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Caught
In Flux #3: Gina Birch Ana da Silva Gina: I always rocked, ever since I was tiny. I just rocked. I used to sing all the time, used to sing in the back of the car. My dad used to say "Oh for god's sake, Gina, shut up!" That's my first story. Ana...? Ana: I had these older cousins who brought all these records. They lived in Hong Kong and they brought all these Elvis records...this is a long time ago...Elvis, the Everly Bros., and he used to play all these singles and we used to make our own top record list. We used to do two at a time, to see which was the better of the two. We always knew which one was going to win; I think it was "Jailhouse Rock." So I always liked music. I used to listen to the BBC because I'm from Portugal, this island called Madeira. I used to listen to the World Service; there was this Top 20 list, and in those days it included Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles and all those people...a lot better than later. I used to very faithfully listen to all that and write them down on a piece of paper. Gina: I think when I was 7 or 8, my dad came home one day with a little mono record player and after that, each Saturday, one of the four of us in the family could choose a single. My dad's favorites were the Ronettes: "Baby I Love You" and "Be My Baby." But we could only listen to the Ronettes if...my dad used to say we could only listen to them at full volume. Only when he felt like it...Then of course we had Beatles records, but I used to love the Ronettes. And then we got The Sound Of Music soundtrack, and that was always a big influence, and we had Swan Lake. Ana: That's where "In Love" comes from. That kind of music. Gina: Julie Andrews meets the Ronettes. Ana, at what point did you move from Portugal to England, and what prompted the move? Ana: 1974. I had been in London three or four years before I moved there. I just felt so excited to see all these people dressed in different things. I went to to couple of gigs and things like that. I just thought that was the place to be because people could just be something different from everybody else and nobody even bothered looking. I once saw this guy, a black guy all made up and his eyebrows plucked, and he was walking down the street and nobody even looked at him! If he was walking like that in Portugal, I think he would have been lynched! I just thought it was a good place to express your own way: it was really great. And obviously there was the music; a lot of it came from America. My cousin was there (in England), so I ended up trying it there. Had you been in bands before the Raincoats? Ana: I used to strum acoustic guitar (in Portugal) and strum Bob Dylan songs and Joan Baez. That's it, really. Gina: I listened to an awful lot of music, but I never dreamt I would be involved in a band. I did a year of art school in Nottingham and I fell completely in love with conceptual art. I thought I would be an artist, and then I came to London and the art scene seemed to be so much less vibrant at the art school than in Nottingham. And punk was happening. And Ana and I...there were about three or four people from our course who used to go to the Roxy. It was really us two who used to go...We were at every gig at the Roxy, really, 3 or 4 nights per week, just watching all these band. Eventually we just decided we could have a go, too. I remember going to a gig at the Royal College of Art seeing the Clash and Subway Sect. Vic Godard was up on stage and he had the lyrics and was reading them (she says while holding up the bill)...and I was like, "this is so fantastic!" I'd already seen the Sex Pistols once before that and completely fell in love with them. There was the Cortinas, the Slits played there, Chelsea... Ana: X-Ray Spex came a little later, they were great anyway. Poly Styrene...I was in love with her, she was just amazing. She used to wear these day-glo kind of clothes and plastic handbags, a bit like Delia does with Mambo Taxi now. I thought she was really cool. Later on she shaved her hair and had these braces on her teeth. It was really an emotional thing to see her. It's not like we were doing something that was as "serious" as some other people at the college. They were doing like systems music and was more... Gina: Philip Glass-oriented stuff. So we were kind of "frivolous." Why bother? I think one of our tutors came to see us and said "Well...what can I say??" I went back during the Raincoats to finish and there would be strange messages on the notice board, strange things written like..."My hero." Mark
Eitzel Jennifer
