Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out 9781628929768, 9781501305252, 9781628929775

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DIG ME OUT

Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration—The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough—Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love—NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books—Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

Forthcoming in the series: Psychocandy by Paula Mejia Donny Hathaway Live by Emily Lordi The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly and many more …

Dig Me Out

Jovana Babović

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Jovana Babović, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-6289-2976-8 978-1-6289-2977-5 978-1-6289-2979-9

Series: 33 13 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Track Listing

Side One:   1. “Dig Me Out” (2:40)   2. “One More Hour” (3:19)   3. “Turn It On” (2:47)   4. “The Drama You’ve Been Craving” (2:08)   5. “Heart Factory” (3:54)   6. “Words and Guitars” (2:21)   7. “It’s Enough” (1:46) Side Two:   8. “Little Babies” (2:22)   9. “Not What You Want” (3:17) 10. “Buy Her Candy” (2:02) 11. “Things You Say” (2:56) 12. “Dance Song ’97” (2:49) 13. “Jenny” (4:03)

Contents

Acknowledgments viii Introduction: Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out in the Cultural Moment of the Late 1990s 1 Olympia Calling: The Making and Breaking Out of Spaces 9 Eight Days in Seattle: The Struggle to Record Dig Me Out 31 Strange Words: Writing about Gender, Punk, and Sleater-Kinney 51 Hey Soundguy: The Dig Me Out Tour 72 Words and Guitars: Celebrity, Fandom, and the Cult of Sleater-Kinney 93 Notes 113

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Acknowledgments

I wrote the proposal for this book while I was finishing my Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. On the day I defended my dissertation, Ally-Jane Grossan delivered the news that SleaterKinney’s Dig Me Out would be joining the roster of the 33 1/3 Series. I couldn’t have asked for a smoother transition from one project to another. First and foremost, I’d like to thank Ally-Jane for her professional cool and keen editorial sense, as well as Bloomsbury assistants Kaitlin Fontana and Michelle Chen. I’m grateful for the help Jenna Freedman of the Barnard Zine Library and assistant Juliana Strawn lent me with searching out and obtaining relevant zines. Portia Sabin and Ben Parrish of Kill Rock Stars sent me a huge package of clippings and documents, which I was all too happy to receive. Early on in the project, I spent several evenings talking about sound and the Northwest scene with Ben Wheeler; these conversations helped shape many of my thoughts about Dig Me Out. I had the good fortune to write about a band with particularly devoted fans whose eagerness to share experiences, zines, and keepsakes from the late 1990s was a tremendous •

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help. I’d especially like to thank Marisa Brown for her assistance with arranging interviews. For their time and memories, I am grateful to Corin Tucker, Janet Weiss, John Goodmanson, Tim Holman, and Julie Butterfield. Their voices carry the bulk of this story—and they carry it well. The entirety of this book was written in Knoxville, Tennessee, where I spent a lot of time revisiting the 1990s with Bill Mercer and Sally Morris. I was lucky to have fantastic colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Tennessee who gave me the opportunity to live in a great music town while I researched and wrote about Dig Me Out (and taught European history). Just as I was finishing the last set of revisions, I was glad to join the Department of History at Louisiana Tech University. In the late 1990s, Judy Thomas, Jeff Swegarden, and Ani Hazard (along with the rest of Post-Bulletin’s Teen Beat staff) encouraged me to write about music. I did, but it fell by the wayside, while radio and, later, history preoccupied my attention. Two decades later, Eric Garcia McKinley challenged me to pick it up anew—and then carefully read and commented on each chapter of this book. My competing challenge for him has been even more fruitful. Thank y’all.

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Introduction: Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out in the Cultural Moment of the Late 1990s

In 1997, Sleater-Kinney released Dig Me Out. Around the time, there was a lot of buzz about women in popular culture. The Spice Girls’ Spice was the year’s best-selling album, while Alanis Morissette and Celine Dion claimed the title in the preceding and proceeding years, respectively.1 Solo artists LeAnn Rimes, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, and Janet Jackson were among those with number one hits on Billboard charts in 1997.2 It was also that same year that Sarah McLachlan launched the Lilith Fair—a summer festival that brought together a cast of female musicians like Sheryl Crow, Tracy Chapman, Jewel, Paula Cole, and Fiona Apple for a high-grossing North American tour. All the while, the mainstream media in the late 1990s wrote about “women in rock,” “girl power,” and repeatedly declared it to be “the year of women.” But the late 1990s were not a golden age for female performers. Instead, the period did more to segregate  1 •

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women into gendered pseudo-genres and to limit the terms of their cultural participation to categories like “sexy,” “sensitive,” and “angry.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, as a trio who played loud, fast, unadorned punk rock, Sleater-Kinney didn’t fit comfortably in this cultural moment. One early advocate called the band a “boundary-breaking act” because, despite the fact that they were women, they didn’t conform to common signifiers pressed upon female performers such as “middle-of-the-road sensibilities,” “shock value,” and “femme mystique.”3 For their part, Sleater-Kinney confidently wielded drums and guitars, turned their amps way up, and broke a sweat as they powered through two-minute tracks. The band didn’t enact the gender and cultural roles women were expected to perform in the late 1990s, and they pushed back when those roles were superimposed on them anyway. The gender and culture roles of the mainstream, however, were not the only ones against which SleaterKinney were measured. Riot grrrl, an early 1990s underground movement born of an intersection of feminism and punk, weighed heavily on them from both within and without. Because some of the members had participated in the movement, the band’s early fans criticized them for not continuing to adhere to the stringent idealism and political activism of the first part of the decade. At the same time, the media frequently pigeonholed Sleater-Kinney as a “riot grrrl band” in the wake of the movement’s popular commodification—not because they sounded like bands associated with riot grrrl, but because, as three women who played in a band together, they looked like them. In these comparisons, as  2 •

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well, Sleater-Kinney were unwillingly reduced to rigid constructs of gender and culture. When Dig Me Out was released, the fiercest battle Sleater-Kinney fought—and, in some ways, the one they’ve been fighting all along—was the battle to be heard on their own terms. Guitarists Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein formed Sleater-Kinney in 1994 while they were college students in Olympia, Washington. They released two studio albums with a revolving cast of percussionists before the band’s permanent drummer, Janet Weiss, joined in 1996. With the addition of Weiss— just in time to write and record the group’s third release, Dig Me Out—Sleater-Kinney grew into their sound. A punchy web of sliding melodies and elaborate harmonies, competing guitars and muscular rhythms, and, most strikingly, the balance of Tucker’s urgent banshee-like vibrato and Brownstein’s lower accompaniment characterize 1997’s Dig Me Out. It’s a sound that has become distinctive of Sleater-Kinney’s two-decade career and one that surpassed easy categorization, then as much as now, of the type of music women made or ought to be making. With the sound of Dig Me Out, Sleater-Kinney insisted that they could not just be seen as “women in rock” or a “riot grrrl band”—but, rather, that they had to be heard. *** Despite their increased visibility in the media, women were not taken seriously as musicians in late 1990s popular culture. Critics asserted that rubrics like “women in rock” actually worked to set female musicians apart  3 •

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from their male contemporaries far more than they legitimized them as integral cultural actors. It was common, for instance, for music magazines to publish issues devoted to “women in rock” without necessarily addressing the lack of gender balance in subsequent editions or in the media as a whole. Frustrated with a category that treated female musicians as if their gender constituted a musical genre, writer Gillian Gaar poignantly asked: “When would women be able to stand on their own, and not perennially seen as part of a trend?”4 Carla DeSantis, editor of the independent music magazine Rockrgrl, also observed that the flood of mainstream coverage of “women in rock” emphasized what these performers wore, who they dated, and how they carried themselves in public, rather than the music they made. “Indeed, in 1997, as always, there were many interesting women at the forefront of pop and rock music,” DeSantis wrote, “and they certainly made good copy.”5 In turn, the disassociation of female performers from music making positioned women as mere entertainers, whereas their male counterparts were more likely to be credited as “authentic” musicians. Needless to say, male musicians were never lumped together in profiles of “men in rock.” In mainstream culture, women were effectively depoliticized. In some cases, they were branded as “angry” and in others they fell under the rubric of poppy “girl power.” The repercussions of both amounted to the repackaging of female musicians into palatable commodities.6 As scholar Kristen Schilt argues, the category “angry women” reduced critiques of normative gender and sexuality by performers like Alanis Morissette and  4 •

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Tracy Bonham to non-threatening rants.7 At other instances, sexualized portrayals of female performers like Fiona Apple and Meredith Brooks similarly worked to disarm any challenges their music might have posed to society.8 When it came to the Spice Girls’ slogan “girl power,” some critics pegged it as a commercial agenda that was “not about feminism but about consumerism in a capitalist society,”9 while others accepted it as “a kinder, gentler feminism,”10 and a few came to terms with it as “a decided improvement” on a world without feminism.11 But, like the category “angry women,” the Spice Girls’ monikers such as “Posh” and “Baby” nevertheless reaffirmed and even further narrowed the spectrum of acceptable gender expression—and thus cultural participation—on stage. Half a decade earlier, the Olympia-based riot grrrl movement had taken issue with precisely those normative views of women’s roles. The movement initially began as a response to early participants’ marginalization from the hardcore punk scene, but it quickly built steam across the country because it had hit on a much broader social problem: young women’s disenfranchisement in society, including in popular culture. Riot grrrl participants believed that young women should be active as both consumers and producers of culture, and they encouraged one another to start bands, write zines, and create support networks. As scholar Julia Downes suggests, the movement had an “explicit intention to disrupt gender power relations and encourage the politicized participation of girls and young women in independent punk music culture.”12 Its more ambitious goal was to dismantle and rebuild the gendered pillars of  5 •

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American society so that young women would be taken seriously as its agents. Once the mainstream media got a taste of riot grrrl, however, it entirely redefined the movement. In the press, the young women who played atonal punk, wrote disparaging social critiques of patriarchal society, and spoke boldly about rape, incest, and sexism, were reduced to whiny teens. The race to repackage riot grrrl for the American public re-articulated it into an assemblage of fads like barrettes and baby doll dresses that bore little resemblance to the politically conscious social movement at its core. Indeed, some scholars argue that the incorporation of riot grrrl served only to diminish the movement’s magnitude so that it no longer posed any constructive critique of the hierarchies it had initially set out to challenge.13 Conversely, others have more recently claimed that, even in a diluted form, riot grrrl brought women’s voices into the mainstream and ultimately precipitated a positive impact on popular culture.14 In 1997, however, riot grrrl was stigmatized to the point that it became static.15 For Sleater-Kinney, including former participants Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, it became another category in which they were reluctantly grouped. *** When Dig Me Out was released, Sleater-Kinney were thrust into the media spotlight that saw their gender rather than their sound as the primary lens for making sense of the band. Sleater-Kinney were compared to mainstream female performers at the same time they  6 •

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were tasked to bear riot grrrl’s torch. “We got asked about the Spice Girls a lot around the time Dig Me Out was released,” drummer Janet Weiss recalled almost two decades later. “I didn’t know anything about the Spice Girls. I didn’t listen to the Spice Girls. I think we were asked about them because we were women and they were women screaming ‘girl power.’ It was ridiculous.”16 Just as frequently, questions about the band’s connection to riot grrrl were raised. Although the members have always cited the early 1990s movement as formative, they didn’t want to continue speaking for it in the second part of the decade, just as they didn’t want their career to be defined by it. All the while, Sleater-Kinney confronted a world that was adamant about imposing gendered and cultural definitions on them. When they went on tour, for instance, club owners and sound technicians approached the three women as amateurs, rather than as musicians, and insinuated that they lacked control of their instruments, their sound, and their stage presence. In order to set the terms of their own meaning, Sleater-Kinney built their identity on music making: songwriting, recording, and performing. Over time, they not only unsettled the hierarchies that had threatened to reduce them to “women in rock” or a “riot grrrl band,” but also opened the door to a wider set of possibilities for the next generation of young women. Dig Me Out marks the moment in Sleater-Kinney’s discography when the band began to lay claim to their own sound narrative. This book tells the story of Dig Me Out from its inception in Olympia, its recording in Seattle, and its reception across the United States.  7 •

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It’s anchored in a short period of time—roughly from mid-1996 to mid-1998—but it encompasses a series of battles over meaning that span Sleater-Kinney’s career. The band struggled with the media about how they would be presented to the public; they struggled with technicians about how their sound would be heard in clubs; and they struggled with pervasive social hierarchies about how their work would be understood in popular culture. The only instance when the band didn’t have to put up much of a fight was when it came to their fans. The acclaim Sleater-Kinney received from their listeners in the late 1990s, and one they continue to receive almost two decades later, speaks to a public thirst for musicians who took issue with normative notions of culture and gender. This story of Dig Me Out chronicles how Sleater-Kinney won the fight to be heard on their own terms—as women and as musicians.

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Olympia Calling: The Making and Breaking Out of Spaces

In the spring of 1991, Corin Tucker, then a first year student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington started a band with her friend Tracy Sawyer. It was a band inasmuch as the two women had rounded up instruments and played together whenever Tucker was home in Eugene, Oregon during breaks. But, more importantly, it was a band because Tucker had talked it up to friends at college. It took an invitation to join the bill for Girl Night at the International Pop Underground Convention (IPUC) in Olympia in late August of 1991 for the two women to materialize as a bona fide band. Tucker remembered her reaction to the proposal: “I said, ‘Okay. Crap!’ I don’t think it would have actually happened had I not been prompted—like, put your money where your mouth is.”1 Having been called on their bluff, the two scrambled to write several songs for Girl Night that would inaugurate their band, Heavens to Betsy, into existence. Although the idea that young women could be agents of cultural production was not necessarily a radical one in  9 •

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the early 1990s, few actually had the means to transform their ideas into practice. Olympia is thus an important site in our story. It’s important as the place where Corin Tucker first made good on her goal to become a musician and where she later formed Sleater-Kinney with another Evergreen student, Carrie Brownstein. More importantly, Olympia is important as a space that took young musicians, including women, seriously enough to call their bluffs. According to the theorist Michel de Certeau, unlike place, space doesn’t simply exist.2 Instead, it is created by a confluence of specific practices—be it organizing shows, inviting young women to perform, or supporting those on the stage—that give rise to a specific historical context in a specific historical moment. In the early 1990s, a confluence of labels, performers, and audiences, as well as the riot grrrl movement, created a unique space in Olympia that chipped away at traditional practices of musicianship. It was in this space that Sleater-Kinney could come together as a band comprised of three young women and, some years later, where they could write Dig Me Out. Yet, as de Certeau suggests, space is not a static entity. Indeed, by the second half of the decade, Olympia had changed, as had SleaterKinney’s relationship with it. Part of this had to do with the hostile media representation of riot grrrl that altered the movement’s dynamic, while another hinged upon the band’s growing commercial success that took them out of the community fold. But even as the space of the early 1990s ceased to exist, its legacy remained imprinted on Sleater-Kinney and continued to shape their work near and far from Olympia.

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Olympia’s place and space On Fugazi’s first US tour in the late 1980s, Guy Picciotto was keen to perceive that something was already brewing in Olympia. He remembered it as a “weird sleepy small town and yet there [was] so much action there—there were so many great bands, so much energy. It was one of the first places where we really felt at home, where the kids were dancing and the vibe was so incredible.”3 A particular youth- and girl-positive space had begun taking shape in Olympia in the 1980s. This space was indebted to Calvin Johnson’s K Records, and would come to be propelled forward by the addition of Slim Moon’s label Kill Rock Stars in the early 1990s. Moreover, it came to be engendered by a cast of producers, performers, and audiences who were collectively invested in undercutting traditional practices of music making. Calvin Johnson’s K Records built the foundation that shaped Olympia into the space it would become in the early 1990s. Operating since 1982 under its long-held credo of “exploding the teenage underground into passionate revolt against the corporate ogre,” K encouraged its bands to rely on low-budget means of making music such as using borrowed equipment, employing only barebones production, and working with an uncomplicated pop song structure.4 Cassette tapes, a new technology at the time, enabled bands to record music at home, while the label could then cheaply reproduce and distribute it. As he did in his own Beat Happening, Johnson urged musicians to prioritize the zeal of playing rather than technical musicianship. As critic Kaya Oakes writes, “one of Beat Happening’s slogans was ‘learn NOT to •

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play your instrument.’”5 Johnson’s punk mantra destabilized the prevailing cultural hierarchies by recording, releasing, and selling—that is, legitimizing—the work of musicians who sometimes hardly knew how to play their instruments. He thus opened the door to youth, including young women, to participate as culture makers regardless of their skillset. Although the K Records roster boasts only a single release considered to be a part of the riot grrrl discography—a 7-inch split of Heavens to Betsy and Bratmobile—Johnson’s label was home to a spectrum of female musicians who broadened women’s contributions to underground culture and the terms of their participation. As music critic Michael Azerrad suggests, Johnson’s work was “a major force in widening the idea of a punk rocker from a mohawked guy in a motorcycle jacket to a nerdy girl in a cardigan.”6 In other words, it was perfectly acceptable and even desirable for a K Records release to eschew the usual signifiers of music making—including that young women could be its active agents. Around the time Johnson was organizing the IPUC as a showcase of local talent, he was also helping Slim Moon establish Kill Rock Stars (KRS), another independent label that would cement Olympia as a positive space for young women. Moon’s first release was a spoken word record of the budding activist, performer, and formative participant of the riot grrrl movement Kathleen Hanna. Although Moon preferred to put out albums that had been recorded in the studio, he was just as committed as Johnson to challenging traditional definitions of musicianship. In the ensuing years, KRS became particularly known for its support of female musicians associated •

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with the riot grrrl movement, among them Heavens to Betsy and later Sleater-Kinney. In a telling nod to the very cultural redefinition that was underway in the early 1990s, one of the first KRS slogans proclaimed Olympia as the birthplace of rock. While Calvin Johnson and K Records had engendered that redefinition by expunging virtuosity as a precondition for music making, Kill Rock Stars further underlined that Olympia’s space poignantly included young women as participants. The addition of KRS introduced a new set of actors to Olympia, like producer John Goodmanson, who had a hand in shaping it as empowering for young musicians. Early on in his career, Goodmanson had sworn off producing records for corporate labels in favor of independent ones like KRS. His intervention was to open a studio, John and Stu’s Place, where musicians with tiny budgets could have a shot at professional recording. At the time, Olympia bands had few options for studio recording beyond using a rudimentary setup in the back of K Records or relying on a covert session at Evergreen State College with a friend taking production classes. At John and Stu’s Place in Seattle, the studio Goodmanson founded with his friend Stuart Hallerman in 1993, a long line of Olympia bands went on to record albums and many of them were released by KRS, including SleaterKinney’s Dig Me Out. This particular intersection of labels and producers made Olympia a space where nontraditional approaches to music making were validated. Members of Hanna’s band Bikini Kill, for instance, refused to take guitar lessons or “get good” because these were seen as requisites put forth by men. As Hanna explained it, •

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“there’s already the stigma that you’re a total fake-ass if you’re a woman … we were saying, not only are we women who are singing militant feminist lyrics, but also we’re not gonna play by your rules.”7 John Goodmanson was willing to participate in this endeavor by recording Bikini Kill on their own terms, with the equipment they brought to the studio that was deliberately broken or out of tune. At the same time, he was willing to work with performers like Sleater-Kinney who presented a different challenge to traditional music making hierarchies: they took calculated measures to achieve precision in songwriting and musicianship without paying much heed to the fact that these were roles usually ascribed to men. To this end, Calvin Johnson and later Slim Moon released a roster of records with full knowledge that they defied the standards of commercial success. Most importantly, it was the young musicians themselves— those who wrote, performed, and recorded music—who made Olympia a space where the dismantling of cultural, and thus gendered, hierarchies was possible and even expected. As Olympia’s cultural space evolved, it developed into one that was rivaled by few others. By the time Julie Butterfield, Sleater-Kinney’s publicist during the time of Dig Me Out, moved from Minneapolis to Olympia in 1994 to work for K Records, she found that the city felt “really electric.”8 Butterfield remembered that Olympia’s downtown, colloquially referred to as the “four block rock,” housed galleries, venues, and offices that were not infrequently staffed by women. Compared to the smattering of Minneapolis bands like Babes in Toyland and labels like Twin Tone Records that included women, •

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Butterfield experienced Olympia as a world apart. In the context of the Northwest, Olympia was also distinct from both Seattle, Washington, some sixty miles to the north, and Portland, Oregon, about two hours’ drive south. For Sleater-Kinney’s future drummer, Californian Janet Weiss, the comparison was stark: “Seattle was macho. There were some women musicians but it was much more male dominated. Portland was all about working class musicians, without a lot of attitude and commercialism. Olympia was not like that at all—it was run by fast, strong, talented women who were political, outspoken, well-read, and intellectual,” Weiss recounted. The visibility of young performers, many of them women, was one tangible proof of Olympia’s particularity. Audience members were likely to see themselves mirrored on the stage, signaling that they, too, could very well participate as culture makers. For Carrie Brownstein, the active presence of female musicians was a fundamental part of her coming of age. “When I first discovered punk rock,” Brownstein told Rockrgrl, “you could see Seattle and Olympia bands like Beat Happening, Last Gasp, Holly Love, the Fastbacks, Mecca Normal and Giant Henry in really small clubs. You could stand right in front of the guitar players and they seemed like normal people who weren’t necessarily virtuosos on their instruments. In this tiny room you could see how the guitar plugged into the amplifier and how the drum kit was set up. I could relate to that. It was very human, very real, and it suddenly seemed possible for me.”9 Olympia was a place where young women had the ability to see other young women perform; the stage was demystified as the province of men and professionals. •

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For women in Olympia, it was perfectly normal to form bands together, regardless of if they’d just started playing or if they were seasoned musicians. In Tucker’s words, it was “a really supportive environment [where] we had a lot of encouragement.”10 After visiting the town for the first time in the mid-1990s, Weiss described it as a small, insular, and dynamic community. “In Olympia,” she told me, “they were so ambitious that they would start a band one week, and by the next week they’d have a recording. Not in a commercial way, but in a DIY, non-corporate way. They wouldn’t let the limitations of having just started stop them from getting their voices out.”11 In 1993, the then 19-year-old Brownstein formed Excuse 17 with Becca Albee and CJ Phillips. Then, after meeting Tucker when Excuse 17 played a series of shows with Heavens to Betsy, without much ado Brownstein and Tucker started Sleater-Kinney as a sideproject in 1994. “In Olympia at the time, there was a very non-monogamous musical community,” Brownstein said. “Everyone played in, like, ten bands. It was really casual for Corin and me to say, ‘Yeah, we should play music together.’”12 Tucker and Brownstein’s easy collaboration is indication that Olympia was a space where two women could—and did—easily transform ideas into practice. Janet Weiss’s experience in California in the late 1980s and early 1990s stands in sharp contrast to that of Tucker and Brownstein in Olympia. As a teen, Weiss had opportunities to see performers like Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, and Bruce Springsteen in large arenas, but remembered that “it was nothing that made me feel like I could be a musician.”13 Later, as a college student in San Francisco, she became more interested in bands like the Minutemen, •

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Husker Dü, Meat Puppets, X, and Dead Kennedys who played at small clubs; she found them no more empowering. “They were just regular people who were not intimidating and who could communicate on my level,” she related, “but seeing them didn’t make me think I could be a musician.” It took “a lucky offer,” as Weiss termed it, to set her music career into motion. Up to that point, she had procured a practice pad and collected tips from friends, but she only became emboldened to transform idea into practice because of a chance occurrence. “Although I had never sat behind a kit in my life, two crazy girls in a band called The Furies got wind that I was ‘learning’ how to play,” Weiss narrated. “I mean they asked me to join but I’d never played a drum set before. For some reason that I can’t fathom, I embraced this challenge … I was hooked. Drums it would be.”14 After joining Tucker and Brownstein as Sleater-Kinney’s fourth and final drummer in 1996, Weiss admitted that “I didn’t have anything like the Olympia scene that inspired Corin and Carrie.”15 Olympia’s uniqueness became all the more amplified when Sleater-Kinney toured. They rarely found comparable communities in other American cities and towns. “Facing a lot of sexism and a lot of condescension was really difficult,” Brownstein remembered. “We were a righteous group of people, thinking that everybody was as evolved as we were, and if they weren’t, we were so indignant. We got in a lot of fights with sound guys and with promoters at shows. It made me appreciate the place that I lived, and I also wanted to figure out how other places could have that.”16 As Sleater-Kinney embarked on the American leg of the Dig Me Out tour •

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in the spring of 1997, the contrast between Olympia and almost everywhere else seemed starker than ever. By this time, the band had become a group of confident musicians who purposefully approached their live shows. The experience of being dismissed by sound technicians drove Tucker to publish a zine that took the predominantly male staff of venues to task for offences such as trying to make her vocals sound “pretty” and tinkering with the micing of Weiss’s kit. The urgency the band felt among their audiences was another reminder of the sharp delineation between Olympia and most other parts of the United States. “People were not just excited,” Tucker said, “they were also desperate to talk to us … they felt physically unsafe.”17 Tucker’s observation suggests that, in contrast to Olympia, youth—especially girls— across the country were neither being taken seriously nor bestowed with equal rights. At punk shows, young women had been pushed out by aggressive moshing, while, in the broad context of American society, political debates about sexual assault and abortion threatened to confiscate the autonomy they had over their own bodies. In noticing how strained the atmosphere had become for young women in the United States in the 1990s, Tucker wasn’t alone.

