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Girl germs, no returns: a Bratmobile oral history

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Girl germs, no returns: a Bratmobile oral history

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GIRL GERMS, NO RETURNS: A BRATMOBILE ORAL HISTORY

By

ALLISON WOLFE
________________________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM: THE ARTS)

May 2017

Copyright 2017 Allison Wolfe
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Acknowledgments

I am eternally indebted to my thesis chair, Sasha Anawalt, whose guidance, enthusiasm and
belief in me provided me with the opportunity to do this work. I am extremely grateful for Josh
Kun, my second reader, for his inspiration, patience and wonderful conversations. Much
gratitude to my third reader, Karen Tongson, who makes academia and cultural activism so damn
cool. I am especially grateful to my bandmates, Erin Smith and Molly Neuman, who boldly took
the journey with me and so graciously and meticulously told their stories. Special thanks to my
program mates Katie Antonsson and Kelby Very for their support, editing, copy-editing and
clarity. Much love to Evelyn McDonnell, who encouraged me and helped get me to where I am
now. More love to Erica Flores for editing and lighting a fire under my ass, and to Andrea
Flores, my play and study buddy, for interviewing me for hours. Thank you to Raquel Gutiérrez
and Meghan Farnsworth for encouraging me to go back to school and tell my stories. More thank
yous to the lovely Jonathan Shifflett, Mark McNeill, Gail Light and Mike Ploszek for thesis
guidance. Much gratitude to my inspirational professors James Boyda, Willa Seidenberg, Tim
Page, Sandy Tolan, Karen Lowe, Peggy Bustamante, Amara Aguilar, Alan Mittlestaedt and
George Lavender. Thanks to David Rees for recording hours of my ramblings. Special thanks to
Victor Figueroa, Sebastian Grubaugh, and Tom Norris for technical assistance and allowing me
to haunt the media center. I am indebted to Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail for paving the way for
me and so many women in punk. And finally, much love to my family—Lucinda Wolfe, Molly
Wolfe, Joe Wolfe, Linda Andrews and Jean Beringer—for being so much of my life story. This
thesis is dedicated to the precious memory of my mother, Pat Shively, whose radical life and
raucous stories have allowed me to become who I am today.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 2
Abstract 4
Introduction 5
Allison Wolfe: Girls are the rocks 10
Molly Neuman: If you pull my hair, I’ll kill you 49
Erin Smith: Teenage Gang Deb 68
Conclusion 92
Bibliography 96
Discography 97

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Abstract

As cofounder and singer of an all-girl band, Bratmobile, I sought to connect with like-
minded feminist punks. Along with Bikini Kill and Heavens to Betsy, Bratmobile was one of the
three primary early ‘90s bands associated with riot grrrl. Together we forged a space for punk
girls to come together and discuss issues that were important to us: domestic violence, sexual
harassment and assault, as well as the lack of encouragement and representation of women in
alternative music. Later recognized as an off-shoot of third-wave feminism, riot grrrl attempted
to fill a void within the punk scene and feminist academia.
This thesis provides a sample of oral histories of the three members of my band
Bratmobile. Through recorded, transcribed and edited interviews, this written project reveals
first-person accounts of our cultural activism within the early ‘90s riot grrrl community. I intend
to show how the personal became political as we used the tools available to us in the creation of
a platform for self-representation. These oral histories document a bygone slice of subcultural
American life and provide insight into how our activities emerged from friendship and
community.

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Introduction

“If I died today, the only thing I’d leave behind is a pile of dirty dishes.”

Kathleen Hanna burst into my apartment one day to show me these words she’d scrawled onto a
photo of a sink full of dirty dishes in a one-off booklet she’d made. The lead singer of Bikini Kill
who spearheaded riot grrrl lived down the hall from me in one of downtown Olympia,
Washington’s “punk rock dorms.” It was common for the resident artists and musicians to bust in
on each other to rant and borrow things. When not at school or the rarely available job, we
twenty-somethings sat around making things all day and sharing with each other.

There’s so much I don’t remember, but I know those dishes well. This visual proclamation on the
meaning of our existence—or lack thereof—has stuck with me throughout my life. That sentence
has encouraged me to try to make something of my life, even if just for fear of amounting to
nothing but a waste of space.

Decades later, contemplating life, death and what’s left behind, I sit surrounded by paper
monster piles, a hand-me-down trait from generations of Wolfes. There are bits and pieces,
crumbs and scraps spilling out of everywhere. I wonder what gems or junk fester inside this mess
of mine. I fear it will simply end up being someone else’s dust-mited burden when I pass. What
are my intentions with all this stuff? Should it be preserved and presented smoothly to the
public? Is it only considered art if it’s displayed for others? Does it matter?

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It does. Or at least I hope it does. We strive to lead the lives we want on our own terms, and if
we’re lucky, we live to tell our stories. Otherwise, no one knows what intentions we might have
had with our life and leftovers. When you leave your characterization up to someone else, you
risk being robbed of your agency. Regardless, I am grateful when people’s stories and objects
see the light of day and we can experience something of their essence and era. Yet how much
richer it is coming from the horse’s mouth. Seeing authentic reflections of people like ourselves
breaking ground in the past enables us to imagine and realize our full potential in the present and
future. This thesis is part of my contribution to documenting the creation of such a reflection
within a certain time and place—the community from whence I came.

I came of age within the punk rock music scenes of Olympia, Washington and Washington, DC.
The language of academic feminism didn’t always speak to my young, punk life. Yet, within the
supposedly enlightened punk scene, sexism and other “isms” continued to play out. Some like-
minded girlfriends and I wanted more punk in our feminism and more feminism in our punk.
Together, we mixed social justice concerns with punk “do-it-yourself” sensibilities to create a
space and voice for ourselves and other girls in our scene. With support and participation from
emerging feminist bands like Bikini Kill and Heavens to Betsy, I expressed myself through a
handmade fanzine series Girl Germs, the politicized girl band Bratmobile, and the co-creation of
the punk feminist network riot grrrl. Bridging a cultural gap between punk rock and feminism,
riot grrrl evoked a rapid, passionate response that exceeded our expectations. Riot grrrl’s far-
reaching influence in the lives of young, counter-culture women earned the movement
recognition as a musical strain of third-wave feminism.

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Riot grrrl has often been written about as a reaction to second-wave feminism. In Girls to the
Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, author Sara Marcus wrote that “Allison’s
version of adolescent rebellion was to roll her eyes and declare the women’s movement a stodgy,
mom-ish, uncool relic” (Marcus, 2010, p. 56). My mother, Pat Shively, was indeed a full-on
second-wave feminist, but I didn’t view my activities as a killing-your-mothers kind of thing. I
don’t believe in waves. Just as sexism has always existed, so has the struggle against it. Riot
grrrls were interested in continuing and adding on to feminism with updated terms and new
imagery that related to our modern, lived experiences.

With this thesis, I am setting in motion my vision of documenting the broader riot grrrl
movement through oral histories of its key players, with the hope that they ultimately form the
basis of a book. My long-term goal is to conduct dozens of interviews with riot grrrl–related
community members, chop their testimonies up and reassemble them into a Please Kill Me–style
narrative (McNeil, McCain, 1996) that reflects a multiplicity of perspectives on the same scene.
However, this project is too large for the scope of a thesis, so I sought a more realizable, unifying
theme amongst the interviews I’ve conducted so far.

I chose to narrow my focus and begin this journey close to home by concentrating on the three
members of my own band, Bratmobile, and our relationship to riot grrrl. Bratmobile consisted of
three friends who made fanzines and started a band: Molly Neuman, Erin Smith, and myself,
Allison Wolfe. Without a unified vision or knowing what we were doing, we jumped full-force
into our quest for self-expression and self-representation.

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This thesis project was conceived in the manner and mindset of the zines we created:
conversational, confessional, and confrontational. To capture the personal vernacular of each
band member, I relay our stories through extensive, transcribed interviews. I employ our DIY
spirit in this project by maintaining a highly subjective, first-person, and often stream-of-
consciousness narrative. I present each interview as an independent story that also speaks of a
shared experience. This subjective exploration of collective memory is not meant to be a fact-
checked assertion of historical realism, but rather a testament to the existence of multiple, often
conflicting, truths.

My proximity to Bratmobile and riot grrrl grants me insider knowledge and privileged access to
my project subjects and subject matter. Yet, I worry about its potential hindrances to my story-
gathering. I was concerned about interviewing people close to me whose stories are so tied up in
mine. Would they be honest with me? Would they hold anything back for fear of hurting my
feelings? Would my feelings get hurt? I asked Molly and Erin to be as open and honest as
possible. I assured them that I wanted to get to the heart of the matter, that their interviews were
a testimony of the past, and that I understood that any feelings attached likewise resided in that
history.

I also had concerns about being interviewed (by a friend, Andrea Flores) and inserting myself as
a talking head in the story I’m documenting. I worried that such meddling could be unethical,
self-serving, or seen as an unfair advantage. Yet, this story can’t be told without me. I considered
writing my story, but it seemed incongruous with Molly’s and Erin’s oral histories. I wanted my
voice to come through conversationally and semi-spontaneously like theirs. I also needed a
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recorded interview of myself for future audio and book iterations of this work. I decided to go
through with the experiment of delivering my part of the story via interview.

As something I’ve learned from journalism school and not from zine writing, I edited the
interviews for clarity and story-flow to honor the intended meaning of the interviewees words;
this includes my decision to have Molly and Erin refer to me in third person. I also removed the
interviewers’ questions to highlight each subject’s voice in telling her own story uninterrupted.
Honestly, not many questions were needed, since we’re all good talkers who spin long, rambling
yarns without much prompting. Questions were generally only asked when an interviewee
needed to be reeled in from the edge of a far-off tangent.

Our stories paint a picture of a certain time and subcultural space in pre-cell phone, pre-internet
American history. Young, breaking the rules, and flying by the seats of our pants, we were
discovering punk and redefining it for ourselves. I am documenting our stories, not out of self-
importance or purely for nostalgia’s sake, but to preserve a pocket of cultural activist history that
has the potential to inspire present and future generations into action. These primary source
interviews are crucial to riot grrrl-era storytelling that will show how the personal is political,
and how our activities came out of personal struggles, interpersonal relationships, and a desire to
build community.

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Allison Wolfe: Girls are the rocks

I was born an identical twin in Memphis, Tennessee in 1969. My parents met when my dad was
in med school and my mom was in nursing school. My father, Joe Wolfe, grew up in a strict,
Baptist family in the hills of East Tennessee. My mother, Pat Shively, came from a large, poor,
Croatian-American Catholic family in Ralston, Nebraska. They were very different from each
other but got together anyway. Before they got married and had us, my dad spent a year in
Vietnam as a doctor in the war. While my dad was away, Martin Luther King, Jr., was
assassinated in Memphis, which had a big impact on my mom. That, mixed with her controlling
in-laws, made my mom want to get the hell out of the South. A few years later, she gave my dad
an ultimatum, telling him she didn’t want to raise her kids in Tennessee. They packed it up and
went about as far as you can go and still be in the United States—to Mt. Vernon, Washington in
the Skagit Valley near the border of Canada.

My parents fought a lot. My dad hit my mother in front of us. Witnessing the abuse was stressful,
and we got chronic ear infections and threw up a lot. When my twin sister Cindy and I were
seven and my little sister Molly was two, my mom worked up the courage to leave. One day
when my dad was at work, she took us three kids and split. Our whole lives changed overnight.
We moved to the other side of town and our income dropped significantly. My mother came out
as a lesbian, went vegetarian, and turned into a folk-song-loving hippie, dragging us to no nukes
rallies and lesbian parties on women’s land.

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We visited my dad on weekends until the divorce went through and he moved back to
Tennessee. My Aunt Jean later told me that the judge deemed both of our parents unfit for
custody. But my sister Molly was so young, the court said she had to stay with my mom. They
asked me and Cindy who we wanted to live with. I said that I was going with Molly, and Cindy
said, “I’m going where they’re going.” I don't remember any of it.

My mom had a hard time making ends meet as a hospital nurse with three kids. My dad paid
child support, but it was probably the bare minimum. We moved to Seattle for a year so my mom
could go back to school to become a registered nurse practitioner. She fell in love with her
professor, a doctor named Linda Andrews, who left her husband for my mom. Aunt Jean told me
that when Linda left her husband, he threatened to have us kids taken away from my mom if
Linda didn’t leave him everything in the divorce. It was the ‘70s, it could have happened. Linda
gave it all up to come live with us back in Mt. Vernon.

I was doing gymnastics during this turbulent time. My coach told my mom I had a talent for it
and suggested I go to an Olympics-level academy in Eugene, Oregon. My parents sent me away
for a year to train at this fancy gym, and I got placed in a filthy house with a horrible family. My
parents paid them money that they used for themselves while hardly taking care of me. The
parents would have me babysit their daughter, also a gymnast, who was six years old. I was
eight. We ran around the neighborhood with her older brother stealing chromies and syphoning
gas from cars. There were no rules at all; it was total mayhem. One night the family went out to
pizza for the daughter's birthday. They said they couldn't afford to bring me and left me at home
alone. I sat there watching TV while mice ran all over the place. I was scared and hungry. I made
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mac-n-cheese from the box but didn’t understand the instructions. I poured the cheese pack and
stuff in before draining the water. When they came home I told them, and they just laughed,
“Too bad— that's your dinner.” I didn’t know how to tell my family how bad it was. Finally, my
mom asked me if I wanted to come home.

We moved to Olympia, Washington in 1981 so my mother could start the first women’s health
clinic there. It took years for the business to take off. She worked long hours and was hardly ever
home. My mom performed on-call rape kit exams before they were routinely done in hospitals.
On the rare occasion that a sexual assault case would go to court, my mom would testify using
the forensic evidence. For this, she received death threats in the mail. The feminist clinic also
provided abortions, and anti-choice protesters constantly harassed her and anyone associated
with the clinic. People threw rocks at our house. One weekend, everyone who worked at the
clinic had to rush their pets to the vet because they’d been poisoned. Eventually, Mom started
packing a Glock in a fanny-pack and wearing a bulletproof vest to work.

Around the time we moved to Olympia, my father married my step-mother, Sara Hunter, an
open-minded woman with three kids of her own. Like the Brady Bunch. We spent every summer
and every other Christmas and spring break with my dad in Dyersburg, Tennessee. Our home in
Olympia was loud and liberal with no rules. Then, all of a sudden, we’d be in Tennessee
surrounded by behavior police and going to church every Sunday. My mom would send us with
“Free to Be” and “I'm a mini-feminist” shirts that would annoy our republican relatives. It was
total culture shock.

