Sugar In The Road

Because I am having a very hectic weekend, but am determined to post something just about every darned day here on the "blog," (someday I'm going to have to rant about the inherent sexiness of the word blog),
I am going to give you all the opportunity to read (or re-read) an interview I got to do with one of my heroes, Kristin Hersh, back in September of 1999. My hair was purple and red at the time, but that didn't affect the interview too much.

Anyone reading in the LA area should know that the residency of 50 Foot Wave, Kristin's super-rockin' new band, comes to a close this Tuesday, January 27th at the Silverlake Lounge. Opening will be the Dick Slessig Combo,which features members of Acetone and the Radar Brothers.

Surf on!

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Rolling Stone has referred to her as the “Godmother of Alternative” while calling her former band, the Throwing Muses, “the Velvet Underground of the 90’s.” The 90’s? Kristin Hersh first picked up a guitar when she was nine, formed Throwing Muses with her step sister Tanya Donelly when she was fourteen and released their first album on the gauzy British label 4AD in 1986. They had a few influential releases out before the 90’s even hit…

The Throwing Muses were indeed one of the most influential bands of the 80’s and 90’s, becoming part of the foundation that college radio built itself upon. Kristin Hersh began her solo career by releasing Hips and Makers in 1994, an album of sparse and delicately painful songs that won her critical acclaim. 1998’s Strange Angels, another stripped down acoustic venture, was declared one of the 10 college albums of the year by Entertainment Weekly. That same year, she also put out Murder, Misery & Then Goodnight, a CD of Appalachian folk songs as interpreted by Kristin and her kids (who play piano and sing back up on a couple tracks). 1998 also was the year that the Throwing Muses officially declared that it was over: the band had seen the departure over the years of key members like Leslie Langston and Tanya Donnely to pursue other projects. While Tanya hit the alternative world running with her group Belly, Kristin continued to create melodically complex and lyrically intense music with the Muses and on her own. Her current release, Sky Motel, is a full band album with Kristin playing most of the instruments. “Well, I wasn’t playing, like, harps and bagpipes,” she laughed. “It’s all instruments I’ve always worked with.”
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Kristin: I’m an underground musician and this (KALX) is underground radio and we should celebrate that. I actually find that the worse Top 40 gets, the better the underground gets. When Nirvana was selling millions of records, it was tough… People thought, "I could be good- AND a millionaire! So, I’m gonna sell out just this little bit - oh, that didn’t work! I’m gonna sell out a little bit more! And, I’m just gonna suck now!" And they all sucked trying to be millionaires. What they don’t realize is that there are thousands and thousands of bands who suck and are not getting famous. It’s not a guarantee that you’re gonna do well. You might as well be good in the closet.

Mo: What would you do if suddenly a song of yours became a huge top-10 smash? How would you feel if suddenly that happened and you were being played right next to like, Ricky Martin? My friend and I joked about if your song was being "tap-danced" to at the start of the Grammy Awards… What would you do?

K: (cackling) I don’t think there’s much danger of that! People don’t realize the amount of ambition involved in that kind of success. There are people who will say, "I hate this! I didn’t ask for it!" But a lot of it has to do with your image and your outfit and the kind of song that you’re willing to write, the kind of production that you’re willing to have, what you’re willing to do to sell that, and just, the seed of ambition that I was not born with. A lot of people are extremely ambitious people - whether or not they have a reason to be and usually it’s the ones that don’t – it’s not the ones that are driven by music. But they’re still driven and they don’t really know what to do about that so they sell themselves and that’s exactly what you have to do. Even if I decided I was gonna do that - like for my kids or something - I would be so bad at it that it wouldn’t work.
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Image is something that does concern Kristin, but not in the way one might think. “It would be better if I could really stick by my theory that music is for blacks, whites, gays, straights, males, females, young and old alike and my fans tend to reflect that, but the fact that I’m a straight, white female, I think, probably gets in the way. My face is on the record cover, it’s in the press, and it’s hard for people to get passed saying, ‘Well, men write music about people and women write music about women. So, go girl! You know, do women now!’ And I don’t feel like that’s what I’m doing.”

One way that Kristin has tried to bypass the images the industry creates about her is by working with her husband and manager, Billy O’Connell, to create and maintain the Throwing Music website (www.throwingmusic.com). The site contains history, news, messages from Kristin and fans, discography and order information for hard to find import titles or internet only releases like Murder, Misery and Then Goodnight , and MP3 files. The site has even earned a nomination for Kristin as a “Pioneer Artist on the Internet.” Kristin enjoys the community that has developed around the website. “They just like each other and they keep it going and they buy tickets for each other and give each other rides and they meet up at shows. I’m starting to just kinda disappear from the website,” she laughed. “Which is cool. They’re gonna forget what I ever looked like and then I really don’t have to be ‘straight, white woman’.”

