thirwell and Marc Almond (as part of a touring group called the Immaculate Consumptives).

In the ‘90s, though Lunch has continued to write (books, comics, and plays), teach classes, and, relatively recently, make music again, it is in her spoken-word performance that her creative fires have burned brightest. Through her live monologues and spoken-word recordings such as
The Uncensored Lydia Lunch
,
Oral Fixation
, and
Conspiracy of Women
, Lunch rips out her own blood and guts and puts them on display for anyone to see. In her stories, confessions, damnations, and tirades she can be alternately shocking, hilarious, and admittedly often a nag. But it’s here, at her most naked, where Lunch’s true voice emerges, and where the implications of her message are clearest. As she says in an interview for the book, Angry Women, “I’m only using my own example for the benefit of all who suffer the same multiple frustrations: fear, horror, anger, hatred. And the stories aren’t just personal – often they’re very political.”

Will Oldham, Palace:

On the
Uncensored
cassette, the kinds of stories she told and the way she modulated her voice in telling the story, she inspired discomfort in the listener and built it very well even before the really brutal aspects of the piece came around. I listened to that tape a lot, and I learned some things from her about understatement in expressing morbid or confrontational ideas. As a writer and a speaker.

DISCOGRAPHY

TEENAGE JESUS & THE JERKS

(Various Artists)
No New York
(Antilles, 1978)
; the band contributed four tracks to the
Brian Eno
-produced no wave compilation.

Teenage Jesus & the Jerks
(Pink) EP
(Migraine / Lust/Unlust, 1979)
; this pink vinyl release collects the group’s singles.

Pre-EP
(Ze, 1979)
; Lunch’s earliest recording, featuring TJ&J’s original lineup with James Chance on sax.

Everything
(Atavistic, 1995)
; a reissue containing all of the band’s recorded material.

8 EYED SPY

Live
(ROIR, 1981)
; a document of the band’s 1980 live performances.

8 Eyed Spy
(Fetish, 1981; Atavistic, 1997)
; a part live, part studio album released after the band had broken up.

SOLO AND COLLABORATIONS

Queen of Siam
(Ze, 1980; Widowspeak, 1985)
; a subdued solo debut, heavy on the noir-jazz numbers.

13.13
(Ruby, 1982; Widowspeak, 1988)
; recorded with an LA.-based band of the same name.

(w/
Birthday Party
)
The Agony is the Ecstasy
EP
(4AD, 1982)
; a live Lunch gig in London appears on one side of this EP, while the other features the
Birthday Party
’s
Drunk on the Pope’s Blood
.

(w/ Michael Gira)
Hard Rock
(Ecstatic Peace, 1984)
; a spoken-word cassette that also features the
Swans
’ leader.

(w/ Lucy Hamilton)
The Drowning of Lucy Hamilton
(Widowspeak, 1985)
; an instrumental soundtrack to The Right Side of My Brain, a film starring Lunch,

In Limbo
EP
(Doublevision, 1984; Widowspeak, 1986)
; a six-track record featuring Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, reissued together with
Lucy Hamilton
in 1989 as
Drowning in Limbo
.

Hysterie
(Widowspeak / CD Presents, 1986)
; a double album compilation featuring the best of Lunch’s past bands, as well as some collaborations.

Honeymoon in Red
(Widowspeak, 1987; Atavistic, 1996)
; an album recorded in ‘82 and ‘83 as a
Birthday Party
collaboration, remixed and featuring Thurston Moore.

(w/ Thurston Moore)
The Crumb
EP / (w/ Clint Ruin)
Stinkfist
EP
(Widowspeak, 1988; Atavistic, 1996)
; two EPs collected onto one CD.

(Harry Crews)
Naked in Garden Hills
(Widowspeak, 1989)
; a project with Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon.

The Uncensored Lydia Lunch
/
Oral Fixation
(Widowspeak, 1989)
; two spoken-word albums, the first originally from 1985, collected on one CD.

(w/ Henry Rollins, Hubert Selby Jr., Don Bajema)
Our Fathers Who Aren’t in Heaven
(Widowspeak, 1990)
; a spoken-word double album, split with three other writer/poets, including former
Black Flag
vocalist Rollins.

Conspiracy of Women
(Widowspeak, 1991)
; another spoken-word album.

(w/ Roland S. Howard)
Shotgun Wedding
(Triple X, 1991)
; a collaboration with the former
Birthday Party
guitarist.

Crimes against Nature
(Triple X, 1993)
; a three-CD box set of Lunch’s spoken-word material.

Universal Infiltrators
(Atavistic, 1995)
; further spoken-word adventures.

(w/ Exene Cervenka)
Rude Hieroglyphics
(Rykodisc, 1995)
;a spoken-word collaboration with X’s lead singer.

(w/ Glyn Styler)
The Desperate Ones
(Truckstop / Atavistic,1997)
; a three-song return to music recordings.