Episode 1577 - Kathleen Hanna
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what's happening i'm mark maron this is my podcast welcome to it today i'm talking to uh kathleen hannah
Marc:I was nervous, man.
Marc:I was nervous.
Marc:She's the lead singer of the band Bikini Kill and a pioneer of the riot girl feminist punk movement.
Marc:And look, I always knew who she was.
Marc:But for some reason, there's a huge chunk of my life in relation to music and art that I sort of I sort of missed because I was doing comedy every night.
Marc:There's TV shows.
Marc:There's music.
Marc:There's live music.
Marc:There's all this stuff starting from like eighty nine.
Marc:You know, through the mid 90s, really, even more where I was just in comedy clubs every night.
Marc:That was my whole fucking life.
Marc:You know, I'd listen to CDs or whatever.
Marc:But I always knew about Kathleen.
Marc:I always knew about Bikini Kill, but I don't know that I'd really ever really processed it or taken it in or listened to it.
Marc:And I always found her a bit intimidating just as a being.
Marc:I decided that.
Marc:that she was intimidating.
Marc:The weird thing is, is like I read her book.
Marc:I read the whole book, Rebel Girl, and it's a great book.
Marc:It's because not unlike any good, like even like Moon Zappa's memoir is that it's of a time.
Marc:You know, Moon Zappa is of a time, but it's also about the Zappa family.
Marc:Rebel Girl is of a time, you know, in the 80s and in the 90s, you know, in terms of where she started out, you know, in Olympia and then, you know, moving, you know,
Marc:To the East Coast and just the punk rock life and how it connected to the art of the time and also the feminism of the time.
Marc:There was just this point of connection that sometimes I forget about in terms of the way I grew up and what I was thinking about and reading about, you know, about art and about impact and about, you know, ideological passion.
Marc:Which, you know, I obviously I'm not a woman and I was not a feminist activist.
Marc:But the intellectual sort of foundation of feminism in the 80s, it's just an odd kind of coincidence, I guess, for me in that, like, look, when I went to high school and.
Marc:I was pretty dead set on the idea that I was going to be an artist.
Marc:And I was pretty sure it was going to be photography.
Marc:And I was kind of consumed with art.
Marc:And I worked in a bagel shop, a bagel restaurant by the university.
Marc:I was constantly talking to artists.
Marc:I was going to art shows.
Marc:I was involved with sort of going to see performance art.
Marc:I was not like the regular kind of townie high school kid.
Marc:You know, that was half of me.
Marc:And the other half was sort of engaged with this
Marc:art scene that was happening in Albuquerque, New Mexico during that time, the late seventies.
Marc:And I was doing work.
Marc:I thought very important work in the dark room at Highland high school, which had just been rebuilt.
Marc:It was like one of the greatest facilities ever, uh, you know, built certainly in a high school, uh, Jeanette Williams, who was the, the teacher and photography, uh, uh,
Marc:teacher over at Highland, who was also a great photographer in her own right, had really gotten together.
Marc:I assume she pulled the money together to make this sort of, you know, high level darkroom, like with real fucking like high level.
Marc:I was in it.
Marc:And I was also in a graphics class, you know, just to learn offset printing and stuff.
Marc:So I had access to an offset camera and I would I would make photo.
Marc:I would make collages and make giant negatives on the offset camera and then print them in the dark room for some groovy kind of punk rocky looking stuff.
Marc:You know, I was looking at the art of of some of the the bigger photographers at the time.
Marc:Some of them, I can't, I remember Cindy Sherman.
Marc:I remember, you know, Joel Peter Witkin, of course, but I was sort of immersed in this idea when I was in my teens that I was going to be an artist.
Marc:And then when I got to college, it was sort of like, oh man, there's so much math and photography and apertures and, you know, different papers, different films, different chemical washes.
Marc:It was just too much.
Marc:It was too much.
Marc:So then I think I decided I was going to be a poet and there was a lot of things going on.
Marc:A lot of things going on.
Marc:But I was always engaged with the art world to some degree because my mother was a painter and she was going to do her master's at the University of New Mexico when I was in college.
Marc:She would always, when I was growing up, we'd fly back to New York to see the retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art.
Marc:It was important.
Marc:It was important.
Marc:There was this idea that art could change things.
Marc:And and that art was important and that you could make statements with art.
Marc:And then I thought that on some level, comedy would sort of accommodate that, that I would be able to do that, you know, with comedy.
Marc:But there's some of the foundations of some of the stuff that Kathleen was, you know, living in.
Marc:I mean, she was doing photography.
Marc:She was doing some performance.
Marc:She was writing, you know, lyrics that later became songs.
Marc:But she was like going to be a photographer.
Marc:And then, you know, once, you know, she decided on becoming a feminist, I guess you would call activist, but primarily an ideological feminist activist.
Marc:Punk rock singer with the agenda of of elevating women and feminism.
Marc:And there were just some of the things it was just this weird coincidence that when you read a book that somebody writes about themselves, you know, you get to know them.
Marc:And there was just this point of connection.
Marc:When I was reading her stuff, because I'm a little older than her, but not that much.
Marc:And I was in New York in like 89.
Marc:And, you know, she was, I guess, probably back in Washington.
Marc:But there are just these points of connection.
Marc:For some reason in 89, when I was in New York and I was living on the Lower East Side.
Marc:I just got very involved with like it wasn't zine culture, but there was stuff around.
Marc:The Village Voice was still around.
Marc:There was this magazine called World War Three Illustrated, which was sort of, you know, a kind of revolutionary publication in a way.
Marc:It was on print paper and it was I don't remember if it was monthly or what, but there were certain graphic pieces in there and certain essays in there.
Marc:It just changed the way I thought.
Marc:And for some reason in the late 80s, I was going to St.
Marc:Mark's Bookstore.
Marc:And then I was kind of trying just to fill my brain up with, you know, I had Adam Parfrey's edited edition of the first version of Apocalypse Culture.
Marc:You know, I was looking at underground comics.
Marc:I was doing all this stuff to kind of feed my brain.
Marc:And at some point, I got hip to research laboratories out of San Francisco and their books.
Marc:And they put together a book called Angry Women.
Marc:And it was just these profiles of these women artists, Kathy Acker, Susie Bright, Wanda Coleman, Karen Finley was in there.
Marc:Lydia Lunch was in there.
Marc:Annie Sprinkle, Avatel, Ronnell, these thinkers and artists and performers that I didn't know anything about.
Marc:And for some reason, I got immersed in...
Marc:a lot of these women who were doing this radical art because it seems so much more fucking interesting because it had a point of view that was focused, specifically feminism, but also just sort of like mind-blowing art and just women's voices in general in art.
Marc:I just didn't... It wasn't on my radar as much until I started to really kind of look at it.
Marc:Cindy Sherman was important, Jenny Holzer...
Marc:Like, I remember after I read research, after I got the Angry Women book, I got Kathy Acker's book, Blood and Guts in High School.
Marc:And it was, like, mind-blowing.
Marc:I was like, what is this fucking thing?
Marc:What is this voice?
Marc:What are these pictures?
Marc:What is this?
Marc:And, like, you know, I'm wary to say I was, like, some sort of, like, you know, I wanted to be a feminist man at that time.
Marc:I was just so fucking blown away by the art of women in general.
Marc:I mean, two of my, you know, fairly serious girlfriends were artists.
Marc:Three.
Three.
Marc:Before.
Marc:I mean, when I was in college, when I met Lauren, she was a welder.
Marc:She had big black mohawk, had that sculpture in her house that she had welded, this emaciated metal female figure with just like nails in the vagina.
Marc:I remember the first time I went to her house, I saw that.
Marc:And then she changed my life, changed the way I thought.
Marc:But I've always been...
Marc:Sort of like engaged or or in awe of, you know, angry, creative women of any kind because they have a point of view that is not mine.
Marc:It's specific.
Marc:It's focused and it's it's fucking raw.
Marc:And it was happening in the 80s and there was just this point of connection.
Marc:And I don't know, you know, by the time I finished a book, I was nervous, but I felt like I knew her a little bit.
Marc:And there was a little baggage there that was I don't know if it was real baggage in the sense of, you know, I thought that, you know, she didn't like me.
Marc:And, you know, that, you know, Adam, she's married to Adam Horowitz.
Marc:You know, I had rock from the Beastie Boys and I had a little issue with him when he talked to me.
Marc:I felt like he was just sort of like, you know, like, you know, who is this guy?
Marc:What difference?
Marc:I mean, he wanted me to wrap up the interview.
Marc:I did.
Marc:I just decided that they were too cool for me and I was some sort of fucking dork.
Marc:some guy who didn't matter.
Marc:But I guess that's my problem, isn't it?
Marc:Hey, folks, if you're in LA next week, Thursday, October 3rd, I'll be at Largo.
Marc:All my tour dates that we rescheduled and all the new ones are for next year.
Marc:You can go to wtfpod.com slash tour.
Marc:You can see all of them.
Marc:So, okay.
Marc:Anyway, heading into this
Marc:talk with uh kathleen hannah the thing was is like i always knew bikini kill was but i don't know if i really sat down and listened and over the last few months in reading the book you know i listened to all that was available and it was just like it i don't know if it brought me back or brought me to a presence but i was like holy fuck this woman is one of the most important
Marc:rock people ever like it was so raw and so good and so fucking earnest and fucking hard and just punk as fuck and i'm listening to i'm 60 and i'm like yeah
Marc:I guess I had the experience that most people who love her and her work had when they were in their 20s, however long ago.
Marc:But I look, I miss so much because of my commitment to my particular art.
Marc:And I don't I often say and I believe it's true, even though I was born with FOMO.
Marc:born with it, that there is no way to the party and that some things stand the test of time and some things represent another time and some things, you know, in their brilliance, you can sort of see how they impacted things after them.
Marc:And I think that Kathleen's work is that.
Marc:And I don't know.
Marc:I was, you know, I was a little a little intimidated.
Marc:But the book, which is excellent, Rebel Girl, My Life is a Feminist Punk, is available wherever you get books.
Marc:And this is me talking to Kathleen Hanna for the first time.
Marc:So, OK, so let's let's just clear the air.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Somehow.
Marc:No, because I know that you were talking to Kim and that you felt like, you know, something got screwed up.
Marc:That I insulted you?
Marc:Well, you know, it was like, I just, well, I think I should, I think I should explain it.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:So I interviewed Adam at some point and it was, it was okay.
Marc:My experience with him on the show with him and Mike.
Marc:But at some point, I get nervous and I want to know what I'm talking about.
Guest:Totally understand.
Guest:I do interviews all the time and have an interview hangover afterwards.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I guess I was overly ambitious with them in terms of wanting more information.
Marc:And it just kept going on because Mike will talk, right?
Marc:No comment.
Yeah.
Marc:And at some point, you know, like, you know, Adam and I know I'm talking about your dude, but, you know, like it's he has a certain disposition he has in public conversations.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And at some point he goes like this, you know, at some he looks at me and he does this.
Marc:He goes.