Pierce ...ln my memory, the first music I remember hearing was my mom singing lullabies, "Under The Bayberry Tree" and sing-songy things like that. I had tons of brothers and Sisters – there’s seven kids in our family – so there were lots of record players, lots of records around. There’d be Beatles singles that I’d snuck out of their room, they had "ln-A-Gadda-Da-Vita" and stuff like that...but I more clearly remember the records that were considered to be mine. Hand-me-downs, basically. There was a series of folk records that had things like "Shoe-Tail Fly" and "Jimmy Crack Corn." I’m sure my parents bought them for my sisters and brothers because they were supposed to be educational. But that and the soundtrack to Mary Poppins were definitely the earliest recorded music I remember. Whether or not they shaped me, I don’t know. I think they probably did. Those records I played and loved, but the first record I really considered to be mine –and I know I didn't buy it myself was the Smothers Brothers’ Live At The Purple Onion. I'm sure that influenced me; there's no doubt. People always say to me, "You always talk between songs!" and I say, "well, uh, because..." No, I don't know, there's probably not such a direct correlation, but the first I record I ever owned was that. It was someone else's in the family, but I somehow got it in my mind that it was mine. I didn't really buy any records until I was in seventh or eighth grade, when we bought singles to play at the school dances. But this one was really something I treasured. I also listened to a lot of Disney soundtracks when I was little, and then I realized what pop music was. My sister Mary Ann, the next one to me, was really into disco and stuff like that. The first concert I ever went to she took me to –I was in eighth grade and went and saw Earth, Wind and Fire. It was that kind of thing: Tavares, the Sylvers, just kind of really poppy. And then my older sisters were really into Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick, so I heard a lot of that as well. Hal David, man, what a genius. Another record I really loved –and I wish I could find it – was a 45 we had of the theme song to The Dick Van Dyke Show. I would play that one over and over. I’d set up the back room in simulation of the show, and then I'd do the thing where I'd trip over. I was really thinking I was Dick Van Dyke for awhile. What were some of the records you bought for the school dances? "Island Girl" by Elton John. I just listened to it again recently and it's the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever heard. I love Elton John, but man, that song is vile, "Brick House" I bought, "Love Rollercoaster," "Strawberry Letter 23" by…not the Ohio Players… (we exclaim "The Brothers Johnson!" simultaneously). That kind of thing. You were living in Phoenix at the time? Yeah. This was in Phoenix. When did you discover that Phoenix had a local music scene? It happened in high school, I think. I remember I heard a lot about punk rock; there would be articles in Rolling Stone, the big-format magazines. I used to buy a lot of those. So I think I heard about it, and then I remember seeing Talking Heads on American Bandstand. I was like, "Is that what they're talking about?" In my high school, everybody drank like crazy. In Phoenix at the time, the drinking age was 19, so basically anyone could buy beer. We heard about this place where you could go, and I'm sure we just thought we could drink beer there without getting carded, and it happened to be a punk rock club, a place called Merlin's in Tempe. l remember the awful Phoenix new wave band was called Billy Clone the Sane. I think that was the first show we saw there, and oh, my God, everyone in the band had skinny ties and was jumping up and down. – this was maybe the end of 1979. I was a junior in high school, I guess. All any friends were digging it because they could go and just get smashed. I started going to all these shows: I saw X there, JFA were just starting. Then I realized there were all these things happening, and it was just fascinating to me: "Man, this is all so weird!" And I went to a very conservative high school, and most of my friends were like, "Yeah, weird, this is yucky, it's gross in here, come on!!" By the time I was a senior in high school, no one would go with me. I really had to seek out punk rock friends. The Phoenix scene was kind of disjointed: there was a rockabilly band, there was JFA, there was Victory Acres, which was a Meat Puppets side project, there was Sun City Girls. I saw the Meat Puppets a million times: they played parties every night, it seemed like. I feel lucky to actually have seen them as a hardcore band; I've never seen anyone play bass so fast in my life. I think I viewed it all as something that grownups did. I thought it was something I aspired to. I didn't "feel" like a punk rocker watching punk rock shows. I felt more like an observer: "Oh, this is how the world works." So when you moved to Olympia, was that your big chance to act on a lot of those ideas? Definitely. I had never been to the Northwest, and a friend of mine told me about Evergreen, said