Riot grrrl in Olympia and American society The riot grrrl movement, as much as Olympia’s labels, producers, and audiences, shaped the space where Corin Tucker first played a show and where she later started Sleater-Kinney. As Slim Moon was founding KRS in the •

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early 1990s, riot grrrl was coalescing into a thunderous social movement. Early participants, Tucker among them, were incensed by the inequalities young women faced in American society. The movement’s core goal, she articulated, was to “make the world a safe place for women, but really for everyone.”18 As quickly as it had formed, however, riot grrrl’s momentum was halted by internal fragmentation and media ridicule. But that’s not to say that its “failure” in the early 1990s undermined its impact. On the contrary, the contestation of riot grrrl precipitated future discussions that made the idea of Olympia’s space all the more feasible for young women living near and far from it. The riot grrrl movement was initially a reaction against the exclusion of women, sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit, from the hardcore punk scene.19 As a departure from 1970s punk where women had been present as both performers and fans, hardcore claimed the scene as a space of male anger and rebellion in the 1980s. Violent mosh pits became a manifestation of the rage young men felt toward the neoliberal society that had left them behind, while band names with phallic references suggested that those young men sought empowerment through a reassertion of masculinity. But empowerment for men came at a cost for women. Many early riot grrrl participants complained that they were relegated to the perimeters of hardcore shows and pushed to serving as “coat hangers” for their friends in the pit. Others spoke about instances of direct violence toward female audience members.20 At these shows, women were not only edged to the margins of the clubs, but their bodies were also poised as the repository for male anger. •

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It’s no surprise that early participants in riot grrrl placed a heavy emphasis on reclaiming their bodies as a path toward reclaiming their space at punk shows. Many young women wrote on their arms, legs, chests, and stomachs; in a scene where they were frequently silenced, if not reduced to a mere physical shell, participants mobilized their bodies as their voice. Some wrote phrases like “riot grrrl” that identified them to the like-minded, while other penned words like “slut” and “rape” to reflect back the misogyny that had come to envelop them at punk shows. Performers who took part in the movement began to call the women in the audience to come to the front of the stage; they used it as a strategy to cipher off moshing and make the show safer for their fans as well as to create a friendly buffer from the less amicable members of the crowd. They encouraged those in attendance to start their own bands and they passed around the microphone so that young women could announce riot grrrl meetings and advertise their zines. The movement’s challenge to the hardcore scene, however, didn’t go uncontested. Tucker remembered that “riot grrrl and Heavens to Betsy shows were so heated—there were debates, arguments, and sometimes physical violence. I came into performing with that background—as part performer, part lecturer, and part referee.”21 Countless other testimonies from the early 1990s report how this active repositioning of women’s bodies at the center of the club—not to mention their voices on stage—elicited anger and even violence from some men in attendance. Riot grrrl quickly evolved from a critique of the punk scene to a critique of American society. By the early 1990s, young women could feel the radical backlash •

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against liberal politics such as affirmative action, LGBT rights, and feminism in their everyday lives. Frequently, their bodies became sites of public debate on topics like abortion, all the while their opinions were rarely solicited. As a result, many riot grrrl participants felt as powerless in American society as they did at punk shows. Significantly, that society was no more comfortable with riot grrrl’s young participants who scrawled words like “slut” across their chests and spoke about domestic abuse, rape, and sexism than the punk scene had been. “At the time, it was confrontational and hard for people to hear,” Tucker remembered.22 As we’ll soon see, panicky Americans set out to detonate the specter of riot grrrl just as it appeared in the national media. Interestingly, riot grrrl didn’t look to feminism as an obvious ally. In part, this was because young women in the early 1990s had difficulty finding a shared platform with the theory-heavy language and institutional reform of second wave feminism that had originated from the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, riot grrrl participants weren’t shy to criticize the previous generation’s feminism for failing to address deep gender, class, and race fissures that continued to divide American society in the 1990s. Although recent scholarship argues that riot grrrl should be understood as part of a lineage of women’s activism, as a reformulation rather than a remaking of feminism, it’s important to note that many young women at the time did not see feminism as an adequate solution to the problems they faced in their daily lives.23 In part, they were right. While American society at large dismissed them because they were women, •

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many second wave feminists dismissed riot grrrl participants because they were young. For Johanna Fateman, a member of Hanna’s later band Le Tigre, the movement’s name, riot grrrl, was “a conscious response to second-wave feminists’ rejection of the word ‘girl’ [that] reclaimed it with pride—and also in parody.”24 Preferring “women,” or “womyn,” the earlier movement had shunned the use of “girl” as infantilizing. But riot grrrl participants saw the reclamation of “girl” with a growling twist to be an apt moniker that gestured at their embrace of the playfulness of youth as well as the rebelliousness typically associated with masculinity.25 As Sara Marcus argues in her book Girls to the Front, by the early 1990s young women faced a world that continually attempted to define their lives, least of all because it “didn’t know how to treat the lives of teenage girls as if they mattered.”26 In an effort to carve out a space for themselves in society as well as in feminism, riot grrrl participants took to building their own movement through punk tactics like performing and publishing. However, riot grrrl was internally fragmented from the very start. Like many leftist radical movements, riot grrrl often seemed like a mere assemblage of dissenting voices that made it complex but also contradictory.27 There were no leaders, no organizational structure, and no unified platform. As one scholar puts it, “riot grrrl had propagandists but no master strategists; it had prophets but no organizers. If an organizer had emerged, the movement would have torn her down, because between the radical feminist inspiration and its anarchist-punk provenance, riot grrrl had never tolerated anything that smelled remotely of a hierarchy.”28 Part of this had to •

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do with the fact that many participants were young women in their late teens and early 20s; most were developing their political consciousness through activism with riot grrrl and almost all were stringent idealists. Another reason that riot grrrl was fragmented had to do with the postmodern moment that vilified diversification rather than unification. Victoria Bromley suggests that postmodernism defined third wave feminism—riot grrrl among its iterations—as a movement that rejected homogeneous categories and identities. “Third wavers deny the legitimacy of claims about who is, and what it means to be, a ‘real’ woman or man … or that there is a ‘real’ way of being black, lesbian, gay, queer, racialized, classed, or feminist,” she writes. According to Bromley, third wave feminism as a movement breaks down to the level of the individual. And although its individualism enabled multiplicity, equivalent to the riot grrrl insistence on the uniqueness of every young woman, it also took a toll on its capacity as a collective struggle.29 This is evident, for instance, in the internal debates, and later critiques, about racial and class privilege of participants as well as the persistent discussions about what constituted riot grrrl at all.30 Moreover, the movement hardly even had time to define itself before it was halted in its tracks. Almost as quickly as it built steam in Olympia and in clusters of youth communities across the United States, it captured the attention—and the headlines—of the mainstream media. The press wasn’t kind to the movement; instead, it trivialized its participants as angsty teens, it reduced its agenda to questions of style, and it essentialized its cultural interventions as a matter of frivolity. Kathleen •

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Hanna was singled out as a representative of riot grrrl, often to her own dismay. “I think part of what made people so venomous in their attacks on Riot Grrrl in the underground and mainstream press, and to my face,” she explained, “was the fact that it was not cohesive and easily consumable. We didn’t have a mission statement we could pass out, we didn’t have a sentence that encapsulated it, we didn’t have one unified goal, we didn’t have one way to dress or look.”31 Coverage of the movement amounted to stories one scholar described as “misinformed, antagonistic, or banal.”32 The magnitude of the media’s representation was not lost on Tucker, who critiqued it as a commodification of the movement. “Our image was sold and sold and sold until we didn’t even know what we looked like anymore,” she wrote in a 1994 Heavens to Betsy newsletter.33 What’s more, while riot grrrl was grossly misrepresented at the time, it has been also misinterpreted since. It was only in the early 2010s, two decades after its emergence, that riot grrrl became the subject of serious scholarly studies that have worked to reposition its significance as a social movement that captured the zeitgeist of the early 1990s. The legacy of riot grrrl is no simpler than the story of its short-lived momentum. Some scholars criticize the movement’s resistance to the media (and frequently to academia) as a missed opportunity to have a broader impact. Joanne Gottlieb and Gayle Wald express concern that riot grrrl forfeited its authorial voice when members called a collective media blackout in 1993. The authors caution that, “if riot grrrl wants to raise feminist consciousness on a larger scale, then it will have to negotiate a relation to the mainstream that does not •

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merely reify the opposition between mainstream and subculture. Like it or not, the Girl-Style Revolution is bound to be televised.”34 While Gottlieb and Wald take issue with the movement’s opposition to the mainstream as politically regressive and elitist, some scholars reject their argument, claiming that it “violates riot grrrl resolve to resist incorporation and the gaze of both ‘mainstream’ media and academia.”35 Gottlieb and Wald do have a point: riot grrrl appeared in the media whether or not participants gave their consent. That, then, begs the question of incorporation: if riot grrrl was going to be televised, how did it impact the society that watched? The paradox is that even negative media attention served the movement by broadening the reach of riot grrrl ideas to young women across America. “Riot grrrl was instantly adopted by all these young girls,” Tucker recognized. “So many girls all over the country immediately identified with it.”36 As it turned out, riot grrrl spoke to an entire generation of young women, most of them far removed from a space like the one that existed in early 1990s Olympia. At the same time, many participants worried that their ideals would become distorted though popularization. Jigsaw zine author and Bikini Kill member Tobi Vail, for example, feared that riot grrrl would be embraced by “posers or maybe just well-intentioned and hopelessly enthusiastic extremely isolated young girls living in small town America who read dumb articles in dumb magazines written by dumb people.”37 Vail’s skepticism was premised on the assumption that both “posers” and “extremely isolated young girls” were passive consumers; she failed to account for the possibility that they could read between the lines of media •

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commentary. More importantly, she overlooked how important riot grrrl ideas could be—even when delivered by the mainstream media—to young women who were surrounded by patriarchal families and communities across America. Over time, and even as the space of early 1990s Olympia ceased to exist, scholars argue that the incorporation of riot grrrl ideas into mainstream culture—and, with them, the incorporation of third wave feminism—has ultimately been positive.38

Sleater-Kinney’s Olympian inheritances More than twenty years after she debuted with Heavens to Betsy at the IPUC, Corin Tucker remembered riot grrrl as a movement that had been extraordinarily important for her. “It was definitely a flawed attempt to deal with some of these giant ideas that young people are sometimes ready to tackle,” she said, “but that’s what we did. I am so proud to be a part of it. I think that the movement touched on really important things.”39 As an early participant, Tucker had also been an early critic—both of riot grrrl’s limitations and of the media’s misrepresentation. By the late 1990s, along with her bandmates in Sleater-Kinney, she forged strategies for navigating the legacy of riot grrrl as well as Olympia’s early 1990s space. Even today, Sleater-Kinney continue to be in dialogue with both of these Olympian inheritances. Unlike riot grrrl’s rejection of the media, SleaterKinney came to terms with the mainstream press as a tool for reaching fans across the United States. “Living •

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in communities like Portland or Olympia,” Brownstein shared in a 1999 interview, “you kind of take for granted the underground and the fanzines and this kind of insular knowledge that just passes through word-of-mouth. But then you start getting letters that say, ‘I read about you in Spin,’ from a sixteen-year-old in Nebraska and you realize that this person won’t hear about you at a show or through a fanzine. We’ve looked at the whole spectrum and there are definitely good and bad sides.”40 When I spoke to Julie Butterfield, Sleater-Kinney’s publicist at the time Dig Me Out was released, she told me she’d been in just that situation as a young adult—growing up in Nebraska with little more than the mainstream media as her cultural point of contact. Although Butterfield was aware of the suspicions most Olympians harbored toward the media after riot grrrl blew up, she prioritized coverage as a means of getting fans to a show. Once there, Butterfield intuited, the band could present themselves to the audience without a middleman.41 When Sleater-Kinney began to develop methods for interacting with the mainstream on their own terms, not to mention when they began to appear in Spin and Rolling Stone in the late 1990s, the Olympia community turned a skeptical eye toward them. While the national press frequently branded the band as too political, the Olympian retort was that they had stopped being political enough. This tells us that the ideals of the riot grrrl movement had hardly collapsed, as many believed, but it also gives us a glimpse of their inflexibility. As far as many Olympians were concerned, mainstream media adulterated even a homegrown band. Sleater-Kinney were left to grapple with the competing pressures of Olympia’s punk ethos •

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and mainstream commercial success. “For some people, Dig Me Out was the first time we sold out,” Brownstein said in the early 2000s. “We came from a community where people were hardly selling any records, were not even trying to get press, didn’t tour with sound people, didn’t have their own booking agents. I felt like we were betraying our Olympians—‘Oh my God, we’re getting a booking agent, what are people gonna think?’ Other bands would be like, ‘Why don’t you guys have a booking agent yet?’ but it was really weird coming from such a fiercely independent, anti-corporate community. Which thank God we did, because those values are permanently instilled in us.” Ten years later, in a feature in The New Yorker, Brownstein spoke more critically about riot grrrl, terming it “elitism that passes itself off as inclusiveness.” “When you’re indoctrinated into a scene,” she explained, “there’s this pride that comes with being accepted and understood by people you admire. But the flip side of that is this almost stifling sense of democracy. You put yourself down, to overcompensate for the embarrassment of riches or the little attention you get.”42 For a movement that rejected mainstream media as a compromised platform, Olympian idealists were hard pressed to accept a band that was coming to be considered a press darling. Sleater-Kinney held no illusions about the incompatibility of riot grrrl’s punk ethics with the realities of commercial success, but they maintained their indebtedness to Olympia as a space that presented them with the opportunity to grow beyond it in the first place. In the 2001 documentary Songs for Cassavetes, they insisted that “Sleater-Kinney wouldn’t exist without •

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bands, individual people, and labels from Portland and Olympia.”43 At another instance, Weiss reiterated that “there’s nothing that we do that can be separated from where we’re from.”44 Tim Holman, a friend of the band who traveled as their roadie on the Dig Me Out tour, provided further insight: “Riot grrrl informed who they were—they were feminists and they were musicians— but, to a certain degree, they were moving past it. They wanted to be defined less by this movement than by themselves as a band. They were still feminists and still cared about the rights of women and queer people, but their ideology wasn’t written on their belly anymore. It was growing up, without dismissing the past.”45 In fact, it can be argued that it’s precisely through the mainstream popularity of Sleater-Kinney that the legacy of early 1990s Olympia has continued to enjoy a vibrant afterlife in the United States. Holman, who’s an educator in Louisville, Kentucky, shared with me a story that encapsulates the band’s contemporary role as a sort of gateway to Olympia’s youth- and girl-positive space. For one of his students, the path to discovering riot grrrl began very much in the mainstream: “She saw [Carrie Brownstein’s IFC comedy series] Portlandia and thought it was funny. From there, her mom got her Dig Me Out, and she said that album was the way she got into that world,” Holman explained.46 The fact that many young people continue to be drawn to the ideals of the riot grrrl movement, as well as to punk in general, indicates that there is still work to be done in dismantling and rebuilding cultural hierarchies. More importantly, because Olympia offered Sleater-Kinney a space to develop as musicians, the band’s commercial •

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success has ensured that the space will continue to be present for new generations of young adults. *** In the 33 1/3 volume on Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Kim Cooper writes that “rock historians like to puzzle over why some towns suddenly belch up the elusive quarry, the Scene … Why Minneapolis in ’84, Seattle in ’89, London in ’66, and San Francisco in ’67?”47 There’s certainly a temptation to claim uniqueness for every scene that has produced a cohort of musicians. However, when it comes to Olympia in the early 1990s, the uniqueness is unmistakable. At the intersection of labels, performers, and activists, Olympia became a space where traditional practices of musicianship were torn down and new ones were built in their place. It was a space where girls no longer just went to the shows of their boy counterparts, wore their band shirts, and read their zines. Instead, Olympia enabled young musicians, particularly young women, to form their own bands, to make their own shirts, and to write their own zines. Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein were two of those young women. It offered them the possibility to transform their ideas into practice. The sound of that possibility reverberates on all Sleater-Kinney albums—perhaps most of all on Dig Me Out.

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Eight Days in Seattle: The Struggle to Record Dig Me Out

As the holidays were underway in late December of 1996, a severe winter storm pelleted the Pacific Northwest. The first round of snow arrived around December 24 and the second followed a couple of days later. As the night of December 27 moved into the morning of December 28, a third winter wave covered parts of the region with upwards of a foot of snow. This might not sound like much to a seasoned New Englander or a Midwesterner, but twelve inches of snow was practically unheard of on the West Coast. Around Seattle, where residents were accustomed to a little less than seven inches of snow annually, the storm closed roads, caused massive infrastructural damage, and even shut down many public works. CNN described downtown Seattle as “a ghost town with no traffic and a few people,”1 while The New York Times reported that the storm had forced all business in Seattle to come to a halt, even basic bus service.2 Worse yet, heavy rain and sleet rounded out the year and transformed the region into an icy, slushy mess. In the days that followed, major roads and airports were reopened, •

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but rising temperatures brought unprecedented flooding that left much of the Northwest in a state of emergency.3 On the eve of the New Year, The Seattle Times predicted that “this one will go down in history.”4 And, indeed, the snowstorm of December 1996 is ranked as one of Seattle’s five worst recorded weather events. The storm has also gone down in history for another reason: it set the scene for the recording of Dig Me Out. Just as the first snow was descending on the Northwest, the members of Sleater-Kinney were preparing for their scheduled session with producer John Goodmanson in Seattle. Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss, who lived in Portland at the time, were charged with driving a van full of equipment to the studio where Carrie Brownstein was to meet them after traveling from Olympia. “I remember waking up and thinking ‘oh, shit,’ because everything was covered in snow and ice,” Tucker told me.5 The two women first worked to defrost the van, then loaded the equipment, and finally started driving north. “It was so treacherous just to get out of town,” Weiss recalled. “I remember driving as we were heading up I-5 and a huge chunk of ice flew off from a truck on the southbound side. It hit the windshield and knocked the rearview mirror off. Corin dove under the dashboard—she was so scared. But because I was driving, I remember that I didn’t even flinch. I think that sort of impressed her; she was like, ‘whoa, this girl’s got nerves of steel!’ It was as if I had passed some sort of test, just getting us to Seattle.”6 The grueling weather, however, was hardly the only hurdle on the road to Dig Me Out. The making of the album amounts to a series of struggles that far surpass Tucker and Weiss’s hairy drive •

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from Portland to Seattle. Just to get to the point of recording, Sleater-Kinney had to first find a label that would release their forthcoming album and to secure a mainstay drummer. Then, when they’d finally arrived in Seattle, the storm blotted the time they had booked with Goodmanson and kept them from the studio for days at a time. Finally, and what was perhaps the most difficult part of making Dig Me Out, Sleater-Kinney had to legitimize themselves as musicians on a national platform where women weren’t usually accepted as equals. As the album was released, young women in America stood in a more precarious position than ever: the riot grrrl movement had been defused by the mid-1990s, gendered notions of music making continued to resonate in popular culture, and a backlash against liberal politics swept the nation. “We were literally fighting to make ourselves heard,” Tucker articulated. “We were fighting doubt from the music industry. We were fighting the terrible snowstorm. We were fighting the lack of any real resources. And we literally got in there and we were just desperate to be heard—that’s why that album sounds the way it does.”7 The sound of Dig Me Out at once tells the story of a band braving the elements to get to the studio and then braving society to be understood on their own terms.