Marc:Like, let's wrap it up.
Marc:Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:And so I was, it hurt my feelings more than anything else.
Marc:I wasn't mad.
Marc:You know, like, so then what happens is, is so I get invited to this thing at you guys' house.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:It was like a benefit for Peace Sisters, which is the organization I'm the ambassador for.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So in my mind, this isn't just me.
Marc:So I'm like, oh, well, maybe we are okay.
Marc:They invited me to their house.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But I was just on a list.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You're just on a list.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So I go there.
Guest:I didn't know.
Guest:I didn't know who you are.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So I go there thinking like, well, this is cool.
Marc:They know who I am.
Marc:Everything's cool.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then I see Adam.
Marc:He's like, yeah, whatever.
Marc:And I'm like, all right.
Marc:So what's that about?
Marc:And then I see you and you don't even acknowledge me.
Marc:And I just it was really just basically it was it come down to me being like, well, maybe I'm not really cool.
Marc:It was really like that.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:You want to hear my side of the story?
Marc:Okay.
Guest:It's actually worse.
Guest:Way worse.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:First of all, you shouldn't be insulted at all because Adam was stoned as fuck out of his mind.
Guest:That night?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And as you remember, John C. Reilly was there wearing a full-on country western outfit with sparkles and hats and everything.
Guest:There's a lot going on.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I love comedy and I go to see a lot of comedy.
Guest:And when I moved to New York, I was like, I'm gonna not be a punk anymore.
Guest:I'm gonna just go to comedy.
Guest:And then I went and it was like all these dudes doing like domestic violence jokes.
Guest:And I was like, this, I can't deal with this.
Guest:So I moved out to LA finally, 15, 20 years later.
Guest:And I start getting involved in like, but I go mainly to see non-binary, feminist, people of color, you know, like I don't see straight white guy comedy ever.
Guest:I just don't.
Guest:I just don't seek it out.
Guest:So I was talking to whoever, someone who was with you or next to you.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And I was like, they were like, oh, what are you doing since you just moved to Pasadena?
Guest:And I was like, oh, the comedy scene here is so awesome.
Guest:I'm like such a comedy head.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then you gave this face like...
Marc:And I was like, I just wanted you to know me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then you kind of like, I think I think you kind of like walked away.
Guest:And then I was like, I was like, what's up with that guy?
Guest:And she goes, that's Mark Maron.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Am I saying your name right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:That's Mark Maron.
Guest:He's a really famous comedian.
Guest:And I was like, oh, shit.
Guest:But I also was like, well, he'll understand.
Guest:Cause he's like, I just don't go see Matt.
Guest:Like I just am not that interested in most white male dude comedians.
Guest:Cause I've actually seen some of your stuff and really, really like it since then.
Guest:But I was like,
Guest:I felt like I was kind of the asshole, but it was also kind of funny because I was like, oh, for once the straight white, because like usually I'm standing next to my husband at some event and they're like, oh, yo, Ad Rock, I love you.
Guest:And then they're like, hey, could you go get me a drink to me?
Guest:Which I actually enjoy because it's kind of nice not being the center of attention and floating into the background.
Guest:But so I felt like I had insulted you.
Guest:So I'm glad that you just felt uncool.
Guest:And I'm sorry you felt uncool, but maybe that's a good feeling to have every single day.
Marc:Oh, right.
Marc:It was insulting to a degree, but it was also leveling.
Marc:And I had gone down there...
Marc:And I was mad, but I didn't really put it all together until I realized, like, oh, they didn't know who was there.
Marc:I mean, it wasn't like, I don't even know how I got there.
Marc:I went with a woman who I was seeing at the time who was a painter, and she knew more people than I did.
Guest:Yeah, she was awesome.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it was one of those things where it's like, oh, it's like art people and nobody.
Guest:I mean, there were, like, a lot of people from my coworkers' church.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Guest:You know?
Guest:So it was kind of all over the place.
Marc:And what was the organization?
Marc:Because I remember there were cool T-shirts and stuff and art shirts.
Guest:It's called Peacesisters.org.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And that's the group.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the money goes to sending women in Togo, West Africa through school to get ID cards.
Guest:They get health insurance, computers.
Guest:Right.
Right.
Guest:All this stuff.
Guest:And it's run by a woman who was an educator in Togo.
Guest:And she has since moved to the States and become a nurse.
Guest:And yeah.
Marc:There was like a film there at the, at the, that night.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Cause I remember being educated on it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It was sort of one of those things where we were trying to like, just let people know, Hey, we're doing this thing.
Guest:I sold t-shirts.
Guest:I made like $12,000 that night.
Marc:And you did the, you did the shirts.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I still do them.
Guest:It's been like, I think six years or something.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I still do that.
Guest:But can I just say something aside?
Yeah.
Guest:I watched GLOW just recently, because I'm like, I always get to everything cool, like, really late.
Guest:Amazing.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:Literally, I was like, first I was like, I love the casting director, and I love Mark.
Guest:Like, I was like, I couldn't, there was a certain, like, Rockford thing that you were doing that was like, I love Rockford, like, I'm a big Rockford head.
Guest:And I was just like, nobody else could be cast in this role.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you kept me watching it.
Guest:So thank you.
Guest:You were really fantastic.
Guest:And I hope it was a good experience for you.
Guest:I have no idea if it was or wasn't.
Marc:But of course it was.
Guest:Really enjoyed it.
Marc:It was it was it was kind of a new experience to be working around that many women every day.
Marc:And it's funny because people who are around our age are a little younger than me.
Marc:But that dude is familiar somehow.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:You know, like everyone, their dad or somebody was around that was like that guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And somehow he, Sam, in the show...
Marc:you know, had the potential for being toxic, but he really wasn't because he was self-involved and he was not neurotic and, you know, he was really kind of selfish more than creepy.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So it worked out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I thought it was very three-dimensional read on the character.
Marc:And you came up like, you know, we grew up like, I mean, when I read the book and I don't want to lead too much stuff because the problem when I read books is then I know too many things.
Yeah.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:Like, I don't like, it's better if I just find them and, you know, but now I know things.
Marc:I did it with Kim Gordon too, because I didn't know if she really talked much and she doesn't.
Marc:So it was good that I read her book, but you're your talker.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But there were moments in it, because I was trying to think today how to go about it.
Marc:And I think that in the same way that I grew up with parents who were emotionally manipulative, negligent, selfish, and yours was a little more dramatic and horrible.
Marc:But there is a part of growing up in a household like that where you spend your life kind of looking for parents.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And in that, like, what I think the book is about in a lot of ways is you're sort of evolving a sense of self from people that you meet that you aspire to.
Marc:And in that whole arc...
Marc:Is it's it's it's kind of an amazing time that you it was fortuitous or that that where art was and where feminism was and where music was at the time and your proximity to it and the people you were meeting.
Marc:I mean, they they kind of gave you an opportunity to fully become yourself.
Guest:Yeah, and to find a family.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I think that's one of the things... Or a number of them.
Guest:Because part of the arcs that people haven't really noticed in the book is exactly that, is that, like, you know, everybody comes from a fucking dysfunctional... Are we allowed to cuss?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Everybody comes from a fucking dysfunctional family.
Guest:And...
Guest:With my particular dysfunction, I just felt like, ugh, I gotta, you know, once I got out of there, I started having memories and being like, who am I?
Guest:And like, just needed to really, really pull away and start my own life.
Guest:And then I was really desperate for family, which came in the form of punk rock community, feminist community, various overlapping communities.
Guest:And
Guest:Then when those things let me down, like when punk rock let me down by being so sexist and so racist and so homophobic, I could go on and on.
Guest:You know, I felt like I was like, had been like a lamb to God and I was being slaughtered.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:It was so much heavier, I think, than if I would have come from a background where I felt, you know, not super insecure and I liked myself and, you know, I had better self-esteem.
Guest:I think I would have been able to leave a lot of the toxicity behind.
Guest:But in a way, there's a good thing because I wanted it so bad that when it didn't meet my expectations, I sought out to change it.
Guest:Because I was like, I'm not leaving this family.
Guest:I'm going to fix it.
Guest:I couldn't fix my own family.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But can I bring feminism into punk rock?
Guest:And many, many other people had already done that.
Marc:Right.
Guest:But it was like, could I bring it into my specific, you know, niche scene?
Marc:Well, they...
Marc:They did it to a degree and just sort of plowing through and being rock people and punk people.
Marc:But it seems like you educated yourself in a much deeper way around the sort of intellectual and conceptual ideas of feminism that some people just played music.
Marc:But you had an agenda early on that was informed by the people you were around.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I definitely had an agenda.
Guest:That's for sure.
Marc:Let me ask you, though, in writing the book and like in seeing yourself in these situations or looking for a family.
Marc:I mean, when you're in it, are you really thinking that?
Marc:No.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You're just sort of like, you know, fuck, I'm uncomfortable and angry.
Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I actually didn't even, you know, because of sort of the dysfunction, I grew up in an uncomfortable, angry situation.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So to me, that was like normal.
Guest:So when I went on tour back then and a guy was like, I'm not plugging in your monitor unless you tell me if you're married or single.
Yeah.
Guest:I would feel, feel grossed out and mad kind of, but I would also just take it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Cause I was like kind of used to that behavior.
Guest:I was used to being like, you're not really even a person.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it was like a lot of the stuff I did, I did sometimes speak back to it, but it happens so often that it was just sort of like cumulative and a lot of it, the really heavy stuff.
Guest:I didn't tell people for years and years and years.
Guest:Cause I was just like, it wasn't like, it's my fault.
Guest:It's like,
Guest:I just was like, you move on to the next thing.
Guest:That's how I grew up.
Guest:And I shut off my intuition as a kid.
Marc:Like suck it up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There was the suck it up.
Guest:The show must go on.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Kind of Liza Minnelli thing in me.
Guest:And then there was the, I turned off my intuition when I was four.
Guest:And.
Marc:Why?
Guest:Because to live in my house, I couldn't really be fully myself or alive.
Marc:Well, what was going on?
Marc:Like, exactly.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:Well, it was just like, you know, my dad would get drunk and he would be abusive.
Guest:More like psychologically and emotionally, like really kind of psychotic.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Abusive.
Guest:He was sexually super inappropriate, like said really horrible things.
Guest:Like asking me if I had an orgasm when I was like 15 or 16.
Guest:I'm in a hotel room alone with him.
Guest:And I'm like, I put that part in the book.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because it was kind of just a good example.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Of one of the times where I was like, oh, my God.
Guest:I was like, no, you know, I don't want to talk about this.
Guest:And it's like, no, I want to talk.
Guest:And it's like clearly so he can get his jollies.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Which is a word you might be.
Guest:Remember that?
Guest:Remember when we used to say get your jollies?
Guest:Like I feel like people don't say it anymore.
Marc:Well, you said that you said something about the nature of because my parents were like naked too much and like inappropriate in ways that I look back at in that.
Marc:When you first started to come into understanding abuse and what an incestuous home looks like, how did that define itself for you?
