Good golly, it’s been awhile since I posted. It’s 2020, y’all. I guess it’s taken the “social distancing” of the Covid-19 pandemic to get me back. Actually, I finally finished a painting that I started back in September 2019. (I guess I could have just said “back in September” but I put the year without thinking. Like 2019 was ages ago or something. Because it was…at least in terms of all of the damn news.)
So yes. Back before I had a trip of a lifetime in New Zealand, before the Holidays, before the Democratic primaries whittled down our prospects to two old white men, I started a three-portrait painting of three kick-ass women of rock. Three women who played bass in influential alternative rock bands from my youth*: Kim Deal of The Pixies, Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads, and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. All three went on to front their own bands but they left their four-string mark on me as the lone female shining in a group of dudes.
I saw Tina Weymouth first, obviously as Talking Heads have been around the longest. I remember sitting in the theater at the AMC in the mall about to see…don’t remember what. But I do recall the trailer for Jonathan Demme’s doc, Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads concert film. I thought, “There’s a girl in the band”. It was 1984 so I knew by that point that girls could be in bands but it wasn’t something that I really knew, you know? When I was young, the ladies were the singers. So seeing one play an instrument in a rock band was like, oh shit, that can happen. I look back a little embarrassed because this thought accompanied another one like “she must be good to be in the band with the boys”. I KNOW. (Somewhere, some place, The Runaways are feeling pissed off and don’t know why.) In my defense, it was the ’80s and that line of thinking was not unheard of. It’s tough to shake, not going to lie. Around that same time, I saw Kathleen Kennedy’s name as a producer on Steven Spielberg movies. Just recently, when some misogynistic Star Wars fans were blaming Kennedy (now head of Lucasfilm) for any perceived SW failings , I tweeted something like “If Spielberg trusts Kennedy, so do I!” Like that’s the definitive reason to trust Kennedy with the Star Wars franchise? Not her decades of experience on huge blockbuster films? Ugh. I cringe at that tweet. Because for a lot of women my age and older that thinking is hard to shake. Even now, I still have traces of that male approval viewpoint deep in my brain. Ugh. Yuck. Shiver. Moving on. Weymouth is awesome. Her bass was almost as tall as she was but she played the hell out of it in one of my all time favorite bands.
But I think it was Kim Deal that really made me want to play the bass. I discovered Deal at first through The Breeders. Then I found out that she was in another band. I KNOW. Good gravy, I come at things backwards sometimes. The Pixies are legends! Anywho, Deal played guitar in The Breeders (The bassist was Josephine Wiggs. Bass Facts!) so I was stoked to see she played bass in The Pixies. Why? Don’t know. I guess because of Weymouth I expected and wanted her to be the bassist.
Quick Interlude about The Breeders: Last Splash is one of my favorite albums of all time. And probably my biggest concert regret was not driving to Lakeland, FL to see The Breeders open for Nirvana. Whenever I get that vague feeling that I missed an appointment or I should be somewhere, it’s that concert. I should have gone, damnit.
Back to Deal. I guess the urge to learn the bass came from her because as I was desperately clawing my way out of a black hole of low self-esteem in the early ’90s, she was being so fucking cool. I also had it in my head that I needed to learn an instrument as well as a foreign language. I mean, I did learn both bass and french but I can’t say I mastered either. Right now, my Epiphone Viola bass sits in its stand collecting dust. I pick it up every so often and play around but good lord it is not music. I also need to restring it and have it tuned. So I can’t really say I’m a bassist. I own a bass. I’m terrible at it. Je suis terrible.
I came to Sonic Youth and Kim Gordon shamefully late. In fact, I didn’t see them in concert until 2010 when they played with Pavement at the Greek. Not that I waited until then to listen to their stuff. I’d been listening since the ’90s but they’ve been around since the ’80s. That’s why Gordon is one of the original Godmothers of Alternative Rock and we should revere her as such. She recently wrote a memoir called Girl in a Band and I will be adding that to my collection of Women In Rock bios that I’ve read. (You didn’t ask but Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Chrissie Hynde’s Reckless: My Life As a Pretender, Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, and yet to read Debbie Harry’s Face it.)
Oh, yeah. Here’s the painting:
*youth here is junior high thru college…I won’t mislead you all into thinking I was tottering towards a cd player in my Huggies pull-ups.