Obstacles on the road to recording Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein formed SleaterKinney in 1994 after their bands Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17, respectively, toured together. By then, both had substantial experience with recording. Heavens to Betsy •

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had released their full-length Calculated on Slim Moon’s Kill Rock Stars in 1993, and Donna Dresch’s Portlandbased Chainsaw Records put out Excuse 17’s self-titled debut the following year. Around that time, Tucker and Brownstein were prolific. Not only did they continue writing, recording, and touring with Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17, but they also released two Sleater-Kinney albums on Chainsaw, their self-titled debut in 1995 and Call the Doctor in 1996, while many still considered the band to be a side-project. But reprioritizing SleaterKinney as their main endeavor did not come easily. First, Tucker and Brownstein had trouble securing a contract with a well-distributed independent label. Not only that, but they had trouble securing a long-term drummer. Once they’d received a commitment from KRS and met Janet Weiss, the future of Sleater-Kinney seemed to hinge on their follow-up Dig Me Out. As the snow began to fall on the night before their scheduled studio time, the band had no other choice than to plow through it all the way to Seattle. After their second album Call the Doctor was released, one writer called Sleater-Kinney “the most acclaimed unheard band in America.”8 The record had made a splash on end-of-the-year top lists in 1996: it placed third in The Village Voice critics’ poll, respected music writers like Terri Sutton and Gillian Gaar claimed it as an instant favorite, and even Courtney Love cited it among her most-listened-to albums.9 The problem was that the band had difficulty reaching the general audience. Although Tucker and Brownstein had a working relationship with Donna Dresch at Chainsaw, the label lacked a developed business model. Their distributor Revolver, for instance, •

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didn’t have a publicist and left bands to do most of their own press. Not only that, but while they toured, Sleater-Kinney constantly ran out of merchandise to sell to hard-won fans. “Donna is a good friend of ours and Excuse 17 and Heavens to Betsy had both put out records on Chainsaw,” Brownstein explained in 1996. “We really wanted to work with women that were running labels. [But] there are drawbacks … [and] some compromises.”10 The band increasingly believed that the compromises were coming at the expense of Sleater-Kinney’s success. As frustration with the poor publicity and distribution at Chainsaw mounted, Sleater-Kinney brainstormed moving to a label that would better fit the band’s trajectory. “We’re never going to be huge like Pearl Jam or something, but I want more people to have access to our music, not just the geeky kids,” Brownstein reasoned at the time.11 Major labels were almost entirely out of the question. Although the band had received propositions from majors and went on to receive many more after the release of Dig Me Out, they were committed to remaining on an independent label based in the Northwest. “Signing to a major label would uproot us from the contacts and the community we came from and that doesn’t appeal to us,” Brownstein said in an interview. “We want to work with people who care about us, who care about our music, and have a vested interest in seeing us grow in a way that makes sense for us; both as a band and as people.”12 For Tucker, who’d already worked with Slim Moon, Kill Rock Stars seemed like a natural choice. The label had an expanding, well-received roster, and, more importantly, it had better distribution through Mordam. •

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Moon, however, still saw Sleater-Kinney as a side-project because both Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17 had established followings. “I had talked Kill Rock Stars into putting out the record, after I had practically twisted Slim’s arm,” Tucker told me. “He didn’t want to do it so I had to badger him to put out the record, and eventually he agreed but said we’d only have a certain amount of time and so we had to make everything happen no matter what.”13 Slim Moon was serious about the offer, but he was only prepared to give Sleater-Kinney a single chance. To record Dig Me Out, he allotted the band a fast deadline and a small stipend to cover just over a week in the studio. Around the same time, the band also had the good fortune to connect with Julie Butterfield, who was working as a publicist at K Records. Butterfield was so enamored with Sleater-Kinney that she founded her own agency in order to be able to work with them regardless of which label released their records. “Everyone who was around Sleater-Kinney felt that they had something special going on,” she told me. “It was a band I wanted to work with and help propel.”14 She did just that as Dig Me Out was about to be recorded. In fact, Butterfield designed a publicity model tailored specifically for Sleater-Kinney: she targeted certain journalists and publications who “would get it,” developed press kits that preceded the band on tour, and kept immaculate records of media allies. With Butterfield on board and the promise of a KRS release, Sleater-Kinney were inching closer to making their third record a reality. But one last detail was left unresolved: the band didn’t have a permanent drummer. Since forming, •

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Sleater-Kinney had cycled through three percussionists. Their self-titled debut was recorded in Australia with Laura MacFarlane. Although they “really clicked” with MacFarlane, they soon realized that “it just became unrealistic to play in a band with someone who lives across the world.”15 Misty Farrell and Toni Gogin both took turns as drummers around the time of Call the Doctor, but neither could commit to the band in the long term. During the summer of 1996, Tucker and Brownstein started looking for a replacement. Brownstein pasted hand-made posters around Olympia that advertised: “Drummer Wanted: Preferably Female, For Rock n’ Roll Band. We like the Buzzcocks.” Tucker took a more targeted approach and reached out to local drummers she liked. After playing a show in Portland with the band Jr. High, Tucker was so impressed with their drummer Janet Weiss that she procured her phone number and invited her to a Sleater-Kinney practice. By all accounts, there was an instant connection between Weiss and the band. “Meeting Janet was the best thing that could have happened to us,” Tucker claimed almost twenty years later. “She showed up and knew all of our songs from Call the Doctor, plus she had such a great presence.”16 Weiss remembered that their first meeting was “a let’s-see-what-happens situation.”17 “When Corin called me and invited me to play with them,” she recounted, “the first song they played for me was ‘Dig Me Out.’ It was a finished song and I had to find myself in it. Their songs were so immediate—they sounded so new and fresh to me—that I had a lot of ideas right off the bat.”18 Tucker and Brownstein were eager to hear their new drummer’s ideas, welcoming the “slightly •

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poppier sound” that Weiss contributed to Sleater-Kinney. “They were very advanced as far as their songwriting and the way they would complete each other’s ideas and how they put songs together,” Weiss explained. “They needed someone older with more experience. I had been playing a lot, very regularly, and I practiced a lot—I was into it. It wasn’t something I wasn’t sure about. I knew, and I think we all knew from the first practice that this was worth exploring.”19 Although they couldn’t have known that the collaboration would last for decades to come, all three were certain that Weiss brought cohesion to Sleater-Kinney. Soon after their first practice, the trio began writing the songs that would appear on Dig Me Out. “I remember thinking that these guys are high-powered and prolific!” Weiss exclaimed.20 She had no trouble keeping up with the pace. Like Tucker and Brownstein, Weiss had built an impressive performing resumé, most notably playing with the Portland-based band Quasi alongside Sam Coomes. When the three women put their minds together, tracks took shape quickly, leaving Tucker and Brownstein to speculate if Weiss had been the missing link all along. Some years later, Brownstein remarked: “Before Janet was in the band, Corin and I really needed to be grounded. I think that’s what Janet really added to the band. She really gave Dig Me Out a center that Call the Doctor didn’t have.”21 But more than that, Weiss gave Sleater-Kinney the impetus they needed to record Dig Me Out.

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At John and Stu’s Place With a deal with Kill Rock Stars, an ambitious publicist, and a new drummer in tow, Sleater-Kinney were ready to record. But more obstacles lay just ahead—the first of them being the massive snowstorm that brewed just as their studio time with John Goodmanson neared. The storm made recording Dig Me Out trying from the very start and, in turn, the dire conditions of their time in the studio are reflected in the sound of the album. “The physicality of making that record was very, very difficult,” Tucker explained.22 Once the band had safely arrived in Seattle, the storm continued to pose problems—on certain days keeping them from the studio altogether and on others making recording conditions miserable. The most challenging task at hand was to complete the album in the eight days that they had booked at the studio. The band didn’t come unprepared and, coupled with Goodmanson’s quick work, Dig Me Out took shape just as the Pacific Northwest was coming up for air after the storm. “We found this amazing drummer and we had just a few days to make something amazing,” Tucker told me. “So we worked at breakneck speed to get songs recorded, to add in a few overdubs, to mix the whole thing, and— boom—we were done.”23 Dig Me Out resonates with the same urgency it took to record it. The album clocks in at under forty minutes, with each second more intense than the last. When it came to choosing a producer, John Goodmanson was a natural collaborator for SleaterKinney. Goodmanson had a well-established repertoire as a recording engineer, producer, and mixer for bands •

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on independent labels. He had opened his Seattle studio John and Stu’s Place in 1993 and went on to record many Northwest bands there, including Heavens to Betsy and Sleater-Kinney’s second album Call the Doctor. Most importantly, Goodmanson’s studio was financially accessible to bands on independent labels. “There was momentum building around the underground stuff,” Goodmanson remembered. “That was the reason I built a studio—to be able to record the bands that I liked and to have a studio that they could afford.”24 Specifically, he wanted to make professional recording available to bands whose albums Slim Moon was releasing on KRS. At the time, Moon’s budget was far from lucrative: around $4,000 for each record. Indeed, when Goodmanson unearthed the invoice for Dig Me Out, the total for recoding, producing, and mixing—including a couple of two-inch reel-to-reel tapes that cost $350 each—amounted to $3,628. This sum dwarfs only the rare contemporary album (Nirvana’s 1989 Bleach was famously recorded for $600—in the very same building that later housed John and Stu’s Place), and it was certainly minuscule compared to what big studios charged and what major labels could afford. Goodmanson’s studio also came with a coveted legacy. Around the time that Dig Me Out was recorded, bands like Built to Spill, Blonde Redhead, and Modest Mouse had all come through John and Stu’s Place. What’s more, the building housing the studio was steeped in a deep cultural inheritance. “As far as Seattle goes,” Goodmanson told me, “that building is the history of rock.”25 Built as a triangular structure on a triangular block just after the turn of the twentieth century, it found itself on a busy •

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street in the mid-1990s between Seattle’s Ballard and Freemont neighborhoods and sandwiched by industrial retailers that had come to reflect the same state of deterioration as the building’s shell. In the 1970s, it had housed Triangle Records, and then Reciprocal Recording where Bleach and other early Sub Pop albums were recorded. When Goodmanson moved in, he mobilized the tiny interior into a “space to get in and work.” True to form, it wasn’t glamorous and hardly had any signage. As a small frivolity, Goodmanson painted the side entrance red to set it apart from the building’s peeling brown paint. Regrettably, a dive bar down the block had a similar door. “More than once,” Goodmanson reminisced, “I had a drunk dude stumble in, see that it wasn’t the bar, and be super confused. It was a little hazardous.”26 In the decades since, Goodmanson moved out and the building acquired a new generation of musical tenants. Most notably, after recording Transatlanticism, Chris Walla of Death Cab for Cutie took an interest in the place and redesigned it as a pit stop for his band’s recording and practicing. Although it was tight and grimy, the interior of John and Stu’s Place was a goldmine for professional recording. “The studio itself was awesome,” Weiss summed up.27 Goodmanson had built John and Stu’s Place with a salvaged Quadra Electronics console and a 24-track recorder. Because the building measured only about 1,000 square feet, the studio consisted of a small control room where “you could just barely fit a band” and a bathroom. The tight quarters made for some recording particularities that Goodmanson was happy to exploit. “Everyone played everything live together—and •

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that’s still how I record albums,” he explained. “But it was peculiar to that room that I could do it without any isolation rooms at all. The band could play as if it was a practice room—there was no adjustment period of getting headphone mixes right or re-learning to play together in a strange environment of hearing sound through headphones and not with their whole body.”28 The studio effectively allowed Goodmanson to capture the best of Sleater-Kinney: their live sound. During their session, the band recorded the songs live, Tucker and Brownstein’s vocals were added later, and just a couple of days were devoted to mixing. Goodmanson described Dig Me Out as “a really present record”—it sounds as if the band is playing in the listener’s living room. Another particularity of John and Stu’s Place enabled bands to record relatively quickly. The studio didn’t have much of an echo and it allowed an instrument to be isolated and fixed without having to do another take each time someone made a mistake. Sleater-Kinney booked eight days in the studio; that was all KRS could afford. Luckily, Goodmanson was ready to record on a tight schedule. “An eight-day album is an intense thing, but it was my bread and butter—12 hour days, 7 days a week,” he told me. “I had opened my studio a few years earlier and it was my reason for existing … it was the way that I was making records around that time.”29 Even so, when Sleater-Kinney finally arrived at the studio after the treacherous drive to Seattle, the storm had already stacked the odds against them. For starters, John and Stu’s Place didn’t have heating. Goodmanson had long ago removed the large baseboard heaters in the interest of sound quality, expecting that the crammed •

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amps and bodies would exert enough heat. This usually worked according to plan, but it was no match for the atypical snowstorm raging outside. “The studio was freezing,” Weiss remembered. “And we weren’t really prepared clothes-wise. Our legs were always wet up to our knees from loading gear and walking through the snow—we only had tennis shoes on. We had to get space heaters to try to dry our clothes and our socks and our shoes. It was a very cold and wet recording experience. There was no comfort to it!”30 Tucker recalled huddling around two small radiators to keep warm, but they couldn’t be kept on for long because they were prone to overload the studio’s fragile electrical board. “The electricity was not so great,” Goodmanson admitted. “It was all self installed in the 1970s when they first turned it into a studio—I had to keep the [portable] heaters plugged into different circuits or it would blow the circuit breakers.”31 Coupled with the freezing studio, Sleater-Kinney battled the storm on a daily basis just to get to John and Stu’s Place. “The weather created multiple obstacles,” Weiss told me. “We couldn’t get to where we were supposed to stay, so we had to stay somewhere else. And there was a morning when we were snowed in and we couldn’t get to the studio. We spent that whole day going crazy because we wanted to be recording, but we just couldn’t get the car out of the parking lot. The van was totally snowed in. The next day, we were determined to get the car out, get to the studio, and to do whatever we had to do.”32 As it turned out, that meant teaming up to dislodge their van from the frozen ground, and in the process damaging a station wagon parked nearby. •

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Sleater-Kinney left a note of apology, and covered the costs when the owner made contact a year later. On the days that the three women could make it to the studio, work with Goodmanson came easily. For their part, the band arrived with a set of polished songs. “As it always is with Sleater-Kinney,” Goodmanson remarked, “a whole lot of stuff was worked out before they even started recording. They are really thoughtful people and take what they do very seriously—we always have a super good time.”33 Although Goodmanson’s contribution to the album’s sound is discreet, it is critical to its form. His interests as a producer were never in leaving recognizable footprints. Instead, he helped musicians find the right interpretations of their own sound without relying on the studio as an instrument to completely remake it. What Goodmanson nurtured most in Sleater-Kinney’s sound was the fast, unwieldy energy that the trio produced together. Each individual is heard on the album; for example, we hear Tucker’s guitar tuned down to a heavy, deep C and Weiss’s toms tuned to add texture. But we also hear the dynamic between the three musicians in the interlocking of their instruments. Goodmanson introduced a few experimental techniques to the recording session. On one of the days when the band members were snowed out of the studio, for example, he spliced and sequenced a drum loop for “Dance Song ’97.” The snowstorm, in this respect, was a happy accident that allowed Goodmanson time to dig up “something groovy” that would fit with the song.34 Another interesting collaboration happened during the recording of “Heart Machine.” Goodmanson asked Weiss to bang on the radiators they’d crammed •

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into the recording room and then sent that noise through a distortion box. The band was receptive to both innovations. The dynamic in the studio was electric the entire week. As their eight days in Seattle came to an end, SleaterKinney were jubilant. “I remember lying on the floor during mixing and just listening to it—I thought ‘wow, we did it,’” Tucker said. Weiss was also happy with the final cuts and somewhat surprised that the physical discomfort of the freezing studio didn’t negatively impact the sound. “The funny thing about recording is that it might have been difficult, stressful, and hard, but then, you hear the music and it sounds really effortless,” she observed.35 On their last day in Seattle, the band wrote out the track names on small pieces of paper and sequenced the album. “John had a baseball lineup analogy,” Weiss remembered: “the songs started with the lead-off batter, then the second batter, the third batter, and then the cleanup hitter.”36 Butterfield came by the studio that day and asked them about their goals for Dig Me Out. Brownstein’s quick reply was that she hoped the album would propel the band to Saturday Night Live. It felt like a daring proposition at the time, but it also felt like an ambitious provocation to the other members. “Carrie was the one who was unafraid, she always thought everything was possible,” Weiss told me. “This made us fearless.”37 Although the band has yet to appear on Saturday Night Live, as of the time of this writing, they would go on to reach and surpass many other goals. The first of them had been making the album at all. “We were just thrilled that we had accomplished something that all of us had dreamed of—of making an album that had •

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the immediacy of reaching out to people and that had the depth of what we wanted to say,” Tucker evaluated.38 With the task of recording and mixing Dig Me Out in a whirlwind of a winter storm complete, Sleater-Kinney left the studio victorious.

Being heard on their own terms Making Dig Me Out had been cathartic for SleaterKinney. Janet Weiss described the process as “exuberant,” while Corin Tucker saw it as a “huge accomplishment.” More importantly, the album came to mark a pivotal moment for the band. It was the beginning of their relationship with Kill Rock Stars, the label that would go on to release three of their subsequent records. It was also the beginning of their career as a trio, with Janet Weiss permanently entrenched in the drummer’s seat. Most significantly, Dig Me Out signaled the transition of Sleater-Kinney from a band with an underground following to one with popular resonance across the United States. “Dig Me Out changed everything for us as a band,” Tucker told me. “Very few people knew who we were after Call the Doctor, and there were few people at our shows. But when Dig Me Out came out, every venue was sold out across the country. It was a totally different experience for our band. We were suddenly in Time magazine, we got a crazy amount of press coverage. Everything just changed when that album came out.”39 The record—its cover art and its sound—translates Sleater-Kinney’s understated intention during recording: to be taken seriously as women and as musicians. •

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The cover of Dig Me Out provides a lens into how Sleater-Kinney imagined themselves as the album was about to be released in April of 1997. At first glance, it’s a simple cover comprised of four photographs: three small portraits of the band members line the top and a larger close-up of a torso playing a guitar occupies the rest of the frame. The portraits are snapshots taken during a practice session in Weiss’s basement: Brownstein is looking up from her red SG Gibson, Tucker is looking away, and Weiss is drumming with headphones. In the portraits, each woman appears to have been caught in the middle of a thought, not having welcomed the photographer’s gaze; they seem almost annoyed to have been interrupted. Weiss took the large photograph that shows Brownstein’s headless body playing Goodmanson’s Jerry Jones Danelectro guitar in the live room at John and Stu’s Place; a Black Sabbath poster peeks out in the back. The name of the band and the album crown the very top in all caps. At first glance, the cover simply declares that this is a group of musicians who prioritize playing over elaborate sleeve art and logos. It almost feels like a haphazard assemblage of image and text. But, as with so much else with Sleater-Kinney, nothing is arbitrary. The cover of Dig Me Out makes a supporting claim in the band’s case against gender hierarchies implicit in music making. In its design, it’s a take-off of The Kinks’ 1965 album The Kink Kontroversy. The layouts are identical, with the exception that The Kinks had a fourth member and thus a fourth portrait lining the top. Weiss had thought of the idea. “The Kinks are one of my all-time favorite bands and they were revered,” she said. “It was fun to play with that idea of what makes a revered •

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band. And we could be that, too!”40 On the cover of Dig Me Out, where in place of The Kinks they substituted their own portraits and their own guitars, Sleater-Kinney suggested that three women could embody a rock band (and play guitars and drums) all the same. While they had presented a similar challenge to rock stardom on Call the Doctor’s “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone,” the cover of Dig Me Out declared that Sleater-Kinney saw themselves as musicians on a par with The Kinks. “I liked toying with the idea that we didn’t have any limitations, that we could be that band, that people could talk about us like we matter, and that what we’re saying is important,” Weiss elaborated. “But the idea of being heroic is often not presented to women. Women are often seen as motherly and nurturing. We wanted to be heroic, scary, edgy, and challenging.”41 Heroism is important and, for Weiss, it’s a trait ascribed to the legions of esteemed rockers like The Kinks—most of them men. To place Sleater-Kinney among them was to question women’s exclusion from the canon, an exclusion that female musicians had long been pushing up against but that nevertheless continued to prevail in the 1990s. But more than just the cover, Dig Me Out as a whole can be considered a rejection of the categories that were frequently imposed on female musicians. Nothing about the album nurtures or seduces the listener. “It was really intense, a very personal album that got at some of the things we faced as women in this band,” Tucker told me. Although women were certainly visible in popular culture in the late 1990s, performers like the Spice Girls and Celine Dion reinforced gender roles rather than dismantled them. There was little room for women who •

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stepped outside brackets like “sexy” or “sentimental” or those who performed social defiance like their male counterparts. Performers who did were rarely taken seriously as musicians, as Sleater-Kinney found time and again when they interviewed with mainstream presses and toured across the United States. The riot grrrl movement had chipped away at the gendered conceptions of culture in the early 1990s, but the climate for women in music seemed just as grave in the second part of the decade. When Dig Me Out was released in the spring of 1997, responses from fans reiterated just how desperate American audiences had been for a band like SleaterKinney. Many were hungry for female musicians who undermined gender hierarchies in music making—what Olympia’s space had provided for Tucker and Brownstein. “From the way people responded to it,” Weiss said, “I know that it had cultural weight as an important record. It seemed there was a feeling of necessity when it came out.”42 The immediate acclaim of Dig Me Out among listeners made the struggles it took to make the album seem worthwhile. “People lost their minds,” Julie Butterfield remembered. “They just loved the album.”43 Critics, too, loved the album and several heavyweights soon rallied behind the band. The most important change set in motion by Dig Me Out was that Sleater-Kinney began to be revered as rock stars. When I spoke with John Goodmanson, he shared with me an interesting anecdote about the Jerry Jones Danelectro guitar that Brownstein is shown playing on the album cover. “When I show up with that guitar, people freak out and want to get their pictures taken •

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with it,” he narrated. “When I was working with the Los Campesinos! guys—there’s a lot of them—they all had to get their picture taken with that guitar.”44 The myth of the Danelectro resembles the one of Abbey Road where The Beatles were once photographed for an album cover. Fans flock to Abbey Road to recreate the scene of the legendary crossing, just like they do to photograph themselves with the guitar that appears on the cover of Dig Me Out. Both of these signifiers capture the imagination of fans because they were once embodied by those perceived to be heroic. That’s to say that with Dig Me Out, Sleater-Kinney had breached a world where they could be heroes.