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Although we grew up in a love-hate relationship with the South, we learned to embrace the
Nashville and Memphis music scenes. While in med school, my father told me he used to go
dancing at Club Paradise, where Ike and Tina Turner were the house band. Meanwhile, at my
mom’s house, women’s folk and country music was on heavy rotation: Joan Baez, Emmylou
Harris, and lesbian musicians on Olivia Records. My favorite records were by Hazel Dickens and
Alice Gerrard, strong women playing bluegrass music with a working-class, feminist message. I
had the privilege of meeting and hanging out with Hazel Dickens years later in Washington, DC.

I also listened over and over to a compilation of Joan Baez songs taped onto cassette when I was
homesick in Eugene. In the late ‘90s, I found myself in a car arguing with Elliott Smith about the
virtues of Bob Dylan versus Joan Baez. He kept going on and on about Dylan, so I told him I
liked Joan Baez better. He asked me to name one good song of hers. I listed the songs that were
dearest to me from that hard time in my childhood, and he informed me that Dylan had written
them all. I yelled, “Well, she has a way better voice than him, and what about ‘Diamonds and
Rust’?” Elliott paused for a while and said, “Okay, I’ll give you that.”

Of course, there comes a time when you explore music on your own. In our tweens, my sister
and I discovered taping things off the radio and our friends’ records. We didn't have much
money, so we didn't go out and buy much stuff ourselves. When we finally did buy our first
record, we realized you could return or exchange it within a week. We would buy a record at the
mall, tape it, then return it and get a new one the next weekend. We thought we had the system
beat.

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New wave kicked in around then, and we especially loved bands like Bow Wow Wow, the B-
52s, Joan Jett, Missing Persons and the Go Go’s. But they were mainstream, out of reach, and
didn’t necessarily influence me to play music. We also obsessed over Duran Duran. We
photocopied the liner notes and memorized every word to every song. But rich, pretty boys on
yachts in “exotic” locales definitely didn’t make me feel like I could play in a band either.

The way we actually started playing music was through nerdy school programs. My fifth grade
teacher created an after-school singing group called the MusiKids. Wearing matching t-shirts and
doing little routines with jazz hands, we sang Neil Diamond and Jimmy Buffet songs at
community centers. My voice changed with puberty, so I decided to play clarinet in middle
school band class. Cindy did percussion. She wanted to be a drummer with a full drum set, but
no one encouraged her and my mom couldn’t afford it, so that didn’t happen. I was first chair
until the three guys behind me challenged me for my chair. I knew they were better players than
me. The week of the challenge, I switched to bass clarinet so I could still be first chair. We
formed a clarinet quartet in which I held down the low end. Our teacher sent us to the state
competition, and we won three years in a row. When I got to high school band, I assumed I'd still
be first chair, but there was an older girl already there on bass clarinet. It’s a gross, gnarly beast
of an instrument—lots of spit drainage.

On our 13th birthday we went to our first concert, Big Country, in Seattle. My mom and her
girlfriend dropped us off. When the band came out to sign autographs, my sister tried to kiss the
singer’s hand and bit it instead. Our second concert was Duran Duran in an arena filled with
rabid, screaming girls with mascara running down their faces. Too vain to wear glasses, I
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couldn’t see much but was too wimpy to leave my assigned, nose-bleed seat in the bleachers. My
sister and our friend hit the floor and pushed their way up to the front near John Taylor. Our
friend got so crushed she passed out and had to be crowd-surfed out of there. Some of the boys at
school made fun of us for being girly Duranimals. Duran Duran were femme guys who wore
make up and were idolized by young girls and gay and bisexual boys. I felt like a lot of people's
criticism of them was homophobic and sexist.

In middle school, Cindy and I were the uncool kids with a lesbian, hippie mother who never
showed up to any extra-curricular activities. We were poorer than most of the kids we knew. My
mom was busy and rarely gave us a ride anywhere. We had to walk half an hour to school in the
rain, which never stops in Olympia. Our classmates would wave while their parents drove past us
with a splash. For a couple years, we were on the free lunch program at school, and the secretary
often drilled us to make sure we were eligible or deserving.

Later on, Mom gave us $10 per week: $5 for allowance and $5 for school lunches. We would try
not to spend our lunch dollars by mooching off of everyone else's leftovers, so we could have
$10 for the weekend. A friend of mine would spit on his food when I came around so I wouldn't
eat it. But I told him I didn't care. He was cute; I'd eat his spit.

One day my mom brought scabies home from work and it took forever to get rid of. So then our
family was the scum of the universe. I was surprised to find out later that the popular kids at
school also felt insecure and gross. I guess it’s all relative.

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By high school, Cindy and I were feeling more confident. Freshman year I started dating a junior
letterman on the swim team. I thought I had it made. We had nothing in common, but I was
thinking, “Sure, I’ll go out with you, whoever you are.” I was just excited that a guy was paying
attention to me. My boyfriend had an old-school, Leave It to Beaver–type family. He was
controlling and had rules about everything, which was the complete opposite of my chaotic
household. He would take me out on uncomfortable, proper dates. One night, my sister was
waiting for him to drop me off at home so we could go to a party down the street. I knew he
couldn’t go because he had swim team early in the morning. The next day, when he found out I’d
been at the party, he freaked. He told me, “When I bring you home after a date, you’re home for
the night.”

I realized I was stuck in boyfriend jail and had to break out. I broke up with him one Saturday
when he came over. My mom was out, but my sister and best friend were hanging out in my
bedroom. I had no idea how to deal with emotions back then. Lord knows what I said to him. He
was really mad and stormed out. When I went back to my room, my sister asked me what was
going on while our friend laughed nervously. All of a sudden, I heard his voice booming in the
house again, yelling at me to come back out. When I did, he grabbed me by the collar, held me
up against the wall, and told me to never laugh at him again. On his way out, he picked up a pan
off the stove and threw it across the kitchen, which broke the handle off the pan and put a hole in
the wall. We kept using that pan and the hole stayed in the wall forever. That guy owes his life to
the fact that my mother wasn’t home.

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I was shocked, stunned. It reminded me of my dad’s behavior and something in me just shut
down. I didn't have the vocabulary or the social consciousness to express it, but I just knew it
was wrong and something had to change. I decided that I couldn’t hang out with ex-boyfriend’s
group of friends or anyone like him ever again. I had a new wave friend and a punk friend who
had been asking me to go out, so I called them up and said, “Okay, I’m hanging out with you
guys now.” I chopped one side of my hair off and started wearing thrift store clothes and hanging
around downtown.

I dove into subcultures, starting out new wave, then gravitating to punk. For such a small town,
the schism between punk and new wave was fierce. Olympia punks weren’t very friendly to me,
but I drank 40s at their parties anyway. I’d see Tobi Vail around with her all-girl band Doris.
They were a year older than me and they all skated. They were cool, but I didn’t feel very cool. I
was fortunate to grow up in Olympia, where I saw a lot of great local bands play, like the
Melvins, Skid Row (who later changed their name to Nirvana) and Beat Happening. But it still
felt fairly male-dominated on stage. I stood back at the shows ‘cause it was violent. I didn't really
see a place for me there, especially as kind of a girlie girl. I was silly, dorky and very immature
for my age.

I saw Skid Row/Nirvana the first time they played Olympia. It was spring of 1987 and the first
time I went to a show on a school night. They played at a warehouse downtown called GESSCO,
an Evergreen State College student-run venue that was about to shut down. The space was big
and empty, aside from piles of wood and junk in the corners. I went to the show alone and got
there early. While I was staring at the piles, Tobi Vail snuck up behind me and said something. I
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knew who she was but I hadn’t met her before. She introduced herself, but she seemed so weird,
I didn’t know what to say. She made me nervous. Skid Row blew me away when they played,
and I distinctly remember thinking they would get really big—not that I knew what that meant.
There couldn’t have been more than 20 people at that show.

Right after graduating high school, I went to Thailand as an exchange student for a year. My
mother’s ex-girlfriend Linda had worked in Bangkok, and some of my best friends in high school
had studied abroad and encouraged me to do it too. It was an amazing learning experience in
many ways and emotionally difficult in others. I loved my village and school, my classmates,
teachers and friends. But my host mother was an unhappy, emotionally abusive person. She ruled
a lonely, loveless home. Every night, I excused myself early to go to my room and study.
Knowledge was the key to my freedom, so I studied the language, customs and maps
obsessively. I learned to sneak around pretty well and even had a secret, older, artist-actor
boyfriend in Bangkok.

When I returned to Olympia the summer of ‘89, Skid Row had changed their name to Nirvana
and the punk scene was thriving. I noticed this new girl stomping around town with a shaved
head and combat boots. Kathleen Hanna had moved to town to go to Evergreen. She always
seemed to be staring people down, and I was intimidated by her. She ran an art space downtown
called Reko Muse with her friend Tammy Rae Carland, and they put on punk shows to help pay
the rent. Half a year later, when Kathleen and I became friends, she told me that she used to hate
me ‘cause every time she saw me I had on a new pair of shoes. Each pair cost a dollar at the
thrift store. It surprised me to hear that someone thought of me as having a lot of nice clothes,
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since we never had that growing up. Discovering thrift stores was liberating for me. Finally, I
could be cool for cheap. Kathleen also informed me that we both went out with the same guy at
the same time. I had no idea.

At the end of that summer, I went to Reko Muse to see a local, growly, all-girl band called
Calamity Jane. I hadn't seen that combination of things in a band before. Another night, while
walking by Reko Muse, I heard a band playing and peeked inside to see who it was. There was
Kathleen with a beet-red face, wailing, at the top of her lungs, lyrics like “Boy poison, Give me a
spanking.” I knew she was tough, but I didn’t know she sang in a band. That image of her stayed
with me.

In the fall of ’89, I went away to college in Eugene, Oregon. The first day in the dorms, I heard
this girl yelling for a long time on the pay phone in the hall. She was clearly going through a
break up, and she terrified me. I had to find out who this fast-talking, bossy girl was. Molly
Neuman was my neighbor in the dorms; we shared a wall. I was intrigued and we became fast
friends. We had special knocks that meant “Good night,” “Meet me in the bathroom,” or “What’s
up?” The shared common bathroom was way bigger than our dorm rooms, so we hung out there
all the time. We would sit on the counters and plot and plan. I've met so many cool girls while
hanging out in bathrooms.

Being from a small town, Molly’s city girl, street smarts fascinated me. She grew up fast and
seemed older than she was. She was into go-go and hip hop and had volunteered for non-profits.
She got me into being more overtly politicized. I had a feminist upbringing, but I kind of took it
20
for granted. I thought, “Oh, that’s just what my mom does.” I didn't see it as something I should
study or work on. Molly influenced me to take socio-political classes, where I learned to see
privilege and oppression systemically. Before you become politically conscious, everything
seems personal without a bigger picture.

I hipped Molly to the do-it-yourself Olympia music scene. I was into the K Records cassettes of
small bands like the Go Team (the original Go Team from Olympia), Spook and the Zombies
and Oklahoma Scramble. Eugene was a hippie town with not a lot going on, so we had to go up
to Olympia to get our all-ages punk fix. Whenever we could, we took the bohemian Green
Tortoise bus or a random ride share up to my mom's house to go to shows and connect with
music people like Tobi and Kathleen.

At the University of Oregon, we were taking progressive sociology classes. In women’s studies
class, both Molly and I used the word “girl” to talk about ourselves and our experiences. Every
time we did, someone in class would correct us, saying, "It's ‘women’." These semantics
arguments got me thinking. I felt like a girl. Molly was 18 and I was 19. We were teenagers.
Why couldn’t we use the word ‘girl’? Why aren’t the lives of young girls taken seriously, and
why doesn’t feminism explore that more? Reclaiming words used against women and forging an
intersection that would speak to the real lives of young, punk girls became important parts of riot
grrrl. We wanted to make our punk rock lives more feminist while making academic feminism
more punk.

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Pre-internet, we didn't have easy access to our foremothers in punk. I saw X play in 1985, so I
knew about Exene. I’d heard about Penelope Houston in the Avengers. Some of our guy friends
used her as an example when we complained that there weren't enough girls represented in
alternative music. They tokenized punk women to try to prove us wrong. “Penelope Houston
exists, she took up the one slot allotted to women in punk, that's enough, so shut up.” These guys
weren’t trying to help us discover stuff that would inspire or encourage us. They didn’t make us
a tape of cool girl bands. They just made us feel dumb for not knowing more about female
musicians without thinking about why that might be.

That first quarter of school, Molly and I were hanging out in the dorm bathroom, brainstorming a
band name. We didn't know how to go about it, but we wanted to be in a band. We loved Prince
and his soundtrack to the Batman movie, which had just come out. We turned the Batmobile into
Bratmobile because we were brats who wanted to be mobile. We were a band in theory for a
long time before we actually started to play. Everything I've done has been a lot of talk before it
happens. But it does happen, eventually.

Molly and I kept saying we were in a band, so we finally got taken to task on that. Calvin
Johnson from K Records called us up in Eugene one day and said, “Hey I'm setting up a
Valentine's Day show with Bikini Kill and Some Velvet Sidewalk in Olympia, and I want you
guys to open.” We said, “Wait. We can’t play this show. We’re not really a band.” And Calvin
said, “Well, you guys come up here all the time saying you’re a band, so why don’t you play?”
He called our bluff. So we went to a guy we knew in Eugene, Robert Christie from the band
Oswald 5-0, and asked him what to do. He gave us the keys to his practice space and let us use
22
their equipment. Great. Now how do we write songs? He said, “That’s easy. Just listen to some
Ramones records.” First of all, I didn't have a Ramones record, but I also thought, “Oh, is that
what everyone does when they start a band? I want us to be different, so we better not listen to
any Ramones.” So bratty. To this day, I don’t own any Ramones records.

Molly bought a car so we could get to our show. We had equipment to bring up and we didn’t
want to deal with the Green Tortoise hippie bus nightmare anymore. She bought a red Galaxie
500 muscle car that she found in the classifieds for $400. She had to turn right around and pour
more money into it, because the brakes were bad and the tires were bald. It had a leaded gas
engine and the interior lights didn't work.