Marc:Like, I mean, how did you look at your childhood like that?
Guest:I just looked at it like I was on a continuum.
Guest:Like, my dad didn't rate me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But my dad did not look at us, me and my sister, in a way that was appropriate.
Guest:And he asked us questions.
Guest:Like a parent.
Guest:Like a parent.
Guest:And continuing into adulthood would say...
Guest:really intricate sexual things to us, like about what he was doing with a girlfriend or like whatever.
Guest:And it was like, to the point of like, we kept, you know, I would go to a therapist and therapist would say, tell your dad on the next phone call.
Guest:He can, you don't want to talk about it.
Guest:And I was like, I've already done that.
Guest:And he would just keep talking over me, say, you know, strawberries and champagne.
Guest:Like, cause I mean, he's also like a sleepless in Seattle kind of loser where it's like, that's his idea of like something like really wild.
Guest:But yeah, it was,
Guest:You know, so you sort of shut down.
Marc:Is he still around?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You talk to him?
Guest:No.
Guest:Hell no.
Guest:Fuck him.
Marc:How long have you not dealt with him?
Guest:Like 20-something years.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But your mom, you're close with her?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She lives like five blocks away from me.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And you've got a kid, right?
Guest:Yes.
Marc:So you've got her there and that works out?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I mean, the two of them are like...
Guest:completely they're obsessed with the library they're like at the library all the time and it's like trying to get library cards at every library and they're like kind of like um they're kind of like baseball wives for library really into libraries but when you started to like it felt like to me when that the time that you were coming up
Marc:But creatively, outside of the first time you sang, which you were very young, but you felt it.
Marc:You felt like that was the place where you felt like you could really do it, right?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I still do.
Guest:I was just singing along to Lana Del Rey in the car, and I was like, ooh, I don't have to go to my head voice to hit that note.
Guest:And I was really psyched because I'm just coming off tour, so I'm still fresh.
Guest:And I was like...
Guest:Oh, I really want to try to do a song.
Guest:I just get really excited about singing.
Guest:And now that I'm older, I also am less afraid of my voice.
Guest:I'm more like...
Guest:I can get enjoyment out of it in a way that is less like outside of myself staring at it going, that's wrong.
Guest:You did that wrong.
Guest:Live, I still have that voice, but it's always replaced.
Guest:I can replace it.
Guest:I can ride the show like a wave.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's so fucked up when you have these kind of parents that don't provide you the space to become yourself and be supportive of it that...
Marc:You know, that voice inside that's like, you suck.
Marc:It's just, you have to be vigilant about it for your whole fucking life.
Guest:Yeah, and then there's the internet that if you ever read it, which you can't.
Guest:I know, you can't.
Guest:But I'm just saying, if you ever do every bad thing you've ever thought about yourself in your head, someone will have written it in...
Guest:a better, funnier, crazier way than you ever could.
Marc:When they can't, when they like, they're so good at the trolls at zeroing in on your vulnerabilities and it just becomes this fucking nightmare.
Guest:But I started to, I was like, what if we are living in a simulation and like the internet is just like parts of our brains talking back to ourselves?
Marc:How's that help?
Guest:It doesn't.
Guest:It's just like something that I was thinking of.
Marc:I like I tell this to people that have similar experiences than me.
Marc:Like I had this I like because when you have these insecurities that will you're constantly fighting the fight to not fuck yourself.
Guest:Yeah, to get out of your own way.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Because that other thing is going to do it and you're not even going to know it's doing it until after.
Marc:And then you have to sort of take responsibility for it.
Marc:But also if the other voice is more stronger, you're like, well, yeah, but fuck them.
Marc:So like you can't.
Guest:I had a therapist a long time ago who was talking about inner child stuff, which isn't really my bag.
Guest:But I spent the whole session trying to convince her that we needed to lock my inner child in the trunk of a car.
Guest:And then I was like, well, I'll put a brick like in the movies onto the thing so I won't be in the car.
Guest:She'll just be in the car and then she'll like explode and then I'll watch her explode and then I'll feel better.
Guest:And she's like, no, no, no.
Guest:you're supposed to like hug her and talk to her and i was like i was like fuck her i don't like first of all i don't want her like driving the bus of my life anymore so can't we just throw her off the cliff right but it's a constant conversation i think it kind of goes along with something i learned while writing the book rebel girl out now on yeah uh available everywhere you get books and did you do the audiobook yep i did oh that's good
Guest:Did it all myself.
Guest:There's this thing that I learned while I was writing it when I was dealing with like sexual abuse type stuff and whatnot, where I was like, okay, I have held on to responsibility for some of these things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it wasn't blame.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Like the whole thing of like, it's not your fault.
Guest:It's not your fault.
Guest:It's not your fault.
Guest:It's like, it doesn't matter how many times I counseled other girls and women, people in general, about sexual abuse.
Guest:I used to be a counselor at a sexual abuse rape crisis center.
Guest:So I know a little bit about things to say when people come to me with that stuff.
Guest:And so I'd done quite a bit of it in my career as a musician.
Guest:And no matter how many times I said it to other people, no matter how many times I said it to myself, I still had this enormous...
Guest:connection to the abuse I'd suffered as if I raped myself with my own dick.
Guest:Or punched myself in the face with my own fist even though somebody else punched me in the face.
Guest:But I realized it wasn't that I felt like I was...
Guest:There was other things that made me feel like I was a deep down dirty napkin to wipe the floor, but it was my only way to have agency in this situation.
Guest:And I had to kind of like, God, I sound so corny, but like honor and respect that.
Marc:To own it yourself, you mean.
Guest:Yeah, to be like...
Guest:It wasn't like I'm blaming myself because I'm like, why did you put yourself in that situation?
Guest:It was like, I can control that not happening again if I look for these red flags.
Guest:And there's a certain part of that that's true.
Guest:And then there's a certain part of it that, you know, the world is a messed up place and messed up things happen.
Guest:And you have no control over it.
Guest:To me, that you have no control over it was terrifying.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And through the book and like reading about my own life kind of, you know, when you go to the editing stage and you have to put your editor's hat on and it's like you're reading about a character and not yourself anymore.
Guest:I was like, whoa, like just a bunch of weird stuff happened that you had no control over.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:And it's like and you can't control the world.
Guest:And there's a certain thing that's just like the universe doing this weird stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it really kind of helped me let go of that and be like, hey, you know what?
Guest:Like staying tied to this stuff isn't actually giving you any agency.
Guest:It's like holding you back.
Guest:So like time to let it go.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It's a way to beat the shit out of yourself.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Ongoing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I basically just like TMI to everybody in the world so that now it's their problem.
Marc:Well, it was an interesting experience to read the book because there was a couple of things that the one thing that sticks in my mind throughout the book was like, God, I hope she gets a really good apartment soon.
Guest:I felt the same way.
Guest:I felt the same way.
Guest:And I was like, I want to put more joy towards the beginning.
Guest:And I was like, well, you just got to write what's real.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:It's just like a series of like, they need a better car.
Marc:And well, that apartment doesn't sound good at all, but she's making the best of it.
Guest:I know, but I really didn't want to come off like Ziggy, you know, under the dark cloud.
Marc:No, no, it didn't come off that way.
Marc:It was the life you signed up for.
Marc:There was no other way to live that life.
Marc:But it just felt like it went on pretty long.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:To last year.
Guest:until I heard the book catch my advance it was just sort of like wow is she just sleeping on fours because she thinks she deserves it I mean no we were broke that's actually been one of the things that really surprised me because I didn't even think about that like that a lot of people were like oh I thought you were super famous and you know you like had a house and all this stuff and it's like
Guest:No, I did not have any of that.
Guest:Really, the only time I got access to money was when I got together with my current husband, who is fucking rich and a rock star.
Marc:Yeah, after you met him, there was a point where I was like, come on, just get her a better place.
Marc:Chip in a little bit somewhere.
Guest:But he's also the kind of person who, when I met him, was living in a one-bedroom apartment.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And just is like...
Marc:Oh, they hadn't blown up yet?
Guest:No, they had, but he's just like, yeah, he's like a civilian.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, he's an interesting guy.
Marc:And he's got so many records, doesn't he?
Guest:Yeah, those are at his studio, which I made him buy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But like...
Marc:Let's talk about the beginning, because I felt like sort of I was interested in things around the same time you were like in terms of art, because although you sang when you were a kid and that you knew you wanted to do that, there was this other world of art going on that was influenced by very specific women artists like Jenny Holzer.
Guest:Barbara Kruger.
Marc:Yeah, all them.
Marc:And that, you know, they kind of informed a punk sensibility before it happened.
Marc:And you seem to be at the beginning of that.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I was like, but I was living in a small town very far away from New York.
Marc:In Olympia.
Guest:In Olympia.
Guest:And so I was like, it's the capital of Washington State.
Guest:But it's also, it functions as a small town.
Guest:And one of the great things about it is that it's always had a functioning downtown.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Which most places don't have anymore.
Guest:They have malls and then they have like a desolate boarded up town.
Marc:And this is like the mid-80s?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like I graduated from high school in 86, so I moved there when I was 17.
Marc:So it wasn't quite completely gone in a lot of places, but they were going.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And it was just like different from, you know, living in the suburbs where you're so far away or living in Portland, Oregon, which actually had a really lovely downtown as well, but it didn't have the kind of...
Guest:because it wasn't a small town, it didn't have the, oh, you know everybody who works at the coffee shop.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Oh, there's long-haired Dave.
Guest:He does books for prisoners.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, like, he keeps asking me if I'll do a benefit.
Guest:Like, there are all these, like, local characters that you see every day.
Guest:I mean, and...
Guest:yeah and it can drive you bananas because like when you're in a band the second you go out of your house someone's like oh how's your band doing it's like you're in a fight like you know or like no one wants to practice and you're totally frustrated about it you're like oh right or if you're dating someone people like how's you know timmy or whoever fucking timmy sucks like timmy's like yeah you know you don't want to talk about it so you sort of just like you know put a baseball hat on and like
Guest:Or like, I haven't had my coffee yet.
Guest:Because back then we walked to get coffee.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It was like this weird thing.
Guest:Like, the idea of having a coffee maker was so wild.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, you wouldn't have a coffee maker.
Guest:Like, what am I?
Guest:Joe DiMaggio?
Guest:I don't have a coffee maker.
Guest:Like, you know, you had to walk in the morning to get your coffee.
Guest:And then when Bikini Kill went on tour in England for the first time,
Guest:We had our label guy, Slim Moon and Tenuvial Sampson ran Kill Rockstars.
Guest:And Slim came with us to England with a suitcase full of Starbucks coffee because they didn't have Starbucks in England.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that was before Starbucks was a monster.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Starbucks had just started and they sold beans.
Guest:Our local coffee places didn't sell beans.
Guest:So we had to get them from Starbucks.
Marc:But because of that type of community, when ideas or art sort of entered it from New York or from wherever, from a book or from somebody coming in, and that was before you were in college, right?
Guest:I was in college.