•

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Strange Words: Writing about Gender, Punk, and Sleater-Kinney

Just as Dig Me Out was released, Time magazine ran an article on Sleater-Kinney that introduced the band to an audience larger than they had ever had before. It was one of their first lengthy features and it set the tone for the flood of forthcoming mainstream coverage devoted to the band. The subheading of the Time article announced that “the rock trio Sleater-Kinney is angry and in your face. But the group is happy to have guitars.” Right from the start, the band was presented through a set of paradoxes: they were both gleeful and glum, both cheery and confrontational. The article continued in a similar vein. It established the authority of the band’s male counterparts by qualifying Sleater-Kinney as “feminist rockers” and asserting that they’d earned acclaim only by virtue of “general media hype” about women on stage. Then, writing that the band “rips through their songs with a gleeful abandon, as if they had just discovered their instruments behind some old tires in the garage,” the author trivialized the members as unskilled musicians. And that’s all before tackling the •

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music itself. Once sound was in question, the article, like many other texts from around the time, skirted sonic adjectives altogether in favor of gendered clichés. For instance, the track “Turn It On” is described as having a “fiery skittishness,” “One More Hour” is reduced to “a lesbian breakup song,” and the whole of the record is said to work on a “primal” level.1 Although the article was likely intended as a positive profile of the band, its loaded subtext gives us a lens into the mainstream media’s unease in writing about a group of women who skillfully played loud, fast, punk rock. The author of the Time article mediated that unease by declaring SleaterKinney as strange—as a mere oddity in a world where professional men continued to be vested as rock stars. The media’s reliance on the words of strangeness to write about Sleater-Kinney revealed its discomfort with young women in the role of culture makers. Although the band’s first two records had received some acclaim, the release of Dig Me Out signaled a moment, as Punk Planet surmised, when Sleater-Kinney “transformed from being well-loved in the underground to total press darlings.”2 Articles published in the national media, however, were deeply entrenched in hierarchies that simultaneously undermined the musicians as they set out to spotlight the band. They employed three methods of grappling with Sleater-Kinney. The language of authority implied that a band comprised of three women had no business in the male-dominated rock world. The language of legitimacy questioned Sleater-Kinney’s technical ability and subordinated it to men’s musicianship. Finally, the language of sound relied on gender stereotypes to make sense of music played by women that otherwise didn’t sound •

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all that different from that played by men. In negotiating gender, punk, and the intersection of the two, the media’s language of strangeness thrust the trio into the mainstream but then attempted to sideline their cultural significance. This complicated relationship wasn’t lost on Sleater-Kinney or their growing fan base; over time, they reconciled with the media, declaring the weird words to be the strangest of all.

The politics of the mainstream media Before Time featured Sleater-Kinney in spring of 1997, critics had already been lauding them for at least a year. But as the attention mounted, the band was increasingly ambivalent about the press. Sleater-Kinney had come of age as musicians in the Olympia community that harbored resentment toward the way the media had misrepresented the riot grrrl movement in the early 1990s. After several early articles defaulted to unwelcome speculation about Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein’s sexuality, Sleater-Kinney became even more skeptical about the attention they were receiving from the press. At the same time, the band knew that the coverage stood to help them reach a larger fan base across the United States. As they prepared to release their third album, their astute publicist Julie Butterfield helped Sleater-Kinney reassert a degree of agency over their representation in the media. But even so, they couldn’t mitigate the words of strangeness that followed the release of Dig Me Out. Early devotees in the national press showered SleaterKinney with praise. Writing in The New York Times in •

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1996, Evelyn McDonnell declared that “Sleater-Kinney’s desire to be rock-and-roll heroes is refreshing.”3 Journalist Rob Sheffield professed himself a convert when he saw the band perform in Charlottesville, Virginia that same year. “We [didn’t] just come out of that show with a new favorite band—we came away feeling like we [could] conquer the world, start our own bands, do anything,” Sheffield wrote. “It’s the most amazing punk rock show I’ve ever seen.”4 Around the same time, Terri Sutton keenly announced that “Sleater-Kinney demand that rock & roll change,”5 and McDonnell, this time writing for Rolling Stone, predicted that they were “poised to become the first band to emerge from the feminist-punk riot-grrrl movement of the early ’90s and cross over to a broad rock audience.”6 Schooled in the punk and riot grrrl tactics of interacting with the media, Sleater-Kinney were apprehensive about the mainstream attention from the very beginning. The Washington D.C. punk community, a close relative of the Olympia scene, had rejected the national press in favor of underground networks of information dissemination. The members of Fugazi, for instance, were purists in their approach: they didn’t give interviews to magazines that they believed “committed rock & roll heresy,” they didn’t sell tees, posters, or records on the road, as a way to avoid turning their music into a “merchandizing vehicle,” and they rarely played shows that were not all-ages and cost more than five dollars.7 Participants in the riot grrrl movement, in which Tucker and Brownstein had taken part, had a more strained relationship with the media. Following a flurry of articles that trivialized the movement in the early 1990s, several •

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chapters called for a media blackout that eventually inspired most women associated with riot grrrl to simply stop cooperating with reporters. As Olympia artist Nikki McClure put it, “it’s really great to have attention and let the media carry your message, but it’s really hard to keep control of that message.”8 Tucker interpreted the infantilized portrayals of riot grrrl as deliberate attempts to disarm the movement. “We were made to look like we were just ridiculous girls parading around in our underwear,” she explained.9 As a result, many members of the Olympia community deemed the national press an unsuitable vehicle for their ideas; instead, they chose to marginalize the media before they could be marginalized by it. Sleater-Kinney were inclined toward skepticism of the media and they questioned the terms of their coverage. “We learned that we needed boundaries and that we didn’t want to be asked the most obvious questions a thousand times,” Janet Weiss remembered.10 At the time, the most obvious questions were ones related to the members’ gender. The band was asked time and again how it felt to be “women in rock.” “Every single interview was the same,” Tucker recalled, “and every single time they asked us what it felt like to be a ‘woman in rock.’”11 The “women in rock” category quarantined female performers from their male contemporaries. “We were a ‘girl group,’ a ‘feminist band,’ we had ‘risen from the riot grrrl ghetto,’” Brownstein explained. “We went from mutable to fixed identities.”12 Indeed, the category “women in rock” overshadowed most female performers in the late 1990s. As Rockrgrl editor Carla DeSantis argued in 1996, “when journalists acknowledge the •

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TREND of women in rock, as if we are a pair of pallazzo pants, this year’s fashion, but sure to be gone by next fall, they are reducing us to a nonentity.”13 As attention from the mainstream media loomed, it became clear to the members of Sleater-Kinney that their mistrust was founded in truth: they wouldn’t be written about in the same way as their male counterparts. The band was further dismayed when early articles dwelled not only on their gender, but also on their sexuality. The media’s interest in topics unrelated to music was a type of celebrity Sleater-Kinney hadn’t anticipated—or invited. In a 1996 interview, Tucker recounted an experience that had breached her comfort zone. “The Village Voice printed that [previous drummer] Toni [Gogin] and I were dating, which is really untrue, because we were flirting and messing around during a photo shoot,” Tucker said. “Suddenly someone prints that in a huge publication and you feel your life just being invaded … I never thought that would be something I would need to worry about.”14 That wasn’t the only instance when their private lives were discussed on public platforms. Around the same time, Spin printed that Brownstein was “Tucker’s ex-lover.”15 The immediate consequence of this aside amounted to a public outing and, in the long run, it further soured Sleater-Kinney to the media. “Who I date is pretty much irrelevant to my music,” Brownstein complained in an interview with the zine Popgirls around the time.16 Almost twenty years after the Spin article was published, Brownstein described the experience as “disorienting.” She continued: “We were so excited about that [interview], it was one of the first big articles [about us] so mostly I just was annoyed ’cause •

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it took all the excitement out of the experience. But I think it instilled in me very early on a sense of wanting privacy and not being very interested in having personal information be tantamount to the work itself. Like, it didn’t make anything about that article more interesting at all. Except that I then had to explain a lot of things to my family.”17 Not only that, but that personal tidbit took on a life of its own, appearing in stories about the band for decades to come and frequently fueling speculations about the band members’ sexual orientation. Despite their cynicism about the press, the primary reason Sleater-Kinney wanted to maintain a working relationship with the national media was because they saw it as a tool for reaching fans. “We weren’t purists,” Weiss told me, “that’s why we would do bigger interviews in more mainstream presses. Our message was not mainstream, but we wanted to be available for girls, women, and all fans everywhere. We felt that what we were trying to convey was something we wanted people to hear, or at least have the option to participate in.”18 The band members were aware that talking to the national media was necessary in order to connect with a broader audience, including those who didn’t have access to underground community networks. Part of Sleater-Kinney’s long-term success can be ascribed to the way they built their fan base with a combination of media coverage and intense touring. An article in the mainstream press needed only to pique a potential fan’s imagination enough to get them to a show. “And then,” Weiss suggested, “they could see what we were really about.”19 This correlated with the band’s larger goals. “We are interested in success as a band, but success that •

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comes slowly, naturally, from more and more people hearing about our band and admiring our music,” Tucker outlined in the late 1990s. “We want to gain fans that will be listening to us for a long time to come, because we plan to be here for a while.”20 Enter Julie Butterfield, the band’s savvy publicist. Butterfield’s aim was to ensure that press coverage happened and that it happened on Sleater-Kinney’s terms. She reiterated that the media was the key to getting fans to shows, building a national audience, and ultimately making the band members’ careers as musicians sustainable. More than anything, Butterfield was invested in changing the focus of the band’s interviews from their gender to their sound. Just as Dig Me Out was about to be released, she created a press kit addendum that she pre-circulated to all writers scheduled to interview Sleater-Kinney. The highlight of this addendum, one that Butterfield developed “out of necessity,” was a four-point guide to talking to the band. Although no one I spoke with was able to recall the list in its entirety, journalists were urged to avoid asking the band about how it felt to be “women in rock,” how they related to other contemporary female performers like Jewel and the Spice Girls, and how they managed to stay together in the aftermath of the Tucker–Brownstein relationship.21 “Julie was trying to help us be seen just as artists—just as Sleater-Kinney— and to be taken seriously,” Tucker contextualized. “At the time, there were much fewer women playing rock music and we were still seen as this novelty.”22 In shifting the topic of conversation away from gender and sexuality, Butterfield’s intent was to normalize the conversation •

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about Sleater-Kinney, and female musicians in general, as legitimate culture makers. The press kit addendum, however, was not always well received. Some writers went as far as to use the request as writing fodder for their articles. One author acknowledged receiving Butterfield’s instructions, but then dismissed them all the same. “Prior to the interview, the band’s publicist even suggested that we refrain from asking the inevitable ‘women in rock’ questions,” she wrote. “But after listening to Sleater-Kinney’s tender yet irate brand of punk, you almost can’t help it.”23 Another journalist was brasher. He opened the piece with a full acknowledgement of the request: “On the eve of a scheduled interview with Carrie Brownstein, the co-singer, songwriter and guitarist of the celebrated fem-punk trio Sleater-Kinney, I get an e-mail … asking me to avoid the following questions: How does it feel to be ‘women in rock’? Do you consider yourselves a ‘riot grrrl band’? What do you make of all of the press you’ve gotten?” However, by the end of the article, he nevertheless asked Brownstein “so how does it feel like to be a ‘woman in rock?’” She, in turn, hung up on him.24 In an assertion of his cultural authority, the male author flaunted his defiance of the request, and then mocked Brownstein’s humorless reaction to the question he was specifically asked to avoid. Even with Butterfield’s precautionary measures, Sleater-Kinney learned, the climate in the mainstream media was not always ready to accommodate young women among the ranks of bona fide musicians. When the Time article appeared in May 1997, Dig Me Out had just been released and Sleater-Kinney were •

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in the midst of the American leg of the supporting tour. The band hadn’t been interviewed for the article and they weren’t otherwise expecting to be featured in the publication. Tim Holman, a friend who accompanied Sleater-Kinney on tour that spring, came across the Time piece when he was flipping through magazines at a gas station in Kansas. Both Holman and the band were startled by the discovery but the article didn’t have an immediate impact on them. As Janet Weiss told me, “we were in the midst of a great tour, and the article was such a small part of everything at the time. On tour, everything is boiled down to your necessities: driving, sleeping, eating, playing, talking to people, selling merch, and doing it again. So something in Time magazine was not a big part of the day.”25 While the unexpected feature might not have seemed pivotal to the band at the time, it precipitated big changes. Most importantly, it metaphorically opened the floodgates of strange words the mainstream media used to write about Sleater-Kinney.

Strange words As writers grappled to understand the challenge Sleater-Kinney posed to the prevailing mainstream hierarchies of gender and culture, many relied on words of strangeness. They wrote about the band with the language of authority, the language of legitimacy, and gendered clichés in place of sonic adjectives. With these weird words, the media marginalized Sleater-Kinney as women and as musicians. But with almost two decades •

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since many of these articles were published, the texts reflect not the strangeness of Sleater-Kinney but rather the media’s uneasy relationship with female performers. In a cultural milieu where rock ’n’ roll was commonly gendered as male, many journalists relied on the language of authority—a technique that subordinated female musicians to their male contemporaries—to suggest that Sleater-Kinney didn’t belong in the boys’ club. At times the subordination was literal: as one writer suggested, Brownstein was “a little like Keith Richards,”26 and another described Tucker as a “smallish, demure-looking woman.”27 Other critics more discreetly positioned the band as diminutive: they deemed SleaterKinney to be “would-be rock stars”28 or a band destined for “minor stardom.”29 The media’s inflexible stance on the mythology of rock reveals the magnitude of SleaterKinney’s challenge. Struggling to reassert authority over cultural signifiers, one writer qualified the band as “the femme Fugazi of the Northwest” who couldn’t be considered pioneers of punk but rather only leaders of “the grrrl-rock pack.”30 Another author expressed dismay at the band’s structure: “Not only are they all-female, but they don’t have a bass player. How many more rules of rock can they break?” Then, dissatisfied with the implications of their defiance of those unwritten rules, he posed another question: “I wonder if SleaterKinney has always intended to be male-free?”31 The author’s disapproval of the band’s arrangement suggests a discomfort with their disregard of the conventional rock ensemble. Further yet, other articles commonly alleged that Sleater-Kinney’s songs stood outside the rock canon because they addressed topics their male •

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contemporaries did not. One article described the band’s songs as “issue-laden rants”32 and another suggested that they were “bad songs for an all-female independent band to be writing … they’re mostly songs about being an all-female band that does things, you know, independently.”33 Employing words of authority, countless critics thus dismissed Sleater-Kinney as outsiders who unsettled the deeply held hierarchies endowing men as culture makers in society—and certainly as rock stars. The language of authority also worked to decouple the band’s music from the realm of serious musicianship by discussing the members not as musicians but as mere commodities. In a review of Dig Me Out, one writer declared that the band “resembled a new good lover the second or third time … so confident of their ability to please that they just can’t stop.”34 Here, the author implied that Sleater-Kinney’s music stood only to please its (male) listener as a lover aware of her dispensability might. Another review declared: “Oh, do we love girls! Girls made of sugar, spice and everything nice and girls like the members of Sleater-Kinney—those that have more rock n’ roll testosterone than Ron Jeremy and either a J-Lo video shoot or a buffet. Anyone hard up for good music will have a hard on for Sleater-Kinney— all natural, rock n’ roll Viagra.”35 In this case, the band members were framed as lubricants for pleasure, seductresses, and objects of consumption. Whether they represented sugar and spice or a sexual stimulant, writing about Sleater-Kinney suggested that the band should be devoured rather than listened to. Some expressions of the language of authority went even further by objectifying the band members’ bodies. •

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One author evoked Brownstein as a repository of desire, narrating her stage presence as “standing with her legs splayed and yet looking completely feminine in the best sense.”36 Another was more vulgar in dwelling on a photograph of the band in which Brownstein’s underwear peeks out above her jeans. “Front and center, it pokes out from her low-riding jeans like the unruly pubes in the Cat Power image by Richard Avedon,” the author wrote. “I feel less of an urge to noodge her about tucking that waistband back into her low-riding jeans than I feel the need to wonder about the gaffe, unintentional or no. Didn’t the band look carefully at these photos? Was this an intentional shout-out to Gisele’s surfboard abs of commerciality, or a simple come-hither, sexy signifier?”37 Nothing about Sleater-Kinney suggests that either of these reductive scenarios was viable. However, by sexualizing the band, the author reasserted that, as women, Sleater-Kinney were more concerned with tempting their fans than playing music. The repercussions of this approach weren’t lost on Brownstein. “Some writers tend to place female artists in meaningless and arbitrary categories like ‘crazy’ or ‘angry’ or ‘sexy’ and they have a way of making women seem very one dimensional,” she stated. “I think that these categories help to continually marginalize the female artist, it keeps them contained and unable to permeate into a larger artistic context.”38 That is to say that the media’s use of the language of authority attempted to underline rock as the province of men and to herd Sleater-Kinney back into the normative confines of women’s cultural roles. The language of legitimacy, on the other hand, placed Sleater-Kinney’s musicianship into question. Writing •

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well after the band released their fourth album, The Hot Rock, one author insisted that the band “played with the passion and reckless abandon of first-time musicians.”39 The writer rejected the notion that SleaterKinney constituted “real” songwriters and performers, and instead belittled them as nonprofessionals. In a piece published in 2000, another author took a sharp jab at female musicians, writing that “Sleater-Kinney is still the one band you point to when you’re looking for an all-woman band that actually devoted some time and care into really learning how to play.”40 Although the line was intended to celebrate Sleater-Kinney, it implied that they were a strange occurrence in world where most female musicians didn’t really master guitars. This type of understated subordination appeared time and again in the media; one writer expressed surprise that SleaterKinney could “play with the boys,”41 while another felt compelled to underline that “they are not amateur musicians.”42 In some cases, the language of legitimacy was directed at individual band members. Tim Holman remembered that “there was also an undercurrent about Carrie not playing guitar the way guys play guitar.”43 Similarly, Weiss remarked how female drummers, herself included, were commonly excluded from articles ranking musicianship because their technique didn’t necessarily emulate that of canonized (male) predecessors. “I see these lists and often of ‘the best 100 drummers’ there are only two women on there,” Weiss told me. “Everyone thinks of this image of the drummer as a technical person … the image has to change; not everyone has to play like [Rush drummer] Neil Peart.”44 In disputing the musical skills of young women, the understated motive •

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of the language of legitimacy functioned to uphold the prevailing cultural hierarchy—one that vested musical virtuosity exclusively in professionally trained men. Finally, the words writers used to describe the sound of Sleater-Kinney’s music were frequently steeped in gendered stereotypes and paradoxes. This textual strategy emphasized the band’s exclusion from the masculine world of rock by presenting them with decidedly feminine clichés. One major media trope was the construction of the band’s sound as neurotic and hysterical, a gendered malady Sigmund Freud famously diagnosed in women in the early twentieth century. By the 1990s, neurosis was a recurring feature in the writing about Sleater-Kinney. For one author, the band’s sound was characterized by Tucker’s vocals that were said to “soar from mild panic to unchecked hysteria” while Brownstein’s resembled an equally gendered “controlled monotone or a sweet singsong.”45 Another writer motioned that Tucker’s voice evoked “a boiling kettle surging with sound” that culminated in the band’s “untamed sound.”46 The media coverage otherwise reverberated with accounts of SleaterKinney’s music as “passionate [and] frenzied,”47 as “fiery and angular,”48 as “passionate, pleading, and pissed-off,”49 and a host of “primal screams”50 and “recklessness of emotional extremes” characteristic of “female adolescent rage, confusion, and pain.”51 Alongside these allusions to the band’s stereotypically female neurosis, the media relied on gendered paradoxes that further singled out Sleater-Kinney as outsiders among their male contemporaries. One article pegged the band’s sound as “wavering between rage and gentleness,”52 another termed it “brutal beauty,”53 and a third described it as “brittle, electrifying •

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vitality.”54 Going further yet, a Rolling Stone article declared that the band produced “furious pheromone punk” that qualified as “both inventive and absurdly remedial.”55 Thus, with a stroke of the pen, these authors undermined the salience of the band’s music by reducing their sound to nothing more than gendered stereotypes. The strange words that the media used to write about Sleater-Kinney give us a lens into the world where a punk band comprised of three female musicians was weird. The mainstream press incessantly qualified Sleater-Kinney by bringing into question their place in the men’s world of rock and their legitimacy as musicians. A lot was at stake for the media: a band that breached the neat categories of gender and culture, especially the intersection of the two, risked upsetting the pillars that held up the entire industry. As music critic Gina Arnold astutely observed in the late 1990s, “never does SleaterKinney sound forced, angry, or sweet—the three words one most associates with all-women rock bands, and the three words that tend to hold women’s music back from the kind of raw believability that characterizes more macho rock.”56 The band and their fans were aware of this textual mechanism of exclusion; as the strange words flowed, they produced a concurrent critique of the weird writing about Sleater-Kinney.