We had no idea if what we wrote qualified as songs. I remember three of the songs: “Girl
Germs,” “Some Special,” and a Spook and the Zombies cover, “Girlfriends Don't Keep.” I think
“Some Special” was the first song I wrote, and “Girl Germs” was the second. Molly played
drums and guitar, switching off between the two for different songs. She had a guitar and had
taken lessons. I had written some poem-song lyrics in a notebook. I tried to play guitar and sing
on one song, but I couldn't do both at the same time, so I only played during the breaks when I
wasn't singing. We couldn't have it all at once.

We made it to our show at the North Shore Surf Club, which used to be the new wave club I
practically lived at freshman year of high school. Corin Tucker, who’s a few years younger than
me, was waiting there to ask if she could film us for a school project at Evergreen. Corin's from
Eugene and went to school in Olympia, and I'm from Olympia and went to college in Eugene. I
23
had already met Corin in high school at a YMCA camp. I saw her again a couple years later in
1989 when the Pixies and Bob Mould played on campus at U. of O. She was with Tracy Sawyer
(from Heavens to Betsy) and another girl. It was Halloween and they all dressed up as witches. It
was so cute.

When we got up on stage, I was terrified. I kept wondering, “Are these really songs? Is this good
or bad?” We only had one singer and one instrument at a time. Bikini Kill was standing up front
cheering us on. I saw Kurt Cobain walk in right when we finished. He got into all the Calvin-
promoted shows for free because he got the K Records logo tattooed on his arm. I jumped off
stage, ran up to Kurt, gave him our fanzine and yelled at him for missing our show. Pat Maley
from Yoyo Studios asked us to record that weekend, which we did. Slim Moon came up to us
and asked if he could put our song “Girl Germs” on a compilation record he wanted to make for
the new label he was starting called Kill Rock Stars (Kill Rock Stars, 1991). Bratmobile was
fortunate to start out in a supportive scene that had a broad definition of music.

All of a sudden, Bratmobile was a real band. Our second show was opening for the Melvins.
Calvin liked to set up shows with seemingly mismatched bands. Kathleen stood in the audience
while we played, and afterwards, she came up and asked us if we were okay. I didn't understand
why she asked that. She told us scary dudes were yelling death threats at us the whole time we
played. Luckily, I'm hard of hearing and have bad eyesight, so I had no idea. Maybe a lot of guys
in the crowd were mad that we got to open for the Melvins and they didn’t. When we got off
stage, I thanked Buzz for letting us play with them. He said he was happy we played with them
and not the usual metal-head dude bands they get paired with. Buzz had recently shaved around
24
the side of his head and spiked his hair up just like Robert Smith. He said, “No one understands;
I hate those kinds of bands. I just like the Cure and stuff like that.”

Grunge was huge in the Northwest well before Nirvana broke. To me, it felt like a new kind of
sexism dressed up in long hair and flannel. Sub Pop used sexist, shock value imagery to sell its
bands. I’m sure they thought it was edgy, but I didn’t see how. We were friends with and liked
some of those bands, but we thought we had something more interesting and important to say.
Shows were still pretty violent then. We would get crushed and bruised, even at 7 Year Bitch and
Babes in Toyland shows. I love those bands, but they didn’t do any crowd control. Not that a
band should be responsible for everything that happens at their shows, but I appreciated bands
like Bikini Kill and Fugazi who stopped the show if people were being abusive in the audience.
Riot grrrl directly addressed violence against women at shows.

I followed Molly back to DC for several school breaks. I signed up for a credit card with a
student promotional deal that gave you two roundtrip plane ticket discount vouchers for $100 to
go anywhere in the continental US. They screwed up and sent me four; that funded my mobility
in Bratmobile.

Molly had become pen pals with Erin Smith, a big Olympia, Beat Happening, K Records fan
who Molly met through Calvin and Lois Maffeo. As soon as we got to DC, we drove out to
Erin's house in Bethesda, picked her up, and drove down to the Embassy, a punk group house in
Mt. Pleasant. Christina Billotte from Autoclave, a band we loved, opened the door and led us
25
down to the basement. We started jamming the minute we got there and wrote a couple songs. So
now Erin and Christina were in the band.

Beat Happening was touring the Northeast with Nation of Ulysses at the same time we were out
there. Molly borrowed her dad's car, saying we were just staying out at Erin's parents' house in
Bethesda all weekend. But instead we drove to Bard College in upstate New York. We kept
getting lost, almost got in a big accident, and got pulled over. That cop was the only person we
met who knew how to get to Bard. He gave us great directions after he gave us a ticket.

Erin and Molly had to get back to DC, but I stayed with Ulysses in the van and went to their
other shows. We all met up again at the Maxwell’s show in Hoboken. Unrest, Nation of Ulysses,
and Beat Happening were on the bill. Ulysses encouraged us to jump on stage and play a song.
We got up there and played the one full song we’d written together. Then we realized we hadn't
come up with an ending, so we kept playing and looking at each other. That song was called
“Stab,” “Stab me and fuck the wound.” The lyrics came from something the guys in the band
Seaweed said to Molly once. Nice, huh? After we played our one song, I went up to the bar to
buy a soda. The bartender gave it to me for free. I was surprised, and he said, “You just played,
didn't you? You can have a free drink.” I was psyched that you could get something for free for
playing a show.

Molly and I flew back to the Northwest feeling excited about the new connections, friends, and
community we made back in DC. We planned to go back for the whole summer. Jen Smith, a
girl who lived in the Embassy and sang a song in the spring break version of Bratmobile, sent me
26
a postcard asking when we were coming back to DC. She told us about a riot that broke out in
Mt. Pleasant, a largely Salvadoran neighborhood, on Cinco de Mayo, 1991. A police officer shot
and injured a Salvadoran-American man in the neighborhood for drinking in public. Tensions
were high in this community that felt ignored and mistreated, and people started protesting. The
cops clamped down, and some cop cars and a fast food joint got torched. A lot of punks also
lived in the neighborhood, and I think some participated. Jen Smith said we needed to come back
and start a “girl riot.” Obviously, our situations weren’t as serious as the conditions that created a
riot in the neighborhood, but her point was that the girls in the scene needed to get together and
get politicized. What Jen Smith wrote in her postcard, combined with Tobi Vail’s use of the term
angry grrl (with two ‘R’s) in her fanzine Jigsaw, formed the basis of the name riot grrrl.

Both Bratmobile and Bikini Kill planned to spend the summer of ’91 in DC. We all wanted to be
there together and make shit happen. Nation of Ulysses took Bikini Kill on tour and ended up in
DC; Molly and I flew out. There was a heat wave all summer and no one had AC. Things got
sticky. Tobi was going out with Ian Svenonius, the singer in Ulysses, and Kathleen started going
out with Tim Green, the guitarist. I guess the idea was that Kathi Wilcox and Steve Gamboa,
both bassists, should go out. But I got together with him and threw a wrench in their perfect
Bikini Kill–Nation of Ulysses plan.

The DC scene seemed to revolve around the guys, but girls definitely ruled Olympia. DC had a
few all-girl punk bands like Autoclave (and Fire Party and Chalk Circle before that), as well as
girls here and there playing in bands with guys. But it didn’t seem like a lot to us. Many of the
27
women in the scene there were very active but weren't necessarily on stage in bands, like
photographer and promoter Cynthia Connolly.

We wanted to connect with more girls in DC, so we set up a meeting. With the keys to Molly’s
dad's office, we had access to a Xerox machine. We decided to announce the meeting in a one
page, folded mini-zine, called riot grrrl, to hand out to girls at shows. The first riot grrrl meeting
was at the Positive Force house in Arlington, Virginia. Some people at the meeting wanted to
meet other girls to play music with, some wanted to share ideas and skills, and some wanted to
form safe-space groups to talk about personal experiences with sexual assault and other forms of
abuse. I don't recall having more meetings that summer, but the connections from that first
meeting endured.

It seemed like the punks in DC, for the most part, came from fairly privileged families, while
most of us coming from Olympia did not. There was somewhat of a class divide. I guess we all
thought of ourselves as middle class, but their middle class was different than ours. Most of the
Olympia punks I knew went to public school and came from single-parent households that
struggled. Many of the DC punks went to private school and grew up in big, immaculate houses
in the suburbs with both parents. I was surprised they considered that to be middle class. It
seemed rich to me.

A progressive, punk rock activist group called Positive Force put on all-ages benefit shows in
churches around Mt. Pleasant and Columbia Heights. There weren’t many other decent options
for shows in DC, and after d.c. space closed down, Positive Force shows were pretty much the
28
only game in town for a while. Because we were in town and politicized, Bratmobile, and
especially Bikini Kill, got asked to play a lot of Positive Force shows. None of the bands ever got
paid. Meanwhile, most of us were broke and could hardly come up with rent. Bikini Kill started
asking to get paid a little for playing benefits. They didn’t ask for much—just $30 or so, enough
to cover dinner since they couldn’t cook at home on show nights. That became quite a
controversy in the scene there. Some people thought that was too capitalist, but Bikini Kill was
just squeaking by. Maybe DC punks could afford to play mostly benefits, but not everyone can. I
was psyched that Bikini Kill confronted the acceptance of women’s work going unpaid and
challenged the assumption that everyone is in the same boat and can afford to play for free.

On the Fourth of July, Bratmobile played a show as a four-piece in Erin's parents’ back yard in
Bethesda. I sang and Erin played guitar. Christina was also on guitar, Molly was on drums, and
they switched off on some songs. The sound was bad. Christina's amp was way louder than
Erin's, so I walked over and turned it down while we were playing. Sacrilege, I know. Christina
was pissed and stormed off as soon as we finished playing. I followed her out to try to talk to her,
but she just said, “This sucks,” and took off. I think she was embarrassed to play in such an
amateur band in front of Fugazi and everyone. We were cramping her style. She’s an amazing
musician with an amazing voice. She didn’t need to be in our band.

Christina split town. We didn’t even know where she went. It took me about a week to figure out
that she had run off to the MacKaye’s family home in Connecticut. Bratmobile had a show
coming up soon at Fort Reno as part of a free outdoor summer concert series that’s been going
on since the ‘70s. We didn’t know what to do. At first we tried to replace Christina. We made
29
Billy Karren from Bikini Kill try to play drums for us. He wandered down to the basement and
tapped on the drums a few times. Then he ran upstairs to make a sandwich and never came back.
So we were like, “Fuck it. We have to do this on our own.” Molly decided to play drums full
time and make Bratmobile a three-piece. Without all the previous randomness, the band was
much more solid. We didn’t need anyone else.

At the end of the summer, everybody went back to Olympia for the International Pop
Underground festival that Candice Pedersen and Calvin from K Records put on. An extended
scene of misfits from all over descended on Olympia to play and hang out. The one-off fest
featured bands like Fugazi, Bikini Kill, L7, the Melvins, Nation of Ulysses, Tribe 8, and Heavens
to Betsy. Bratmobile was the only band to play twice: Girl Night and a 9:00 a.m. week day slot
opening for Kicking Giant and Jad Fair. Even my mom and sister couldn’t make it out that early.
Spin magazine covered the festival, which put Olympia on the indie music map and presented an
alternative to grunge in the Northwest. Then the press tanks started rolling in.

Kathleen and I had an opportunity to start a record label, Riot Grrrl Records. Ian MacKaye
suggested it and said he'd front the money. We thought about it, but Kathleen was busy touring
with Bikini Kill and living in DC, while I was in school and based in Olympia. We didn't really
have the time or energy for it. A lot of thankless grunt work goes into running a record label. We
wanted to be up front, on stage, doing stuff. Looking back, I wish we had done it, instead of
letting semi-creepy dudes from supposedly feminist labels get half the credit and half the money
for our art. Two of these record labels started out with women co-owners. They weren’t allowed
30
full partnership, got pushed out, and are somewhat forgotten in the labels’ histories. I think
keeping it in-house and having girl bands on a girl label would have been really successful.

Molly and I left the University of Oregon after two years and transferred to Evergreen up in
Olympia. We both had been just taking classes we wanted to and not enough required classes.
Evergreen was a hippie college with no grades and few requirements—a school we knew we
could graduate from. Molly hated Eugene and couldn’t wait to leave, but I preferred U. of O.
because I do better in structured environments. But we both knew that Olympia was where we
needed to be, music-wise.

After our summer in DC, we wanted to start having riot grrrl meetings in Olympia too. We had
already been doing riot grrrl–type activities for the past year, but now we had a name for it. The
Olympia meetings were small and intimate. There was backlash from some guys who felt
excluded. They didn't understand the need for a separate, safe space. Usually it was the hardcore,
straight-edge vegans who gave us shit. One of them left an anonymous note for a friend of mine
that said, “If you're wearing a leather jacket, don’t talk about sexism and racism and expect to be
taken seriously.” But most backlash was easily drowned out in a girl power town like Olympia.

Most of the guys in the scene were allies, but when it got down to personal relationships, I
sometimes felt abandoned by them. If you’re a straight, feminist woman, you’re sleeping with
the enemy in a lot of ways. There will always be a degree of misunderstanding. You can discuss
issues, but ultimately, sexism is deeply ingrained in men and hurts women in a personal way.

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People always ask who my songs are about. It's never about one person; it's usually a composite.
If someone thinks a song is about them, they should either think about why that might be or
remember that the world doesn’t revolve around them. Most of my song lyrics bring up sexist
things guys I know have said or done. The anecdotes in my songs serve as an example of how
sexism manifests itself in our everyday lives. I don’t name a particular person because it’s
important to blame the behavior and not the individual. I also try to show how women reinforce
internalized sexism against each other. We're all capable of replicating stereotypical gender roles.

I try to implicate myself in my lyrics as well. My songs explore self-esteem issues in women. It's
a do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do kind of thing. I haven’t always felt strong in my personal
relationships. When I experience a sexist interaction, I usually obsess over it later and wish I had
said this or that. Writing a song about what I should have done can be a way to identify the
problem and start a conversation. I want my cautionary tales to validate other women’s
experiences.

Molly and Erin came from more mainstream backgrounds than I did, and tensions between us
that I thought came from these differences started showing. I felt like Molly was selling out,
whatever that means. I thought I was for the "revolution" and she wasn't. I knew Erin wasn't
from the beginning. Erin worshipped Molly and was secretly in love with her—maybe not so
secretly. Erin backed Molly up on everything and always took her side. I often felt alone in our
threesome.