Kristin Hersh is someone who remains surrounded by community; whether it be her cyber fans or her family or her band. She was born on a commune with a hippie dad who played Neil Young, the Carter family, and Patti Smith on his guitar to her unsuspecting ears. His Tennessee mountain roots and folk songs led to the Murder, Misery and Then Goodnight collection of Appalachian traditionals. He also wrote songs, influencing Kristin to pick up a guitar and start a band with her sister. The Throwing Muses were an extremely young group of music enthusiasts… “Somebody said once that it sounded like we were all playing different songs at the same time,” Kristin remarked. “But we wanted to be fascinated every measure. And it made us a little, you know, not groovy - literally ‘not groovy’ - you can sit in a groove and let it become hypnotic and we didn’t really do that. We just kinda went ‘baaah!’ (she makes an explosive sound with a funny face) . I just thought it was a lot of melody.”

The Throwing Muses had a long and illustrious career spanning 12 years and they were critics’ darlings and college radio mainstays. The group stayed together in some form when Kristin began her solo work, but just couldn’t hold out. “I adored my band. I spent more than 10 years living on a bus with those people and every morning I would wake up excited to see them,” she recalled. “They opted off of the American tour (laughing) because we’re all in our thirties and touring is a very hard life. So, I don’t blame them, we’re all pals and everything. They kinda said, ‘Hmm, no, but we’re still friends. Come up with your own set now!’”

Much has been said or written about Kristin Hersh and her songwriting inspirations: family, mental illness, personal trauma… all these things have crept into her lyrics. She found songwriting an unnerving experience at times. “I just would hear songs as if someone was playing a Throwing Muses record in the next room. And that was way too kooky for me. I didn’t want to be a crazy person and it disturbed me so I blocked as many songs as I could. I just thought: ‘No, no, no - please, no more songs.’ And it
would make me sick. I could have seizures from it and I’ve since found out that there’s such a thing as musical epilepsy - where a seizure is associated with a piece of music. Some people have the same piece of music every time. For some people, it’s something they heard on the radio and for some people its music they’ve never heard before. So, I just hated it. It was awful and for two years after the band ended I wasn’t hearing songs and it was just wonderful. Other people would call that ‘writer’s block’, I just called it ‘real life’ and it was so lovely. I just thought, ‘Yay!’ Before this happened, I wanted to be a vet, you know… I was like a little 13 year old kid and, (in a play voice) ‘I’m gonna go be an animal doctor now! This is great!’ But I realized that I was still under contract and I couldn’t keep playing Appalachian folk songs forever… So, I thought, ‘Well, I’m just gonna invite them (songs) while I’ve got this guitar in my lap and I enjoy playing it like the way a runner enjoys running. I like the feel of it.’ So, I played chord progressions I enjoyed and hummed along and thought, ‘Well, Hell, that counts!’ and it actually did. They didn’t suck. They were the same songs I’d always written. I just wasn’t fighting them so they didn’t have to scream at me.”

The result of Kristin’s invitation was Sky Motel. A full fledged rock album with radio friendly pop songs, perhaps the next Throwing Muses album… if there were still a Throwing Muses. The strong melodies, anguished howls and clever phrases abound, mixed with crickets and thunderstorms as a result of her recent stay in the Mojave Desert. “Quiet makes you listen more than noise does,” she commented. The release is on 4AD, the label the Throwing Muses started with in 1986: “I’m the oldest person there - well, not the oldest, but I’ve been there longer than anybody but one guy. And yet their ethic is incredible, I mean, stupid! To care about music as a record company is not very bright, but what they do is wonderful. “

“I’m not offended by the idea of record companies like many artists are. I understand the ‘Sugar Daddy’ aspect of giving bands money to make records. You’re lucky to get the money to make a record. So what if you can’t live off it? On the other hand it would be nice if ‘working musician’ wasn’t a contradiction in terms. If you could actually be like someone’s plumber and say, ‘Alright, fixed your pipes, gimme 20 bucks’ and that’s what we do. You play music and they say ‘Alright, good music - here’s 20 bucks. Go home.’ And then you would actually have a home to go to.”
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Kristin: My dream job is to be someone who can mail out songs and not have to put my name and my face on them and not have to tour - talking about them. Because I do months and months and months of promotional touring all over the world.

Mo: You just get tired of it?

K: Well, plus, I’m nobody! I mean, I’m not famous!

M: Oh, that is SO NOT TRUE! (Mo and K laugh)
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