that they didn't have any grades. For some reason, I was really dying to go to the Northwest. Once I heard about Evergreen, I told the nuns at school that this was where I wanted to go, and they said, "You'll ruin your life if you go there." Sister Katrina was really disappointed in me." My parents…we have a large family, but mostly everyone has stayed close in their post-college life. But they've always been extraordinarily supportive of me: my father's advice has always been, "Be content." So I went up there and in the dorms, you'd hear the Modern Lovers coming out of the rooms. I was a year behind Calvin (Johnson); there was kind of a little clique going on that he was definitely a part of and somewhat of a ringleader. The second I saw all these people, I knew it was going to influence me. I really can't say how important it was, what Olympia was like around the when K was starting and Op magazine was around, I think Op was a big influence on me, not just to get beyond the punk milieu, but to things like blues.. they would cover anything. And I think, going back one step further, Evergreen itself was important. I drink if there was ever a study of why Op came about and riot grrrl existed, it's because they teach collective action and they teach by seminaring. So everyone's always talking and it's always a group kind of thing, which has driven all of these things in that it’s always a collective of people who puts together these projects. Getting the basic fundamentals of that at Evergreen was really influential to me. And KAOS, the radio station at Evergreen, was put together the same way. The people that did Op, their project before that was that they had taken the radio station and turned it from a cheesy jazz station to an independent-label format that wasn’t strictly rock. They had a policy of 80 percent independent music. Another thing you’ve mentioned as influential about Olympia was freedom to fail. Definitely. There were events, and people had parties all the time where people got up. And I’ve lived in and visited other places where people do this sort of thing, performance parties. In Olympia, they were very theme-oriented. We’d have parties where there’d be a Sixties Twiggy-style Swinging London party, a Berlin 1919 party...just a tag for people to do whatever kind of performance they wanted. You could just get up. I remember the first time I ever did it, Stella Marrs had this studio called Satellite Kitchens. She had a party; I think it was the night Reagan was re-elected. I got up and sang a Hank Williams song. I was really scared, but everybody clapped! Actually, I just heard this one criticism of YoYo-A-Go-Go yesterday: "Everybody just clapped for everything!" It was so Olympia, even from people who weren’t from Olympia. That’s good to me. Were you into Patti Smith by this point? No, I resisted Patti Smith for a long time. At my school, we had to wear uniforms because they said that street clothes would be distracting. And all this weird stuff about trying to keep us as good little girls. So I think I viewed her as a threat, kinda scary, not what I’m supposed to be. It was buying into what they were trying to tell me. And then I had Patti Smith records, but when I was doing my radio show I was anti-Patti, because I was like, "Patti Smith is not the only woman who does punk rock!" When I started to play music and read what she wrote is when I realized how incredibly amazing a person she was. Do you have any thoughts on fandom in general? Well, when people come up to me and say, "I feel kind of stupid, but I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed Butterfly Kiss," that’s so unstupid to me. I totally wrote letters to people I admired; I wrote letters to Tracey Thorn. I have a great draft of a letter that Calvin wrote to the Slits. I’m a fan of everything. If I have a good piece of pizza, I’ll go, "Yeah, this is great pizza!" I’ll cheer for anything; I just think it feels good. I know some people don’t like their fans that much, it’s kind of bothersome to them and takes a lot of time. But I have really great fans. Last night at the Maxwell’s show, these kids brought me a huge plate of cookies, all decorated. That was so amazing. Then this other time, when I got mugged in L.A., this guy that was helping us deal with the whole thing was this teacher for third grade. He went to class, took my CDs, played them -- he'd actually played them before for them. So he told them what happened: "I went to see Lois this weekend," and they went, "Oh yeah, that girl with the guitar!" And the kids all wrote me these valentines. So I got 30 construction-paper valentines. Some of them said "Sorry you got robbed," but there were others that read, "I like you and I love you!" Whatever could you do in your life to get this amazing outpouring from people? Do you come from a musical family? My mother plays flute. My