32
Molly and I went back to DC for a bleak winter break. It was cold, we hardly had any shows set
up, and nothing was going on. I spent the holidays away from my family, and I was miserable.
Steve Gamboa and I fizzled out, and of course, I had to see him around. I sublet Brendan Canty’s
room in the Pirate House, and for some reason our friend Jeremy Blake was hanging around
there a lot then. Visiting from Chicago, Jeremy was a visual artist originally from the DC area
who had roadied for Nation of Ulysses and Bikini Kill. He and I butted heads politically, but
oddly spent a fair amount of time together during the break. One night when we were arguing,
Jeremy held up a butcher knife to make his point. I yelled at him that it proved he was sexist. We
both started laughing. I appreciated that he hung out with me when almost no one else did that
winter.

I was fed up with a lot of the DC guys by then and the girls who I thought catered to them.
Various people from our group didn’t seem interested in being politically progressive anymore. I
thought they just wanted to look cool and take Polaroid pictures of each other. A schism in our
scene grew out of the tension, with a few of us on one side and everyone else on the other. To
me, it was about who was serious and who wasn’t. Obviously, it wasn’t that simple, but that’s
how I felt at the time.

I returned to school in Olympia feeling resentful, but I still wanted to do stuff with my band. The
spring of ’92, Sassy magazine flew Bratmobile out to New York City to play a show. It was right
when the Rodney King riots broke out in Los Angeles. Things were tense in New York in
response; the cops were all out. I felt guilty, knowing that we got flown across the country while
real shit was going down. I thought about the privilege within riot grrrl and how we weren't
33
really questioning enough stuff, like systemic racism. I felt that much of our scene had lost sight
of the politics, and it had become a fashion show. I wrote a song “Polaroid Baby” about it that
weekend. I was thinking, “Okay, most of us in our scene are white, and we’re just taking fucking
Polaroids of ourselves and trying to be cute. Why aren’t we addressing more important things?” I
mentioned the LA riots in the song. Someone once asked me if the song glorified white
supremacy, because of the line, “We’re so white and we’re so cute.” I meant the song to be
sarcastic and to point out hypocrisy within our scene. Maybe it wasn’t clear what I was singing
about, but in my mind, it was. More likely, it wasn’t good enough. The song needed to do better,
and so did we.

Bratmobile hadn’t done a tour yet, so I started planning a summer tour for us and Heavens to
Betsy, a duo made up of Corin Tucker and Tracy Sawyer. Heavens to Betsy were going to
Evergreen and lived communally with several of their friends in student housing. I think they
slept three to a bed. Heavens to Betsy wanted to bring their whole entourage on tour, but I didn’t
see how it would work. They all came downtown to my studio apartment for dinner to discuss
the situation. I put a Runaways record on in the living room area while they took over my
kitchen. I ran across the street to get some soy margarine for them, and when I came back, the
record was in the kitchen with a bite out of it. I don’t know what the hell they were doing with it,
but I was mad. I yelled at them that it was a rare, expensive record that wasn’t even mine. One of
them cried. They thought I was a monster. It probably wasn’t that rare or expensive, ‘cause they
replaced it easily. Almost everyone who didn't need to be on the tour dropped out because I was
such a bitch. Mission accomplished. They still brought two extra people: Corin’s boyfriend Dan
34
and their wacky friend Hannah Sternshein. They needed her ‘cause she owned a car and could
drive.

I booked the whole tour by word of mouth and a photocopied list of contacts from K Records. I
mapped a route and sent a letter and demo tape to the show contact for each town we wanted to
play. I followed up with phone calls. It was a game of leaving answering machine messages to
try to get the other person to call you back. Calling long distance from landlines was expensive. I
called when I thought they wouldn't be home and left a message, hoping they'd call back and pay
for it. Sometimes I lucked out and got whatever stolen calling card number was circulating at the
time. You had to quick make as many calls as possible before the card got cancelled. Right
before leaving on tour, I sent postcards to confirm the shows.

We toured with two cars, mine and Hannah's, and switched off who rode in each car. We went
down to the Bay Area but didn't do LA because it seemed out of the way. I started making out
with a guy Jesse from an East Bay band called Blatz. He followed us to our Sacramento show
with Tiger Trap and brought some friends so he wouldn’t seem like he was just coming to see
me. One of those friends was this guy Chrisser from a band Bumblescrump who Molly ended up
marrying. We stayed up all night going to Yum Yum Donuts. I passed out in Jesse’s van and
woke up to Sharpie graffiti all over my legs. On our way to the Midwest, my car started steaming
so we pulled over at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. I asked for help while wearing a 7
Year Bitch hat and see-through boxer shorts with Sharpie on my legs. Everyone at the gas station
just stared at me.

35
We had to drive all day and night to get to Salt Lake City. We kept having to stop at pay phones
to call the girl who was putting on our show to get directions and see if we could crash with her
when we arrived. Something strange was going on and she wasn’t sure if we could stay with her.
We tried to get a motel room but everything was booked up because of some NASCAR thing. So
we drove to the promoter’s house anyway. It was an eerie scene. She wasn’t there because her
boyfriend had beaten her up. I think he was still there packing his things up and moving out. Her
roommates let us in and showed us to her room but didn’t say anything. We felt like such
assholes.

In Minneapolis I stayed with Babes in Toyland’s roadie Howard. He gave me some of their 7-
inches and a bootleg cassette of their album Fontanelle that hadn’t come out yet. Babes in
Toyland was a major inspiration for me and many riot grrrls, and that tape became my
soundtrack of the tour. The next day I found out that Stefani Sargent, the guitarist from 7 Year
Bitch, died. I was a big fan of theirs and was devastated. Even though we hardly knew each other
and weren’t exactly in the same scene, it was a huge blow, not just to Stefani’s friends and
family, but to a larger community of musicians and women in punk. I poured my heart out in a
long letter to Kat from Babes in Toyland about Stefani and about what Kat’s lyrics and stage
presence meant to me. She later told me that my letter meant so much to her and that it was the
first time she felt like someone really got what she was doing.

Two days before we got to Chicago, we found out that our shows there had fallen through.
Christina Billotte gave me the number of a guy she was dating there named Joaquin who set us
up good. Too good, actually. As soon as I met him I just knew; it was undeniable. He and I
36
started going out immediately, which set off years of tension between Christina and me. Joaquin
booked us a secret show opening for Yo La Tengo at Lounge Ax. It was so secret that no one
showed up. But we got drink tickets, and Erin and Hannah had their first beer ever that night.
They kept giggling and pretending to be drunk. I was outside on the pay phone most of the night
using the stolen calling card Joaquin had given me.

We all stayed at Jeremy Blake’s warehouse. In the morning, Heavens to Betsy called a meeting
to talk about what happened the night before. They lectured us about alcoholism and not wanting
to take care of us on tour. At most, I had two beers while Hannah and Erin drank less than one
beer each. I got mad and said, “Who’s taking care of who here? I booked this whole tour, I call
to get directions to the next town every day, and we’re using my car. And no one was even drunk
last night.” We were halfway through the tour. The Heavens to Betsy camp exuded righteousness
and misery. I loved Corin, but she was so serious about everything all the time. You gotta have
some joy and fun in this life too.

A tornado chased us into Bloomington, Indiana. It also chased away anyone who might have
come to our show. On the way out of town the next day, we stopped at a sandwich shop for 15
minutes. When we came out, someone had broken into Hannah’s car. The thieves actually
moved our tour money bag (left in the car, of course!) and Hannah’s expensive camera
equipment to the side in order to get to Erin’s duffel bag of clothes and Molly’s box of mix tapes.
That’s all they stole. But of all the people they could have stolen from, it had to be Erin. We had
worked hard to get her to agree to go on tour in the first place. We called the police to make a
report. While Erin was crying, the cop told her, “It’s okay. You’re a girl. Now you have an
37
excuse to go shopping.” Then she started wailing. The rest of us gave him a stern, “shut up”
look. She wanted to go home right then and there.

Next, we went off to Louisville, which had a thriving punk scene. We pulled up to the Rocket
House where a lot of musicians who were later in bands like Slint, Rodan, and June of 44 lived;
they all came out to greet us and we hung out on the stoop in the sweltering heat. Hannah walked
in the house and came out five minutes later reporting that she had just made out with someone.
We played ping-pong, put makeup on the guys, and went to Krispee Kreme, which was rare at
the time. We loved it there so much that we cancelled our next two shows and stayed for a week.
Molly was hanging out with one of the Rocket House guys ‘cause he had AC in his room. One
morning she shook us all awake and said, “Get up. We're leaving. Now.” She didn't give us a
reason until we were on the road. She claimed that Jon Cook, whose mom owned the house, was
bellowing through the vents, "Bratmobile, go home."

When we got to our last show of tour in DC, we found out that Nation of Ulysses had added
Christina’s new band Slant 6 to the bill. I didn’t want a fourth band to play because Bratmobile
and Heavens to Betsy were broke and needed the money. At the end of the night, when James
tried to divide the money equally four ways, I told him only the headliner and touring bands
should get paid. He said Slant 6 was about to go on tour, which I didn’t believe. Then they
actually did. Christina was pissed at me for that, on top of the boyfriend tension between us.
Christina’s little sister Mira was at the show that night, looking like Children of the Corn. I
thought she put a curse on me.

38
We all stayed in DC for the rest of the summer. I sublet Jen Smith’s room in a group house that
Kathleen and a guy Ron Pettit from Washington State started. Rachel Carnes and Billy Karren
lived in the pantry. The house was haunted, but I was the only one who seemed to care. Kathleen
put on a riot grrrl convention that Bratmobile played but wasn’t able to partake in. We had to
practice and record our first album Pottymouth that weekend. It cost us 40 bucks for the reel, a
pizza, and a box of hair dye. At the end of the summer, I had to drive my car back across the
country at my own expense with no help from my band.

That school year, I studied in Thailand again for a quarter. Erin thought I was never coming
back. I didn’t want to, but I did. We planned to tour the West Coast, make a new record, and tour
the UK that summer. Erin flew into town right after spring semester ended, and we had three
days to write new songs and practice before tour. That’s how we operated.

Janelle Hessig, a prolific East Bay cartoonist and fanzine writer, roadied for us on that tour. She
was surprisingly quiet. One day in the van she told us about a song that Screeching Weasel wrote
about her and Born Against covered. At the time, I wasn’t a fan of Sam McPheeters, the singer
of Born Against, because of something he’d said in an interview in Spitboy’s fanzine. I told her,
“Fuck that. We can write a better song about you.” I created a fake rivalry, some kind of
“Roxanne, Roxanne” inspired situation. Our song “The Real Janelle” became the title of our next
record with a picture of her on the cover. Janelle told people that we were the biggest shit talkers
she’d ever met.

39
I met Mia Zapata from the Gits on that tour when our paths crossed in San Francisco. She was a
little stand off-ish. Like a lot of female musicians from that era who got mislabeled “riot grrrls,”
she didn’t seem too happy about it. But I was a fan of the Gits and was psyched to find out we’d
be opening for them in LA. We drove down to LA for the first time and quickly loaded into
Jabberjaw. Gary Dent, one of the owners, pulled me aside and told me that Bratmobile needed to
headline the show ‘cause so many riot grrrls had been calling about us. I felt weird about that
‘cause the Gits had been around longer than us and I didn’t want to piss Mia off. Janelle and I
danced and yelled up front the whole time they played. Most of the live footage in The Gits
documentary came from that show, and you can hear us cheering.

When Bratmobile played, it was so crowded, hot, and stifling in there that we had to cut our set
short. Molly’s drum sticks kept flying out of her hands. Raquel Gutiérrez, a confident, tough,
young girl in a band called Tummy Ache planted herself next to me on stage. She helped me sell
merch and explained LA to me. Independent music seemed hard to come by in LA then, and we
sold out of everything.

A week after we got back to Olympia, my mom called me early in the morning and said, “Wake
up. I have to tell you something. A punk woman in Seattle was murdered. Did you know her?” It
was Mia Zapata. I couldn’t believe it. It was so horrible. Besides the sheer evil and injustice of it
all, her murder also tore the Seattle music scene apart. Most rapes and murders happen amongst
people who know each other. I think everyone suspected someone else within their scene. People
were looking at each other, blaming each other. In the end, it was a stranger, but that's kind of
40
rare. It hit close to home and had an impact on the Olympia scene too. It could and does happen
to any woman anywhere.

Bratmobile flew to England the next week. Bikini Kill had played there with Huggy Bear earlier
that year and it was a big hoo-ha. Kathleen sat me down before our tour and told me that England
was really different, that the food was bad and expensive, that there wasn’t always hot water, I
couldn’t take a shower every day, and that I’d be sleeping on hard, cold floors. She scared me, so
I decided to sleep my way across the country. The first night in London we played with Blood
Sausage. The singer Dale Shaw was so drunk he dropped the mic into a full pitcher of beer on
stage. Liz Phair was at the show for some reason, and I begged her to let me stay in her hotel
room that night. No dice. We stayed in Oxford with Heavenly, the band who booked half of our
tour.

A few days later we were hanging out at Jon Slade from Huggy Bear’s house in Brighton. I was
flirting with him in the kitchen. Having broken up with a girlfriend of seven years, he told me he
was single. After the show, I tried to sleep in Jon’s room, but Erin beat me to the punch. I started
clearing a floor space in the hall next to the bathroom. Erin ran out of his room five minutes later
and said I could sleep there instead. I was psyched to have a nice bed to sleep on, with a cute guy
to boot. But when I went into his room, I saw that he slept on the floor with just a sheet
surrounded by a bunch of junk. I was deflated, but we made out anyway.

We played the first week of shows with Heavenly, who were responsible adults; that part of tour
was well-organized. But none of our shows were publicized in Melody Maker or NME. Melody
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Maker had run a tabloid-y story on riot grrrl several months before, and I wrote a bitchy letter to
them in response. It seemed like their chief music writer Everett True was boycotting us. He
wrote one mean review of our London show that pitted us against other women. He had power
and it affected our tour.

Heavenly handed us off to Huggy Bear in Manchester, and we headed to the West Country,
where Jon Slade had booked some weird shows in small towns. He wasn’t in the van because he
has a fear of cars and planes, so he took a train to meet us in St. Ives. When we got there, Jon
wouldn’t acknowledge my existence. That’s when I found out that Jon’s ex-girlfriend of seven
years was Jo Johnson in Huggy Bear. Jon didn’t tell me that. He also didn’t tell me how recently
they had broken up. Jo was freaking out and didn’t allow us to speak to each other. All hell broke
loose and Huggy Bear fought the whole tour.