Guest:I started when I was 17.
Marc:In Evergreen?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So like, so these ideas would come and it wasn't, like in New York, I think you get a little jaded.
Marc:But when you're out in the world, it's the same with zine culture, with punk rock in general, is that there is a sense of discovery, even though it's already been discovered.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:And you just take the template or the process and you make it your own and you learn the language.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was so exciting because, you know, we could envision a protest and then get a bunch of people together and be like, OK, we're all going to put PAs, you know, on the roofs of our building.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And this is what we're going to play or like I got a you know, I was learning about, you know, what ACT UP was doing and Queer Nation.
Guest:And so I got an old slide projector at a thrift store and I put it in my window and I lived across from a building that just had a great big, huge white space.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I started projecting slides about the AIDS crisis on the wall every night.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The police could do nothing about it because I wasn't graffitiing.
Guest:I wasn't vandalizing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I learned it from, you know, I learned it from you, Mark.
Guest:No, I learned it from a magazine, I think, called High Performance, which is a performance art magazine from New York.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They had it at our library, but it was always like three months behind.
Guest:So I would like go to the library and like wait for it like that.
Guest:I would read about Karen Finley.
Guest:I saw Karen Finley.
Guest:I was just really into, you know, what was happening mainly in New York.
Marc:And you were doing a lot of visual arts.
Guest:Yeah, I did photography mainly just because it was like the one cool teacher I had was a photography teacher.
Marc:Right.
Marc:One of those people that just makes it happen.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Like when I was in high school, they had an offset press and a silkscreen thing.
Marc:And you have that moment where you're like, I can just do this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And everything else is like stupid.
Marc:Right.
Guest:You're like, I don't want to fucking, I don't want to remember the Canterbury Tales.
Guest:I just want to like be in the dark room, like taking pictures of bands and, you know.
Guest:What was that machine that you were in love with?
Guest:Not the stop machine.
Marc:The flatbed?
Guest:The flatbed.
Guest:It was a flatbed printer that printed on fabrics.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That was a life changer?
Yeah.
Guest:That, and then a soundboard, like the soundboard that we had in the basement.
Guest:It was actually right by where I worked.
Guest:But, okay, so there's this guy, his name was Hollywood.
Guest:He was a bank robber.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there's a documentary out about him, and he lived in this treehouse in Olympia.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he's a little bit older than me, and I didn't know him, though I saw some of his friends at this coffee shop that I went to, because I just watched the documentary.
Guest:I was like, oh, I recognize her.
Yeah.
Guest:But he used to sneak into the Evergreen State College around the same time I did, but in the science lab.
Guest:And he was making meth.
Guest:And I was like, so when I saw the documentary, I was like, wait a minute.
Guest:Those were the same years I was sneaking in to make art.
Guest:And I was like, my art, however, did not sell.
Marc:The meth went well for him.
Guest:Yeah, I think the meth went well for a while for him.
Marc:So when did you feel like...
Marc:I know that you had that roommate that was assaulted, and that was a huge shift in the reality of thinking around what being a victim is.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I think mostly it was like, you know, when you get in a car crash or something and you almost die and you're like, what is my life?
Guest:You know, it was like she almost died and I was like, why am I doing this photography stuff?
Guest:This feels really stupid.
Guest:Or like what we all went through, you know, what we've all been going through with the Trump stuff.
Guest:You know, a lot of artists are like, why am I making art?
Guest:Like, you know, I need to be out in the streets.
Yeah.
Guest:And you can do both or you can use your art to do protests.
Guest:I happened to go to a school that was very much like, you know, a binary of like either you make art and you're a total hedonist or you're like an environmental activist and that's it.
Guest:You know, like you're either carrying a sign or you're making art.
Guest:So it was very hard for me to put those two together and feel like that was okay.
Guest:But Allie, you know, what happened to her with the assault, that's her story.
Guest:That's like that affected her.
Guest:Way more than it did me.
Guest:But it encouraged me to realize something that I'd always cared about, which was ending violence against women.
Guest:Like I wanted to be a part of that in one way or another, always.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And and in a way it was selfish because I wanted to be around other people who were surviving sexism on a daily basis and talking about it.
Guest:And sometimes the really extreme forms of sexism.
Guest:You know, I think it's like, you know, watching, you know, people, a lot of women and there's been a lot of conversations about it watching.
Guest:um shows where women are getting killed and you know raped and all this stuff and oh I just watch it so that I can fall asleep I don't do that anymore but I used to and part of it was like I wanted to see people who survived I kept waiting to see well how I want to see a success story of like I saw one where it was these two roommates which reminded me a lot of me and Allie and there was a guy like basically murdering the roommate another roommate walked in and she ran up into the bedroom and
Guest:And locked the door because she couldn't get him off her.
Guest:And then she was like, I got to get out of here to get her help.
Guest:And she's on the second floor.
Guest:And she took, she stepped back, ran as fast as she could off the balcony and just jumped and broke her leg and then crawled to get help.
Guest:And her roommate was saved.
Yeah.
Guest:And I'm like, I need these stories.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:I need these to feel hopeful.
Guest:I'm not watching them for the trauma porn of it.
Guest:I'm also watching it because sometimes it's the only place you can get community.
Guest:If you're a woman who's alone and isolated and you've had these horrible things happen to you, you're like, I'm not alone.
Guest:This person had something way worse happen to them.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:But sometimes it would keep me from getting help.
Guest:Because I'd be like, well, that woman died.
Guest:I didn't die.
Guest:Like, I'm so lucky I'm alive.
Guest:I'm going to, you know, go out and do all this stuff.
Guest:And as I'm doing it, I'm going to remember I'm not just doing it for me.
Guest:I'm doing it for everyone who didn't make it.
Guest:It's like a lot of pressure to put on yourself.
Marc:But initially it drove you into, you know, learning more and becoming an actual crisis counselor, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you took action to help.
Marc:And then I guess that with the music, that until... Because I had, like, for some reason, Kathy Acker had a profound impact on me, too.
Marc:I don't... I'm not... I can't explain my period in New York in the late 80s, but there was a lot going on with... It wasn't really zine culture, but there was a lot like World War III Illustrated, St.
Marc:Mark's Bookshop, and then somehow or another...
Marc:You know, I had gotten Avatel Ronnell's like book and I'd gotten Kathy Acker's book and I got that research book, Angry Women.
Marc:So I was like, because it seemed like the thinking was a lot more interesting than most of what else was going on.
Marc:And when I read Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in high school, I was like, what the fuck is this?
Marc:Oh, yeah, me too.
Marc:I mean, what the fuck is this?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it was like, you know, life changing in the sense like you couldn't even wrap your brain around.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's so cool.
Guest:We both had the same very similar experience with the same book.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I just didn't I it wasn't like I was trying to be, you know, a feminist per se.
Marc:But it was like I found the art of women at that time more interesting and had a lot more sort of not just personal relevance, but cultural relevance.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So I was reading, you know, all this stuff.
Marc:But like Acker, I was like, I got to know this person.
Marc:But I never met her.
Marc:But you did.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it changed your life.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That was like, it seemed like that was the moment.
Marc:It was not the Andrea Dworkin moment.
Guest:No.
Guest:I feel like I'm like, you know, Forrest Gump of a feminist punk.
Marc:Well, no, it's so funny because like I had read Dworkin years ago and I'm like, I thought like it's a little extreme in some ways.
Marc:And when you wrote that story about, you know, getting the guts up to ask her a question and how she treated you in your book, I wrote Andrew Dworkin's a fucking asshole.
Marc:I wrote that right in there.
Guest:I, here's the thing.
Guest:I appreciate her extremism in the same way I appreciate Valerie Solanis' extremism.
Guest:Right, yeah.
Guest:The thing is, is that literally watching her give a lecture, I was like, if you want to be obsessed with porn, just be obsessed with porn.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:There was a part of me that was like, you're really obsessed with pornography.
Guest:And that's also because she was a victim of pornography.
Guest:But it was like...
Guest:I don't want to look at all this violent porn at a feminist lecture and just be focused.
Guest:It was really, really strange.
Guest:And then she just shamed me and didn't answer my question.
Guest:And this was the thing about the 90s was that if you tried to go to an anti-censorship thing, they were like...
Guest:Pornography is great.
Guest:It's really empowering.
Guest:And it's like, no, it's not.
Guest:You know, how is a stapled, you know, navel in the middle of a magazine where guys are just jacking off to it?
Guest:And women are jacking off to it, too.
Guest:I mean, I saw Shannon Tweed and Playboy when I was a kid.
Guest:And it turned me on.
Guest:So, like, I guess I'm the problem, too.
Guest:But whatever.
Marc:The black and white pictures?
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:The Ski Money ones.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Anyways.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:I can't believe I just had it myself.
Yeah.
Guest:Gene Simmons, if you're listening, fuck you.
Marc:But there was also, like, you were at the juncture of that, those two sides of that early kind of punk feminism where you had, you know, that, because you lived it, having done, you know, sex work, that idea that it was empowering to own it, but yet it was still judged by other feminists as being, you know...
Marc:Part of the male gaze and toxic culture.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or just like you're not a real feminist if you're a sex worker of any kind.
Guest:And like I actually never found sex work empowering to be perfectly honest.
Guest:It was a job.
Guest:You know, I didn't find McDonald's empowering.
Guest:I didn't find data entry empowering and I didn't find stripping empowering.
Marc:But did you did you know Annie Sprinkle?
Guest:Yeah, I knew about Annie Sprinkle and I really appreciated the work that she was doing.
Guest:And I was really excited about the idea of alternative porn.
Guest:But now it's just been.
Marc:No, it's different.
Guest:The way that I think the utopian way that a lot of us were thinking about it is not what ended up happening.
Marc:It took over culture and it became totally exploitive.
Marc:And then it just became this sort of billion dollar content generating thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, you know what I liken it to kind of is like there's parts in the book where I talk about, you know, not wanting to do interviews with mainstream magazines because anytime I would try to, it would be like they would want me to talk about, oh, so you were raped and you were a stripper and da-da-da-da-da.
Guest:And it was like they would want to like sexualize the stripper stuff.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that's not what I want.
Guest:I want to talk about my music.
Guest:I want to talk about our music, you know, as a band.
Guest:And I was like, it was just, it was really disheartening and traumatizing sometimes.
Guest:And I was just like, I can't do this.
Guest:And so I stopped doing it.
Guest:And then I only did fanzines.
Guest:And then I had to stop doing fanzines because they started doing the same thing.
Guest:And it almost reminds me of the thing we're talking about with porn, where it's like mainstream porn.
Guest:And then they're like, we're going to make this alternative porn and it's going to change everything.
Guest:And it's going to be more like equality based.
Guest:And it's going to be, yes, there still is some of that stuff that's happening in very small pockets.
Guest:It's cool that you can find.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But in reality, it's like how the fanzines just were emulating the mainstream.
Guest:The independent porn just started emulating the mainstream.
Guest:So it was just bad versions of the same mainstream, you know, bad power dynamic, toxic thing.