Reconciling with the media attention In 2001, Greil Marcus crowned Sleater-Kinney as “America’s Best Rock Band.” The accompanying article was unequivocally positive and, more importantly, •

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perceptive of the threat the band seemed to pose to mainstream culture. “The world is organized so as not to have to listen to songs as frightening and fast as ‘Youth Decay,’ from last year’s album All Hands on the Bad One,” Marcus wrote. “There are thousands of people living in the world desperate to hear a song so unafraid of its own noise, to go to a show precisely to feel unafraid of the noise that they themselves might make.”57 But Marcus stood with a minority of writers who were unafraid to incriminate the media for refusing to acknowledge that a band of three young women could have their finger on the pulse of a cultural zeitgeist. Interestingly, at the time Sleater-Kinney was named “America’s Best Rock Band,” they received virtually no mainstream radio play and their name had not yet come to reverberate beyond the arts section of magazines and newspapers.58 After Marcus’s article was published, Brownstein remembered an ambivalent response from the broader media. “I heard Bryant Gumbel on ‘The Today Show’ said something like ‘And Time’s pick for best band is … Sleater-Kinney? Who are they?’” she recounted. “Mainstream culture at large is so challenged by our music that it’s always funny when we get shoved into that arena.”59 Funny or not, coverage in the mainstream media was increasingly the norm for Sleater-Kinney—and one with which the band and their fans had to reconcile. Sleater-Kinney came to terms with the national press once they began to see it as a stepping stone for their own success as a band. The attention didn’t come naturally to anyone. Brownstein remembered that reading about Sleater-Kinney was “like reading about people we don’t even know,” while Weiss equated media coverage with •

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stress and mounting expectations that “changed our lives.”60 The band took the mainstream coverage with a grain of salt. “We all have a certain amount of cynicism toward the major national press,” Weiss said. “I think we’ve all sat around commenting on all the people they forget and never put in there and how crappy all the bands are in those magazines. When it’s yourself in there, you can’t take it too seriously because you see yourself along all this crap.”61 But they also relied on the media to build a national fan base and to assert their place among rock’s heroic set. “We had done so well with Dig Me Out and we wanted to keep going,” Tucker explained. “We wanted to be a popular independent band that made a professional career out of it.”62 Retrospectively, Weiss articulated the band’s role in the realignment of gender boundaries: “Sleater-Kinney was such a powerful tool against the argument of excluding women from the category of rock. We were airtight as a band,” she asserted.63 That is to say that the persistence of media coverage, as veiled in strangeness as it was, eventually facilitated Sleater-Kinney’s integration into mainstream culture—and enough of a rearticulation of mainstream culture to accommodate them. While the band came to terms with the media, long-term fans remained unconvinced. Writing in the zine Silver Rocket before Sleater-Kinney had been proclaimed “America’s Best Rock Band,” Nicole Solomon complained that “it’s like the media’s picked them to be the acceptable/ legit face of angry young women or whatever the fuck they want to call it.” Not only that, but Solomon pinpointed Sleater-Kinney’s mainstream coverage as the culprit behind the commodification of the riot grrrl movement. •

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“What it seems like to me is that the mainstream media has embraced them as the token Riot Grrrl band or something,” she continued. “Like here it’s look how wonderful SK is as opposed to the immature H2B + E17. Well that’s how it seems to me, + that pisses me off … But have you noticed how often SK is praised @ the expense of other media-labeled RG bands?”64 Although Solomon didn’t necessarily blame Sleater-Kinney for appearing in the mainstream press, she worried that their coverage created an artificial subculture hierarchy. Another zine writer, Lynn Ho, complained that the media coopted the band. “I have seen Sleater-Kinney’s name mentioned in Seventeen magazine before, and it made me angry,” Ho wrote in Cyanide. “I’m unsure if the magazine had their permission to do so, but I doubt it. I don’t understand why this magazine would contradict itself by mentioning Sleater-Kinney, and trying to make them ‘trendy.’ On one page you’ll see them mention Sleater-Kinney, and then on the next they will be discussing Hanson and who is the hottest brother.”65 Side-by-side features of SleaterKinney and Hanson appeared entirely incompatible to Ho likely because it would have implied that the band had “sold out.” Instead, she preferred to hold Seventeen responsible for “contradicting itself.” Other early fans, however, were not as delicate in interpreting Sleater-Kinney’s coverage in magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone as an act of “selling out.” Their core question was one of authenticity: did commercial success ideologically compromise Sleater-Kinney? As one scholar suggests, selling out is the process by which artists “sell beyond their initial market, which, in turn, loses its sense of possession, exclusive ownership •

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and familiar belonging … selling out means selling to outsiders.”66 Even before the band became a mainstay in the media, audiences in Olympia had scrutinized the addition of Janet Weiss as a moment when the band had shed a bit of its authenticity. “I remember when we were playing at the Capital Theater [in Olympia] and there were these real hardcore fans saying that Call the Doctor was better and that they liked the drummer on Call the Doctor more,” Weiss narrated. “I think that when a band starts to get bigger in any way—even if it’s moving from 100-capacity to 200-capacity clubs—the fans that were there from the beginning will hold a certain sense of ownership.”67 When asked by musician and zine writer Amanda MacKinnon in the late 1990s how the accusations of “selling out” influenced Sleater-Kinney, Corin Tucker responded with a list of tenets the band has stringently upheld. “I think that the decisions we make as a band, decisions like which label to be on, what publicity to agree to, are made in response to our need to feel in control,” Tucker explained. “Sleater-Kinney definitely want a decent living, and to be successful, we just want to do it on our own terms, according to our own vision.”68 From the release of Dig Me Out, the band made few concessions to the principles Tucker shared with MacKinnon. Although criticism from early fans never fully subsided, the band continued to mobilize the media as a tool for building a devoted national audience that was, by 1997, more than likely to have first read about them in a mainstream newspaper or magazine. ***

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“I personally have long been turned off by the huge amount of press the band’s first three records generated,” Gina Arnold wrote on the eve of The Hot Rock’s release in 1999. “If you read the admiring press clips closely, Sleater-Kinney starts to sound more like an ideological construct than a band.”69 Arnold’s observation reminds us that writing about Sleater-Kinney was a political endeavor. The mainstream press approached the band with the language of authority, the language of legitimacy, and gendered stereotypes and paradoxes that negated their agency as culture makers. Writing about the band was, indeed, ideological; by subordinating Sleater-Kinney to their male contemporaries, the media reasserted the cultural hierarchy in which it was already invested. Men were embraced as serious musicians, while women—especially young women with an inclination toward punk—were written off as wanna-be rock stars, as amateurs, and as hysterical sideshows. Although the band didn’t easily come around to working with the media, they learned to reconcile with the weird words of mainstream writers in exchange for reaching fans that might not have otherwise had access to their music. As Sleater-Kinney rationalized it, an article in Time or Rolling Stone only had to get a reader to a live show. From there, the band was in charge.

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Hey Soundguy: The Dig Me Out Tour

A few weeks after Dig Me Out was released, SleaterKinney set out on a five-week US tour to support the album. Like many bands before them, they drove their own van, hauled their own equipment, and slept on friends’ floors. Three shows into the tour, Corin Tucker started documenting the band’s experience on the road and later published it as a zine titled Hey Soundguy. But instead of the usual touring travails, it chronicled Sleater-Kinney’s nightly negotiations with sound technicians about how their instruments would be set up on stage and how their sound would be projected in clubs. Most musicians, women and men alike, can relate to stories about brash club employees. Hey Soundguy, however, presented the band’s encounters as Tucker perceived them on the tour: as manifestations of gender and culture hierarchies that put young women at a disadvantage relative to their male counterparts. Tucker wrote about every show and, along the way, she named, photographed, and categorized each sound technician. In an interview with the zine Panophobia a few days into •

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the tour, Tucker outlined common types of behavior she had already begun to notice among the venue staff. “The Muzzler … is the soundguy who drops my vocals down because they ‘knock you over’ or they’re ‘a little too intense’ … There’s The Twiddler, or The Fidgeter, who is always fucking with the sound … The third category so far is The Bluffer, the guy who has no idea what he’s doing.”1 In her zine, Tucker employed “soundguy” as a pejorative, distinct from “soundperson” (a neutral synonym for “sound engineer”). At one point, she defined “soundguy” as “a nasty stereotype of a rocker dude with long hair, shifty eyes and a shocking lack of communication skills,”2 and later speculated that this type of person may be “damaged by the institution of rock, believing that rock n’ roll is played by guys with guitar, bass, drums, a lead singer and bad hair.”3 In other words, Tucker qualified the “soundguy” as a champion of the mythologies of popular culture in which all rock stars are virtuosos and all virtuosos are men. For Sleater-Kinney, the Dig Me Out tour, like Tucker’s zine, was a project of reclaiming their narrative agency from an array of “soundguys” on the road. As far as most technicians, promoters, and venue owners were concerned, Sleater-Kinney were young women whose story could be reduced to that of amateur performers lacking both cultural and gender legitimacy. The band members, on the other hand, were invested in asserting themselves as professional musicians who were—and had every right to be—in complete control of their instruments, their sound, and their live show. “We’ve all been performing for a long time,” Tucker wrote in Hey Soundguy, “and have a lot of practice honing our •

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assertiveness against would-be bullying tech hogs who want to turn us down or tune us out completely.”4 Although it didn’t always feel triumphant, the Dig Me Out tour was enormously successful. Most importantly, it marked a moment when Sleater-Kinney regained control of their experience on the road and, from this position, told their own story. Their growing audiences were poised to listen.

On the road with Dig Me Out A few weeks after Sleater-Kinney released Dig Me Out, the band packed up their equipment into a van and set off for a US tour; it was a transformative experience. “The first show and the last show were radically different,” explained Tim Holman, who traveled with the band that spring. “They were almost a different band at the end.”5 The tour was a resounding success. SleaterKinney received glowing write-ups in local and national presses and they entertained several offers from major labels. In the band’s memory, the tour stands as the golden era of their career. “Everyone loved Dig Me Out,” Weiss recalled. “I’d say that some of the best memories in my life come from touring behind Dig Me Out.”6 Tucker echoed the sentiment: “The shows were amazing … Even though we were working really hard, driving, and didn’t have any help except for Tim, it was so rewarding. We had this record that everybody loved and we were thrust into this other world where it seemed we might actually be able to be professional musicians.”7 On the Dig Me Out tour, they proved that much. •

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The tour started quietly in the upper Midwest and built steam as the band traveled toward New England, then snaked westward through the South, and finally ended up back on the West Coast. “The logic behind [starting in northern Minnesota] was that if our first shows completely sucked at least we’d embarrass ourselves in front of less people,” Tucker reasoned.8 Of the 24 dates the band played, the majority were booked in small rock clubs like 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis, Black Cat in Washington D.C., and Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco. These were appropriate venues at the onset, but the band outgrew them as the tour went on. The unexpected media coverage precipitated an exponential increase in attendance, from audiences of 50 to those of 500. “As soon as the [Time] article came out, the shows were packed—and with a different crowd, too,” Holman recalled.9 Tucker also noted the shifting composition of the audiences, suggesting that the mainstream media coverage “moved us outside this small indie rock world … people who didn’t necessarily listen to underground music started coming out to shows.”10 The tone of the shows, however, consistently remained urgent, energetic, and, above all, fun. At a tiny coffeehouse in Detroit, Tucker remembered that “the windows [were] dripping from the steam that Janet was creating in her whirlwind of percussion … I think this was my favorite show.”11 In San Francisco, the last stop of the North American leg of the tour, Tucker professed that “we were elated and emotional … and I think the audience reflected that feeling.”12 Twenty years later, the show at CBCG’s in New York was one the band members remembered most vividly. “Being able to play •

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that club was like a dream come true,” Tucker told me.13 Their publicist, Julie Butterfield, was in attendance that night, as were a number of big names in the music industry. Butterfield noted that the gig was the first time Sleater-Kinney had played “on a notorious venue stage” and that they were nervous about making their debut count.14 Weiss recalled the band’s anxiety on the eve of their CBGC’s debut: “We got extremely lost trying to find it—we were just driving around in circles—and being really stressed at soundcheck. Whenever you play in New York, you always feel more pressure to get there and to play really well.”15 When they arrived, albeit late, the first thing Sleater-Kinney faced was an assault of the senses. “One, it was filthy. And, two, it was small and jammed up,” Holman explained.16 On top of that, there were rats everywhere. Weiss remembered seeing them backstage and Butterfield joked that she encountered rats “the size of cats” in the bathrooms. “It was just gross and just-don’t-touch-anything,” Tucker said. “But it was also a very rock ’n’ roll club.”17 Once they’d acclimatized, the band played a very rock ’n’ roll show to a packed audience. Holman described it as “visceral.” Tucker elaborated: “It was really high energy, very electric, very dramatic. Everyone was excited, and it was really fun.”18 The success of the shows was chronicled in the press. The review of the band’s performance in Washington D.C. praised their energy, musicianship, and stage presence. “Sleater-Kinney doesn’t play by anyone else’s rules,” the author declared.19 Critic Evelyn McDonnell was equally impressed with the band’s showing, especially when it came to their handle on the crowd. At a Los Angeles show where Sleater-Kinney opened for the •

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John Spencer Blues Explosion, McDonnell narrated the following scene: “When a Spencer fan started harassing singer and guitarist Corin Tucker, she announced, ‘We just want to say that we’re not here to fuck the band; we are the band.’”20 Recalling the episode later, Tucker added: “Admittedly, I came into it with a chip on my shoulder. I was worried that we weren’t going to be taken seriously. So, when I got the vibe that we were being looked at as groupies, I was immediately pissed off. I wanted the band to feel in charge—I wanted us to feel powerful.”21 Sleater-Kinney had begun to exert a stage presence strong enough to command control over concert reviews. That wasn’t the case for most mainstream coverage, but the band’s performances swayed writers like McDonnell to lend Sleater-Kinney a voice in the story. Julie Butterfield played an important part in ensuring Sleater-Kinney’s strong stage presence was also captured in images. She was aware that photographers usually received a pass to shoot only during the first three songs. However, Butterfield was similarly aware that most performers, including Sleater-Kinney, were plagued by “opening jitters” during those first songs. As one zine writer confirmed, the band’s set was prone to “[start] out soft, with a sheepish hello.”22 Butterfield’s proposal was for photographers to shoot after the third song. She argued that this would give them an opportunity to catch the band in more representative moments, when they’d warmed up to the stage and the audience. And, indeed, the strategy worked to immortalize Tucker’s expressive grimaces, Weiss’s dynamic movement, and Brownstein’s windmill strumming. “I think that helped create live, visceral images of them playing,” Butterfield confirmed.23 •

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In turn, those photographs gave the band a degree of agency over their presentation, just as they cemented their reputation as powerhouse live performers. In 1999, Punk Planet featured an image of the band on its cover: they are sweaty and in mid-performance.24 With the buzz surrounding the tour, major labels were among those who noticed. Warner Brothers, Outpost, and Matador all approached Sleater-Kinney during the Dig Me Out tour. Tucker spoke candidly about these encounters: “We were gradually becoming a soughtafter band and we suddenly had these label guys chasing after us. Also, to be honest, I was a total brat at 25, and so I was quick to go out with these labels and order everything on the menu. We were broke, broke, broke college students.”25 When the band was in Minneapolis, for example, a label representative took them out for an extravagant sushi dinner. During their stop in New York, another label put them up in individual suites overlooking Central Park. Tucker remembered: “We were still sleeping on people’s floors. When we stayed in a hotel, we all stayed in one room … so when these label guys said they’d meet us in New York and get us hotel rooms, we were excited.”26 For Holman, the moment was just as vivid. “I had a suite all to myself and I remember that I wanted to make use of it. So, I jumped on the bed and I jumped on the chair,” he told me.27 However, the wining and dining didn’t leave the same impression on everyone. While Weiss conceded that attention from major labels made her “feel appreciated,” she spoke about it as a novelty: “it was just something fun—but it doesn’t stand out [in my memory] and it didn’t make us want to sign with a major label.”28 •

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Although Sleater-Kinney sometimes speculated that they had outgrown Kill Rock Stars, the band, like Weiss suggested, did not seriously consider the offers from major labels. With KRS, they had little security: they had no written contract, no commitment for future releases, and almost no financial guarantees. On top of that, despite being the label’s bread and butter, Sleater-Kinney noticed gaps in their record distribution and they rarely received a tour advance.29 But they valued their relationship with KRS for an entirely different reason: the label lent them almost absolute autonomy to write, record, and perform music on their own terms. Maintaining a connection with the Northwest community and working with trusted collaborators were other reasons that the band members cited in their decision to stay with KRS even when major labels beckoned. Brownstein suggested that Sleater-Kinney never considered making a switch. “It’s never really been a question for us,” she said. “There was a time when we talked to major labels even though we were pretty sure we didn’t want to sign with one. We wanted to educate ourselves on the industry and be able to make an informed decision.”30 For Weiss, it was a matter of preserving the band’s creative license. “Our decision to stay with an independent label protected us from being swallowed up and losing control,” she explained.31 In the late 1990s, Tucker evoked a similar argument, citing that “losing control would really not make us feel good about what we were doing.”32 Almost 20 years later, however, she expressed regret. “We fought pretty intensely about [signing to a major label] at the time,” she told me. “That would have been such a gigantic move for us. Even going to Matador, which I •

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thought we should do, we just couldn’t agree on.”33 In 1997, they agreed only to a European distribution deal with Matador and stayed with KRS until they released their seventh studio album, The Woods, on Sub Pop in 2005.

Hey Soundguy: We are the band! While the Dig Me Out tour was marked with success, it was also marked by the band’s struggle over technical knowledge, sound, and the accessibility of their music on the road. As far as Sleater-Kinney were concerned, live performances were to be more of a showcase of their musicianship and less of a battleground of gender politics. “At this point in their career they weren’t interested in doing the Kathleen Hanna type of performances or standing up and doing lectures,” Holman suggested.34 But as a group of three young women, the band couldn’t escape the gendered conceptions of music making that loomed large in society, and, alike, in the clubs. Early on, Tucker noticed that the band’s interactions with the venue staff were threatening to define the tour. “I needed to start documenting, in some way, this little dance we were doing before the real performance and how it affected what everyone else would see,” she wrote in Hey Soundguy. “It was a way for me to take control—hoping that by taking people’s pictures and getting their names (for the most part) might possibly make us both more aware of our actions.”35 The band didn’t win all their fights, but the three women achieved a major milestone on the Dig Me Out tour: they took •

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command over how the story of their time on the road would be told. The Dig Me Out tour was a low-budget affair. In Tucker’s words, it was “not very glamorous” because the band was “playing in tiny clubs, schlepping our equipment, and working really hard.”36 Holman echoed this sentiment: “More than anything, the trip was drudgery … It was four people in a van. It was a lot of driving, a lot of showing up and soundchecking. A lot of throwing food in our mouths, doing the show, and getting in the van.”37 Remembering the tour later, Weiss complained about the band’s financial constraints: “On the first tour, we all shared beds. We weren’t making very much money, so we shared pretty much everything.”38 When they weren’t sharing cramped sleeping quarters, the band shared physically exhausting routines and endless long-distance drives. Sleater-Kinney’s most pressing budgetary concern, however, was that they couldn’t afford to bring their own sound engineer on the road, but had to rely on the staff provided by the individual venues. The fact that the band couldn’t afford a sound engineer was also a problem because promoters, owners, and technicians were frequently unwilling take the young women seriously. Coupled with the other major variable—each club’s sound system—Sleater-Kinney constantly worried that what the music fans would hear was apt to fluctuate wildly from show to show. “We were at the mercy of the sound person on the Dig Me Out tour, something I found very frustrating,” Tucker told me. “That’s why I decided to write that fanzine.”39 In an ideal world, Tucker dreamed that a professional soundwoman (“she’s six feet •

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tall with dark flowing hair and huge muscles”) accompanied the band, carefully carried their equipment, and meticulously set it up “with the exact decibels and time for each instrument.”40 More realistically, Tucker offered the following advice to readers in Hey Soundguy: “If you are, like us, unable to take your own sound engineer on tour, having a roadie give his or her opinion of the sound each night is invaluable. Someone who has even an inkling of what you might want your band to sound like is infinitely better than someone who has never heard you and may never want to hear you again.”41 On the Dig Me Out tour, it was Holman who played the mediating role between the band and the house technicians. “I had to influence the sound people significantly,” he recalled. “After a while I got a really good idea of what the band wanted to sound like.”42 Holman was usually able to grasp a degree of leverage, but, as we’ll soon see, he wasn’t always spared from the hostility directed at Sleater-Kinney. Technical knowledge was a recurring point of conflict. On the road, Sleater-Kinney found that the staff of rock clubs, the majority of them men, were determined to undermine the band’s grasp over the sound and the stage. As Tucker put it: “a lot of men are able to use their knowledge of music in a way that’s more exclusive to women.”43 That, of course, began with defining knowledge—how instruments should be set up or how they should be played—and then guarding access to that knowledge as a legitimization of their authority. “[I] found that there really are some dinosaur soundguys out there that think a female band would never know what they’re doing,” Tucker explained.44 That is to say that •

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technicians frequently assumed Sleater-Kinney didn’t command their instruments because they were women; this assumption, in turn, bolstered their own position on the gender—and culture—hierarchy. Sound techs routinely trivialized Sleater-Kinney by challenging the way they played or set up their instruments. At a show in Portland, Oregon, just before they embarked on the Dig Me Out tour, a sound engineer declared that two guitars didn’t complete the rock paradigm and that Tucker’s should sound like a bass.45 Weeks later, Tucker wrote about another technician who was also “quite confused by our two-guitar set-up. So confused, in fact, that he continued to e.q. my guitar so that it sounded like a flat, droning bass.”46 In Madison, Wisconsin, the third date of the Dig Me Out tour, the resident sound engineer “wanted to mic Janet’s drums the ‘right’ way.”47 Without considering that Weiss used a wood beater and hadn’t cut a hole in her drum, both of which make for a louder standalone sound, he contested that the microphone wasn’t arranged in its “right” place in the back of the drum. “Micing the bass drum [behind the kit] makes it sound much more ‘boom-y,’ which Janet discouraged. ‘The Beatles never mic’d the drums!’ Janet says. She goes for a more natural sound,” Tucker imparted.48 Undeterred by Weiss’s explanation, the sound tech insisted on his authority to define musical knowledge. Tucker narrated: “This was one of those instances where the soundguy stuck to his training as religious text. No, the bass drum will only ring the particular tone needed if mic’d in this precise manner. The soundguy pledged his allegiance to the brotherhood of technology: We know how it should be done, you don’t, and we are •

