Women Who Rock Over America

Adele Bertei. Photo by Lucretia Tye Jasmine. Tori Amos artwork by Lindsey Bailey

When I started editing Women Who Rock: Bessie to Beyonce. Girl Groups to Riot Grrrl, I knew we would be honoring a matrilineal history, but I didn’t know we would birth a sisterhood. During the two-year process of producing this book, my 30something contributors and I went through death, birth, divorce, band breakups, and band formations – not to mention the election and tyranny of a misogynist, racist pig. Some of these women I have known as dear friends for decades (love you Jana, Vivien, Ann!). Some I am still meeting. Getting to present with many of these writers during the WWR book tour has been powerful and empowering. We are making alliances and forging friendships.

Evelyn McDonnell. Photo by Solvej Schou

 

The last night of the tour on December 6 brought this all home, literally, to LA. I was honored to be joined by three gifted women at Beyond Baroque in Venice before a full house. I started the evening by reading the words of one of our New York-based sisters, Caryn Rose, who wrote about Beyond Baroque as the place where Exene Cervenka met John Doe, and “the world shifted on its axis.” Solvej Schou followed by talking about PJ Harvey, then belting Harvey’s 1993 song “Man-Size” – and when Solvej belts, you can hear her down the block. She also played her own recent composition, “America.”

Solvej Schou. Photo by Lucretia Tye Jasmine. PJ Harvey artwork by Anne Muntges

 

Thoughtful, funny, personal, philosophical, DJ Lynnee Denise described her odyssey of discovering Bjork: from Crenshaw to Iceland and back. The night closed with a true musical legend. Adele Bertei is one of the original girls who invented punk rock. She began her career working with the doomed, gifted Peter Laughner (Pere Ubu), moved to New York and introduced Brian Eno to the No Wave scene, in which she played as a member of the Contortions. She was in the all-girl, out-dyke band the Bloods before you were born, and her film career includes a starring role in the cult film Born in Flames. Adele read from her WWR essay about Tori Amos, then performed two original songs, including one also called – wait for it – “America.”

DJ Lynnee Denise. Photo by Lucretia Tye Jasmine. Bjork artwork by Winnie T. Frick.

 

Women Who Rock. Making America great again, for real.

Just Genius

Photo by Lera Pentelute

To make a braid, you need three strands of hair. A stool needs three legs to stand. And when individually acclaimed singer-songwriters Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus join their formidable vocal, compositional and instrumental talents, the sum is even greater than its parts. The three artists ended their tour together at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles Friday night, each performing separate sets, then taking the stage together for the power trio they ironically call Boygenius — because girls don’t get called geniuses. But when they blended their voices in perfect three-part harmony on “Ketchum, ID” before a soldout crowd, it was genius, ungendered and true.

Looking and sounding like a young Melissa Etheridge, Baker is the powerhouse of the three, on both throat and ax — a supremacy her bandmates honored by taking to their knees and hailing her with deep bows when she partook in some serious shredding. But Dacus has a wonderful deep timbre, and Bridgers has an Emmylou Harris-meets-Hope Sandoval husk. It’s empowering to see the way they bring their voices together, never upstaging or hotdogging.

They talk in interviews about the strength they have found in numbers, how their support of each other has allowed them to express and articulate thoughts and feelings — and jokes — in ways they had never felt free to do before. All three, individually and collectively, make music drenched in melancholy. So when they find relief in each other, it’s all the more liberating. I mean it was cool when the National’s Matt Berninger and film composer Stephan Altman came out and performed with Baker during her solo set. But Boygenius felt like a statement, a pinnacle.

At the end of the evening, the end of the tour, Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus hugged and cried, and so did a lot of the audience. Rule of thirds: three is not a crowd, it’s a movement.