dad has a very nice singing voice. My uncle plays flute...a lot of my aunts have nice singing voices. I guess so, yeah. I wish I was raised with a piano, because that’s something I would like to have been around. What’s the first song you remember hearing? I think the first song I remember hearing is…this song my mom sang a lot. (Starts singing:) "Da da da da, I’ll eat at your table, I’ll sleep in your clover, who cares what tomorrow might bring..." That’s the song. I don’t know the name of it, though. That’s the first song I ever heard. She used to sing it a lot. One day she wrote all the lyrics out and said, "Here, Barbara, this is a gift." She said that was my song from then on. I hung it up. Do you still have the lyrics? Oh, I’m sure I don’t. But anyway, my parents were both really young, and they had a stereo. They were into the Beatles and rock & roll. I loved the Who. Did your parents have their records? No, I heard them in a really weird way. I was taking my long-lost but just-recently-found hermit crab out for a walk. He had been lost for two weeks in the middle of winter with no food or water or warmth, and I found him in my shoe downstairs. He had rolled down the stairs and crawled into my shoe. I was so happy that I wanted to take it out. So my sister and I went for a walk – this is when we were living in Grass Valley, CA, which is very small with one movie house. At this point, my mom was living in a school bus in a driveway, and me and my sister had this little tiny house to ourselves. We were allowed to put Bee Gees pictures up on the walls, anything we wanted to. I just remember walking by and seeing this poster for The Kids Are Alright, and not knowing what it was except that I saw Ringo Starr was in it. So Terri and I were like, Let’s go!" We were the only people in the theater, and we were sitting there, just me and my sister and the hermit crab in my hand, watching it and getting so into it. We had never seen or heard the songs, and of course fell in love with the first scene when there was the Smothers Brothers guy and Pete Townshend was so handsome, John Entwistle…even Roger Daltrey looked good at that point. And, of course, Keith Moon stole our hearts. The thing is that we didn’t know it was the Who until the Tommy part came on, and we both went, at the same time, "TOMMY! THE WHO!" The reason we did that was I always thought the record Tommy was called "Tommy The Who" and that Tommy was a Who. Kind of like a Dr. Seuss book? Yes. My mom used to say that all records were concept albums, and I remember the day my mom brought home the Who’s Tommy, and that she opened it up and put it on my lap. I remember looking at it a lot, and my mom telling me the story as it went through. But I thought all songs had connections to each other, any Beatle record or anything. I didn’t know the band was called The Who. That’s how green I was. But anyhow, the end of the story is that by the end of the movie, Terri and I were avidly into the Who, just adored them, but as I walked out of the theater, I realized that my hermit crab had died. And I think it might have been from the noise...or maybe I was getting so excited I was clenching my fist together, as I have been known to do. What about the Bee Gees? You told me they were your other big early obsession. Well, the Bee Gees were a revelation because I had been living without any source of outside communication for a long time. We couldn’t get the radio, we didn’t have electricity or TV, and my sister and I went to see, in the same month, Saturday Night Fever and Star Wars in San Diego. Star Wars completely blew our minds in every way; we started collecting everything and making our own starships in a junkyard. But the Bee Gees were the first music we heard that was…our age or something, I don’t know. They were already pretty old by that point. Hell yeah! But I became an early Bee Gees fanatic. I still have all their early records; Horizontal’s my favorite. My sister and I just learned the songs and just got really into them. They were my first concert; I saw them at the San Diego Sports Arena. I remember thinking, "I’m breathing the same air they are." I was tripping out because I was literally in the same room as Barry Gibb. But we had the worst seats in the house; we were in the back of the arena facing their backs, and there was this column in front of us, but it didn’t matter at all. Barry did an acoustic-guitar version of "Words," which is one of my and Terri’s favorites. What was the first record you bought on your own? It would have been a 45, I think. Actually, I can tell you, I have it on a list. I found my old box of 45s and wrote each one down. So hold on, OK? (a few minutes later:) No, I actually lost the first part of it. I only have numbers #51 through #80. Let’s see...the 60th single I bought was the Cars’ "Don‘t Tell Me No." And #61 is "Touch & Go." #63 is "Turning Japanese," but #64 is Dolly Parton’s "9 To 5." I didn’t buy a lot of records; I was scared of record stores, scared of teenagers a lot. But I remember the avid part, when you get really crazed: it was when I discovered The Who. Then I got into my soloing period, where I was listening to Quadrophenia and riding my bike around and thinking. I had a guitar already, so just thinking about my life, I think, got me into records. When you’re in that solitary state where you’re discovering who you are inside, you just want to listen to records all the time. I think that’s what was going on. I went from the Who to the Clash to X to Joy Division...l learned about Wire early. I’m glad. Sounds like a pretty logical progression. Yeah, although I can’t listen to the Clash at all anymore. But maybe my kids will like them. See, that’s the thing, I can’t sell any of my records I don’t listen to anymore because I keep thinking my kids will want them... maybe. When did you and Terri begin playing together? Right after the Bee Gees were on this Amnesty International show, which also featured ABBA, Danny Kaye spoke…but they sang this song a cappella. We were already singing Bee Gees songs anyway, but that was the first time we were, like, "Let’s do this. You and I can do this. Let’s sing together." She wrote a song and we sang harmony to each other, took it very seriously. At this point, I was working at a laundromat so I managed to buy this guitar. It was just a couple of weeks later that we were playing outside and performing for people. We played songs we wrote, and my early ones were so horrible. I have a book of them, and they’re really sappy songs. We wrote a song to our mom…but mostly love songs, though I didn’t know anything about love. I was totally into it. I wanted to be in a rock & roll band. I used to fantasize about it all the time; I knew that was what I was going to do. I think I did everything in the right steps. I wanted to, I got the guitar, learned by myself, started writing, and naturally fell in with a group of people when I was 16…no, 17. What are you a fan of now? There’s so much now; I feel like my tastes have really expanded. It was so great seeing Faust; I got to really know them, since I traveled with them. Right now I’m listening to theremin music; it’s so beautiful. I was listening to a band called Main the other day; I never heard them before, but I bought their CD. I’ve been listening to Motorhead a lot, and Hawkwind, but it just makes me happy, that’s all. I’ve been listening to Gate lot, and the new Caroliner record is brilliant. I really like old; early jazz, even though I don’t know as much as I wish. And I also love the Rolling Stones. I’m going through a real Rolling Stones phase. Stephin
Merritt What’s the first song you remember hearing? I think it was probably a Burt Bacharach song. My parents used to play Burt Bacharach tapes all the time, and I was dance around snapping my fingers when I was like three or four, and I would always run and put them on. Oh, and Tom Jones, they were totally into him. Well, they weren’t, but I was. I still remember exactly what he looked like. Jenny liked Burt Bacharach too. That one’s more faint with me; I know my parents liked him a lot. They also listened to a lot of Ferrante & Teicher, sort of popular classical stuff. We had very few records besides the box of classical greats that you all should have, but I also remember they had a copy of the Hair soundtrack on vinyl. I used to stare at the album and wonder what Hair was about, what was this thing...and I would sing along to "Jesus Christ Superstar." That was a scary piece of music, very eerie. I remember I didn’t listen to much kid stuff. I think the closest I came to that was "Disco Duck" in sixth grade. I took it to school once for show & tell, proudly got tip to put it on the turntable, dropped it on the floor and watched it shatter into a million pieces. My sister used to do a routine to "Kung Fu Fighting" and stuff. Were you ever into Kiss? Yes, definitely, fourth and fifth grade. I had a friend, Laura: we used to write love letters to Kiss, dip them in perfume. I remember this: All these guys in my school wanted to be in Kiss, that was their dream band, and we’d go to music class as part of the curriculum. They wouldn’t even clap their hands in time, they were so obstinate. They’d just say, "But we’re gonna be the next Kiss!" They would dress up like then at talent shows, do the blood spurting and stuff. One of the first "bands" I ever saw was these four kids from my sixth grade class who dressed up as Kiss at our talent show and mimed over...I guess it had to be either "Rock ‘N Roll All Nite" or "Christine Sixteen." It was probably the first one. Yeah, I was always mad at the kids in my school: "They don't even participate in music class!" They were dumb! Another thing I was thinking about the other night – we