Guest:It's like, it just...
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I think that that's that it's an interesting thing to think about is like how capitalism infects everything and how like, you know, you can be in this this scene that's like doing all these positive things.
Guest:But there's still this like individualist, competitive, capitalist crap that's going on within it that needs to be faced.
Right.
Marc:It's weird because we brought up Acker, but she told you because you were writing at that point stuff that became songs.
Marc:But she literally told you if you want people to listen to this, you need to be in a band.
Guest:I mean, I definitely think she was a little bit psyched because I said nothing about music or anything.
Guest:And I don't know.
Guest:It was really wild.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The thing about that moment when she told me that was that it told me, it informed the rest of my life in that I realized there's a lot of people who are kind of on the margins of society who don't get told by mainstream media that you have permission to be the next person.
Guest:Judd Apatow.
Guest:You have permission to be the next William Burroughs.
Guest:You have the permission to be the, you know, it's like you have the permission to be the next Dave Grohl.
Guest:Maybe not now.
Guest:But like, you don't, I didn't feel like I had permission.
Guest:And this person who, this artist who I super respected was like, you have permission.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You don't have permission.
Guest:I'm telling you to do it.
Guest:And it was like I really it was that small thing that like I already probably would have ended up doing what I did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But that made it happen like the next day.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:And so when I'm interacting with other people and I don't bullshit them and tell them, oh, I love your fanzine or I love your music if I don't.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Also, something I learned from Acker because she also told me that I was kind of an idiot in terms of where my feminism was at at the time.
Guest:And that really reminded me, hey, you know, the kindest thing you can do is be honest with people.
Guest:The kindest thing you can do is if you listen to someone's record and you're like, you know what—
Guest:You don't have a chorus here and your vocals aren't loud enough and you need slap back.
Guest:Like to just give them the notes.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Give them the notes.
Guest:Don't just say, oh, it's so great.
Guest:Like tell the truth.
Guest:Like that's being helpful.
Guest:That's engaging with their work.
Marc:It might hurt them for a second.
Guest:But it's also like being like, I listened to it and here's what I thought.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You know, instead of just like lying and being like, you're great.
Guest:All of us women are great.
Guest:Let's all support each other.
Guest:It's like, no, it takes criticism and challenging and also support.
Marc:And also talent.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I realized that me giving other people permission sometimes is really great.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I try to do it whenever I can, like listen to what, you know, younger people are saying they want to do and being like, you should do that.
Guest:I think you'd be great at it.
Marc:It seemed like the combination between what Acker said and who was it you saw, Babes in Toyland?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That was like, that was it.
Marc:That was the one-two punch.
Marc:And you're like, yeah, we did it.
Marc:Jinx, you owe me a Coke.
Marc:But that propelled you.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I'm so lucky.
Guest:I was given, like, such good origin stories, right?
Marc:Yeah, but you were there, like, at this, like, you know, what was going on, and then so you start doing it, and then at that time, that scene in Olympia was pretty vital.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, like, there was... I mean, it still is, actually.
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:I mean, it seemed like there was enough women around to at least have a community.
Marc:No?
Marc:Not really?
Guest:It was, I mean, it was still, like, we played to all guys with the five girls in the front, and...
Marc:And you started telling the girls to come up front.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And when we first started playing, it was just like, you know, a lot of people were very mad.
Guest:They were like, how dare you put feminism in your music?
Guest:It was really weird.
Guest:It was really weird how angry people were because...
Guest:I was very Pollyanna about it.
Guest:Like, I was like, everyone's going to be psyched.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, you know, I'm, you know, putting this, like, you know, feminist content into punk rock.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's kind of become stale.
Guest:It's become this, like, white boy hardcore nonsense.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Where, you know, they're like, mom, make me a sandwich.
Guest:You know, like, or my girlfriend won't give me a blowjob.
Guest:Like, or whatever their songs were.
Yeah.
Guest:I used to be like, oh, we're having, when we had white guy hardcore at our gallery that ended up being an event space and shows, I'd be like, oh, comedy night?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because it's like white guy hardcore, and I'd be like, oh, comedy night?
Yeah.
Marc:But it's so it's so interesting to me still that like that that punk seemed to in its at its core was really about fuck you.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that, you know, to inform fuck you with actual ideology was so threatening to them.
Marc:It's kind of crazy because it just showed how shallow it ultimately was.
Marc:And there was only a few bands like I mean, you talk about Ian McKay a lot.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That understood intellectually the possibilities.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, when we played L.A., Flipside Magazine gave us a review that said, fuck you, 11 times.
Guest:That was it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, I mean, haha, but at the same time, like, they didn't give anybody else a review like that.
Guest:And it was like, oh, thanks for making us feel welcome.
Guest:Thanks.
Guest:And we put on a great show.
Guest:We still put on a great show.
Guest:I'm not going to hold back.
Guest:I mean, I leave 110% of myself on the stage every night.
Guest:And it's like, yeah, sometimes there's kind of crap shows.
Guest:I have a sore throat or we're really tired or whatever.
Guest:The sound is bad.
Guest:But it's like we put everything out there every time when we've played.
Guest:And it's like...
Guest:To have constantly reviews and stuff and just articles written about how all it was was that we were man haters and, you know, we looked like this and I bared my breasts, which I never did.
Guest:And it was like, you know, when you're 23, you're like, oh, everyone hates me.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:And it's not like I really give a shit what flip side is.
Guest:But at the same time, you know, I'm 55 and I still remember it.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:And it's not because I think, oh, I'm a bad person.
Guest:It's like, thanks for reminding me I'm on the right path.
Guest:Because if I'm pissing every single, like I'm pissing off people in my own scene.
Guest:I'm pissing off people in L.A., San Diego, Orange County scene.
Guest:I'm pissing off people in D.C.
Guest:I'm pissing, you know, it was kind of like I just started.
Guest:The thing that really saved me was remembering that.
Guest:when a kid liked me in school, they would throw spitballs at me.
Guest:And I was like, these people are just throwing spitballs at me because they really like me.
Guest:And they don't know what to do about it because it's too interesting.
Guest:It's too smart.
Guest:It's too good.
Guest:It's too sexy.
Guest:They are freaked out.
Guest:So fine.
Guest:You just told me you suck and I don't have to deal with you.
Guest:Thanks for telling me.
Guest:I will move on.
Guest:And so it allowed us to find our own community of like friends and
Marc:But it also like it seemed intentional, like the thing, even if you do politics in general, you know, even if it's not specifically feminism, but even if you're doing political music, it seems that, you know, meatheads are going to react like, you know, like, you know, what the fuck is this?
Marc:Because they don't even want to do the thinking.
Marc:They're not even hearing what you're saying, really, because they're not processing it other than some sort of attack on them.
Marc:And it just seems to me that to have the courage to just put new ideas out there.
Marc:And these ideas are still like now the world we're living in this fucking, you know, nascent fascist reality.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, all those ideas are being shut down still.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:But it seemed boring to me at the time.
Guest:Like I was like, it's really not that crazy when like everybody I know has a story of being raped or punched by a guy or, you know, pulled into a car.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or just like, you know, not getting a job because they're female or like whatever.
Guest:Everybody I know.
Guest:And then which is over half the population.
Guest:And I'm singing songs about it.
Guest:And people are freaking out.
Guest:I'm like, this seems really not.
Guest:I'm not GWAR.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:It's like I was like GWAR is way scarier than we are.
Guest:You know, why?
Guest:Why aren't you freaked out about GWAR?
Marc:Because you threaten them.
Guest:Well, and that's part of the thing that's funny is like, guys, it's fine if anybody doesn't like our music.
Guest:I'm always like, there's some of our music I don't even like.
Guest:But it's like, it's fine if people are like, I just don't like the way that they put songs together.
Guest:I don't like that kind of music.
Guest:I don't like the guitar sound.
Guest:I don't like her voice.
Guest:I don't, that's all fine.
Guest:It's just when it's like,
Guest:Nobody talks about the songs.
Guest:Nobody talks about the music.
Guest:Nobody talks about my voice.
Guest:Nobody talks about the guitar.
Guest:Nobody talks about the drumming.
Guest:All they say is, fuck them.
Guest:They hate men.
Guest:And it's like, or they say they're not really musicians because they're activists or they're not really.
Guest:And it's like...
Guest:I keep saying this.
Guest:How many songs do I have to write before an article treats me like a real musician?
Guest:Like I've written real songs, like legitimate songs that like have beginnings, middles and ends.
Guest:And they're like on records.
Marc:But there's a hypocrisy to it from the get go.
Marc:It's like, you know, punk rock wasn't about, you know, necessarily being a perfect musician.
Marc:It was about expressing a certain sentiment.
Marc:And it was it was a free zone.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, it's about kids creating culture outside of corporations.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so I thought and we thought as a band, oh, well, guys go up all the time and just like play some stuff that they're just learning their instruments.
Guest:And it's totally like, that's so cool.
Guest:They're so punk.
Guest:But when women or people of color or women of color do it, it's like, oh, they suck.
Guest:They need to go home and work harder.
Guest:You know, it's like.
Guest:But if you show up and you're Stevie Ray Vaughan Jr.
Guest:lady, then it's like you're ridiculous.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:So it's like you really can't win.
Guest:So we were just like, well, this is what we want to do.
Guest:We want to do punk rock and that's what we're going to do.
Guest:And if people are like, you don't know how to play, we're going to be like, yeah, it's punk rock.
Marc:But in reaction to this pushback or this reaction that this is where the community really kind of becomes defined.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That's where the idea of taking your counseling experience and creating spaces for women to talk about their issues.
Marc:But also like that ultimately became somewhat of an exhausting liability on some level.
Marc:Yeah, it seems.
Marc:But but that was the core of the beginning of the right girl movement.
Marc:was to create a space for women to have these ideas in public and to feel supported among themselves.
Guest:Well, it's kind of like what happens if you give a rape crisis counselor a guitar.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:And also the ability to make flyers that, say, come to my teenage sexual assault support group and hand them out from stage instead of just put them up at the grocery store.
Guest:Like a big...
Guest:thing impetus for me of being in bikini kill was I was like oh I could look like some weird lady walking up to teenagers outside of the high school inviting them to this group or I could be the cool girl in a band yeah talking about it from stage yeah
Guest:And maybe that would be a better fit.
Guest:So it all kind of ran together, you know what I mean?
Guest:And it was like, oh, I did counseling and I started to be like, I can't do intakes anymore because I'm burnt out on intakes.
Guest:I can't do overnights anymore because they're terrifying.
Guest:Overnights at the domestic violence shelter where nobody's supposed to know where it was, but, you know, things happen.
Guest:You know, I can't do rape crisis phones anymore.
Guest:I'm getting totally burnt out.
Guest:Okay, I'll do public speaking.
Guest:So I started going to high schools and doing public speaking and actually this band Unwound, um,
Guest:all three of them at the time, were in the class that I went to because they were high school students.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They weren't the band Unwound yet.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was really, it was pretty hilarious.
