guitarded

So I've been wanting a baritone guitar for awhile, because I love the sound thanks to Corin Tucker and Ian Mackaye and countless others. I like the possibilities of being an octave lower, of being able to play bassline-like or heavy chords and have the advantages of the higher end too.

And there's someone selling one on Craigslist that looked really nice so I emailed the guy about it and through the course of the correspondence I asked about giving it a try as far as playing goes and he kind of flipped out and said that these were collector's items and if I played it it wouldn't be in mint condition anymore and how if I wanted to "test drive" instruments I'd be better off going somewhere like Guitar Center.

Well, okay then. Last time I checked, the majority of people who own instruments intend to play them, right? I mean, it'd be like buying a car without taking it for a drive to see if it actually runs. I'd want to know that the pickups work, and the neck feels good and the tone is what I want, which is why I don't buy things like this over the Internet. I'm sure that being a female didn't help my case either, because we all know that ladies never play anything except piano, violin, or an acoustic guitar like they're in Lilith Fair.

So I'm a little miffed and also glad that the Red Flag of Douchebaggery has been raised so I know better, and say never mind and omit the "sorry I asked," and got an email back about how he was glad I was being honest about not being a "serious buyer."

Really now. If I wasn't serious, I wouldn't have inquired, right? But yeah, I guess I'm not worthy or not serious, because guitars are meant to be in glass display cases and collected like sports cars and baseball cards instead of played. Who would ever do that? How could I be so dumb?

girls go to mars

Once upon a time, I wanted so badly to be in a band. Via my dental work at Case by a rockabilly-loving resident, I was hooked up with his prof's daughter who played the drums. They lived in a very nice house in Berea with a room off to the side full of amazing guitar gear and a four-track recorder.

We attempted all sorts of sounds and projects, and at that time I didn't know how to sing (ah the wonders of embracing the alto and learning to transpose to different keys since!) and we had a revolving door of acquaintances with which we played, often with varying results, some lasting longer than others because sometimes they really didn't know how to play and just wanted to say they were in a band or they were in bands with other people or whatever.

After the short-lived punk band in which I played bass and we quit before playing a show that wouldn't have happened anyway, there was a brief all-girl project that resulted in a cassette tape with some Bikini Kill covers and our attempt at sounding like a Kim Gordon-fronted Sonic Youth track. For all the feminist rhetoric of my bandmates, that soon also went down in flames as I really don't like Bikini Kill and wanted to play something with more than four chords, and one of the other girls started dating some guy because most of the uber-feminist-I-don't-need-a-man girls usually end up doing. For those of us who prefer the company of the male species but always seem to end up being the platonic homie, this is frustrating in its irony but that's a whole other post.

I have not played these tapes for anyone for obvious reasons. After that, my drummer friend got sick of all this and went off to an Ivy League college and out of all my former bandmates, I'm still in touch with only one, incidentally the one who took the band breakup the hardest.

Ten years later, I'm driving back to Berea and getting utterly lost. I've been itching to play music in a more noise-making capacity for awhile now, so thanks to the strange connections made over fiber optic cables and a shred of musical commonality, I'm plugging my guitar in, tweaking the tone knobs on the amplifier and my distortion pedal as we try to find some common ground between my absurd college radio eclecticism and ultimate corporate rock tendencies that mesh well with the 90's rocking of the rhythm section and I wonder what the singer who's a few years younger than us and got the whole thing started thinks since none of us are really metalheads or at least that's not the style we play or it's not always that kind of metal.

We settle on the Cure and on Joy Division's 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' because it's something everyone knows, and while my fingers are used to strumming from doing church music and bluegrass, I find that all those years of noodling on my dad's Gretsch in the basement haven't been for naught, as my fingers loosen and I have the back of bass and drums and rhythm guitar courtesy of the girl who just arrived.

I'm tremolo-picking on the upper frets and noodling through pentatonics, bending strings and sustaining notes with the whammy bar and letting the tremolo from my ancient amp reverberate like crush with eyeliner. While the others take a break, me and the bassist mess around with songs that we grew up hearing on the radio but turning them into something more feminine and melancholic and find that our voices harmonize well.

I wonder what this may or may not coalesce into, because there are so many dynamics and so many unknowns and so many ways in which tastes converge and also don't. I don't understand the love of Kittie when there are infinitely better and more interesting women making music. I still don't know how one gets through 20+ years in American subcultural life without ever hearing a song by Nirvana or Alice in Chains, or maybe I'm just more irrelevant than I first thought. It's highly possible.

I'm pondering the infinite strands of subculture and taste beneath the all-encompassing tag or rock and or roll. I have the certain sounds I like, and the things I play, and while I can break out of that, it's still where I ultimately come back to. I want to play songs that would move me if it wasn't me.

I love melodic vocals and strange harmonies, glorious layers of distortion, sinuous basslines and insistent drums. I love guitars that shimmer, crunch, and cry. I'm feeling old and past the point of wanting to make it good, and for now, I will play well with others, and see what comes.

All I know is that I still want to be Kristin Hersh when I grow up.

color and sound

A day off spent in Oberlin, walking paths through the woods with my friend and her daughters and as-yet-unborn son, as we catch up and the kids are picking purple flowers and scarlet leaves. Our progress is slow due to the little feet walking alongside us but we crunch the leaves, inhale that certain autumn smell, stop to listen to the symphonic drones of cicadas, frogs, and birdcalls.