were listening to "Stairway To Heaven" driving somewhere, and I thought, God, l remember when I first recognized this song in fourth grade. I thought it was so cool. Then I realized what classic rock meant, that it wasn't new. I figured it out when I asked someone if they liked "that new song, 'Stairway To Heaven." You mean not everything's new all the time? What was the first record you ever bought? With my own money? The one I remember is the first B-52ss album, the yellow one. First concert? I sneaked into a Chicago show once. I also saw the Police, the tour with UB40 was with them. Those are all stadium shows. I lived in Calgary, which was a terrible cultural wasteland, unfortunately. Did you see Chicago in Calgary? No, I saw them in Pueblo, Colorado. That was after Calgary. I mean , I've been to a lot of classical performances, and even played in piano recitals. I can’t remember anything I went to on my own volition before Chicago. This was more like, "Let’s sneak down the race track to see if we get in to see Chicago!" We ran down there and got up to the front row. It was so easy. Just something to do to keep us occupied. How were they? I remember not being very excited about it. This was around Chicago 17. There was another country star there, too, which we missed. At what point did your friends who carried guns turn you on to punk rock? Oh, those guys? Toby? The Italian boys? It wasn’t them; they just pushed me in more of a localized direction. I had a couple of B-52s records, which was kind of wacky I thought. Then, the last couple of years of high school who were really into the Jam and the Who…the whole mod scene, although they didn’t dress like mods at all. I went and saw The Clash on the Combat Rock tour. Then my Italian friends turned me on to the Dead Kennedys and Sex Pistols, and really local stuff. Denver had a pretty small scene. Were you in bands yourself before you moved to D.C.? I was in three – no, four – bands in college. And I was almost in a band in high school. Mostly I ended up being Chief Number One Fan of this band who was in my high school called…l can't remember now, they just played the dances once in awhile, kind of sounded like The Who. There were a lot of bands in Denver at the time that never got anywhere, but we'd always go see them. There were a lot of women in those bands – it never felt like anything I couldn't do, that's for sure. I remember ASF. There was ASF, and there was another band called UTI, Urinary Tract Infection. And then I started organizing shows in college. I played piano and stuff like that, and was learning how to play guitar piece by piece in college. How extensive was your piano playing? In Canada there’s something called the Royal Conservatory of Music. It's graded levels from kindergarten to 12 of musical instruction. Twelfth grade is pretty much symphony-style concert pianist style. You can study; they have standardized books. At the end of the year, they have a theory test and a performance test, So I took those lessons up to eighth grade. The theory was getting really, really hard, transposing all this stuff. I always found it really interesting; it was mathematical and I liked it a lot, all these ways to compose. But I never had any flair for it artistically. l feel like some of it's carried over to make it easier to play guitar because I understand the relationships between the notes and I can figure out where my fingers should go to make a certain sound. Although it's never natural: it's really, really mechanical in my head. How do you feel or the other side? What kind of letters do you get from Tsunami fans or people who buy Simple Machines releases? We do get a lot of letters, especially about lyrics, saying how this song has gotten to them, or so-and-so cries every tune we play this or they broke up with their boyfriend during it. I understand it, because sometimes it's so subtle or personal. I mean, there was a time in my life just recently when, if I hadn't been listening to a certain Scrawl song, I would have made a different decision in my life. I thought, "They're right. I should stand my ground on this." I just happened to be in this state of indecision, and they're always saying to he a strong woman: that’s what most of those songs are about, even if some are kind of sad and run down. I'm surprised sometimes. I don't know what it is about music that makes me so emotional that it can make me cry. There are very few bands that can do that, but it's consistently those few bands, like Scrawl and Fugazi. The other day I was weeping when I saw the Spinanes. It's usually live performance that does it for me: records sometimes do, but seeing them live.. it's because I can’t figure out why I’m crying that makes it so powerful. That’s the pinnacle of good music for me, but I can’t say why. Just because they get to a certain emotional level in me. Jenny
Toomey |