Guest:You know, they let me, like someone who was like, I was about 22, 23 years old, walk into a classroom and talk to people was like totally insane.
Guest:In my mind, I was like, how'd they let me do this?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I did it.
Guest:And it was like, I think in a way that,
Guest:me like starting to go into high schools and give, you know, talks about sexual assault and consent and stuff like that.
Guest:I was like, oh, I can't do the crisis phones anymore, but I can do this more performative thing where I'm in collaboration with an audience and I'm talking and, you know, and sometimes I would do full like auditoriums and I would have a mic.
Guest:It really, if you look at it as a natural evolution to like, and then I'm on stage singing and
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Turning it into a poem song, which is what I like to call lyrics.
Guest:But writing lyrics about the stuff that I was I was witnessing and some of which I'd experienced and had friends experience because that's been the other thing that was very hard to contend with is the idea that like everything I've written is autobiographical and it's not.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You know, it's like you're a songwriter.
Guest:I'm a songwriter.
Guest:I get ideas from all over the place.
Guest:And now as I'm older, I do feel more like, oh, I could write like a narrative song if I wanted.
Guest:I could, you know, go down a lot of different roads that I haven't gone down.
Guest:But at the time, it felt very important to be specific and to be almost didactic and to be really clear.
Guest:Like this is a feminist performance.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's not the only feminist performance, and it's from my perspective.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it is a feminist performance.
Guest:You're not seeing a mirage.
Guest:This is really happening.
Marc:And also the sort of evolution to doing that and trying to detach a bit from –
Marc:You know, crisis counseling, like there's points in the book where you said there were lines of girls who needed to talk and that like your instinct is you wanted to do it, but you just couldn't.
Marc:You know, the bandwidth.
Marc:And then you also then it seemed that you became the de facto leader of a situation that was becoming out of control.
Marc:And there's a point in the book where you talk about the revelation of, you know, entitlement and racism within the feminist community that you were kind of attached to.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because you had not, you know, what you were doing was in earnest and it was correct, but you were not seeing the full picture.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the punk scene that I was involved in was largely, it was at least run by white people.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And so it wasn't necessarily a welcoming space to people of color.
Guest:And it was like, you know, the same way that I had felt unwelcomed at a lot of punk shows.
Guest:I was a part of creating all white spaces or predominantly white spaces that didn't welcome BIPOC people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I had to contend with that.
Guest:And I chronicled kind of my failures in the book.
Guest:And also sort of... It's not like I'll ever come to terms with it.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Like, I've got to keep working on myself and reading books by other people.
Guest:And that's the thing.
Guest:So many amazing writers have written so many great books about their experiences or...
Guest:Things that they know that I don't know about that I can read.
Guest:I don't have to go up to somebody and be like, please explain to me as a white person how to be a better person, you know, how to be an ally.
Guest:It's like.
Guest:I feel like I've actually been really lucky that I've had so many men come up to me and be like, how can I be an ally?
Guest:And I'm like, go read a book.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Like, Google feminism.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Like, that's not my job.
Guest:And I think going through some of those experiences, and obviously the template isn't the same for every situation, but...
Guest:It really encouraged me to read a lot of books by people who see things different than me, who grew up different than me, who are different than me.
Guest:That's really helped me to be like, oh, here's my limitations.
Marc:With Bikini Kill, I know you guys are back at it, but what really was the point where you hit the wall the first time?
Guest:There were so many walls, but...
Guest:I mean, you know, honestly, I'm just going to tell you a weird story.
Guest:I was really sick.
Guest:I had a temperature of over 103, 104 maybe.
Guest:When was this?
Guest:This was like probably, I think we broke up in 97 or 98.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it was like 97.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was in my apartment in Olympia, and I just had a mattress on the floor.
Guest:And I was really extremely sick, and I was trying to do this thing for this political organization that I had started working with.
Guest:They were doing a lot of stuff around freeing Mumia from jail.
Guest:And I was trying to raise money and, like, start due benefits and, like, all this stuff with this organization.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And this woman called me and was like, I need you to try to reach out to Eddie Vedder and Zach De La Rocha.
Guest:Here's their number.
Guest:They'd probably...
Marc:Take a call from me?
Guest:Take a call from you and not from me.
Guest:And I was like, I need to hold this off because I barely, I can't even get out of bed.
Guest:Like, I had to crawl to the bathroom.
Guest:I was so sick.
Guest:And she's like, crawl to the fax machine and fucking fax them.
Guest:And I was like...
Guest:I never worked with that organization again.
Guest:I hung up the phone.
Guest:I did crawl to the thing and fax them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I never did anything for them again and I still won't.
Guest:But I was like, okay, if someone is actively like saying the cause matters more than your health.
Marc:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:you gotta get out of that.
Guest:And it made me look at the rest of my life and be like, there were a few people in kind of the riot girl scene who were very like, you know, I'm the most anti-racist, anti-classist, anti-colonialist, you know, like, and they were like white metal class people, mostly.
Guest:Having these like, kind of like beauty pageant in reverse contests, you know, and it was like,
Guest:downwardly mobile like bullshit and you know liberal guilt and all that kind of crap and it was like constantly attacking me and i think part of it was just jealousy it was like because you know we were all fighting for the scraps off the man's table and and we're taught to think there's only so much and so there could only be one cool punk feminist girl at a time and i was that so i was target um
Guest:targeted by people in what I thought was my own community and from the mainstream outside telling me I was a slutty stripper man hater.
Guest:And it really just got to be too much.
Guest:And I was like, I can't, I literally can't do this and I'm getting physically ill.
Marc:Which turned out to be a real thing.
Guest:Yeah, which turned out I have an autoimmune illness, which we don't need to discuss because I hate talking about it.
Guest:But I have an autoimmune illness.
Guest:It is under control.
Guest:It took a while, though.
Guest:It took a long, long time.
Marc:It's a tough one.
Guest:It is a tough one.
Guest:And most people don't believe in it.
Guest:What, Lyme disease?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's definitely crazy if you're like...
Guest:You have a pick line in and you're like, you know, constantly in the emergency room and you like haven't been able to work for, you know, seven years and people are like, it's not real.
Guest:It's like, well, my body's telling me it is.
Guest:It's like.
Marc:And also that was something I was trying to address earlier is that not unlike trolls, you know, in any community, you know, voices can be heard, but it doesn't mean they're going to be the voice.
Marc:And I think there's a lot of resentment and jealousy and frustration on behalf of people that are not necessarily talented in a certain way to sort of figure out a way to get a stronghold in any community.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, and some people are just as talented.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But like I said before, the way that it gets treated is, you know, oh, there can only be one woman band.
Guest:There can only be one feminist.
Guest:It used to be like there could only be one woman musician on a stage at a time.
Guest:Like there'd be a bass player or, you know, and if there was like a female singer in one band, you wouldn't want...
Guest:Right.
Guest:To have another one, because then they're compared to each other.
Guest:They wouldn't play, and they still don't, a lot of times on rock radio, if that even exists, won't play a female singer next to another female singer.
Guest:They'll play one female singer every 10 records, or if at all.
Guest:And so you really get this thing in your head.
Guest:So I don't really...
Guest:I understand it.
Guest:And I've been on the I'm the jealous one side.
Guest:So, like, I totally get it.
Guest:And also, I am privileged.
Guest:You know, I was like a skinny, cute white girl getting a lot of attention.
Guest:And, you know, there were tons of bands that were privileged.
Guest:great bands with women in it who weren't getting attention and had worked very hard.
Guest:And then we were like, we don't want to do mainstream press.
Guest:Fuck the mainstream press.
Guest:Like, I can imagine to a lot of women who had worked really hard in the music industry proper to get where they were were kind of like, oh, you think you're so great that you don't even need this and I'm fighting for it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But we we did to me.
Guest:I did that as a thing for my mental health.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, there was also this thing that like doesn't exist anymore in the same way of this.
Marc:The idea of selling out.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:That was so huge.
Marc:And that like it was I think I mean, I get it.
Marc:And it certainly was enabled people to carve a different path for themselves and transcend in a different way.
Marc:But a lot of that was bullshit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:DIY till you die.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, how the thing that is really frustrating about it is the only people who can afford to not have a day job and then do their own booking, their own press, their own everything like you have to that's it's it's a 40 hour, 50, 60, 70 hour a week job.
Guest:if you're going to be in a band and do every single thing yourself, the only people we can afford to do that are people with trust funds or, like, you know, rich parents or inheritance or whatever.
Guest:Like, we didn't have that when we were still trying to DIY everything.
Guest:And it got to the point of, like, sometimes I'm like, man, you know, if we would have just got a manager, like, maybe we would have lasted a couple more years without another great album.
Guest:Like, you know.
Guest:But...
Guest:I honestly didn't know about a lot of those jobs.
Guest:I mean, I did have a fax machine, which was, you know, pretty business.
Guest:Pretty business in the 90s.
Guest:But, you know, I didn't know what a publicist did.
Guest:I didn't know – I knew what a booking agent was.
Guest:I didn't – I thought a manager just took a bunch of your money.
Guest:Like, I had no idea –
Guest:that I didn't even realize I was doing all these jobs.
Guest:You know, we did our own artwork.
Guest:We did our own booking.
Guest:We, you know, got the van.
Guest:Like, sometimes we had a roadie.
Guest:Like, that was it.
Guest:And doing that for seven years on the level we were doing it was really a lot of work.
Guest:And, you know, if we had rich parents...
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, maybe it would have been different.
Guest:But I that's why I think this sellout having the sellout idea kind of dissolve and not be present is great because, you know, people need to make money off of their work and what they do and or else the punk scene is going to be a bunch of rich white people.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So after you hit the wall with that and you try to get your health back in place, it seemed like Joan Jett was the next key to the next evolution.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, because everybody needs a Joan Jett in their lives.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, me and my, yeah, I mean, yeah.
Guest:Joan called me on the phone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My bandmates swear they didn't do it, but I know one of them did it.
Guest:Someone wrote on a bikini.
Guest:We had a bikini kill.
Guest:All we had was a demo tape.
Yeah.
Guest:And on the demo tape, someone wrote, for a good time, call Kathleen and put my phone number.
Guest:And this person, who shall remain nameless, who refuses to say they did it, was backstage at a Fugazi show in D.C.
Guest:And Joan was there because she's a big Fugazi fan.
Guest:And this person handed Joan the cassette.
Guest:And then I didn't know about any of this.
Guest:I'm just like working my job, you know, my life, you know, practicing with my band.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I get a phone call, and it's like, hi, it's Joan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm like, Joan who?
Guest:It's like, Joan Jett.
Guest:I'm like, heh, heh, heh.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, who is this really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's like, no, this is Joan Jett.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we literally had a Glorious Days of Misspent Youth poster in the living room.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I was looking at it while I was talking to her, and I was like, this is like, in the Jetsons, like a video phone call.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So 90s.
Guest:And I really did not believe that it was her.
Guest:She's like, did you put out this cassette?
Guest:Are you the lead singer of this band?
