The Imprecision of Memory: Punk Influencers and musical DNA.
the warp and weft of musical references and inspiration that becomes the fabric of a sound, an album, a band. (with audio links)
Sep 06, 2024
(This is a crosspost that I published before I started my newsletter. Reposted 12/19/2024.)
This thread came loose in my mind a couple of weeks ago when I went to see some old skool comrades play an unlikely outdoor show at a resort; think fancy gardens and fairy lights, expensive tickets, and a bunch of aging punkers and their kids(me included) awkwardly sitting on a manicured lawn for Bikini Kill’s reunion tour. My history with the band and the Riot Grrrl movement is complicated; as friends, room mates, classmates and feminist musicians in a small scene, we came up in waves that overlapped. The nuances of our music and individual ‘genius’ that made each of us unique were ignored to report on a ‘movement’; as a result, our own identities were merged by press and history in a way that felt incorrect, sweeping and general. This was hard on the ego, and I stayed stubbornly on my leaky dinghy of ‘not a riot grrrl, because I was around before that movement’ and braved the choppy waters as a musician for years. But this only kept me isolated and angry at the wrong people; suffice to say that as I get older and wiser(?), I have decided to allow my own part as a female punker who shared rickety stages, crappy PAs, college classes, dodgy housing, makeup, hairdye, and velvet minidresses with the likes of Bikini Kill to be a badge of honor. I was pretty psyched to have my 12 year old kid hear Tobi Vail site my band Calamity Jane as an influence and dedicate a song to me on stage (at last-validation from my peers!).
It reminded me that when we name our influences, we acknowledge that our music comes from a whirling vast ocean of people and sounds that came before, though we may have been oblivious at the time. As Bikini Kill gave shoutouts on stage and named theirs, it prompted me to recall mine. The albums I listened to when I was first trying to write songs in high school included well-known artists available to a small town kid in the mid 80’s like X, The Police, Devo, Talking Heads, REM, B 52’s. But that was just the beginning; then I went to Evergreen State college in Olympia, dragging my Harmony electric guitar around trying to start a band, and found my people there. I discovered strange new bands through labels like SST, Dischord and local cooler-than-thou K Records, and at shows in the dorms, house parties, student run venues. I was blown away by Fugazi, hated the Melvins, and was entranced by some heavy trio called Nirvana who played at my house for my 21st birthday party(but that is another story). At one point, co-founder of K/Beat Happening Calvin Johnson let me house-sit at his apartment when I was between places and he was on tour, and this became a musically influential moment for me. I was doing research; I had his amazing collection of albums and 7” vinyl that came from places far and wide at my disposal for a whole week, and I made a bunch of mixed-tapes with the theme ‘at least one band member is a female’. My friends were all into music, or playing it on radio shows, or writing about it in ‘zines, or later putting it out on tiny labels. Physical copies of records and cassettes traded between friends were the only way we could discover any music at the time, that or get lucky and go to a live show- “you can't drive around and hear your favorite song so you tape it live if you can get inside when it comes along”(X). And so it was handed around, hand to hand, word of mouth, hand to mouth, mouth to mouth, into my ears.
The bands I heard totally colored how I played, how I wanted the songs to sound that eventually became Calamity Jane’s first and only album Martha Jane Cannary. I will now perform the magic trick of trying to identify the songs and bands that directly influenced me, that I attempted to channel, or ‘ripped off’ (albeit crudely as I lacked the technical prowess/attention to detail that would have made it obvious), in order to write those songs. I had to search for the sounds, sometimes filtered through a dream or just the imprecision of memory -feelings that made the music and the poetry I was writing at the time. Looking back towards ground zero for this little explosion that my band mates and I were part of. Or in other words, this is an example of how listening to music caused me to make music.
.Martha Jane Cannary by Calamity Jane.
(click to hear) SONG. /=/ INFLUENCES(band: song)…
1. Miss Hell /=/ Babes in Toyland: Dust Cake boy
2. My Spit /=/ X: We’re Desperate
3. (Car)/ You got it Rough /=/ Cyndi Lauper: She Bop
4. Hang Up /=/ Vomit Launch: Swelling Admiration
5. Shark /=/ U-Men: Solid Action/ and
6. Olympia /=/ X : The Unheard Music
7. Little Girl /=/ Mudhoney: Touch me I’m sick
8. Mean Song /=/ Naked Raygun: Roller Queen
9. A lot O’Blood /=/ STP: Hey bastard / and
Sonic Youth: Beauty Lies and Jimi Hendrix: Crosstown Traffic
10. Say It /=/ Umen: Cow Rock / and
11. No Mirror /=/ Fetchin’ Bones: What I did
This is direct lineage, as far as I can remember it, imprecise but specific at the same time. There were so many more bands that I was fortunate to see and hear live as a young hopeful musician, all of whom held sway on my path. From the small town punk scene in Ashland, OR where I saw Black Flag, NOFX, CamperVan Beethoven, The Sea Hags, to the Olympia student run venues where I saw the Melvins, Dangermouse, 7 seconds, Some Velvet Sidewalk, The Nation Of Ulysses, Fugazi and I played my first show at the Smithfield coffee shop. I ended up in Portland, OR where Calamity Jane moved with our friends because there were so many great bands-Hellcows, Dharma Bums, Dead Moon, Rawheadrex, Dirty bird, Crackerbash, Caustic soda, Smegma, Death Midget, Poison Idea, and clubs like Blue Gallery, Satyricon, the X-Ray Cafe, Pine Street. We played with Scrawl, No means No, L7, Frightwig, Babes in Toyland, Vomit Launch, Girl Trouble, Fugazi, Ed Hall, Tar, Beat Happening, Dead Moon, Nirvana, Frances Farmer Gals, and tons of others and I can definitely say that every one of these fierce bands changed how I listen to and make music. To the current day, every time I go to see a band live, or listen to a song, I am taking it all in, and it is altering my musical DNA. It is interactive, imitative, adaptive, and I am one of a billion living cells in the evolution of this organism we know as Music.
*I am certain I have inadvertently omitted plenty of bands who deserve to be mentioned by name, not purposely, but simply due to the imprecision of memory.
I too had an all-female band. We mostly followed the rules of Wire. Short, very short songs. No solos, no outros. etc. We were called Alpha Betty.
I miss it very much.