As soon as we got home, Huggy Bear came to Olympia, minus Jon, and toured the US with the
Frumpies. Tobi, Kathi and Billy from Bikini Kill had started the Frumpies as what seemed like
an anti–Kathleen and Allison band. It felt like a big fuck you, like “Let’s do a band without the
singers who we resent.” So I was like, fuck that band. They seemed exclusive and all about being
cool. I don’t think I went to any Frumpies shows. It’s too bad, because they were a great band.

That's when I met Carrie Brownstein, who later formed Excuse 17 and Sleater-Kinney. She was
a cool fan girl who had just moved to town. Carrie was in love with Jo from Blood Sausage and
Huggy Bear and kept trying to get us all to hang out together. But even on my home turf, Jo
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wouldn't speak to me. I told Carrie she'd never get anywhere with Jo if she kept being seen with
me. So she stopped hanging out with me.

Because Nirvana got so big so quickly, there was a microscope on Northwest music scenes in
general, which found its way to Olympia and riot grrrl. The media jumped on riot grrrl as the
next big thing. We had no experience and no idea how to deal with the media onslaught. We got
misquoted all the time and taken out of context, which made us wary. Within our community, we
shared photos, drawings, and all sorts of things. Some people freely handed materials that didn’t
belong to them over to the press. Our work and images were reproduced in articles without our
knowledge, consent, or compensation.

We didn't feel like we had much to gain from media attention. We did fanzines, bands, and riot
grrrl so we could represent ourselves in ways that were meaningful. When the mainstream media
came in, it felt like they were taking our voices away from us. Ultimately, the bands did gain
something by selling records and getting people to their shows, but there were plenty of riot
grrrls who weren't in bands. The publicity ruined something that was precious to them.

The sensationalist tone of most of the articles made riot grrrl look ridiculous and like a fad or
fashion statement. Our message got watered down, de-fanged and de-clawed. That’s one way to
make something non-threatening. Then companies come in to co-opt your work and repackage a
version of it to sell back at a profit. Urban Outfitters, one of the earliest co-opters, played fake
riot grrrl music in their stores and sold clothing that blatantly bit our style. The Spice Girls
43
straight up took the motto “Girl Power” from riot grrrl publications. It was annoying and things
got weird.

It got to the point where many of us felt we had to stop talking to the press. They always got it
wrong, made us look stupid, and said hurtful things. Kathleen bore the brunt of it. People were
always trying to take her down, at shows, in the press, and even within our community. Fights
broke out at Bikini Kill shows and she had to deal with violent situations or some creep fucking
with her. It's funny, a lot of people talked shit about Bikini Kill but still went to every show. The
media pitted girls against each other, often successfully, and in-fighting started within riot grrrl
and our bands. The press zeroed in on Kathleen, whether she wanted it or not, and she got
accused of trying to speak for everyone in her band, all riot grrrls, and all women in music.

Kathleen called a media blackout, because the stories got too distorted and sucked up too much
of her energy. I supported her and joined the media blackout with many other riot grrrls. But the
articles didn't stop. They just wrote whatever they wanted, made stuff up, and got their “facts”
from previous articles with misinformation. One story said Kathleen was a stripper who was
raped by her father. She didn't grant an interview or offer this information to anyone. People just
assumed her song lyrics were completely autobiographical. Whether the statements were true or
not, and mostly they weren’t, who wants their friends and family to find out such serious,
personal stuff in a national publication? There were no boundaries, and it felt dangerous.

Molly and Erin didn’t agree with me on boycotting the press. They grew up in media-friendly
families and didn’t see the need to go along with the media blackout. Though they were
44
discerning, they didn’t think the press was so bad and saw how it could benefit us. Also,
Bratmobile didn't get as much shit as Bikini Kill, or at least not the same kind of shit. People
thought of us as the kid sister band, funny and ridiculous, and didn’t take us as seriously. Bikini
Kill was Marcia, Bratmobile was the Jan, and Heavens to Betsy was Cindy Brady—or maybe
Heavens to Betsy was the Jan and we were Cindy Brady.

As much as I hated the press, it made our parents accept our lifestyles. You’re suddenly validated
just because someone wrote about you. When I was a student at Evergreen, my final project for a
class was on riot grrrl, and I was somehow about to lose credit. It’s hard to fail at Evergreen. My
professor didn't understand what I was doing. I didn't really, either. I think I did a zine and a
project band. That spring break, my professor went to New York and saw a riot grrrl article
mentioning me in the New York Times or something. When she came back, she suddenly “got it,”
it was valid, and I got full credit.

Many ‘90s female musicians who didn’t identify as riot grrrls got lumped into that label by lazy,
unimaginative journalists. Even bands who paved the way for us, like Hole, L7, and Babes in
Toyland, got called riot grrrls. Not that there’s anything wrong with riot grrrl, but that wasn’t
their scene. The media was happy to tokenize us and pit our bands against each other, acting like
there’s not enough room for all of us in our variety.

Unfortunately, plenty of female musicians took the bait. I get the annoyance at automatically
being labeled a riot grrrl, but the knee-jerk reaction from many punk women played into the
hands of a sexist society. After years of experience and infinite internet access, the press still
45
calls ‘90s or any era of punk women “riot grrrls.” Some women still make a big deal in a
negative tone about not being riot grrrls. While I understand the frustration, the sexist framing of
women in music is not riot grrrl’s fault. Why dis other women? Don’t take the bait.

The media attention put a lot of pressure on the singers of our bands. Our bandmates resented
that we were the ones people focused on. We were made to answer for everyone and everything,
including the behavior of our bandmates. We had to be the spokespeople and say and do all the
right things, while our bandmates could do whatever they wanted. Relationships within our
bands had become strained. We all had strong opinions about everything and couldn’t see
beyond our convictions. It was all or nothing.

Molly and I used to be very close, best friends, and then we started realizing that we were pretty
different from each other. It seemed like she cared more about her boyfriend, her other bands,
and being cool. She probably thought I was always criticizing her. I thought she had traded her
social consciousness for mainstream goals. That's probably not fair. I wasn't cutting her any slack
or allowing her to just be who she is. We each felt betrayed by the other.

The tension between Molly and I had gotten so thick, that we weren't paying attention to any
problems either of us might have had with Erin. Erin probably thought I was too much of a loose
cannon. I felt like she wasn’t taking any risks. Erin was very guarded, careful, and couldn’t take
any curveballs. She had a hard time being spontaneous and going with the flow.

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Bratmobile was pretty disjointed by the spring of ’94, when we got an offer to play a big show at
the Thread Waxing Space in New York. I had recently graduated from college and was
temporarily living and working in Washington, DC. I was going through a lot of turmoil in my
personal life. I was having personal–political conflicts with some girls from Olympia who had
come out to DC. I didn't understand what the problem was but I was bending over backward
trying to. These girls were trying to villainize me and I didn’t stand up for myself. That’s the way
riot grrrl had become—lots of intense blaming.

Molly got flown out for the show, while Erin and I took separate buses up to New York from
DC. We hadn’t practiced or seen each other for half a year or so. In true, last-minute, Bratmobile
style, our sound check was our practice. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore walked in and just
stood there staring at us while we tried to practice. We weren’t really getting along. The drama
trauma with the stalker girls put me in a bad headspace and I hadn't slept. Erin and Molly didn't
understand what was going on with me; it was too convoluted. I was out of my mind.

In our time off, the riot grrrl press seemed to have worked its wonders. We didn’t realize how
popular we had become. We were headlining and the show was sold out. Blonde Redhead
opened; it was their first show. It was the place to be, with Sonic Youth, Joan Jett, Harmony
Korine, and Pussy Galore all there. But we didn’t feel special in any way. I couldn’t fully enjoy
it. It just felt weird to me.

The two girls who had it out for me came up to the show from DC and set up their zines at our
merch table. They were all drama, and I was enabling them. While we were playing, they pushed
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up to the front to yell about a guy who had shoved them or something. I gave them the mic to
yell in. They seemed determined to take over our show. The show was fucking sold out, we were
in the middle of playing and barely even getting along ourselves. Not only did we provide the
entertainment, but we were held responsible for everything—the merch table, security, how
people were feeling and being treated. Lord knows why there was no security in that place, but it
wasn't my fault.

Although I’m sure a lot of it was self-imposed, I felt so much pressure, and I couldn’t handle it.
As riot grrrls, many of us, the singers, did feel responsible for everything at our shows. But it’s
impossible to be. I put these assholes on the guest list, I let them sell their zines at our merch
table, and I gave them the mic when they ambushed our show. Molly and Erin were shaking their
heads, like “What the fuck?” It was complete chaos.

Bratmobile kept starting and stopping as the girls kept interrupting the show. We were probably
halfway through the set when, finally, Molly and Erin said, “Fuck this.” Molly stormed off the
stage and Erin followed. One of them left the building. I started crying. People were taking
pictures. I begged them to come back to finish the set, and they did. We played a few more
songs. Erin said into the mic, “That’s it. We’re through.” Bratmobile broke up on stage, and that
was it.

We went our separate ways and didn't talk for quite a while. They were like, “Fuck you,” and
rightfully so. We were young and didn’t know what the hell we were doing. Everything was do-
or-die. There was no room for compromise. I holed up in a DC basement and didn’t want to have
48
anything to do with riot grrrl or being in a band anymore. I couldn’t handle it. There was so
much backlash anyway, it wasn't hard to feel bad about it all. I was 24 years old and felt like a
failure.

In the end, riot grrrl ate itself. Girls were tearing each other apart. They looked for figureheads,
held them up to impossible standards, and reveled in tearing them down. It turned into a game of
who's more politically right on, who's more privileged or oppressed than who, who's fucked and
who's not. Nothing was ever good enough, and it got to be too much. We all thought that riot
grrrl had gone horribly wrong and felt kind of ashamed of what we'd done or not done.

Riot grrrl was undefined and never had any solid, stated goals. We always said, “There's no
trademark or copyright. Whoever wants to can take it and run with it.” We scattered our shots
and left it too open. People with conflicting motives came in and took over, politicizing their
personal beefs through riot grrrl. I wish we had figured out what we wanted to achieve and had
more focused goals. We should have done more to take over the means of production by starting
a record label and independent publishing house. What would some of our lives be like now if
we had found a way to harness all the energy and opportunities we had?

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Molly Neuman: If you pull my hair, I’ll kill you

Assertive and no-nonsense, Molly was the unofficial leader of Bratmobile. She took care of shit
and made shit happen. Possessing an astute sense of direction, which saved us many times on
our pre-GPS tours, Molly has always known where she’s going, literally and figuratively. As an
only child who grew up with various forms of absentee parenting, her fierce independence
emerged early on out of necessity. I’ve heard people characterize Molly as bossy and aggressive,
traits not often allowed in women, and that’s exactly what drew me to her. Opposites attract and
repel. I often had a hard time understanding her fake-it-till-you-make-it, unbreakable
confidence. I expected Molly to be my replacement twin, which was a tall order, not to mention
impossible.

– Allison

I was born in 1972 in Washington, DC, and lived there until I was three. Then we moved to
California, where my father was from, so he could work on a campaign for a guy named Jerry
Waldie who was running for governor. He didn't win, so we moved back to the Washington area,
to rural Maryland, actually. It wasn't feasible for me to go to the local public school because both
my parents worked in Washington and they didn’t get home until seven at night. So that meant I
had to go to a private school. I started at a Montessori school on Capitol Hill, and then I went to
the Washington International School. It was a bilingual school, and I was in the Spanish
program. We alternated between a day in Spanish and a day in English. My parents didn't speak
50
Spanish, so it was hard to learn a whole different language without any framework at home or
anyone who could help me with my homework.

Growing up in Washington, I had a de facto awareness of the political community and dynamics.
And it certainly was omnipresent in my life because of my father's involvement in political
campaigns when I was young. My father also traveled a lot with Jimmy Carter, advancing press
for the president’s international visits. He would go to whichever country a couple days ahead of
time and set up all the media. It was very glamorous in a way. As a kid, I got postcards from
Cairo, Lagos, Iceland, Poland. But I wouldn't get a phone call. That wasn’t possible in 1976 or
‘77.

I started watching news shows, because I wasn't really allowed to watch any other kind of TV. It
was the news or no TV at all. So I taught myself to enjoy it. Why didn't I go read a book instead
of watching the McLaughlin Group with my parents? Sometimes you just want to check out,
even if it's with four talking-head yahoos.

My parents split up and that was confusing. In the wake of their separation, my mother became
quite religious out of the blue. I was baptized when I was six or seven and started going to
Sunday school. She and I stayed in rural Maryland but still went into Washington all the time.
My dad got remarried when I was ten, and I moved in with him and my stepmother, an energy
law attorney, a year later. My mother stopped being an active part of my life from the time I was
11 until we reconnected when I was about 27. That lack is something you just survive. You make
it work because there’s no other option. I didn’t feel like I could act out or be depressed and
51
despondent. Getting through that is something I'm proud of. I don't want to talk too much about
my parents. I think you could paint most ‘70s parents as a pretty checked out generation. They
were figuring their own shit out, fucking up in various ways, and I don't know how we survived
it.

I got into music at a very young age, partially because we had such a long commute. We listened
to the radio a lot, at least an hour each way. Hits of the ‘70s are embedded in my mitochondria:
“I Will Survive,” Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom,” and the soundtracks to Grease and
Fame. Fame was the first album I ever bought. When I got to high school, I had older friends
who would make me mix tapes. My teenage years were mostly R&B, go-go and hip hop.
“Roxanne, Roxanne” was a huge hit, followed by “Roxanne's Revenge,” the Real Roxanne and
all that. I was aware of the DC punk scene, but I wasn't in it. My friends weren't going to shows,
and I didn't have permission to go to a show by myself. That just wasn't happening yet. But I
knew about the shows from the local paper. Banned in DC, a photobook of DC punk by Cynthia
Connolly, came out in 1988. I got it and studied it.

The summer before I went to college, I was an intern for Congressman Mo Udall who my father
had worked for, for many years. While I had this pretty cush job working on Capitol Hill, I met
this boy Derrick at an intern happy hour down the street. He was a student at Morehouse and was
working for Congressman Dan Glickman from Kansas, who later became Secretary of
Agriculture. We had an intense summer romance. I would not say he was my boyfriend.