Guest:And I started being like, wait, this actually might be her.
Guest:And then I was just like, okay, what kind of hair do you have right now?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because every Joan fan knows what kind of hair she has at that particular moment.
Guest:And I was like, and she goes, oh, it's like a bastardized, disheveled bop.
Guest:And I was like, oh, no, it's really Joan.
Guest:Because that's what she had.
Guest:And, yeah, she was just like, I want to come see you play.
Guest:I love your band.
Guest:And then she came and saw us, and she's like, oh, that Rebel Girl song, that's the good one.
Guest:I really like that one.
Guest:I want to produce that.
Guest:And I was, you know, she produced the first Germs record.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And, you know, she's a legend in a million ways.
Guest:She's in The Runaways, which, you know, prototype punk band, like just voice of an angel.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Heart of a demon, voice of an angel.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Joan Jett.
Guest:But yeah, she was amazing.
Guest:And she also really, again, provided family for me at a time when I felt really kind of like...
Guest:ousted from my own community and like I couldn't go to shows that were like feminist punk shows because I would just get nonstop hassle like people would be like why did you do this and this lyric and I was just like oh god like I created a fucking Frankenstein monster it's interesting when trolls had to be in person
Guest:No, there's a scene in the book where it's like I had, what's the thing revenge porn done to me in person?
Guest:What?
Guest:This guy I dated took these pictures of me where I was like wearing a sexy negligee or something.
Marc:Oh, was that the artist?
Yeah.
Marc:Or the guy who did a show of the pictures?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he took these, like, pictures of me in this, like, see-through, you know, outfit.
Guest:And I was like, no, don't.
Guest:And he's like, just let me take a couple.
Guest:And then he did.
Guest:And he's like, I won't show it to anybody.
Guest:And then after we broke up, he...
Guest:Built a wooden cross and then nailed the pictures all over it in a public space, like in the library building right above where I worked.
Guest:And I had to walk by it to rent stuff from the media loan where Kathy worked, the bass player for Bikini Kill, who I didn't know at the time.
Guest:But I had to walk through there like every day and see those pictures.
Guest:And I was like...
Guest:And now that's what's so great about being 55 and writing the book is that I look back and I'm like, oh, that was revenge porn before the Internet.
Marc:You were at the beginning of it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Wow.
Guest:I feel like such a, you know, like.
Marc:But do you think Joan, in terms of where she eventually went with her career in creatively was sort of the basis for La Tigra in a way?
Guest:I mean, I don't really relate that to her.
Guest:I think of Joan as a singer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because what she can do vocally in a studio is magical.
Guest:What she can do live with her voice is amazing.
Marc:But she eventually got a more defined pop sensibility in the later records.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I think the main thing, the main...
Guest:Musical thing is that she taught me, hey, it's okay to have a job.
Guest:You know, like she got me jobs songwriting and singing backups on records.
Guest:And I started being like, okay, I can earn a living at this.
Guest:After I quit Bikini Kill and sort of towards the end of that project.
Guest:And then...
Guest:she taught me i was doing this whole thing with my voice on the early records where like there was nothing on it no reverb no slap back like it was just completely raw and there's a lot of early rap records where you know real close to the mic there's like no reverb or anything on it um i wish i could say i was emulating that i wasn't yeah um i was just sort of like i don't want my voice to be airbrushed yeah i don't want pantyhose on my voice right like
Guest:I want it to just be like in your face.
Guest:That's great.
Guest:But when I went in the studio with Joan and she was like putting reverb on me, putting slap back, she's like, Elvis, you slap back.
Guest:Let's try that.
Guest:You know, like we were trying all these different things and experimenting.
Guest:And also I wasn't just singing the song three times and then picking the best take or picking the best verse.
Guest:It was like pieces doing it, you know, like in film.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You know, where you like caught up.
Marc:And you didn't even know you could do that.
Guest:I knew, but we didn't have the money to sit there and do that.
Marc:And did you think there was a lack of integrity to it?
Marc:No.
Marc:Oh, good.
Guest:No, it was just we literally did not have the money to sit there and piece stuff together.
Guest:And we had the biggest budget, which I think it was like $2,000 for that single, than we ever had for anything.
Guest:From Kill Rockstar?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we had two days to do a single where usually we have like five days to do an album.
Guest:So it was like very luxuriant.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And yeah, I learned a lot from that because I was like, hey, my voice still sounds like me.
Guest:It still is...
Guest:It still sounds in your face.
Guest:It still sounds exciting.
Guest:The band still sounds exciting.
Guest:And actually, the contrast of that sheen, of that little bit of pop sheen she put on us made it feel like the band was, like, kind of fighting against the pop sheen.
Guest:And it created this really interesting tension that you can get with, like...
Guest:You can also get it if you have, like, a guitar that comes out too loud and starts blocking out the singer, and then the singer goes loud.
Guest:And you're like, ah, they won.
Guest:The singer won.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:You know, like, you can create that tension.
Guest:But I learned about creating that tension in the studio through her.
Guest:And I learned, like, oh, I want to experiment more with how I produce myself.
Guest:And I don't want to have these ideas of, like, don't put anything on your voice because that's so loud.
Marc:Well, how does that not lead to La Tigra?
Yeah.
Guest:That does.
Guest:And so in that way, production wise, it definitely did.
Guest:Because I got really excited about production after that.
Guest:And then I got like a four track and then an eight track and I started recording at home.
Marc:Drum machine.
Guest:Drum machine.
Guest:Dramatics.
Marc:That was big.
Guest:For $40.
Marc:You still have it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Of course I do.
Guest:Of course I do.
Marc:And by that point, you're with Adam, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And was how they were working any sort of influence?
Guest:yeah I mean of course like you know I mean mainly just being like oh whoa they actually have fun in the studio you know what I mean and like they set up their own studio like all the different things that they did that I watched and I was like they have a publicist and I was like I want that you know yeah yeah yeah and and
Guest:And my husband put out a lot of really sexist, homophobic, crappy songs in the 80s and grew up and changed and became a different person, the person that I love.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In seeing that, that was really powerful and gave me the ability to see myself growing and changing.
Guest:But it also was like, you know, even though they had an inflatable dick on stage and a dancer, Danielle, in a bikini, you know.
Guest:like in a cage.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They, they never, besides when I got the, you play a mumia at Pooja Mall protest, when they got protested or a benefit show, they got protested by the police for that one, but they never really got protested.
Guest:And I've been protested a million times, sometimes totally for right, the correct reasons.
Guest:And I totally agreed with the protest, but, but for like weird things.
Guest:And,
Guest:I was like, that's really wild.
Guest:That's really wild that you had a dick, an inflatable dick on stage and there was no protest about it.
Guest:And yet I've, you know, been like threatened.
Guest:Just for saying things.
Guest:Just for saying.
Guest:And I was like, oh, OK, you know, some of this stuff, a lot of criticism against me, totally valid and totally helpful.
Guest:But then a lot of it, it just isn't.
Marc:Fuck it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I was kind of like, OK, I just got to turn my bullshit detector up.
Marc:But I like that you were in love with the guy despite all that because it was something beyond his work.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he also wasn't doing that anymore.
Guest:Like when I was on tour with them, it wasn't like the dick was there.
Guest:It's in Long Island.
Guest:It's still in Long Island.
Marc:In the Beastie Boy archive?
Guest:It's in a storage locker.
Guest:And apparently the guys who work at the storage locker have a party once a year and they...
Guest:It's hydraulic.
Guest:It's not inflatable.
Guest:That's the thing that's so hilarious is that when I'm like, yeah, because I can win any argument.
Guest:You know, all I have to do is bring up the inflatable penis.
Guest:But then he goes, it's hydraulic.
Guest:And I'm like, seriously, seriously, you're going to say that to me right now.
Marc:But so do you feel like with the La Tigra records that, you know, put you on the map in a different way?
Marc:Because that was a big record deal.
Marc:And it seems like it was ahead of its time in terms of like techno and some other stuff.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then did you have your first real hit with them?
Yeah.
Guest:Not really.
Guest:I mean, we were on an independent label, and currently we're on Late Tigre Records that we own ourselves, and Bikini Kill is on Bikini Kill Records, which we own ourselves.
Guest:But, I mean, Decepticon became this crazy, out-of-control thing that just everybody got into and played, and people know that song, and it's wonderful.
Guest:But it wasn't a hit in terms of...
Guest:um, radio or any of that.
Guest:I mean, we didn't even know the extent of it until years later because it keeps having a new life.
Guest:Like every few years it'll get revived and it'll get used in a bunch of movies.
Guest:And that's how we get paid is through sync licensing because Spotify is, you know, fucked all of the musicians.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Um, we could have, you know, 50 million plays and thanks for the $2 and 27 cents.
Marc:Um,
Marc:Even if it's on a playlist and you really, there's just no money there.
Guest:You get less than a penny.
Guest:You get like less than a penny for each.
Guest:And like we used to in the days of Apple Music get a dollar a song.
Guest:And we didn't get that whole dollar, but we got like 80 cents of it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like that was a lot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But yeah, I'm waxing fondly about 1998.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, but, yeah, it really was a departure for me.
Guest:And the really exciting thing for me was that a lot of people, it wasn't like the Bikini Kill Girl is in Lateef or like people thought I was a totally different person.
Marc:Well, you had a different name, right?
Guest:No, I still use the name Kathleen Hanna.
Guest:But I did a solo record in between called Julie Ruin.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which was like, you know, my Sasha Fierce or my Chris Gaines.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I was really just following Chris Gaines.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Was that Garth Brooks?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:His...
Guest:His eyeliner, like Kurt Cobain face.
Guest:That was so wild.
Guest:It was really wild.
Guest:That thing happened after Julie Rohn, and I was like, oh, my God, I'm like Chris Gates.
Guest:I just didn't want my name on the record.
Guest:I was weird.
Guest:But I did put my face on it.
Guest:But I made this record that was, like, electronic, and then it ended up being Les Tigres.
Guest:And, you know, we did a lot of stuff.
Guest:And we did sign to a major label.
Guest:For like one record and didn't go great.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Didn't love it.
Marc:Oh, that's where they put the promotional money into something else.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Into Jojo.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Who I think she had a hit with a song called like Get Back or Stand Back, Boy.
Guest:I mean, no disrespect towards her.
Marc:But now you're touring with Bikini.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:Original lineup?
Yes.
Guest:Original lineup, except Bill, who does not want to tour.
Guest:So Sarah Lando, who is a very good friend of mine and was in the Julie Ruin band experience with Kathy and I. It's our guitar player, and she's amazing.
Guest:Just listening to her guitar playing through the monitor...
Guest:While I'm singing and like, it sounds like there's two people playing at the same time.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But like, so after all this, the book and Lyme disease and going through.
Guest:The tornado that took my house away.
Marc:All of it.
Marc:All of it.
Marc:The cars, the apartments.
Marc:And then, you know, finally, you know, having, you know, a child and, you know, the adoption process and all that.
Marc:Do you find now when you look back at everything or at least do you do you get back that you did actually change things?