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the bosses.”49 In the end, Weiss persevered and played the show with the setup she wanted, but not without being berated. For the rest of the soundcheck, the sound tech went about claiming that Weiss’s silver vintage Ludwig kit now sounded like a kazoo.50 A couple days later, Weiss expressed her exasperation in an interview: “Every club I play in, every weekend of my life practically, no one ever complains about it, and now this one guy …”51 But it was Tucker who seized control of the moment when she dubbed the “soundguy” as “someone who didn’t know that rock-n-roll was meant to break the rules!”52 As the band’s rallying cry, and eventually the title of her zine, she proclaimed: “HEY SOUNDGUY: WE ARE THE BAND!”53 Tucker’s voice, frequently described as banshee-like, just as often became a battleground where the politics of gender and culture were played out. “The most reliable discomforter in the Sleater-Kinney arsenal is, of course, Tucker’s tearing, ferocious voice, and all three know it,” wrote music critic Terri Sutton.54 Tucker was aware that her voice was provocative. It was provocative by design. “I always wanted to be a singer that grabbed people’s attention,” she stated. “I think that I could be a pretty normal singer if I wanted. But it’s part of the music that the vocals are striking and sort of confrontational.”55 At shows, she sang with deliberate intent: “At some point in the performance I want my voice to make the audience feel like their skin is peeling off. Is that too much to ask?”56 Many technicians, confident in their right to define how music should be heard, thought that it was. The sound engineers’ assertion over Sleater-Kinney’s sound is indicative of the pervasive social hierarchies •

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that sanctioned men to tower over women. The turning down or tuning out of Tucker’s voice, moreover, can be metaphorically interpreted as the silencing of women’s collective voices. In some cases, venue technicians minimized the weight of the vocals in the mix. “The sound people were always turning down Corin,” Holman recalled. “I always had to tell them that the audience was there to hear that—as much as they didn’t like it.”57 Tucker aptly identified these offenders as “muzzlers.”58 In a pointed retort to the technicians’ attempts to silence her, she proclaimed: “None of this ‘low stage volume’ crap … This is rock-n-roll! … Loud! Loud! Loud!”59 Another strategy technicians used to control sound was “blending” or “smoothing” the vocals. In Moorehead, Minnesota, at the first show of the tour, the band encountered a sound engineer who thought Tucker sounded “over the top” and took the liberty of adding special effects to mask her higher range. “I have become extremely wary of soundguys adding some super-cheesy Whitney Houston-type effects to my voice,” Tucker wrote. “Some add reverb, others delay and some just take out the high end to ‘blend in’ my vocals. Hello! Guess what—not everyone, thankfully, wants to sound like Whitney Houston or ‘blend in’ or soothe an audience.”60 The disregard of the band’s authority laid bare the stipulation that the cultural definitions put forth by men de facto trumped those of women. The confrontations Sleater-Kinney had with the sound technicians were analogous to those many of their fans experienced in their lives. They saw the band as advocates in a world that was, much like the rock club, premised on institutionalized inequalities. “It was •

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the towns where the kids were crying at the door that I realized how important the band was to the audience,” Holman told me. “For some it was a matter of sexual identity, others were overcoming a terrible childhood, and many were struggling against barriers to be who they wanted to be.” Sleater-Kinney’s growing fan base was desperate to hear the band and to connect with a youthpositive, girl-positive, and queer-positive community. For many, the Dig Me Out tour was as much a rock show as a campaign for the physical safety of women, for the social agency of youth, and for LGBT rights. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this type of empowerment wasn’t in the interest of the self-elected guardians of the rock canon. At no show more so than the one at Atlanta’s The Point did Sleater-Kinney see just how invested the staff of the local venue were in hindering their performance and, by extension, in limiting the access of culture produced by young women who took issue with traditional social hierarchies. From the moment the band started setting up their equipment, the staff of the club made them uncomfortable. An aggressive owner heckled the band about the placement of their amps, deliberately tested them during soundcheck, and employed intimidation tactics to deter their protests. “It was so terrifying,” Holman remembered. As tension mounted, Sleater-Kinney were ready to forfeit the show. After some discussion, however, they resolved to play anyway. The most important factor in their decision was the long line of fans that had already assembled at the door. Once they’d gotten on stage and caught a glimpse of the audience, the band realized that the struggle at the club had not been for nought; the fans were desperate to hear •

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the band—almost as desperate as Sleater-Kinney were to assert their agency in a situation intended to strip them of power. “That night we played a ferocious set … the kids screamed for more after each song,” Tucker wrote in Hey Soundguy.61 What made the incident more intense was that The Point’s bouncers were as rough with the audience as the club owner had been with the band. Despite the fact that Sleater-Kinney invited audience members up on stage to dance during certain songs, the staff of the venue forcefully pulled them off and altogether ignored the band’s plea to the contrary. “I remember Corin yelling from the stage that this was their show and their audience,” Holman told me. In one evocative moment, a female fan climbed on the stage and took off her shirt. “That had never happened at a show I had played,” Weiss remembered.62 Tucker read significance onto the woman’s action: “It wasn’t a superficial moment—it was raw. [For her] it was like ‘my people are finally here,’ a sort of Take Back the Night moment,” she explained.63 The episode seemed only to enliven The Point’s bouncers, who violently grabbed the woman and pulled her, too, off the stage. In his attempt to intervene, Holman found himself caught up in a physical altercation with the venue’s owner. But neither Holman nor the band was interested in a scuffle. “Tim packed up the boxes [of merchandise] with lightning speed and we all moved out quickly after the show,” Tucker documented in her zine. “All of us walked out of that club feeling battle-worn, or perhaps shaken after our encounter with an evil force.”64 But Sleater-Kinney’s show in Atlanta wasn’t an encounter with an evil force; it was a culmination of the very real •

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relationship between the venue staff, the band, and the audience that was, unfortunately, not unique to that night at The Point or to the Dig Me Out tour. A key reason that the entire tour didn’t devolve into similar scenarios was because Sleater-Kinney didn’t just represent empowerment on tour—they enacted it. By the Dig Me Out tour, the band had clear preferences about how the stage should be set up, they were confident with their instruments, and they exhibited a firm grip over their performing image. Moreover, as soon as they’d soundchecked, the band could evaluate the quality of the club’s sound system and the competency of the venue’s staff. In Columbus, Ohio, Tucker declared that the monitors were inaudible and that the sound system “was probably made by Fisher-Price.”65 In Northampton, Massachusetts, she complained that the projection system wasn’t grounded and that the microphones shocked the band during their show.66 In Philadelphia, on the other hand, Sleater-Kinney spotted the tech’s forthright behavior as a way to mask his own shaky grasp of technical knowledge. Tucker documented that he incorrectly set up the microphone on Weiss’s tom (it fell off mid-set) and altogether neglected to mic the bass drum. When he realized his mistake too late, and to the band’s shock, “he just reached through Janet’s legs while she was playing.”67 At other clubs, SleaterKinney came across apathetic, impatient, and insecure sound engineers. At The Bottleneck in Lawrence, Kansas, Tucker swiftly identified the staff member in charge of sound as an “imposter,” a doorman unfamiliar with equipment masquerading as a sound technician. Predictably, some venue employees reacted brashly to •

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confident women and responded by reasserting their control in the clubs. It’s very likely that Sleater-Kinney encountered resistance on the road precisely because they displayed a significant degree of agency over the stage, the sound, and the show. Young women who assuredly navigated these worlds were a veritable threat to the hierarchies that insured them, in the first place, to be the provinces of men. More importantly, the Dig Me Out tour marked the moment when Sleater-Kinney seized control over how the narrative of the tour would be told. The band called out the venue staff who rearranged their equipment, the sound engineers who took liberties to alter the way their sound was projected, and club owners who attempted to derail their performances; Hey Soundguy took down names and ascribed responsibility. For Tucker, the act of documenting was cathartic. “This little fanzine helped me keep my head straight on tour,” she confessed. “I had a good time making it and a GREAT time talking about making it.”68 The stories that she narrated are indicative of small triumphs against big hierarchies, but triumphs none the less that helped Sleater-Kinney reposition musicianship in the narrative arc of the band’s story. Another way that Sleater-Kinney reasserted agency over the story of the tour was by mobilizing it as an opportunity for instruction. Hey Soundguy armed its readers with accessible knowledge or, as Tucker put it, the zine offered “some technical advice for rockers.” A glossary of frequently used terms such as “p.a.,” “monitor,” “mic’d,” and “soundcheck” appeared on the very first page. Tucker also inserted drawings of •

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equipment, such as the components of a drum kit and the proper connection between an amplifier and a speaker. Various troubleshooting tips lined the pages of the zine; for example, Tucker suggested throwing a shirt over a microphone jolting with electricity and warned that sound reverberates differently in an empty club than one packed with an audience. She wasn’t alone in this endeavor to educate young female musicians. Carla DeSantis’s Rockrgrl, published from 1995 to 2005, around the same time Sleater-Kinney were active as a band, similarly aimed to give its readership access to the technical elements of playing in a band—from how to select equipment to how to secure bookings, promotion, and legal representation—that they might not have had access to elsewhere. Like DeSantis, Tucker’s agenda in writing Hey Soundguy was not only to chronicle and challenge the behavior of club owners and sound technicians, but also to equip her readers with the tools to do the same.

The fans in the crowd Once the band had reined in their own voice, SleaterKinney’s audience had no trouble hearing them. The Dig Me Out tour represented a moment when the band transitioned from an opening act to a headlining one, and it was the first time they played in clubs that were filled mostly with their own fans. Tucker, a riot grrrl alumna who came into touring “ready for battle,” noticed that the audience became markedly more positive on that tour. In turn, the band nurtured a •

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reciprocal relationship with their fans. “Sleater-Kinney didn’t see themselves as above anyone and they didn’t act like rock stars,” Butterfield recalled. “They wanted to meet and connect with people who liked their music— they were super genuine with their fans.”69 Those in attendance responded in kind. A fan who saw the band play one of the last dates on the Dig Me Out tour enthusiastically reported: “Sleater-Kinney, how I love them, let me count the ways! … If you ever get a chance to see ’em, don’t miss it. That was the best show I’ve been to.”70 To commemorate their show in Lawrence, Ericka Bailie published several photographs in her zine Power Candy. Along with the photos, she declared that “this is a gratuitous centerfold for my boyfriend who feels there are far too many zines out there with S-K in ’em.”71 If there were too many zines covering SleaterKinney in 1997, there would be many more in the years to come. In fact, their most resounding accomplishment on the Dig Me Out tour was to establish a long-lasting relationship with fans. Those the band had won over that spring became the foundation of a remarkably loyal national fan base in the years and decades to come. Adrienne Aldredge, a Texan fan, saw the band perform at least three times in the late 1990s, coercing her father to accompany her to 18+ shows when she was still a minor.72 Paula Tagle, a Californian, confessed in 2000: “I’ve seen S-K five times now and through every live show my admiration and affection for this band increases ten-fold … If you love this band, your heart is in the right place. They are great musicians, great live performers, great to their audience.”73 After the same show in Chicago, •

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two different zine writers were compelled to write glowing reviews. One declared: “I always feel so pumped after seeing them live. They have so much energy and obviously have such a good time playing together.”74 The other mused: “I saw Sleater-Kinney tonight. I don’t know if I really want to tell you about it. It’s like one of those encounters with something beautiful or graceful and you don’t really feel like sharing.”75 Over time, fans would come to share a lot of what they appreciated about the band. Key among them was that SleaterKinney continued standing on their side. In clubs and in American society from the late 1990s onward, the fans felt more empowered knowing the band was there. For Sleater-Kinney, the feeling was mutual.

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Words and Guitars: Celebrity, Fandom, and the Cult of Sleater-Kinney

When Sleater-Kinney announced, without much of an explanation, that the band was going on indefinite hiatus in 2006, heartfelt eulogies reverberated among fans. One long-time listener experienced the news as a bittersweet bookend. “It was an end to not just a band whose career I had followed for eleven years, but also to a trio of women—Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and Janet Weiss—who had become icons,” she reflected.1 Another writer deemed the members of Sleater-Kinney as the musical role models for a generation of young women. “They were our Beatles, our Hendrix,” she explained, “the ones who made us want to go home post-show, grab the nearest instrument and strum and scream until our fingers and vocal cords bled.”2 The eve of the hiatus, however, wasn’t the first time fans spoke about Sleater-Kinney as iconic rock stars. Many had already conceived of the band as heroic performers since the release of their rock anthem “I Wanna Be Your •

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Joey Ramone” a decade earlier. In the song, the band posited itself into the body of a larger-than-life rock star—in this case, Joey Ramone and, in another verse, Thurston Moore (with occasional substitutions, such as Kim Gordon, when performed live)—whose posters graced the bedroom walls of an adoring fan. Reflecting on “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” some years later, Brownstein suggested that the song explored “a role typically associated with male performers”—and one that ultimately reflected her own desire to be just as revered.3 The exploration was cathartic for both the band and their fans. In laying bare their aspiration to stardom, Sleater-Kinney staked a claim on membership in the rock canon and enacted it with ferocious drumming and guitar shredding that has since become a trademark of their live shows. Seeing the song performed—that is, seeing three young women own the moves evocative of the Ramones or Sonic Youth—signaled to those in the audience that rock heroism was as much a possibility for them as it was for those on the stage. As early as 1996, some reviewers were even keen to recognize that “Ms. Tucker and her bandmates are already becoming their generation’s Ramones.”4 A little more than a year later, an article in Rockrgrl proclaimed Sleater-Kinney as bona fide rock stars who were “loved, lusted after and respected from afar.”5 It was a role the band embodied through much of their career, one that became the cornerstone of their legacy. To their ever-growing and intensely loyal fan base, there was no question that Sleater-Kinney were a canonical rock band on equal footing with the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and the Ramones. But this definition •

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stood in direct competition with those put forth by the strange words of the media and the sound technicians the band encountered on the road, both of whom were invested in underplaying comparisons of three women to iconic performers. It was a milieu, as feminist critic Susan J. Douglas observed in the fall of 1997, just months after Dig Me Out was released, in which “male standards of performance have usually defined what is truly ‘genuine.’”6 Through their tireless combat with gender and culture hierarchies, Sleater-Kinney weren’t just interested in claiming a rock star moniker for themselves. Instead, the band was committed to redefining the contours of rock stardom altogether. On tour, for instance, they eschewed the mythic triad of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. “There wasn’t much—or, really, any—partying, drinking, or drugs,” their roadie Tim Holman recalled. “I just remember Corin doing her vocal exercises and drinking a lot of tea.”7 In place of the predictable rock posturing, the band mobilized the spotlight with an agenda of carving out a place for young women on stage; to that end, they exemplified musicians who performed on their own terms and they urged those in attendance to start bands, write zines, and challenge institutionalized norms around them. Fans legitimized the band as rock stars with gifts and crushes, perhaps even more so because Sleater-Kinney’s brand of rock heroism was accessible. This was, after all, precisely who they’d been becoming all along: a rock band of everywomen.

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We could be heroes Much like it is today, it was rare for women to be venerated as rock stars in the mid-to-late 1990s. Throughout their career, Sleater-Kinney were deeply invested in undermining hierarchies that marginalized them as canonical rock stars, setting their sights on rewriting the rules of membership altogether. “There needs to be an alternative where a little girl can imagine that she grows up to be a heroic figure like David Bowie,” Weiss explained.8 To engender this change, the band began by enacting it. On and off the stage, Sleater-Kinney defied the notion that only men, particularly the aloof sort, could embody stardom. Fans were receptive of Sleater-Kinney’s version of stardom because they could relate to it: they felt the band grasp the teenage zeitgeist, they saw them tear down the wall separating the stage from the audience, and they were humbled when the band members saw them as individuals in the crowd. As Weiss put it, the band hoped to be seen as “real people who can be superheroes.”9 Not only that, Sleater-Kinney hoped that fans would also extrapolate that possibility for themselves. Leading by example, as many of their own role models had done, was the band’s most powerful instrument for empowering their listeners. Sleater-Kinney easily connected with their fans because the band was especially adept at capturing what it felt like to be a young adult in the 1990s; after all, the members were just barely in their twenties when Dig Me Out was released. “When I saw them in 1995 on their first tour, playing in a living room in Santa Cruz,” one writer remembered, “I thought it sounded exactly •

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like what it felt like to be a seventeen-year-old girl.”10 A fan, herself a teen at the time, affirmed this sentiment in admitting that the music “triggered an emotional response in me that I had never really felt with music before.”11 Another listener imagined Sleater-Kinney as an articulation of her own experiences. “Every last song was filled with crazy energy,” she related. “I was amazed at their ability to go from sugar-sweet song to the angry pissed off screaming you do at your parents when they’re being unfair in a matter of milliseconds.”12 But fans didn’t only hear their own experiences echoed in the music, they also saw themselves—and their potential—mirrored by the band. One devotee of both Sleater-Kinney and the members’ other bands declared that “the girls in the band look just like any other girl in the audience … Guess that’s why I like them so much.”13 Another listener identified with Sleater-Kinney’s evolving sound as a reflection of her own coming of age: “[A]s jaded & bored i am with most music, s-k has just been steadily changing & maturing,” she wrote. “[I]’ve been steadily listening.”14 The fact that Sleater-Kinney represented rare female musicians in a sea of men wasn’t lost on anyone. Already in 1996, music critic Evelyn McDonnell noted that “the goal of these artists is not to make the stage a place of envy but to make it one of inspiration—to create music that empowers rather than alienates.”15 Indeed, Amanda MacKinnon, a musician and ardent SleaterKinney fan, identified Tucker as an “ultimate heroine” in league only with Kathleen Hanna. “These are the women who made me want to be involved in music in the first place,” MacKinnon explained.16 At first, Tucker and her bandmates weren’t comfortable with the responsibility •

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of serving as role models to other young women. “It can sometime feel like a weight I’m carrying, when people expect a lot from me, and have this image built up of me in their heads,” she admitted in the late 1990s.17 Over time, however, the band grew into those roles. By the early 2000s, Tucker acknowledged that “we’ve known for a few years that we’re role models, and I think we’ve come to terms with that.”18 In fact, as Brownstein asserted months after Dig Me Out was released, the band hoped that their own enactment of wants and desires would inspire other women to do the same.19 One reason that fans easily embraced Sleater-Kinney was because the band didn’t rope themselves off from the audience. In a review of a Portland, Oregon, concert in early 1997, one writer noted that “Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein were actually part of the audience— go-go dancing with their fans [during the opener’s set]. When it came time for Sleater-Kinney to play, they simply stepped onto the platform, turned on their instruments and cranked into ‘Dig Me Out.’” When they finished playing, in what the author saw as a “true punk-rock gesture,” the band simply “walked off stage and once again became part of the crowd.”20 Around the same time, zine writer Katy Weselcouch attended a Sleater-Kinney show at Syracuse University where, as she recalled, Brownstein stood behind her in the audience during Lois’s opening set and the band came out to talk with fans after the show. Not only that, but Sleater-Kinney showed genuine investment in interacting with fans: they posed for photos, showed that they’d taken note of the audience, and hugged them before departing.21 Weselcouch later remembered that Tucker •

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and Brownstein had been “super nice and down to earth … we were these really gushy goofy teenagers and they were really so nice to us despite this!”22 Writing about Sleater-Kinney’s performance at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles several years later, Paula Tagle narrated a similar encounter: “I was next to the stage while the girls were putting away their stuff and my heart was beating so fast. I could feel it sitting right on top of me … Corin was making ready to leave, and I thought I would never get my photo, but somehow I got enough guts to say ‘Hey! Can I take a picture with you?’ And oh yea, I got my shot! It was a very cool moment for me thank you very much. And when she told me, ‘Thanks for coming to the show,’ I never felt happier.”23 In their interaction with the audience before, after, and during concerts, Sleater-Kinney showed that they weren’t invested in elevating themselves above the crowd but rather in elevating both the band and the audience above predictable stipulations of celebrity. The fluidity between performer and listener was facilitated by the small venues—coffeehouses, tiny clubs, university centers, and basements—where Sleater-Kinney played their early shows, but the band was also active in dismantling the wall that separated the stage from the crowd. For instance, audience members were frequently invited to mount the platforms where they played, rarely protested when fans breached the barrier uninvited, and tolerated nuisances like having bras flung on stage. When the band performed at the tiny Three O coffeehouse in Portland, Oregon, the venue’s stage was only a six-inch riser that made the distinction between the band and the audience nearly arbitrary. The setting created an •

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unplanned intimacy wherein one dancing fan repeatedly collided with the performers and their instruments. “Instead of chastising the enraptured fan,” another member of the audience wrote, “Tucker voted her Best Dancer.”24 At the show Katy Weselcouch attended in Syracuse, New York, the platform was more discrete; she and her friends had to climb over a fence in order to reach the stage after being chosen by the band as dancers. “We danced the best and fastest, the way you dance in your underwear in front of your mirror, the way that is full-fledged instinctual,” she wrote in her zine afterwards. “We danced for 3 songs, my stomach hurt and I couldn’t breathe but I didn’t care. I was on stage with Sleater-Kinney.”25 To Weselcouch, there was no doubt that the three women were heroic performers, just as there was no doubt that they didn’t subscribe to the self-aggrandizing enactment of the rock mythology. Another way that Sleater-Kinney rejected normative notions of fame was by being aware of their fans as individuals. Tucker knew that the band’s success was built upon an “incredibly loyal fan base.”26 Weiss, whose first tour with Sleater-Kinney was the one supporting Dig Me Out, remembered that she often recognized familiar faces in the crowd. “Lots of kids came to a lot of shows,” she told me. “We’d see them as we’d pull up, we’d say ‘hey, what’s up’ to them, and they got to be sort of our friends.”27 In fact, the Dig Me Out tour was pivotal for Sleater-Kinney: it was in the spring of 1997 that fans began to follow them from show to show, to ask for their autographs, and to race to have pictures taken with the band. In Tucker’s words, “everything just happened in an instant and morphed into a moment of celebrity.”28 But  100 •

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even with the growing stardom, Sleater-Kinney were still making deliberate attempts to meet fans before and after shows. Their publicist Julie Butterfield recalled that they were among the few performers who put aside time to talk with audience members.29 “For me, the connection we had at the show was really important—that was our time to talk to people,” Tucker explained. “It always felt like a two-way street at the shows. It wasn’t about passive entertainment—our fans were always engaged. We wanted the shows to be about that interaction.”30 Weiss, who was known to jump off stage after a set and head directly to the merchandise table, was especially eager to chat with individual audience members. “That’s when you feel that touring is worthwhile—when you connect with people every night,” she elaborated. “We weren’t making much money but we were reaching people—and that’s what mattered to us back then.”31 In other words, the encounters countless fans gushed about were willingly facilitated by Sleater-Kinney. It is no surprise that a band like Sleater-Kinney so quickly built a devoted following. As Ann Cvetkovich and Gretchen Phillips noted in 2000, “it’s not like older male managers and cynical record-company execs are sitting down together to say ‘OK, it’s Sleater-Kinney’s turn to be hot hot hot.’ No, this is success of their own making, based on touring regularly, recording on their own labels, and playing the local coffeehouse.”32 Another foundational block of their success was their relationship to their audience. To fans, the members of Sleater-Kinney were equal part canonical rock stars and role models. “Unlike so many other self-conscious and ironic ‘alternative rock’ bands,” one critic wrote just as  101 •

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Dig Me Out was released, “Sleater-Kinney demand that rock & roll change.”33 The band enacted that change by embodying an everyday heroism—and inciting their fans to do the same.