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I was influenced by Derrick and a lot of political realities in Washington. Spike Lee’s Do the
Right Thing had just come out. Growing up in Washington, DC, where 70 percent of the
population was African-American, I had a lot of African-American friends and role models who
my father worked with at the Democratic National Committee. I had a sense of consciousness-
raising around race relations that had been brewing for many years. I had pursued knowledge
around African-American culture and issues of race specifically. That was sort of where I felt
comfortable.

Huey Newton died that summer. I went to his funeral by myself on the bus, multiple buses from
the ritzy part of Oakland, where my aunt lived, to East Oakland where the funeral was. It was a
big celebration of life and very intense. It's still one of the most memorable moments of my life.

When I got to college at the University of Oregon and started to take ethnic studies classes, I
started thinking more about my own privileges. I wrote to my high school art teacher, a very
wise man, who was African-American. I was not a good visual artist; I had no talent for it. I don't
know why he put up with me for two years. Maybe he thought I was entertaining. He wrote me
back and said, "I think it's good that you're studying this, but you should also think about your
place in the world as a woman and the marginalization that women experience in society. That's
not something to ignore. You can't suffer for the African-American community and try to come
up with your debt in that way. Also, think about other issues of power." That really struck me as
something I hadn't considered and motivated me to take women's studies classes the next quarter.
It also set me on the path for studying the parallels of ethnic studies, women's studies, political
53
economy, and understanding the framework of power in society that I had kind of taken for
granted.

My mother had been anti-ERA for some reason, and my dad never discussed why. I remember
thinking that seemed pretty lame. My step-mother was very smart and funny, and I knew a lot of
intelligent, independent women who worked with my dad. But I felt that I had not been
encouraged in a feminist way. Girls doing things—that we can do them too—are pretty clear
themes in Bratmobile and in the first fanzines we did. That was a response to not having sexism
or feminism acknowledged specifically while growing up. It's funny to think how those little
messages are interpreted and manifest themselves. Allison, having grown up in a feminist,
lesbian home, had a much different understanding of possibility, strength and power that
manifested itself in other ways.

With the money I'd made at my summer job, I bought an acoustic guitar that I thought would be
a cool accessory to take to college as I forged my new creative identity 3,000 miles from home.
I'm the chick with the guitar! I ended up trading it in for my first electric guitar, a 3/4 scale, 1-
pickup Fender Musicmaster. I took guitar lessons that fall as an elective at U. of O. I also took a
singing class there. I took a lot of electives. I was never going to graduate if I stayed there,
because I never took a course that met any requirement. I only took classes I thought were
interesting. I’d done theater all through high school and started college as an acting major. But I
wasn't feeling it and changed my mind pretty fast. My political sense of things blended more
with my music passion. I was trying to merge the academic, political and creative parts. I wanted
something more authentic and self-expressive—not just other people's words.
54

It was 1989, not an election year. Allison and I were neighbors in the “international dorm” at the
U. of O. She had been a student abroad in Thailand. I was placed there because I had gone to an
international school, and I was sort of annoyed by it. I had never shared a room with anyone
because I was an only child until my brother Frank was born when I was 17. I was high strung
and freaked out. But as it happened, it was one of the fortuitous things of my life, because I met
Allison there.

I had been pretty preppie. My wardrobe was 90 percent J.Crew and 10 percent some other
catalog. Allison wore wacky clothes and pointy glasses, and I was influenced by her style and
vintageness. We became best friends and started hanging out pretty obsessively. We would take
the bus out to some old diner to eat pie, drink coffee, read and write. Because of the energy we
were projecting and the comedy in our dynamic, people were like, “Who are these girls?” We
were a pair of enthusiastic college kids who talked too much. Maybe we never stopped talking.
But I could also shut up. That's the thing about being an only child. Allison is a twin. She had to
fight for everything—the last cookie, the last piece of clothing, the last word. So she always had
to be ready with something to say. That's something I didn't have to do, because I had a lot of
alone time. Allison never had that.

Allison was from Olympia and had all of this cool music from home that she listened to. It
opened up a whole new world for me. I had no idea that bands could be so simplistic. Beat
Happening, Oklahoma Scramble, Spook & the Zombies, Go Team, Some Velvet Sidewalk.
Hearing those bands for the first time, I thought, “What? These are real bands?” We started
55
running around and going to shows. Front and center, music became our vehicle for expressing
all the raw and evolving emotions that people in their late teens and early twenties experience.
Wanting to make music happened pretty early on. All these Olympia people were doing this
simple music that felt accessible. We wanted to do it too, so we did. What was the risk? That we
might suck?

We were a band before we had a song or knew what that meant. Allison and I were hanging out
in the dorm bathroom the night before I left for Christmas in 1989, and we were trying to come
up with a band name. We made a list and decided on Bratmobile, which came from the
popularity of the Batman film. We also wanted to have a girl radio show and a fanzine called
Girl Germs. Making a fanzine, a radio show, a band—it was all the same frenetic activity.
Women role models in punk and indie music weren’t easily available to us. We wanted to help
change that.

Because we kept saying we were a band, Calvin Johnson from K Records asked us to play a
show on Valentine's Day, 1991, in Olympia with Some Velvet Sidewalk and Bikini Kill, a new
band who we were friends with. We realized we’d better fucking write some songs so we could
play the show. We had a little amp, a little guitar and a drum kit. We made up four or five catchy
songs that were about a minute long. Most of our songs had just guitar and voice, or drums and
voice. They probably didn’t have all the requisite parts expected of a song. That's fine; you don't
need those parts.

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I bought a car so we could get to our first show. I wanted a cool car, but the only thing I could
afford to buy was a ’69 or ’71 Galaxie 500, a two-door, red muscle car. It had bald tires and an
alternator problem. The brakes went out on the first day, so that was another $400. And it took
leaded gas. It was a tank, a classic lemon. Somehow we made it to Olympia and back without a
break down.

I was totally frightened at the show. I wore shorts over tights and a big headband holding in my
perm that was still growing out. Fashion was not what it is now. Imagine these two nervous girls
with one instrument playing their weird tunes. But we played our five songs and even recorded
them that weekend.

A couple months before our show, I had gone home to DC for the holidays. Allison didn’t go
with me. We had been working on our first issue of Girl Germs fanzine, and I was on a mission
to print a batch over the break. I had access to a congressman's office, so I snuck in late at night
to make a bunch of photocopies. I got snowed in and had to sleep there.

During that winter break on Boxing Day, I met our future guitarist Erin Smith at a Nation of
Ulysses show. I had heard about her fanzine and that she was a passionate Beat Happening and K
Records fan. Calvin introduced us and I told her I’d send her our zine. She said, “Oh yeah?
Nobody ever does what they say they’re gonna do.” But I did.

I had actually been in the same room as Erin half a year before that when the band Courtney
Love
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played on Erin’s brother’s radio show at the University of Maryland. The singer, Lois Maffeo,
invited me, but I went by myself ‘cause I didn’t know anyone in the DC scene yet. There were a
bunch of cool people there: Brendan Canty and Guy Picciotto from Fugazi and James Canty and
Ian Svenonius from Nation of Ulysses. Someone passed around some cookies. Erin and I were
checking each other out, but we didn't talk.

After meeting Erin and sending her our fanzine, we became pen pals. Allison and I were
planning on spending spring break back in DC, so I wrote Erin and said, “My step-mom just had
a baby. We’re going home for spring break to meet him. Maybe we can jam together.” Of
course, when Allison and I went, we barely met my brother Andy ‘cause we were too busy being
in a band and hanging out.

As soon as we got to DC, we picked up Erin and went down to the Embassy, a punk group
house, to jam with Christina Billotte, who Erin had already been playing with. We were big fans
of Christina’s band Autoclave. Erin played guitar, and Christina and I switched off between
drums and guitar. Another girl who lived in the Embassy, Jen Smith, sang a couple songs with
us.

We did a lot that week. I stole my dad's car. I told him we were going to the Maryland suburbs,
but we drove to Bard College to see Beat Happening and Nation of Ulysses on their Northeast
tour. Allison stayed with Ulysses in their van, while Erin and I drove home and her brother drove
us back up to the Hoboken show. The new Bratmobile ended up playing one song at that show at
Maxwell’s— “Stab,” a fantastic tune. Within a span of seven days or so, we wrote songs, went to
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some out of town shows, and played two shows of our own. And I guess I met my brother. I
barely even remember that part of it.

On that Northeast road trip, we met Chia Pet, a band of women who ran Sassy magazine. We
gave them our zine Girl Germs, which they later featured as “Zine of the Month.” When that
magazine issue came out, my dad left a message on my answering machine saying, “Hey Moll,
saw the review. Good job. I wondered why there were so many extra miles on the car that week."

We went back to the West Coast feeling very connected to the DC punk scene and decided to go
back for the whole summer. DC bands like Nation of Ulysses influenced us a lot with their
politicized presentation and Ulysses Speaks fanzine. They talked about philosophy, Filipino
power and issues that weren’t being discussed much in punk at that time. Ulysses was
charismatic and powerful. Although they weren’t talking about feminist issues, they were allies.
They already had an album out and took Bikini Kill on tour across the country early that
summer. We all ended up in DC for “Riot Grrrl Summer,” 1991, “Revolution Summer Grrrl
Style Now,” or whatever you want to call it.

The name “riot grrrl” came partially from a postcard that Jen Smith sent to Allison and I in the
time between our spring break visit and our return to DC for the summer. Riots had broken out in
Mt. Pleasant, the neighborhood where the punks we knew lived. It was a tumultuous time. Jen
said, “We’re gonna have a girl riot,” or something like that. It also came from Tobi Vail who had
already been using the term “grrl”—with two R’s— in her fanzine Jigsaw when talking about
“angry grrl zines.” Tobi had just printed a new issue of Jigsaw, Bikini Kill put a fanzine out, and
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we had Girl Germs. There was a lot of cool energy around making things, doing things, being
together and getting shit started.

We wanted to connect with punk girls in DC while we were there for the summer. We made a
one-page, folded mini-zine called riot grrrl and passed it out to girls at shows. The zine
announced a meeting and discussed the idea of girls doing things, getting credit for it, and
working together. We held our first riot grrrl meeting at the Positive Force house in the interest
of collective action and community-building.

Riot grrrl started out as just a way for girls in the punk scene to network and talk about things
that were important to us. Later on, as riot grrrl got more and more attention, we all had to
navigate our differences in dealing with the press. I wasn’t on the media blackout side of things.
My dad’s a PR guy, so media attention was part of the currency that won me support from my
parents, or at least less friction. It wasn't frightening or shocking to me like it was for some
people. I can also see the logic in not talking to the mainstream media. I get that. It's never going
to be "accurate" or what you're trying to say. I don't think we navigated it well, but I don't think
we could have. When you're in your early twenties, you don’t have the tools to go through
something that random, unless someone's specifically trying to help you. That certainly wasn't
the case for us.

That summer, my dad helped me get an internship observing an election in Bucharest. It was a
great opportunity, but with my socialist world view, I thought, “Who are we to be there?” Really,
all I wanted to do was hang out with my friends and play music. So I quit that job.
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Bratmobile had some shows lined up that summer as a four piece. We were still an amorphous
band then. At some point Christina was like, “I don't have time for this.” That's when I switched
to drums, and we focused on just the three of us. We were able to do a lot more that way.
Somehow we got a show in New York in July with Kicking Giant and Chia Pet. We opened for
Fugazi at d.c. space at the end of the summer. It was just our two bands and 200 people in the
room. I’m sure some people were thinking, “What the hell is this? Who are these amateurs?
Where’s the bass?” I played on Brendan’s drum set, which includes a big bell. I played it on our
song “Girl Germs” and everyone laughed.

In August, everyone flew to the West Coast to play the International Pop Underground Festival
in Olympia. Then Bratmobile recorded three songs “properly” at Egg Studios in Seattle for a 7-
inch EP on Homestead records. All three of us were still in college. Erin always lived in
Bethesda, Maryland, and Allison and I were transferring from the U. of O. to the Evergreen State
College in Olympia. That was where we needed to be. Bratmobile could only do stuff during
school breaks, so we planned to go back to DC for Christmas and play some shows. I was
already in the organizer role. But these things were not planned well. We played New York again
at the same place with the same line up. We decided to bring our own equipment but didn’t have
a car. We got a Rent-a-Wreck, and of course it broke down. We were stranded in New York, and
it was abysmally cold, but we finally made it home. There were a lot of things that were fucked
up about that trip.

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For the summer of ’92, Allison booked our first tour across the US with Heavens to Betsy. Using
the pre-internet tools we had at our disposal, she gathered phone numbers and mailing addresses
from friends’ bands who had just toured. She mailed letters and called people’s landlines to book
that tour.

The windows for doing everything were very tight. We finished school for the year with only a
week or two before going on tour. Erin was flying out so Bratmobile could practice. That was
right when Lois asked me to play drums on her first solo album recording. I was very flattered,
but it was really bad timing. It was definitely a friction point for Bratmobile while getting ready
for tour. But we survived.

We had zero money. You have to have something to sell on the road, so both bands made demo
tapes. We had recorded a split 7-inch with Heavens to Betsy for K records that was supposed to
be ready in time for tour, but it wasn't. Our friend Girl Sam made a small amount of Bratmobile
T-shirts that sold out before we even left the West Coast. Everything was so shoestring. We
toured in two cars—Allison's car and our friend Hannah Sternshein’s station wagon, which was a
stick. Only three people knew how to drive it: me, Hannah and Corin. The others didn't drive at
all, which was annoying, or couldn't be split up, which was also annoying. On that tour, I ended
up being mostly in the car with Heavens to Betsy and not so much with my band. That's not rad.

We went down the West Coast to the Bay Area. We didn't play LA; how random. By the third
show I had a new boyfriend, who had a girlfriend. I had met my future ex-husband. Things that
happen when you're a rock band on tour, right? For all of our feminist identity politics and
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aspirations, we were still trying to meet boys, or girls, and we did. I would smooch whoever if
they had AC in their room. It was a fucking hot, uncomfortable tour. There were certainly some
smooches of convenience.