I wander around the square a bit before heading over to the art center to pick up my plates and jewelry pieces, which will then be immersed in nail polish remover to get the toner off. I forgot to reverse the image of this Harry Clarke illustration, but the detail on this came out so beautiful that it almost doesn't matter.



Picked up Christine in Shaker and we went up to Coventry to hang out and wait for the Wild Flag show to start. The last three shows I've been to have been metal bands therefore mostly dudes, but this crowd was low-key and energetic in the right way. The encore seemed a bit rushed and when Carrie said that Cleveland's a big city compared to, say, Omaha, we realized that Omaha actually has more people than we do.



It seriously warms my heart watching other women rock out. I'm not sure why. It just does.

low-res from someone else in the audience last night.



higher res from another show:



Drove home with my ears ringing and wondering how I'd function today but caffeine works its wonders and I've got tonight to crash.

so much wrong here.

As a chick and musician, I find the below Craigslist ad totally hilarious due to the misogyny and general rock star egotism especially endemic to the untalented. I'm going to assume here that being a "kick ass hot female" is probably more important than actually knowing how to play, but I could be wrong.

Also, I highly doubt from the band photos that said singer/guitarist looks like Dave Navarro. To just assume that all chicks are into you seems just a bit narcissistic. And "Grunge Lust" just sounds corny. I was really hoping they'd have a Myspace page or something, but no such luck. Still, it is slightly less demanding than the ad a few years back looking for Elton John and Tom Araya combined into one person.


Looking for Sean Yseult (Battery Park/Ohio City)

The name of our band is Gypsy Prince. If you know who Sean Yseult is, then you are on the same page as us. Our music is "Grunge Lust" and needs a kick ass hot female bassist. We're already booking shows, so hurry up. All though the drummer and myself are incredibly beautiful people, it is important to remember we are trying to get something done here, and we can't have you falling in love with us. We already have a sweet bass rig so all that you need is a sexy swagger and the chops to back it up.

I've got lust in my heart
My eyes set wide apart
I'm a Gypsy Prince
From far distances

Son of a far land
Traveling
With the wind at my back
Into the west
Into the sunset
Pulled by invisible forces
You wake up
I'm gone with
Your wallet
Your jewelry
and your heart

* Location: Battery Park/Ohio City
* it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

As a side note Sean Yseult is doing graphic design and general awesome arty things now. Go her.

four strings

As a perpetual wallflower and shy person, it felt good on Sunday morning to not be in front of a microphone thrashing away with an electric guitar like Billy Bragg's born again niece, but to hang out in the back with a very gifted drummer with a love of similar tunes and with the mingling of good voices harmonizing together, I could hold down the low end, letting the calluses harden again on my right hand as my left worked its way up and down the fretboard. I could sing and not be heard

I once resented being relegated to "chick bass player" status playing in terrible teenage bands, but now that I'm not there anymore, it feels good to be there, because I love working root notes into runs, providing something between rhythm and melody. By the end of the second set of songs, his drumsticks were disintegrating, I had to transpose for an unexpected capo, but we finished sweaty and euphoric, because the sensual and the spiritual aren't always so far removed from each other, and there is an incredible feeling when instruments and voice come together in ways that are hard to understand.

To begin the day with that, and driving through the beautiful grey to feast with the Ethiopians resplendent in embroidered white, to hang out with the family before heading back through empty streets to the almost-hood, wondering what kind of drama went down a couple blocks south with all the cop cars, wondering when the seeds I planted will start to come up and what else I have room for, especially if the new tenant downstairs is the lady with three dogs that looked at the place this weekend...

Meanwhile, in more pointlessness, the Rock Hall is doing some lame exhibit highlighting the tired trope of "women in rock" which will naturally feature Lilith Fair acoustic chicks, and boomer approved canonites, and Rolling Stone cover girls.

As a musician with ovaries who digs power chords and loudness, I have to remember that this is the Rock Hall and therefore nothing better is to be expected, but damn I'm sick of hearing about Carole King and Yoko Ono and Kathleen Hanna and pop stars known more for their trainwreck lives, cover girl looks, and wacky outfits (Hello Britney, Gaga) than for producing quality music.

None of this was inspiring to me when I started playing music, as I was neither a burgeoning lesbian or much to look at and until I delved into the underground, my role models were all dudes because I liked their songs better because it wasn't until later that I found out that there were talented females who got by on talent rather than image, that there were even chick bassists that were an integral part of the sound rather than just eye candy. Kim Coletta, four string fiend and fellow worker in the field of knowledge, you rock my world.

in which I get ridiculous over music again.

... But there's a new Throwing Muses record coming out, which makes this Millenial-Wishing-I-was-Xer very very happy.

Dear Kristin Hersh,
Please please please come to Cleveland! I love your acoustic stuff too and your book you just wrote, and that solo show you did with the cellist was awesome, but I want to see you rock out. Besides I play your music on my show all the time and this will give me a good excuse to play more. I hope I'm as awesome as you when I get old.

Thanks!

That (Fan) Girl

To explain this embarrassingly gushiness on my part, listen below...

one of my top 10 favorite songs of all time. Michael Stipe can be forgiven for Shiny Happy People because of this song alone. The cello, the way their voices go together... it still moves me every time i hear it.



I got into Throwing Muses because Thom Yorke said they were a big influence on him and this CD was at the library I shelved books at as a teen.



And then the most recent project between solo records which always reminds me of if Kurt Cobain had ovaries and decided to make an even more corrosive record than In Utero, have a bunch of kids instead of get addicted to heroin and kill himself. How much do I love absurd amounts of heavy distortion, power chords, and general fury? So, so much.