Totally crushed out A couple of years after Dig Me Out was released, Punk Planet’s Daniel Stinker suggested that “there’s something about the band’s potent mix of danceable beats, contrasting vocals, and dueling guitars (in the best sense of the term) that electrifies their audiences.”34 SleaterKinney’s fans were just as electrified by the individual members themselves: they were as emboldened by the trio’s transgressions as they were motivated by their call to actions. By the late 1990s, Sleater-Kinney’s fans were, as they have continued to be, enthusiastic champions of the women they admired as role models and obsessed over as celebrities. Although the band attracted a diverse audience, each member also drew their own devotees. Fans expressed their zeal for the band through gifts, declarations of love, and written odes. To have a crush on a band member, as many fans did, was, after all, the most apt indication that their audience perceived SleaterKinney as rock stars. Because they received virtually no radio play and released their first music video only in the late 1990s, Sleater-Kinney relied on relentless touring, word of mouth, and media coverage to build a national following. At first, the band inherited fans of Tucker’s previous band Heavens to Betsy and Brownstein’s Excuse 17, but  102 •

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they painstakingly won over their own audience over the course of their career. “I saw them in concert for the first time in early 1999,” one fan recalled. “I didn’t know anything about their music, but I remember being wowed by their onstage energy … I had never seen that kind of fierce young female energy at any concert before. I think I bought The Hot Rock and Dig Me Out a few days after that, and I was hooked!”35 Another listener first heard Sleater-Kinney when a friend lent her a copy of Dig Me Out. “I listened to it at home (on a Discman!),” she remembered. “It’s cliché, but I was hooked immediately. The first notes of ‘Dig Me Out’—that opening guitar riff punctuated by the drums! And then hearing Corin’s voice for the first time was a revelation.”36 Many others came across Sleater-Kinney after reading about them in a magazine or newspaper. One listener credited the local public library for facilitating her initial encounter with Dig Me Out. “I still feel a damp wet chill in my bones when I think about borrowing that CD from the library and remember listening to it on rainy afternoons after school,” she reminisced.37 That’s to say that SleaterKinney grew far beyond the independent music networks where they got their start and, over time, encompassed a large audience that was unfailingly devoted. Sleater-Kinney also attracted fans who were increasingly diverse in gender and age. Tim Holman, who accompanied the band on the North American leg of the tour, remembered that more and more men could be seen in the audience.38 That same spring, Brownstein also noticed that a growing portion of older fans appeared among those in attendance. As one music critic put it, Sleater-Kinney listeners ranged from  103 •

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“15-year-old students to a 50-year-old bus driver.”39 At certain moments, the band expressed concern that younger female fans would be edged out of the concerts. “Sometimes it really sucks. We’ll play New York and there’s a wall of baseball caps and we’re like, ‘Where are the girls?’” Tucker related.40 At shows where they noticed that men predominated in the crowd, Sleater-Kinney revived riot grrrl tactics: they invited women to come to the front of the stage, they reprimanded moshers and aggressive dancers, and they encouraged the audience to make the pit a safe place for all in attendance. At a show in Los Angeles, for instance, one fan recounted that the band discouraged stagediving and instructed the crowd to “try to do the pogo or any number of other shimmys and booty-shakers that they enthusiastically illustrated for us.”41 Most shows, however, were peaceful affairs where the band welcomed all fans equally. “One of the things we wanted to do was have our music transcend a specific genre, and not just appeal to a certain group of people,” Brownstein insisted just as Dig Me Out was released.42 As diverse as their fans were becoming, what most had in common was that they were extraordinarily loyal to Sleater-Kinney. Holman remembered that it had not been uncommon for fans to travel from afar in order to catch the band on the Dig Me Out tour. “There were kids from the middle of nowhere coming to see them,” he told me.43 One fan, for instance, drove 300 miles to see the band perform at the Gilman in Berkeley, California.44 Some fans began to follow Sleater-Kinney from date to date. “We’ll have people come to 10 shows in a row. It’s wonderful, they’re always in the same spot  104 •

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in front, and we’ll say to each other, ‘Those guys were in the front again,’” Brownstein narrated.45 Over the course of their career, the band’s fan base only became stronger. Even listeners who felt at times to have outgrown the band reconnected with later albums. One fan, for example, stopped listening to Sleater-Kinney in the late 1990s but returned to the fold after the release of One Beat in 2002; with this album, she could once again relate to the band because it “sounded like it was made by thirty something women who were still frustrated by the status quo … you could hear that they were living with children and mortgages and standing weekly therapy appointments.”46 Once they announced their hiatus in 2006, an outpouring of accolades showed just how wide Sleater-Kinney’s reach had been. Their final performance, one writer pointed out, was “packed [with] new and old fans alike … [it left] us clinging hopefully to the word ‘indefinite.’”47 Not only that, but the band’s audience continued to grow even in the decade after they disbanded. Although the celebrity of Sleater-Kinney was larger than the sum of its parts, some fans gravitated toward individual members. “The three of us are pretty different,” Weiss pointed out.48 On the Dig Me Out tour, Holman noticed that “there were fans coming to the shows that were Carrie people, Corin people, and even Janet people.”49 Although Weiss, like most drummers, was usually not in the audience’s direct line of sight, some listeners were specifically drawn to her. Writing in her zine, one fan excitedly shared that “Janet kept looking at me and smiling while she whiped [sic] her brow.”50 After attending a Quasi show, a band in which Weiss performs  105 •

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only with guitarist Sam Coomes, an avid listener of Sleater-Kinney praised the stage set-up that positioned the drums at the front, rather than in the back of the stage. “I never get to see the JW play her drumkit as she sits in the back behind two other members in that other band,” she teased. “But this night she was right up front and I was right at top in order to view the manically fast drumming that is the Weiss. She is a great drummer. Period. One of the best.”51 For her own part, Weiss was most outwardly receptive to fans. She frequently mingled with the crowd and worked at the merchandise table. “I really enjoyed meeting the fans. We had a lot of good fans. There are a lot of good huggers out there!” she related.52 As one of two vocalists and guitarists, Tucker had a far more visible onstage role. During shows, it was not uncommon for certain fans to crowd by Tucker. “We always joked that Corin had these intellectual 50-year-old men who wore glasses and looked like college professors,” Weiss explained. “She really had a type—these guys always stood on her side and they were Corin’s special, intellectual fans.”53 Many others were drawn to Tucker because of her previous band Heavens to Betsy and her participation in the riot grrrl movement. At a Cadallaca show, a band she performed in with two members from The Lookers in the late 1990s, a fan in the audience noticed that many attendees were there specifically because of Tucker. “I could tell a lot of kids there went to the show to see Corin,” she wrote. “I [was] not … an exception.”54 In a zine titled Corin OXOX devoted entirely to Tucker’s work, two writers venerated her as a musician and as a role model. “[I] don’t know  106 •

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where i was when i first heard [Heavens to Betsy’s album Calculated],” one of them explained. “[C]orin’s voice, clear and bright … heavens to betsy was/is the perfect thing for the feelings i had while i was growing up.”55 Tucker’s later bands, including Sleater-Kinney and the Corin Tucker Band, were just as influential for these two zine writers. At another point, they expressed their desire to emulate the performer. “[I]’ve spent more than half of my life pretending to be in sleater-kinney,” one continued. “[D]ays playing dig me out over and over in my old bedroom, i would play amazing air guitar, and fake like i was corin, or sometimes carrie. high kicks and jumping up and down. it was dig me out that changed everything for me.”56 Fans who favored Tucker did so on the grounds of an emotional connection. As Weiss put it, “Corin is so sensitive, intuitive, and deep … She’s open and just, a really fair person. She gets the real misfits of all ages, men and women, who really relate to her.”57 Fans who gravitated to Brownstein, on the other hand, were most frequently enthralled by her physical performance and her bold ownership of iconic rock moves. “I loved watching Carrie jump around windmilling like Peter Townshend in her gray businesswoman’s skirt,” recounted one zine writer who saw the band perform in Chicago.58 Another declared that “I’ve never seen anyone rock that hard ever, boy or girl … Carrie moved like Elvis.”59 Brownstein was equally fond of hip thrusts as she was of high kicks and high jumps that evoked canonical performers. Reflecting on her bandmate’s performing persona, Weiss summed it up evocatively: “She goes physically crazy on stage. She is such a guitar hero.”60 Music critics concurred. In a review of Dig Me Out, one  107 •

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writer declared Brownstein to be “one of the most exhilarating rock guitarists ever” who “plays as if generations of rock-star lore had seeped into her very bones.”61 More than a decade and a half later, when Brownstein had transitioned to playing in Wild Flag with Weiss, Mary Timony, and Rebecca Cole, she continued to captivate the rock star mythos. “On stage, she projects the primal grandeur of Iggy Pop,” one article assessed. “She writhes on the floor, climbs on the kick drum, and windmills her playing arm. She yelps and shouts, and hiccups just like Joey Ramone.62 Fellow musician Brendan Canty, the drummer of Fugazi, saw Brownstein in the same light. Describing her as “a straight-out-of-the-box rock star,” Canty pointed precisely to her bold posturing and posing as the trademark of her performance.63 Brownstein’s onstage persona earned her more fans than any other individual member of Sleater-Kinney. Moreover, fans who preferred her, many of them women, seemed to share a common ailment: they were infatuated with the guitarist. A year after Dig Me Out was released, one writer speculated that having a crush on the SleaterKinney guitarist was becoming a widespread epidemic. “Brownstein’s stage presence regularly causes young (and not-so-young) girls’ collective jaws to drop in lustful abandon.”64 From behind her kit, Weiss noticed the same phenomenon: “Carrie can have really crazy, outspoken girls up front who can’t contain themselves and then start screaming ‘I love you’ and stuff like that.”65 As one listener admitted, “I’m nearly 30 and seeing them live I turn into a teenager. I don’t know what she touches upon but you’re just swooning. There’s just something about [Brownstein], the incredibly sexy way she moves with her  108 •

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guitar and kicks the air.”66 Like Elvis, The Beatles, and Robert Plant before her, Brownstein became a repository for the swooning, sighing, and screaming fans; these fans, precisely, affirmed her membership among rock’s most iconic performers. Crushed-out fans were not shy to share their yearning for Brownstein publicly. Some wrote about their infatuation in zines. One fan confessed that “I helped Carrie off stage and felt a pang of that ‘I’m never gonna wash this hand’ feeling.”67 Another zine writer captioned photos from a Sleater-Kinney show with “Carrie—Will you marry me?,” “Carrie strikes a pose,” and “Love Carrie!”68 In the late 1990s there even used to be a fan site called “Crush on Carrie”—since replaced by Tumblr feeds and fan forums—where devotees posted testimonies of their Brownstein crushes. “When I saw SK play at CMJ, I stared at Carrie almost the whole time,” one fan wrote in 1997. “Carrie’s stage presence is sooooo powerful. God, the way her mouth hangs open when she plays, her gnarled screams. Oy, she was (IS) really sexy.”69 That same year, another admirer shared a similar story of infatuation: “Sleater Kinney comes out and I swear I almost fainted. That gift up there [Carrie] was a babe and a half. I stood there through the whole show completely hypnotized by her beauty and grace,” she wrote.70 Fellow musicians were no less immune to developing crushes on Brownstein. In a late 1990s edition of the widely circulated zine Chickfactor, Pamela Berry and Gail O’Hara asked a number of performers to compile their own “crush lists.” Brownstein appeared prominently on these lists, where she was claimed as a crush by the likes of Sarah Dougher of the Lookers and Candice Pedersen of K Records.71  109 •

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In addition to crushes, fans expressed their passion for Sleater-Kinney with an array of gifts. The band frequently received letters and cards, drawings and caricatures, mix tapes and demo tapes, stuffed animals, and even food.72 One zine writer described how she and her friend threw homemade bracelets on the stage as the band walked out to take their places.73 Another fan boasted that she’d prepared an “Easter/Passover basket filled with candy and a huge (100oz) jar of bubbles” that she presented to Tucker at a show.74 Others frequently asked Holman or Weiss, who were most often accessible at the merchandise table, to accept gifts on behalf of the band. “We would get all kinds of awesome gifts at shows: things like care packages for each of us with our names and filled with things like teddy bears and cookies and letters,” Weiss recalled. “People spent a lot of time making us stuff and it made me feel so welcome. When fans felt invested they would make you cookies because they knew you were going to get them and eat them. And we did!”75 The band appreciated cookies and other gifts alike. “Janet got this awesome mix tape once that we listened to during the entire trip,” Holman remembered. “I’m sure the kids that made it would have been amazed to hear that.”76 More than fifteen years later, Tucker has held on to some keepsakes. When we spoke, she proudly produced a stuffed monkey dressed in a shirt with “SK” printed on the front. As she recalled, a fan threw the toy on the stage around the time her son was born.77 Almost unequivocally, listeners sang the band’s praises. In fact, it can be a challenge to dig up a critical word about Sleater-Kinney at all. In the eyes of their fans, the band could do no wrong. As one declared: “They are such a  110 •

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good band to watch—Carrie with her dancing, Janet with her great drum playing, and Corin with her nice communication with the audience.”78 Another confirmed: “They are great musicians, great live performers, great to their audience.”79 And, in a show review, a third fan indicated: “I can’t pick out the best part of the evening … maybe it was the fact that I was so close to these three amazing women for an hour or so.”80 With their crushes, gifts, and praise, the collective words of devotion signaled that, to their fans, Sleater-Kinney were nothing short of heroic.

The legacy of Sleater-Kinney Even though the band members remained active as musicians in the years after Sleater-Kinney went on hiatus—playing in bands like Quasi, the Corin Tucker Band, and Wild Flag—fans fantasized, speculated, and clamored for a Sleater-Kinney reunion. In 2014, they were appeased when the band announced that they had recorded a new album and that they would once again embark on a tour. Interestingly, during their decadelong break, the group seemed to have only accrued more fans. Those who’d been too young to see them perform in the 1990s and 2000s now raced 30- and 40-year-olds to secure tickets to sold-out shows. Not only that, but this time the tracks from the new album, No Cities to Love, instantly appeared in rotation on radio broadcasts and online streams. Perhaps most importantly, articles and interviews published in the wake of Sleater-Kinney’s reunion were now more likely to skip the thorny qualifications of the band within gender and  111 •

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cultural hierarchies. Instead, they went straight to the point and discussed the trio’s new record. That is to say that the response Sleater-Kinney received in 2014 effectively proved that the band had been successful in the endeavor that spanned their careers: they were being heard within the rock canon as women and as musicians.

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Introduction 1

2  3 4 5 6 7

“List of Best Selling Albums by Year in the United States,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_best-selling_albums_by_year_in_the_ United_States (accessed on April 8, 2015). “Billboard 200—1997 Archive,” Billboard, https://www.billboard.com/archive/charts/1997/ billboard-200 (accessed on April 8, 2015). Vickie Gilmer, “Sleater-Kinney,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, October 23, 1998, 16E. Gillian G. Gaar, She’s a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll, Second Edition, New York: Seal Press, 2002, xv. Carla DeSantis, “One Last Look at 1997— Another Year of the Girl,” Rockrgrl, January/ February 1998, 2. Ann Cvetkovich and Gretchen Phillips, “Revenge of the Girl Bands,” The Nation, July 10, 2000, 16–17. Kristen Schilt, “‘A Little Too Ironic’: The Appropriation and Packaging of Riot Grrrl Politics  113 •

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8 9

10 11 12

13

14 15

by Mainstream Female Musicians,” Popular Music and Society 26, 1 (2003): 10. Maria Raha, Cinderella’s Big Score: Women of the Punk and Indie Underground, Emeryville: Seal Press, 2005. Rachel Henry Currans-Sheehan, “From Madonna to Lilith Fair and Back Again: Women, Feminists, and Pop Music in the united States,” You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby: Women, Politics, and Popular Culture, ed. Lilly J. Goren, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2009, 60. Gillian G. Gaar, She’s a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll, 2nd edn, New York: Seal Press, 2002, 447. Susan J. Douglas, “Girls ’n’ Spice: All Things Nice,” The Nation, August 25–September 1, 1997, 22. Julia Downes, “The Expansion of Punk Rock: Riot Grrrl Challenges to Gender Power Relations in British Indie Music Subcultures,” Women’s Studies 42, 2 (2012): 204. Kristen Schilt, “‘A Little Too Ironic’: The Appropriation and Packaging of Riot Grrrl Politics by Mainstream Female Musicians,” Popular Music and Society 26, 1 (2003): 5–16. Also see: Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Routledge, 1979. Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, New York: Harper Perennial, 2010. Lindsey Zoladz, “Not Every Girl Is a Riot Grrrl: Today’s Musicians Grapple with the Feminist Punk  114 •

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Legacy of Riot Grrrl,” Pitchfork, November 16, 2011. 16 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014.

Olympia Calling: The Making and Breaking Out of Spaces 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9

Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, New York: Harper Perennial, 2010, 96. Emphasis in the original. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, 117. Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981–1991, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2001, 400. Mark Baumgarten, Love Rock Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music, Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2012, x. Kaya Oakes, Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture, New York: Holt, 2009, 126. Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981–1991, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2001, 455. Kaya Oakes, Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture, New York: Holt, 2009, 127. Julie Butterfield, interview with the author, September 11, 2014. Barbara Arnett, “Sleater-Kinney Still Rocks,” Rockrgrl, May/June 1999, 9.  115 •

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10 Don’t Need You, dir. Kerri Koch, 2005. 11 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014. 12 Rob Sheffield, “Sleater-Kinney: America’s Answer to the Clash—Three Girls who Drink Peppermint Tea and Kick Ass,” Rolling Stone, October 30, 2003, 70–2. 13 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014. 14 Pamela Berry and Gail O’Hara, “Janet Weiss is the Super Powerful Drummer for Quasi and SleaterKinney,” Chickfactor, Issue 12, 1998, Barnard Zines O52c. 15 Barbara Arnett, “Sleater-Kinney Still Rocks,” Rockrgrl, May/June 1999, 9. 16 Gillian G. Gaar, She’s a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll, 2nd edn, New York: Seal Press, 2002, 440. 17 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, August 21, 2014. 18 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. 19 See: Lisa Darms, “Grrrl, Collected,” The Paris Review, July 30, 2013; Lauraine Leblanc, Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999. 20 Joanne Gottlieb and Gayle Wald, “Smells Like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrrls, Revolution and Women in Independent Rock,” Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose, London: Routledge, 1994, 252.  116 •

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21 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. 22 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. 23 Alison Piepmeier, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, New York: New York University Press, 2009, 18. 24 Johanna Fateman, “My Riot Grrrl,” The Riot Grrrl Collection, ed. Lisa Darms, New York: The Feminist Press, 2013, 13. 25 Mary Celeste Kearney, Girls Make Media, New York: Routledge, 2006, 65. 26 Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, New York: Harper Perennial, 2010, 9, 221. 27 Lisa Darms, “Introducing the Collection,” The Riot Grrrl Collection, ed. Lisa Darms, New York: The Feminist Press, 2013, 6–12. 28 Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, New York: Harper Perennial, 2010, 321. 29 Victoria L. Bromley, Feminisms Matter: Debates, Theory, Activism, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012, 146–7. 30 See: Adela C. Licona, Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderland Rhetoric, Albany: SUNY Press, 2012; Mimi Thi Nguyen, “Race, Riot Grrrl, and Revival,” Women & Performance 22, 2–3 (2012): 173–96; Kristen Schilt, “‘The Punk White Privilege Scene’: Riot Grrrl, White Privilege, and Zines,” Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women’s  117 •

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31 32

33 34

35

36 37 38

Movement, ed. Jo Reger, New York: Routledge 2005, 39–56. Gillian G. Gaar, She’s a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll, 2nd edn, New York: Seal Press, 2002, 365. Kristen Schilt, “‘A Little Too Ironic’: The Appropriation and Packaging of Riot Grrrl Politics by Mainstream Female Musicians,” Popular Music and Society 26, 1 (2003): 9. Corin Tucker, “Dedicated,” The Riot Grrrl Collection, ed. Lisa Darms, New York: The Feminist Press, 2013, 241. Joanne Gottlieb and Gayle Wald, “Smells Like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrrls, Revolution and Women in Independent Rock,” Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose, London: Routledge, 1994, 271. Jim Finnegan, “Theoretical Tailspins: Reading ‘Alternative’ Performance in Spin Magazine,” GenXegesis: Essays on ‘Alternative’ Youth (Sub)Culture, ed. John M. Ulrich and Andrea L. Harris, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003, 144. Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, New York: Harper Perennial, 2010, 256. Anna Feigenbaum, “Remapping the Resonances of Riot Grrrl: Feminism, Postfeminism, and the ‘Process’ of Punk,” Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culutre, ed.  118 •

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39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, 132–52. Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. Daniel Stinker, “Sleater-Kinney,” We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews, ed. Daniel Stinker, New York: Akashic Book, 2001, 99. Julie Butterfield, interview with the author, September 11, 2014. Margaret Talbot, “Stumptown Girl,” The New Yorker, January 2, 2012. Songs for Cassavetes, dir. Justin Mitchell, 2001. Grail Marcus, “Raising the Stakes in Punk Rock: Sleater-Kinney,” New York Times, July 18, 2000. Tim Holman, interview with the author, September 9, 2014. Tim Holman, interview with the author, September 9, 2014. Kim Cooper, In the Aeroplace over the Sea, 33 1/3 Series, New York: Bloomsbury, 2005, 17.