When we got to Chicago, we stayed with our friend Jeremy Blake, an art student who had
roadied for Ulysses. A ton of people were crashing at his loft: Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy,
Jeremy’s roommates, and Tobi and Kathi from Bikini Kill, who were heading west in a
driveaway car. There was a conflict at the show that I wasn't paying attention to, some concern
over Erin and Hannah having one drink and being drunk or something. I wasn't around when it
went down initially, but it traveled back to Jeremy’s apartment with us.

The next morning, Allison, Erin and Hannah had to get in a big fight with Corin, Tracy, and
Corin’s boyfriend Dan. Heavens to Betsy were straight edge and vegan as well as feminist
rockers. Seeing Erin and Hannah “drunk” at the show set off Heavens to Betsy’s fears of
alcoholism along with surface-level anxieties and righteousness. The early ‘90s was a time of
straight edge and militant veganism in the punk scene on top of other identity politics. I didn't
drink for five years, from 19 to 24 years old, but I didn’t think of myself as straight edge.
Everybody took themselves very seriously. Erin and Hannah having a beer doesn't mean they’re
alcoholics. There was no rational or mature way to address it. That's okay, we weren't mature.
We were kids.

When we got to Louisville, a town with a happening punk scene at the time, we all posed for a
classic photo on the front porch of the Rocket House. You can see some serious misery on some
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of our faces. There was a letter from my future ex-husband Chris waiting for me there. It
exploded my heart. He said he’d be in New York soon, so I tracked down where and when. Our
next two shows were booked in a 21+ bar in Cleveland and across the border in Toronto.
Heavens to Betsy refused to play shows that weren’t all-ages, and someone in their entourage
didn’t have a passport or driver’s license. I maximized that situation and cancelled the shows so
we could short-cut to DC, where I could take my dad’s car and go to New York. I met the band
in Boston and our last show on the road was in New York. My dad was in town for the 1992
Democratic National Convention and he brought some friends to our Manhattan show. Allison
asked the crowd, “So, who’s gonna take us home tonight?” several times. I was horrified. Joan
Jett was there. My boyfriend was there, with his girlfriend. There was a lot of bad behavior on
many fronts.

The tour ended in Washington, DC, where we all spent the rest of the summer. Bratmobile and
Heavens to Betsy played the Riot Grrrl Convention. Chris and his girlfriend came down for that
and stayed with me. That was weird. Bratmobile recorded our first album, Pottymouth, in just
one day that same week. We asked Tim Green from Ulysses to record us. He had a small studio
in the basement of the Embassy where he lived. Since we didn’t have any money, he did it for
free, basically. We had to record quickly ‘cause Ulysses was going on tour the next day. We
recorded all day, played a show, went back to mix, then went out to get a late night dinner.
Kathleen Hanna went with us to eat at the Georgetown Café. Some guy looked at her the wrong
way or something, and she threw a glass at him. We all got thrown out of there. Exhaustion
mixed with chaos. It was very dramatic.

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Tobi, Kathi and I started talking about playing together in the Frumpies, an idea they already had
of a non-Bikini Kill band. They asked me to play drums. I said yes, of course, because Bikini
Kill was my favorite band. I had a quarter left of school. Allison was going away for a quarter
abroad. That time period began what has continued to be my life: being busy and travelling a lot.
I know a lot of people, and I can be wherever. I feel at home that way.

When I graduated, I moved to the Bay Area where my boyfriend lived. My life was in a new
phase. I had never lived with a boyfriend before. The dynamic of falling in love and trying to
figure that out as a young person became my focus. I was concerned about giving my life to a
guy. Part of me was trying to reconcile my feminist identity with the reality of having a man of
major significance in my life. I decided that the way to make it okay was to tour as much as
possible, so my life wasn’t all about Chris. It was about me doing stuff and still having a
boyfriend. But those are not easy things to reconcile.

For me, 1993 was about doing as much as possible: finishing school, moving, touring. I wanted
to be in bands and tour as much as I could. Everything flowed one into another. I went on tour
with Lois in the UK in January, moved to the Bay Area in February, and in March did a West
Coast tour with Lois and the Spinanes. After moving to Oakland, I had Frumpies practice and
recording and then geared up to do Bratmobile. When was I going to be home? How was I going
to live? What temp job was I going to have to fund this life?

Bratmobile did a West Coast tour in June after our first album came out. We also practiced and
wrote songs for a new EP a few days before tour and recorded it a few days after. Then we flew
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to England, where we played with Blood Sausage, Comet Gain, Heavenly and Huggy Bear.
When Bikini Kill toured there earlier in the year with Huggy Bear, it was sensational, as if the
Sex Pistols had toured. But it wasn’t a media event for us being there. It was cool, some shows
were better than others, but it wasn’t an invasion. These were small shows in small towns. In the
UK, most bands never play outside of London—maybe Brighton, maybe Glasgow. For a lot of
bands, a UK tour is four shows, and we were there for three weeks. We were young and didn't
have any guidance or real support. We did it all on our own with our friends.

We didn’t play with Huggy Bear in London. The shows they set up for us were in the West
Country: St. Ives, Plymouth, Exeter. Both bands stayed with a girl at her parents’ country home
somewhere in Devon. After the show that night, everyone was sitting outside at this big table
getting wasted. They were trying to get me to drink, but I just wanted to call my boyfriend. The
country house had no phone. We were on opposite sides of the world with no means to
communicate. The internet existed only for the defense industry, not for common people. There
was a phone booth about a mile away in the middle of a field. The whole group of us traipsed
down a moonlit path through cow fields to find a red phone box so I could call my boyfriend in
the US. He wasn’t home.

After getting home from Bratmobile’s UK tour, I had to turn right around and do a Frumpies tour
with Huggy Bear in the US. At that point I had really exhausted myself. I had no immune
system, no money, and I didn't know what the hell I was doing. By the time we got half way
through the Frumpies–Huggy Bear tour, I was really cranky. I still didn't drink. I probably should
have. That would've made the whole thing more fun. But I was just angry and tired. We were in
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this gnarly van, getting sweaty every night, not showering enough—a critical explosion of
awesome factors. I ended up getting a massive physical infection, tinea versicolor, an expression
of immune suppression triggered by stress and humidity. I went to the hospital in Minneapolis
because I didn't know what it was. I ended up having to deal with it over the course of my life,
until recently.

When I finally got home from that tour, I decided to get a job and be in love with my boyfriend.
Erin was in Maryland, and Allison was in the process of moving to Washington, DC. We were in
different places logistically and emotionally, but Bratmobile had all this momentum that we
thought we had to keep up. Instead of being rational, responsible people, we just let it explode. If
we had someone to tell us, “You make great work and still care about each other. Why don’t you
take six months off?” who knows how much better it could have been? I don't think we gave
each other enough latitude or consideration to ask for that or know to give it. It was all or
nothing.

Bratmobile got flown across the country, or at least I did, to play a show in New York. That
seemed like a glamorous thing to do. I had just started a job at a biotech company and didn’t
think I could take a day off, so I flew out straight after work that Friday. Allison and Erin came
up separately from DC. We had planned to do some kind of mini-practice at the venue, an art
space. I was beyond tired by then. All of the factors were bad. We were not connected
emotionally or in a good friendship mode. Erin and I were being bitchy to Allison. Erin was
always a little more on my side, and I took advantage of that. Sometimes you manipulate your
friends to rationalize your own bad behavior.
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I think we actually played a pretty good show. We pulled that part off. We were disrupted by
something that happened with two girls we knew at the zine table. They said some guy was
harassing them or something. They stopped the show. It was all dumb, as far as I could tell.
Allison was probably right to allow them to pause the show. But how could we have figured out
what was really going on and dealt with it properly? Erin and I were being brats. We just said,
“This is fucked, you're fucked. We're not going to play.” Then we decided to finish the set and
said, “That’s it. We're broken up.” And that was that. It was dumb and sad.

Nobody did anything wrong. On top of whatever emotional, twenty-something, romance-slash-
politics stuff was involved, I wanted a dramatic excuse. I really just wanted to be at home doing
stuff with my boyfriend. Which is what I did, and I ended up marrying him. That is pretty much
what happened. Everybody could've done things in a more mature way. But we were kids. We
were trying to prove so much without any examples or support. That's why people have
managers.

In an organizational, emotional and business sense, no one went out of their way to help us. We
were on our own. Bratmobile’s specific reality of unnecessary chaos motivated me to manage the
Donnas years later. We didn’t have all the tools you need to be functioning artists in the music
biz. The fact that we weren't able to be successful doing that is not surprising. The nonsense that
we put ourselves through and ended up breaking up over didn’t have to happen.

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Erin Smith: Teenage Gang Deb

Bratmobile talked a lot of shit during the long drives on tour. Ask our one-time roadie, Janelle,
she’ll tell you. She only lasted a few show dates down the 5 and back in California. I’m sure we
annoyed the hell out of her the whole way. Even though we didn’t often see eye-to-eye within the
band, it was usually us against the world on tour. And shit-talking broke up the monotony and
hypnosis of the highway. We made up nicknames for each other along with our own words and
expressions for recurring situations, phrases I still use to this day.

We called our guitarist Erin Smith “Rain Girl” because of her strange ability to recall exact
dates and details of both personal experiences and general cultural events from her lifetime. An
ultra-keen and sometimes harsh observer of people and the behaviors they’re doomed to repeat,
Erin’s pretty good at predicting the future as well. She’d always come crashing down on some
yarn I’d be spinning with her historical facts. Probably too smart for her own good, Erin’s a
know-it-all, which I loved and hated.

Before we met Erin, Molly and I were an extremely mobile hot-air factory trying to figure out
how to make stuff happen. Bratmobile was still a band in theory, more or less, with only one a
cappela ish show under our belts. When Erin joined forces with us, she was the only one in the
official version of Bratmobile who had any real musical experience.

The first time Molly and I set foot into the Smith family’s split-level suburban home, the Brady
Bunch influence Erin’s fanzines proclaimed suddenly made sense to me. Her parents were older
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than ours and exuded a post-Depression, post-war upbringing. Erin’s mother, energetic and
sassy, came from a family of Czech immigrants based in Pennsylvania. She was a sharp woman
with an occasionally sharp tongue. Her children certainly carried on that family trait. Physically
present yet largely absent, Erin’s father generally hid out in the living room with the cats. He
was a World War II fighter pilot and boasted a rural Oregonian accent and an amazing pair of
long, winged eyebrows that definitely took on a life of their own. He didn’t talk much, but when
he did, we loved it. You could feel that something was brewing underneath the surface and that
this household wasn’t exactly TV-idyllic. But then again, whose is? Molly and I certainly had our
own dysfunctional upbringings to reckon with.

– Allison

I was born in Georgetown but lived in Bethesda, Maryland my whole life. I grew up in a
neighborhood with no children, so I grew up very close to my brother. We were extremely
interested in television and reading encyclopedic-type books about TV. We didn’t have cable;
Bethesda got cable in 1987. I watched every network TV show I could and then just pored over
everything and became an expert at anything I was ever interested in. We were always super-fans
of what we liked, and everyone has to respect that. No matter what someone likes, I will respect
whatever it is if you're a good fan of it.

I really got interested in Duran Duran when I was 11. I watched everything I could about them
and bought every magazine with my babysitting money. I started going to a record store in
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Rockville called Yesterday & Today in 1984. I would not be who I am if it weren't for Skip
Groff, the owner. He was such a decent guy and so interested in fandom and in a kid's—an 11-
year-old child's—interests. The record store clerks were Guy Picciotto and Brendan Canty. I
grew up listening to those guys talk about music. They were extremely respectful, treated me like
any normal person, and didn't condescend. I'm sure it was hilarious, because we were like these
two weirdo encyclopedic siblings. My mom brought my brother and me there every single week
to look at records and hear those guys talk while she and the dog waited in the car.

After Duran Duran, I got into Depeche Mode (their Mute days), Daniel Miller and the Normal,
and all the early Mute bands. After that it was the Smiths and collecting each single with all my
dog-sitting and babysitting money. Only after the Smiths did I get into Beat Happening, which is
how I got into super underground culture. But it wasn't my underground culture; it was Olympia,
Washington underground culture. I had a pen pal, John Huston, a record store clerk in Michigan,
who would send me tapes. He gave me a mix tape that had Beat Happening, Talulah Gosh, the
Pastels, Pixies, BMX Bandits. That was really mind-blowing. I really liked the childlike aspect
of Beat Happening and the simplicity of it. It was punk, but it was punk that was accessible to
me. It was a good entry drug. The record store people knew Beat Happening. When I would ask
to see their records, they’d say "Oh Calvin. That guy comes in here. He brought those tapes in
and sold them here." There was a DC connection because Calvin's mom was living in Maryland.
He was coming to DC twice a year at that point.

My brother was four years older than me, but he wasn't driving yet. He was getting my mom to
take us to the record store and was cool with having his sister be there with him. He always
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wanted me to be aware of these parts of culture and fostered my interests. I wasn't into exactly
what he was into, but he wasn't saying anything was bad about what I liked or telling me what to
like. Music was so personal to both of us. We didn't speak to each other that much about it. We
didn't talk about dating, we didn't talk about anything. We just went to the record store together.
By the time I confessed that I liked Beat Happening, he was like, "Oh I saw them. They played
with Unrest in 1987." His best friend in college was Mark Robinson, so he had seen them before
I ever did. I didn't see them until March 14, 1988.

Sometimes my mom would walk in the store and say, "Why is this 7-inch $25?" She yelled at me
in front of Brendan once. I knew what Rites of Spring was. I knew that wasn't my thing yet, but
you know, I was 12. But I knew that was them. I saved anything they wrote with their
handwriting on it. I still have a bag from the Smiths 12-inch that Guy wrote my name on. One
time Ian MacKaye was working at Yesterday & Today, and my brother brought up Egg Hunt or
something that Ian played on and asked, "What do you think about this?" My brother didn't know
he was talking to Ian MacKaye. I knew about Fugazi. I knew exactly who they were; it's just that
I wasn't up to that yet. Really, Nation of Ulysses was my entry. That was more accessible to me,
'cause it wasn't so hard, you know.