Marc:I mean, do you feel like you have enough women who come up to you who are in their 40s now and say, like, you know, it made all the difference to me?
Marc:Do you feel like if not the music being of service in the way you were is is validating?
Guest:Yeah, it's totally validating.
Guest:And I can take it in to a certain extent, but you know what I mean?
Guest:It's like if...
Guest:I can't rely on external validation, even though I love it.
Marc:Wait, you can't?
Marc:God damn.
Guest:Mark, your therapist is talking to me through my other ear.
Marc:I know you can't, but boy, you know.
Marc:And I resist it, which I think is something you do too because of the nature of who we are as people and the way we own ourselves.
Marc:It's like if something comes at me that's positive, I mean, I'm like 30 seconds away from being like, all right, where's the negative stuff?
Guest:okay, do you look out in the audience and see the one person who's not laughing?
Guest:Okay, I'm the same way.
Guest:I look out and I see the one person who's not reacting and I'm like, I will make that person dance.
Guest:I will make that person dance.
Guest:And then I had to get over it this tour because I was like, there are certain places where people in the front just don't dance or they're too squished or they're too like whatever.
Guest:Or there's someone who's like partner brought them and they don't like the music and it's like fine.
Guest:And I was like, I really had to make an effort to focus on the people who are having a great time.
Guest:And I would pick a couple people
Guest:And just watch them dance and be so psyched.
Guest:I would, like, dance with them.
Guest:And it's really—you should try it.
Guest:Try looking at the people who are laughing and perform for them.
Guest:Don't perform for someone who is, like, doing their laundry in their head.
Marc:Why is your eyes—why do our eyes always fall on them, though?
Marc:I mean, I—like, it happens all the time where, like, it'll get to a point where I'm doing stand-up.
Marc:It happened the other night where I'll see the one person.
Guest:Who leaves.
Guest:The person who leaves and then you start—
Guest:Well, there's a bit of that.
Marc:Like, are you all right?
Marc:Where are you going?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:But they're just going to the bathroom.
Marc:But if I see somebody who's not laughing, sometimes they'll be like, are you having a good time?
Marc:Is it okay?
Marc:Is this landing?
Marc:And then they freak out.
Marc:But a lot of times it is that.
Marc:They don't know me.
Marc:They're brought to the show.
Marc:They're thinking about something else or maybe they're receiving it differently.
Marc:You know, a lot of times people don't react the way you want them to react and they're still talking.
Guest:Or maybe they're like, oh, my God, I can't believe I'm in the same room with my fucking idol.
Guest:I love this guy so much.
Guest:I don't know what to do.
Guest:Like, you have no idea.
Guest:They could be stunned.
Guest:They've never seen, like, a professional comedian before.
Guest:Like, you have no idea what it is.
Guest:They could have gotten a horrible diagnosis.
Guest:They could have, like, IBS.
Guest:And they're like, oh, God, where's the bathroom?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you got to just like let that go and detach.
Guest:But I mean, I can tell you that it doesn't matter why.
Guest:It matters what you do with it now.
Guest:It matters.
Guest:I know you have a thing in your brain that's like, you got this, Mark.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Like you just got to go back to you got this, Mark.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And also it's it's fine.
Guest:But the thing I was saying about praise and stuff is that, like, yes, I feel like I have shaped culture in a certain way in the indie feminist world and maybe beyond.
Guest:I mean, I do see girl power shirts at Target very often.
Marc:Is that a positive thing?
Guest:It's a whatever thing.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:I don't really think about it too much.
Guest:But it's also like, I think it's, I don't believe in the like, all press is good press.
Guest:I don't believe in a lot of old show business.
Guest:You know, it's like, drink yourself to death.
Guest:I just don't believe in a lot of it.
Guest:And one of the things is that,
Guest:While I really appreciate people saying, and it can be really nice and lovely to hear, like, you helped me through a bad time.
Guest:And it has been, like, something that's kept me going.
Guest:And I can take it in.
Guest:I don't dwell on it.
Guest:Because if I dwell on it, I have to dwell on all the negative stuff, too.
Guest:And my thing is, like, I really care what my best friend thinks.
Guest:I really care what my mom thinks.
Guest:I care...
Guest:you know, what the people in my actual life think of me and how I'm doing as a friend and a mom.
Guest:And, you know, that's the real thing.
Guest:And so I just feel like I'm at the place now where I'm doing it for enjoyment, not for external validation.
Guest:And so it's like I let kind of the negative and the positive roll off me a little because I'll say you don't want to become like some egomaniac who's like, I changed culture.
Guest:God damn it.
Guest:You know?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I don't feel that.
Marc:But I do like that because for me it was like a byproduct of doing this podcast or whatever kind of comedy I do that where I do get a significant amount of people who are like, you know, you got me through a dark time.
Marc:And that's like that is actually the most rewarding thing.
Marc:Yeah, that just that one.
Marc:Or if I help somebody get sober, like those things have in terms of facilitating any sort of change, just the idea.
Marc:And I think it's part of the what the initial riot girl thing was about was to make people who were alone with their fucking problems and had no outside way to compare or think other people are going through it to realize that they're not is that's the best you can do.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If you can help somebody, like, get to the place where they're doing the thing they really want to do.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Or not destroying themselves.
Guest:Yeah, or not destroying themselves.
Guest:These are the validating things.
Guest:And that's where it gets back to our conversation of what feels really important is, like, validating other people who are, like, doing cool, creative, progressive things.
Marc:Especially if they're people you respect.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And then being validated by, you know, having cool media out there, actually seeing something that reflects you or reflects your friends.
Marc:Yeah, it's nice.
Guest:Great.
Guest:This has been an awesome talk.
Guest:I feel like we really made up from the time I didn't recognize you.
Guest:And I said I was a comedy head, and yet I blamed you.
Marc:I was good with it before we got started.
Marc:I'm glad it all worked out.
Marc:It was good talking to you.
Guest:But you wouldn't have recognized me either.
Marc:No, I don't know if that may be.
Guest:Well, you recognize me because I was at my house.
Guest:That's like cheating.
Guest:You like cheated on a test.
Marc:No, I did some work.
Marc:I listened.
Marc:You know, I knew who you were.
Marc:I was intimidated.
Guest:What?
Guest:Of course.
Guest:I'm like so nice.
Marc:No, but you're going to tell me you've never been intimidating.
Guest:What?
Marc:You've never been intimidating.
Marc:intimidating yeah well i don't know exactly it was all me half of it was me see that's the thing it's projection because like a lot of people tell me i'm intimidating and like i'm actually totally not and it's so annoying because it's like that's your thing that's your problem well yeah but the people that know you know you're not but people who don't know you for whatever reason i get it all the time and i'm like i'm not even thinking about you right now
Guest:That's what I'm saying.
Guest:I'm not even thinking about you right now.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:You know what's been really positive about this conversation, Mark?
Guest:What?
Guest:Is that I've seen that it's not—that, like, sometimes it's hard to pull apart the, like, I'm a political musician part from the, like, I'm just a person making work part.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm seeing that, like, you get some of the same stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:the way it comes to me is a little bit more dramatic probably.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, but it's not just like a sexism thing.
Guest:No.
Guest:You know, and like that's actually one of the horrible damaging things about like all of the, you know, oppression in the world is that people are constantly having to be like, is this a thing because of...
Guest:You know, because I'm not a straight white male or is it because of this?
Guest:And it's like – and sometimes missing the mark on thinking it's this, but it's not.
Guest:And it's like, you know what?
Guest:It's fine to miss the mark and think it is.
Guest:Everything in your world has told you that this is probably sexism because it typically is.
Guest:But it's like the intimidating thing with being a feminist artist is like –
Guest:It's also coupled with, you're a man-hater.
Guest:So men typically will be intimidated by me when they've never met me.
Guest:And I'm like, I'm not saying that about you.
Guest:I'm just saying that, like, it's like, she's a ball buster.
Guest:Right, right, yeah.
Guest:You know, we did a—Tigre did a TV show in England once, and the guy who introduced us was like, and now for the ball busting, man tearing up—
Guest:Group, Le Tigre.
Guest:And then we came on, and I'm wearing a pink dress, and I'm like, hot topic is the weather we rhyme.
Guest:And it was like, oh, yeah.
Marc:People just want to create juice.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Bad stuff.
Marc:Yeah, we're all right.
Guest:But this has been wonderful.
Marc:It has been great.
Marc:I'm so glad we did it.
Marc:I have a present for you, too.
Marc:Oh, no.
Marc:No, no.
Marc:No.
Guest:I love you, Kathleen.
Guest:I love you, Kathleen.
Marc:No, I have a lot of stuff as you get older.
Marc:I'm sure you do too.
Marc:Is it that guitar?
Marc:It better be.
Marc:I'm just kidding.
Guest:Okay, let's go because can I touch it?
Marc:Yeah, okay.
Guest:Oh my God, you have to take that off.
Marc:No, we know you're talking about the guitar.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:Her book is called Rebel Girl, My Life is a Feminist Punk.
Marc:Get it where you get the books.
Marc:Hang out for a minute, folks.
Marc:So look, people, more outtakes are now posted for Full Marin listeners.
Marc:We've got a new batch of clips that didn't make it into recent episodes, including stuff with Moon Zappa, Michael Rooker, and Greg Fitzsimmons.
Guest:Lenny is the guy that you can't argue.
Guest:He, of course, did questionable material, but I don't know anybody that had the charisma, has the charisma of Lenny Clark.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Guest:On and off stage.
Marc:What was that story?
Marc:Do you know that story?
Marc:I tried to tell it to one about, I don't know if it was Billy Martin or Bobcat.
Marc:Now that I think about the story about how the way I used to tell it was that Lenny Clark, like Bobcat had gotten Letterman.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You know, and he was like, what, 22 or 23.
Marc:And he had moved down to Boston from upstate New York with Tom Kenny.
Marc:And he got Letterman.
Marc:And the story is, is that Lenny went up to him at a club, picked him up by the shirt collar, slammed him against the wall and said, it's not your turn.
Marc:And it's like, yep, that tracks.
Guest:That's hilarious.
Marc:To get bonus episodes twice a week, sign up for the full Marin.
Marc:Just go to the link in the episode description or go to WTFpod.com and click on WTF+.
Marc:And a reminder before we go, this podcast is hosted by Acast.
Marc:And this is me playing with my looper.
Marc:I'm still, I'm not good at the endings.
Marc:I got to figure out how to fade or something.
Marc:But I laid down a track that actually had, let's see, one, two, three guitar tracks.
Marc:And I played on top of that.
Marc:And look, I don't know what I'm doing.
Marc:So don't, you know, it's not tight.
Marc:It's not, it's not pro.
Marc:It's not pro.
Guest:Thank you.
.
.
.
.
Thank you.
Marc:Boomer lives.
Marc:Monkey and La Fonda.
Marc:Cat angels everywhere.
Marc:I gotta figure out how to fade out.
Marc:I gotta figure out how to fade out.