Eight Days in Seattle: The Struggle to Record Dig Me Out 1 2 3

“Second Winter Storm Hits Northwest,” CNN, December 29, 1996. Timothy Egan, “A Calm between the Storms Helps the Pacific Northwest,” New York Times, December 30, 1996. Rory Marshall, “Powerful Snow and Ice Storm  119 •

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4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Takes Pacific Northwest,” Los Angeles Times, December 29, 1996. “Winter Wonderland becomes Waterworld,” The Seattle Times, December 30, 1996. Corin Tucker, interview with the author, August 21, 2014. Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. Corin Tucker, interview with the author, August 21, 2014. Mark Jenkins, “Sleater-Kinney: Dig It,” Washington Post, May 16, 1997. Me’shell Ndegeocello, “The Top Ten of 1996,” Rockrgrl, January/February 1997, 8. Amy Ra Nea Wilson, “Sleater-Kinney: Riot Grrrl Grows Up,” Rockrgrl, July/August 1996, 12. Amy Ra Nea Wilson, “Sleater-Kinney: Riot Grrrl Grows Up,” Rockrgrl, July/August 1996, 12. Barbara Arnett, “Sleater-Kinney Still Rocks,” Rockrgrl, May/June 1999, 9. Corin Tucker, interview with the author, August 21, 2014. Julie Butterfield, interview with the author, September 11, 2014. Amy Ra Nea Wilson, “Sleater-Kinney: Riot Grrrl Grows Up,” Rockrgrl, July/August 1996, 12. Corin Tucker, interview with the author, August 21, 2014. Barbara Arnett, “Totally Janet Weiss,” Rockrgrl, September/October 1998, 20. Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014.  120 •

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19 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. 20 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. 21 Daniel Stinker, “Sleater-Kinney,” We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews, ed. Daniel Stinker, New York: Akashic Book, 2001, 105. 22 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, August 21, 2014. 23 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, August 21, 2014. 24 John Goodmanson, interview with the author, September 4, 2014. 25 John Goodmanson, interview with the author, September 4, 2014. 26 John Goodmanson, interview with the author, September 4, 2014. 27 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. 28 John Goodmanson, interview with the author, September 4, 2014. 29 John Goodmanson, interview with the author, September 4, 2014. 30 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. 31 John Goodmanson, interview with the author, September 4, 2014. 32 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. 33 John Goodmanson, interview with the author, September 4, 2014.  121 •

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34 John Goodmanson, interview with the author, September 4, 2014. 35 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. 36 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. 37 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. 38 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, August 21, 2014. 39 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. 40 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. 41 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. 42 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014. 43 Julie Butterfield, interview with the author, September 11, 2014. 44 John Goodmanson, interview with the author, September 4, 2014.

Strange Words: Writing about Gender, Punk, and Sleater-Kinney 1 2

Christopher John Farley, “Songs in the Key of Glee,” Time, May 19, 1997. Daniel Stinker, “Sleater-Kinney,” We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews, ed. Daniel Stinker, New York: Akashic Book, 2001, 97.  122 •

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3 4

5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13

Evelyn McDonnell, “Riot Grrrl Returns, with a Slightly Softer Roar,” New York Times, June 2, 1996. Rob Sheffield, “Sleater-Kinney: America’s Answer to the Clash—Three Girls who Drink Peppermint Tea and Kick Ass,” Rolling Stone, October 30, 2003, 70–2. Terri Sutton, “Enraged and In Love: SleaterKinney and the Dichotomies of Rock & Roll,” Minneapolis City Pages, April 2, 1997. Evelyn McDonnell, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” Rolling Stone, June 12, 1997. Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981–1991, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2001, 407. Experience Music Project, Riot Grrrl Retrospective, 1999. Experience Music Project, Riot Grrrl Retrospective, 1999. Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014. Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. Carrie Brownstein, “More Rock, Less Talk: Live Music Turns off the Voices in Our Heads,” This is Pop: In Search of the Elusive at the Experience Music Project, ed. Eric Weisbard, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, 320. Carla DeSantis, “This Women in Rock Magazine Hates Women in Rock Articles,” Rockrgrl, March/ April 1996, 3. Emphasis in the original.  123 •

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14 Amy Ra Nea Wilson, “Sleater-Kinney: Riot Grrrl Grows Up,” Rockrgrl, July/August 1996, 12. 15 Eric Weisbard, “Riot, Laugh,” Spin, August 1996. 16 Amanda MacKinnon, Popgirls!, Issue 1, April 1998. 17 Lisa Butterworth, “Carrie Brownstein Spills the Beans on Fred, Feminism, and Fear,” Bust, July 30, 2014. 18 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. 19 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014. 20 Amanda MacKinnon, Popgirls!, Issue 2, 1999, Barnard Zines M556p. 21 Julie Butterfield, interview with the author, September 11, 2014. 22 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. 23 Donna Freydkin, “Punk Trio Sleater-Kinney Keeps on Digging with Fourth Album,” CNN, March 23, 1999. 24 Joe Heim, “american bandstand,” Salon, March 4, 1999. 25 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. 26 Stephanie Zacharek and Jeff Stark, “Olympian Heroes,” Salon, May 9, 2000. 27 Greil Marcus, “The Best Band in the World,” Esquire, April 1999. 28 Courtney Barbour, “Sleater-Kinney,” Woove, 2000. 29 Bill Friskics-Warren, “Making a Scene,” Weekly Wire, March 8, 1999. 30 David Daley, “Quiet Riot,” Magnet, April/May 1999.  124 •

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31 Andrew Smith, “But if only they had a bass player …” Observer, June 4, 2000. 32 Matt Diehl, “Recordings,” Rolling Stone, May 15, 1997. 33 Stephanie Zacharek and Jeff Stark, “Olympian Heroes,” Salon, May 9, 2000. 34 Robert Christgau, “Consumer Guide,” The Village Voice, April 15, 1997. 35 Justin Kleinfeld, “Review of One Beat,” CMJ, August, 26, 2002. 36 Stephanie Zacharek and Jeff Stark, “Olympian Heroes,” Salon, May 9, 2000. 37 Kimberly Chun, “Duck, Duck, Fox: Boys, Girls, Love Songs—How do Sleater-Kinney Pull It Off?,” The San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 25–31, 2005. 38 Amanda MacKinnon, “Interview with Carrie Brownstein,” Popgirls!, Issue 1, April 1998. 39 Carrie Bell, “Kill Rock Stars’ Sleater-Kinney Rise to New Challenges on ‘Hot’,” Billboard, January 23, 1999. 40 Stephanie Zacharek and Jeff Stark, “Olympian Heroes,” Salon, May 9, 2000. 41 Beth Johnson, “The Week,” Entertainment Weekly, April 25, 1997. 42 Courtney Barbour, “Sleater-Kinney,” Woove, 2000. 43 Tim Holman, interview with the author, September 9, 2014. 44 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014. 45 James Sullivan, “Sleater-Kinney’s Poised Intensity,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 16, 2002.  125 •

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46 Johnny Ray Huston, “Electric Lady Band,” The San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 25–31, 2005. 47 Donna Freydkin, “Punk Trio Sleater-Kinney Keeps on Digging with Fourth Album,” CNN, March 23, 1999. 48 Andrew Smith, “But if only they had a bass player …” Observer, June 4, 2000. 49 Barry Walters, “Killer Lesbians,” The Advocate, May 13, 1997. 50 Todd Inoue, “Kicking Out the Shams,” Pulse, April 1999. 51 Charles Taylor, “Post-Riot: Sleater-Kinney Rise from Heavens to Betsy’s Ashes,” Boston Phoenix, April 11–18, 1996. 52 Donna Freydkin, “Punk Trio Sleater-Kinney Keeps on Digging with Fourth Album,” CNN, March 23, 1999. 53 Stephanie Zacharek, “Knockout: Sleater-Kinney Top Even Themselves,” Boston Phoenix, April 10–17, 1997. 54 Vickie Gilmer, “Sleater-Kinney,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, October 23, 1998. 55 Marc Weingarten, “Performance: Sleater-Kinney at the Roxy,” Rolling Stone, April 15, 1999. 56 Gina Arnold, “Digging out a ‘Hot Rock’,” Metroactive, February 18, 1999. 57 Greil Marcus, “Sleater-Kinney,” Time, July 9, 2001. 58 Gillian G. Gaar, “Meditations on Sleater-Kinney,” Seattle Weekly News, October 9, 2006. 59 Neva Chonin, “Pure Rock Fun,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 13, 2002. 60 Daniel Stinker, “Sleater-Kinney,” We Owe You  126 •

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61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69

Nothing: Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews, ed. Daniel Stinker, New York: Akashic Book, 2001, 101. Daniel Stinker, “Sleater-Kinney,” We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews, ed. Daniel Stinker, New York: Akashic Book, 2001, 99. Corin Tucker, interview with the author, August 21, 2014. Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014. Nicole Solomon, Silver Rocket, Issue 4, 1996, Barnard Zines S645s. Lynn Ho, Cyanide, Issue 1, 1998, Barnard Zines H68c. Sarah Thorton, “Moral Panic, the Media and British Rave Culture,” Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose, London: Routledge, 1994, 180. Emphasis in the original. Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. Amanda MacKinnon, Popgirls!, Issue 2, 1999, Barnard Zines M556p. Gina Arnold, “Digging out a ‘Hot Rock’,” Metroactive, February 18, 1999.

Hey Soundguy: The Dig Me Out Tour 1

Jen and Sarah Wolfe, “Sleater-Kinney,” Panophobia, Issue 5, 1997, Barnard Zines W6544p. Emphasis in the orginal.  127 •

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2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 1. Emphasis in the original. Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 2. Emphasis in the original. Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 2. Tim Holman, interview with the author, September 9, 2014. Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014. Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 3. Tim Holman, interview with the author, September 9, 2014. Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 12. Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 27. Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. Julie Butterfield, interview with the author, September 11, 2014. Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014. Tim Holman, interview with the author, September 9, 2014. Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. Mark Jenkins, “Sleater-Kinney, at Full Throttle,” The Washington Post, May 20, 1997.  128 •

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20 Evelyn McDonnell, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” Rolling Stone, June 12, 1997. 21 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. 22 Jessica Alexis LaJoie, Riley Elizabeth Manion, and Corinna Lee Manian, Not Quite Israfel, Issue 5, Summer 1999, Barnard Zines L356n. 23 Julie Butterfield, interview with the author, September 11, 2014. 24 Sara Sherr, “Hearts of Glass,” The Village Voice, February 23, 1999. 25 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. 26 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. 27 Tim Holman, interview with the author, September 9, 2014. 28 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. 29 Amanda MacKinnon, Funky Spunk!, Issue 6, 1997. 30 Barbara Arnett, “Sleater-Kinney Still Rocks,” Rockrgrl, May/June 1999, 9. 31 Barbara Arnett, “Sleater-Kinney Still Rocks,” Rockrgrl, May/June 1999, 9. 32 Amanda MacKinnon, Funky Spunk!, Issue 6, 1997. 33 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. 34 Tim Holman, interview with the author, September 9, 2014. 35 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 3. Emphasis in the original.  129 •

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36 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. 37 Tim Holman, interview with the author, September 9, 2014. 38 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014. 39 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. 40 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 2. 41 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 5. 42 Tim Holman, interview with the author, September 9, 2014. 43 Don’t Need You, dir. Kerri Koch, 2005. 44 Amanda MacKinnon, Popgirls!, Issue 2, 1999. 45 Terri Sutton, “Enraged and In Love: SleaterKinney and the Dichotomies of Rock & Roll,” Minneapolis City Pages, April 2, 1997. 46 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 26–7. 47 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 6. 48 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 7. 49 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 7. Emphasis in the original. 50 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 7. 51 Jen and Sarah Wolfe, “Sleater-Kinney,” Panophobia, Issue 5, 1997, Barnard Zines W6544p. 52 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 7. 53 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 7. Emphasis in the original. 54 Terri Sutton, “Enraged and In Love: SleaterKinney and the Dichotomies of Rock & Roll,” Minneapolis City Pages, April 2, 1997. 55 Don’t Need You, dir. Kerri Koch, 2005.  130 •

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56 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 4. 57 Tim Holman, interview with the author, September 9, 2014. 58 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 7. 59 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 9. 60 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 4. 61 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 25. 62 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. 63 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, August 21, 2014. 64 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 26. 65 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 14. 66 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 14. 67 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 16. Emphasis in the original. 68 Corin Tucker, Hey Soundguy, 1997, 3. Emphasis in the original. 69 Julie Butterfield, interview with the author, September 11, 2014. 70 Wynde Dyer, Keep Yer Kitty Wet, Issue 1, 1997, Barnard Zines W96k. 71 Ericka Bailie, Power Candy, Issue 21, Summer 1998, Barnard Zines B353p. 72 Adrienne Aldredge, email correspondence with the author, August 14, 2014. 73 Paula Tagle, Dessurt furst, Issue 4, 2000, Barnard Zines T34d. 74 Kathy Moseley, Semi-Bold, Issue 6, 1999, Barnard Zines M667s. 75 Jessica Alexis LaJoie, Riley Elizabeth Manion, and

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Corinna Lee Manian, Not Quite Israfel, Issue 5, 1999, Barnard Zines L356n.

Words and Guitars: Celebrity, Fandom, and the Cult of Sleater-Kinney 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

Maria Meltzer, “Last Exit for Sleater-Kinney: Notes on the Break-Up of an Iconic Band,” Slate, August 4, 2006. Catherine Plato, “Why do Good Things Never Wanna Stay,” Curve, December 2006. Carrie Brownstein, “More Rock, Less Talk: Live Music Turns off the Voices in Our Heads,” This is Pop: In Search of the Elusive at the Experience Music Project, ed. Eric Weisbard, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, 321. Evelyn McDonnell, “Riot Grrrl Returns, with a Slightly Softer Roar,” New York Times, June 2, 1996. Denise Sheppard, “The Cult of Carrie,” Rockrgrl, January/February 1998, 30. Susan J. Douglas, “Girls ’n’ Spice: All Things Nice,” The Nation, August 25–September 1, 1997, 22. Tim Holman, interview with the author, September 9, 2014. Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014. Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014.  132 •

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10 Maria Meltzer, “Last Exit for Sleater-Kinney: Notes on the Break-Up of an Iconic Band,” Slate, August 4, 2006. 11 Adrienne Aldredge, email correspondence with the author, August 19, 2014. 12 Courtney Bennett, Bitchfield, Issue 18, 1996, Barnard Zines B466b. 13 Paula Tagle, Dessurt furst, Issue 4, 2000, Barnard Zines T34d. 14 Amy Mariaskin, Southern Fried Darling, Issue 14, 2000, Barnard Zines M373s. 15 Evelyn McDonnell, “Riot Grrrl Returns, with a Slightly Softer Roar,” The New York Times, June 2, 1996. 16 Amanda MacKinnon, Popgirls!, Issue 2, 1999, Barnard Zines M556p. 17 Amanda MacKinnon, Popgirls!, Issue 2, 1999, Barnard Zines M556p. 18 Neva Chonin, “Pure Rock Fun,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 13, 2002. 19 Evelyn McDonnell, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” Rolling Stone, June 12, 1997. 20 Charles Cross, “Performance: Sleater-Kinney at Three O,” Rolling Stone, April 3, 1997. 21 Katy Weselcouch, The Jellybean, Issue 21, June 1997. 22 Katy Weselcouch, email correspondence with the author, August 6, 2014. 23 Paula Tagle, Dessurt furst, Issue 4, 2000, Barnard Zines T34d. 24 Charles Cross, “Performance: Sleater-Kinney at Three O,” Rolling Stone, April 3, 1997.  133 •

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25 Katy Weselcouch, The Jellybean, Issue 21, June 1997. 26 Neva Chonin, “Pure Rock Fun,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 13, 2002. 27 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. 28 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. 29 Julie Butterfield, interview with the author, September 11, 2014. 30 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, October 2, 2014. 31 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. 32 Ann Cvetkovich and Gretchen Phillips, “Revenge of the Girl Bands,” The Nation, July 10, 2000. 33 Terri Sutton, “Enraged and In Love: SleaterKinney and the Dichotomies of Rock & Roll,” Minneapolis City Pages, April 2, 1997. 34 Daniel Stinker, “Sleater-Kinney,” We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews, ed. Daniel Stinker, New York: Akashic Book, 2001, 97. 35 Elise Nussbaum, email correspondence with the author, March 19, 2015. 36 Adrienne Aldredge, email correspondence with the author, August 19, 2014. 37 Neda Maghbouleh, email correspondence with the author, March 9, 2015. 38 Tim Holman, interview with the author, September 9, 2014. 39 Neva Chonin, “Pure Rock Fun,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 13, 2002.  134 •

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40 Carla DeSantis, “Corin Tucker: Breakin’ Up Is Hard to Do,” Rockrgrl, Summer 2004, 54–5. 41 Paula Tagle, Dessurt furst, Issue 4, 2000, Barnard Zines T34d. 42 Mark Jenkins, “Sleater-Kinney: Dig It,” The Washington Post, May 16, 1997. 43 Tim Holman, interview with the author, September 9, 2014. 44 Wynde Dyer, Keep Yer Kitty Wet, Issue 1, 1997, Barnard Zines W96k. 45 Johnny Ray Huston, “Where the Wild Things Are,” The San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 25–31, 2005. 46 Maria Meltzer, “Last Exit for Sleater-Kinney: Notes on the Break-Up of an Iconic Band,” Slate, August 4, 2006. 47 Catherine Plato, “Why do Good Things Never Wanna Stay,” Curve, December 2006. 48 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, October 23, 2014. 49 Tim Holman, interview with the author, September 9, 2014. 50 Wynde Dyer, Keep Yer Kitty Wet, Issue 1, 1997, Barnard Zines W96k. 51 Paula Tagle, Dessurt furst, Issue 4, 2000, Barnard Zines T34d. Emphasis in the original. 52 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014. 53 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014. 54 Paula Tagle, Dessurt furst, Issue 4, 2000, Barnard Zines T34d.  135 •

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55 Miss C. [Colleen] Bean and Neelybat Chestnut, Corin OXOX, undated. 56 Miss C. [Colleen] Bean and Neelybat Chestnut, Corin OXOX, undated. 57 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014. 58 Kathy Moseley, Semi-Bold, Issue 6, 1999, Barnard Zines M667s. 59 Katy Weselcouch, The Jellybean, Issue 21, June 1997. 60 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014. 61 Stephanie Zacharek, “Knockout: Sleater-Kinney Top Even Themselves,” Boston Phoenix, April 10–17, 1997. 62 Margaret Talbot, “Stumptown Girl,” The New Yorker, January 2, 2012. 63 Margaret Talbot, “Stumptown Girl,” The New Yorker, January 2, 2012. 64 Denise Sheppard, “The Cult of Carrie,” Rockrgrl, January/February 1998, 30. 65 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014. 66 Denise Sheppard, “The Cult of Carrie,” Rockrgrl, January/February 1998, 30. 67 Wynde Dyer, Keep Yer Kitty Wet, Issue 1, 1997, Barnard Zines W96k. 68 Paula Tagle, Dessurt furst, Issue 4, 2000, Barnard Zines T34d. 69 Denise Sheppard, “The Cult of Carrie,” Rockrgrl, January/February 1998, 30.

 136 •

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70 Denise Sheppard, “The Cult of Carrie,” Rockrgrl, January/February 1998, 30. 71 Pamela Berry and Gail O’Hara, Chickfactor, Issue 12, 1998/1999, Barnard Zines O52c. 72 Johnny Ray Huston, “Where the Wild Things Are,” The San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 25–31, 2005. 73 Miss C. [Colleen] Bean and Neelybat Chestnut, Corin OXOX, undated. 74 Courtney Bennett, Bitchfield, Issue 18, 1996, Barnard Zines B466b. 75 Janet Weiss, interview with the author, December 13, 2014. 76 Tim Holman, interview with the author, September 9, 2014. 77 Corin Tucker, interview with the author, August 21, 2014. 78 Amanda MacKinnon, Funky Spunk!, Issue 6, 1997. 79 Paula Tagle, Dessurt furst, Issue 4, 2000, Barnard Zines T34d. 80 Jessica Alexis LaJoie, Riley Elizabeth Manion, and Corinna Lee Manian, Not Quite Israfel, Issue 5, 1999, Barnard Zines L356n.

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Also Available in the Series

 1. Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes  2. Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans  3. Harvest by Sam Inglis  4. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller  5. Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice  6. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh  7. Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli  8. Electric Ladyland by John Perry  9. Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos 11. The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard 12. Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. Exile on Main Sreet by Bill Janovitz 19. Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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Ramones by Nicholas Rombes Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno Murmur by J. Niimi Grace by Daphne Brooks Endtroducing … by Eliot Wilder Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese Low by Hugo Wilcken Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes Music from Big Pink by John Niven In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy Doolittle by Ben Sisario There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis The Stone Roses by Alex Green In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti Loveless by Mike McGonigal The Who Sell Out by John Dougan Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

A L S O AVA I L A BL E I N T H E SE R I E S

40. Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Use Your Illusion Vols 1 and 2 by Eric Weisbard 42. Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris 58. Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. XO by Matthew LeMay

64. Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. One Step Beyond … by Terry Edwards 67. Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. 69 Love Songs by L. D. Beghtol 70. Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles 73. Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Kid A by Marvin Lin 76. Spiderland by Scott Tennent 77. Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Dummy by R. J. Wheaton 86. Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer 89. I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall

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 90. Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum  91. Entertainment! by Kevin J.H. Dettmar  92. Blank Generation by Pete Astor  93. Donuts by Jordan Ferguson  94. Smile by Luis Sanchez  95. Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven  96. Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold  97. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves  98. The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild  99. ( ) by Ethan Hayden 100. Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Live Through This by Anwen Crawford

104. Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica by David Masciotra 109. A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. Geto Boys by Rolf Potts

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