My brain was really programmed for music. I would listen to Christmas records over and over,
learn every single lyric, mimic the songs. I couldn't wait to come home to listen to my records—
that kind of kid. I had been playing clarinet. I'd been taking private lessons and was first chair.
Even though I loved Duran Duran, I never thought there was a place for me in that. I would
never be Andy Taylor. I couldn't be one of the guys, wearing the matching outfits. The women I
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was seeing were singers. I was just a little bit young for Joan Jett's peak and just a little bit young
for the Go-Go's peak. I got into playing that kind of music because my brother bought a $100
guitar and a cheap Gorilla amp in the dorms. But he was totally tone deaf, always was. He
couldn't do anything with it, so he gave it to me. That was probably 1988. So I had a guitar, amp
and a pedal that just magically appeared because my brother couldn't use them.

I started taking private lessons every week. It was totally normal. I was always encouraged to do
things artistically. That came from my mom's side of the family. My teacher was a metal dude
named Randy Pfeifer with flowing long hair. I was 15 or 16. I just lucked into the fact that he
was normal about me bringing in only Beat Happening or Shonen Knife cassettes to learn. He
thought Calvin’s voice was deep and weird. He tried to teach me Beatles songs, but I was still
like, “I'm gonna learn ‘I Wanna Eat Choco Bars’."

By this point I had my vintage equipment. My brother moved into a room in a group house that
had been Mike Schulman’s from Black Tambourine. The vacant room had nothing but this black
Teardrop guitar in it, and Mike said, “Oh yeah, I wanna sell it. Would you give me $100 for it?"
So I got my black Kapa Minstrel Teardrop, which is the only thing I’ve ever really played, for
$100. I had been a baby-sitter and a pet-sitter, always saving money. I knew enough about mid-
century equipment to buy a Sears Silvertone amp, with the head that could be stored in the body
of it, for $150. Beat Happening used Silvertones. The music I played at that time was very much
in an Olympia vein, much more so than in a DC vein.

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One time when I was at my guitar lesson, the door was open, and some random high school guy
peeked in and said, "Do you know what you have there? That is a Vox Mark VI." Of course, it’s
a Kapa Minstrel, which is a fake Vox Mark VI. I just sat there. I didn't even tell him off. What's
the point? That was just one of those early experiences when I thought, "Man, these guys really
suck. They don't want me to even have ownership of my own equipment. Of course, I know
exactly what I have."

I went out to Olympia for a visit in 1989 to think about going to Evergreen, which I didn't end up
doing. But I met Lois Maffeo in person, who I'd known all about. By the time I was a senior in
high school, Lois had moved from Olympia to DC. She didn't really know a lot of people and
was like, "I'm gonna play music with this teenage girl I know." Thank god she gave me a chance.
It’s kind of funny, 'cause she was probably 26, and I was a high school senior. She just said,
"How ‘bout if I come to your parents' house and we just jam sometime?" So that's what we did. I
had a yard sale drum kit as well, so she was playing guitar and I was playing drums. I had started
writing songs at that point. I had written "Love Thing," which later became a Bratmobile song. I
played "Love Thing" on guitar with Lois, and she must've been playing drums. There was some
other song that became a Courtney Love (the band, not the person) song that she played guitar on
and had me playing drums. I did stand-up drumming. We were called Bobby Socks Bandit
Queens and played at d.c. space on March 26, 1990. I was still in high school, and I remember
saying into the mic that I had a science test the next day.

At Walt Whitman High School, I worked on a big project senior year where we tried to get the
school to celebrate Women's History Month. That had never been done there before. We learned
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all these women’s studies things, this presentation was given, and nobody liked that. My own
guy friends, who I thought were cool, wouldn't wear the pink ribbons. I couldn't believe that they
didn't want to support us. It was just shocking.

In the spring of senior year, I wanted to try out for the talent show doing a Beat Happening song
"Cast a Shadow" with my best friend Yoomie and Emily Tagliabue, now Rockefeller, who's dad
was the football commissioner. We were going do this Beat Happening song as an all-girl group.
I was really getting into all-girl groups like Autoclave and Thee Headcoatees. We were all ready
outside the auditorium to do our tryout for the talent show. There were these high school guys
from a band called Squid, that later changed their name, who saw me in the hall outside the
auditorium and said, "Whose guitar is that?" It wasn't even "Nice guitar" or "You don't know
what you have." It was, "That isn't even yours." We were going to do standup drumming, which
was common in Olympia and was totally normal with a band like Courtney Love or later, Rachel
Carnes. Beat Happening did it. And these guys who didn't even know me just said, "What is that,
African rhythms or something?" I didn't get it, ‘cause I was extremely knowledgeable about
music. I felt like the world had wronged me. I thought, “I’ll show them!”

Of course, what we played was so weird, avant-garde and minimalist that we didn't get into the
talent show. But Squid did, and they played a Red Hot Chili Peppers cover. That lit a fire. I had a
family that was super supportive of that stuff. In other parts of my life, I didn't have to fight
against people who didn't think a girl couldn't do this. It was more like fighting against the
teenage boys of the world. I don't think age is ever an excuse for that kind of asinine behavior. I
don't care. Some people would say, "Oh 16-year-old boys are like that." No—I don't think so.
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And then to not get in the talent show, it just really made me feel like I had to show the world
that somehow I could do something. In high school, they didn’t quite get it, it was before punk
broke. But my own community believed in me. When I think about the timeline of that talent
show, I must have been playing at d.c. space just a few weeks after that incident. None of these
guys were ever going to play d.c. space, and they never did. They had minor success later as a
different band, but no one's writing any books about them.

Outside of high school, in the DC music scene, I wasn't feeling a whole lot of oppression., But I
wasn't into hardcore. I was into this fuzzy Beat Happening stuff that had a woman in it. I was
seeing that women were doing these things. I knew there weren't as many, but it was like, “Okay,
I can't be Andy Taylor, but Lois is doing this, and Heather Lewis from Beat Happening is doing
this.” And I was super into the Go Team, so I was seeing Tobi do it too. There was nobody
acting like I couldn't. All anyone ever did was act like I could.

I was encouraged by most of the guys that I knew. It sounds kind of unbelievable, but my
brother's best friends were Mark Robinson and the Slumberland Records guys, who later became
Velocity Girl. These are not assholes. If you listen to early audio of the first show in March of
'91 that I played with Bratmobile, you can hear Jim Spellman say, "Your sister's a good guitar
player, Don." He didn't have to say that. I probably wasn't even a good guitar player then. But
there was nobody yelling at us to get off the stage at that point. I know there were lots of people
in DC in the '80s who saw something different, but it just wasn't my particular experience.

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Weirdly, the first person who really told me I should play music is Jeff McDonald from Redd
Kross. They had known us from writing Teenage Gang Debs, our fanzine, so they knew us as
super pop culture fans. He was just like, “Okay Don, your sister plays guitar?” I told him I could
play covers, and I told him I was too shy. Jeff said two important things, which were, "Stop
being shy and start writing original music." So that's what I did. But I didn't stop being shy.

After playing with Lois, Christina Billotte said, “Do you wanna come jam?” I'd gone to
elementary school with her since the ‘70s and knew her family. I later met Christina through Ian
Svenonius or Fugazi. Then we put together that we had known each other as children. And I'd
known her sister Mira because I was her crossing guard. In 1990 I started to see Christina’s band
Autoclave and was a massive fan. I was at every single show. In the waning days of Autoclave,
when she saw the writing on the wall that they were breaking up, she asked me to play with her.
In the winter and spring of my freshman year of college I would go down to her group house, the
Embassy, and jam for hours. I'd been practicing a lot. I had written my own songs, so I had
material to bring to it. Christina wanted to call it Black Eye. It was me, her and Mira, who was
probably still in junior high. Mira was other-worldly. I remember her staring out the window and
saying, "The moon, it's just a sliver." I don't think Mira was there every week, but it was always
me and Christina. That went on for a few months. Eventually, I said, “Hey my friends, my pen
pals Molly and Allison, are coming to town. I think they want to jam with us. What do you
think?” She was like, “All right.” Little did she know what she was getting into, ‘cause my pen
pals took me away!

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I first met Molly when my brother had Lois’ band Courtney Love up on his radio show at
WMUC, probably June 24, 1990, and she came as an audience member. Molly had come home
to visit DC the summer after her freshman year of college. She knew Lois vaguely through
Calvin. When Courtney Love played my brother's radio show, there were probably five people
there: me, Molly, Guy, Pat Maley and Lois from Courtney Love, and that's it. It's sort of like that
first Sex Pistols show when every person in the audience started a band.

When we really connected was actually that December—December 26, 1990, at d.c. space at a
Nation of Ulysses show. DC always had great Boxing Day punk shows after Christmas. Molly
was there, and I remembered her vaguely from the Courtney Love radio show, but we hadn’t
really talked before. This time she went right up to me and introduced herself. She said, "I do a
fanzine and I'm gonna send you a copy." Well that's what everybody said, and no one ever sent
anyone a copy. People just said whatever and never followed up. What was different about her is
that she actually sent the fanzine. We became pen pals after that.

Then Molly came back for spring break, March of ’91, and she brought Allison with her. I was
going to the University of Maryland. I remember the minute that I opened the door, there Allison
was in her backwards 7 Year Bitch baseball cap, a trucker mud-flap girl pin, shorts and a big gas
station jacket. It was unlike any fashion DC had ever seen. I'm in my sedate, J.Crew navy or
black jeans, and she’s wearing shorts with long underwear, the jacket and the hat, bouncing
around on the front steps. I was like, “Whoa,” ‘cause she wasn’t very much like Molly. Molly
and I were very similar, I thought. I was just like, "Wow, who is this girl?" But it worked out. It
all made sense in the end.
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We met up at my parents' house but went straight to the Embassy to practice. Molly and Allison
had never been to the Embassy. I was trying to give directions; Molly was annoyed with my bad
directions. I told Christina my friends were coming. She was okay with it. Christina and I were a
unit, and Molly and Allison were a unit. But she didn’t know what she was getting into. We
walked in that door, and it was like we were a gang. Molly and Allison were a known quantity.
Mark Robinson had met them because they had seen his band Unrest play. "Oh those girls! They
dropped some walnuts or something down the staircase." And Ian Svenonius knew them. "It's
those girls from Olympia or Eugene or wherever!" They were a funny package deal. Mollison.
Mallison.

There were a whole bunch of girls that were right around our age in DC at the time who were
creative, not all in bands, and they were interested in hanging out. It was like a cultural
exchange. The Autoclave girls, Melissa Klein, who made fanzines, and Jen Smith were living in
the Embassy. Jen could sing and had written lyrics. By the time Christina and I were playing
there was not a lot of Autoclave going on anymore.

We followed Beat Happening and Nation of Ulysses on the road for a week. It wasn't my spring
break, so I missed a lot of school. I missed a French exam. Molly didn't tell her dad she took the
car. Half a year later, when he heard the story, he was like "So that's what was up with the
mileage." Chia Pet, the girls from Sassy magazine, opened the show at Bard College. Unrest was
on the bill when we stormed the stage up at Maxwell's on March 16, 1991. We played “Stab.”
We played a show at Abi’s in College Park on March 20, I think. Somehow, we did all of this.
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Molly and Allison came to town, and then I ended up on stage playing a show with them by the
end of their trip. They couldn’t possibly have been in town for more than two weeks.

I always pretend Molly and Allison were just a cappella until I joined. Molly's a way better
drummer than guitar player, so it all ended up how it should have. With all of the extra people,
we were doing these shows where we switcherooed. It was a derailing mess. At our first real
show at Abi’s, there was a lot of talking, someone messed up their guitar strap, something fell off
someone else. Allison played guitar Jeff Healey–style, playing guitar on the stage floor with her
back to the audience. I knew that it had better potential than what we were reaching. We were all
four doing all the songs, but then we had guest musicians. I knew these guest musicians were not
going to leave their jobs and move for the band. They weren't in it for the long haul. Then when
Molly and Allison went back to the West Coast, they played some shows with some other people
like Jenny Toomey, Michelle Noel, Tobi Vail and Kathi Wilcox. It was hard for me because I
had written all these songs that I brought to the table. We were doing really well together, but
then they let someone else play my songs.

Molly and Allison’s college was on the quarter system, so they were not back in DC that early in
the summer. In the month of June, 1991, I lived up in New York and worked as an intern for
Sassy magazine. But I wanted to come back to DC for the rest of the summer, 'cause Allison and
Molly were coming to town and all these things were going to be happening. I was coming back
on the weekends from my internship, and then I came back for the summer, and we were all
three practicing again with Christina.

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Somehow by the time of the Fort Reno show, July 11, 1991, we didn't have guest singers
anymore. We were to play as a four-piece, but it turned out that Christina had driven up to
Connecticut that week. She just left town without a word to us! While she was parking at Fort
Reno, Molly rammed into the car of some guy she had liked in high school. Then suddenly we
were on stage as a three-piece for the first time, and that's just what happened.

We basically took over, ‘cause the three of us really bonded. We were just gelling with each
other, and it wasn’t really working before. Christina would kind of leave the room. It just wasn't
her thing. And then she and I eventually just did not play together, and instead we three
continued playing together. I think Christina was much more "professional" and really wanted to
be in a more professional band. We played in a much more goofy, sing-songy, Olympia vein; we
were not serious. God love her, but she's more serious. I guess she was pushed out in a way. She
was just different. Molly, Allison and I had the same musical sensibility. Christina told me, very
seriously, early on, "You're going to be in a much better band someday." And I really wasn't in a
much better band, ever. ‘Cause there is no better band.

I remember Molly coming into my bedroom at my parents' house and saying, "I wanna do a
fanzine. I wanna know what you think. I don't know if I should call this zine riot grrrl or Ms.
45." And I said, "Call it riot grrrl." ‘Cause I thought Ms. 45 reminded me of the cult film and”
was too violent. “Riot grrrl” has a better ring to it. So this whole movement, if it had started with
a zine called Ms. 45, I don't think it would have taken off at all. The first issue of the riot grrrl
zine was first passed out at my parents' house on the Fourth of July in Bethesda, Maryland. So I
want to say the birthplace of riot grrrl is Bethesda. I'm making that point! Before there was a riot
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grrrl, before there was a word for it, we got compared all the time to Beat Happening, even in
early print reviews. And Bikini Kill got compared to X-Ray Spex. Bratmobile and Bikini Kill
were friends and sister bands and suddenly had a name for what we were doing. Then it became
riot grrrl music. It was a zine that my friends were doing, and then it just became a name for a
genre.

The whole scene was centered in Mt. Pleasant, and there had been the Mt. Pleasant riot just after
Molly and Allison had visited in the spring. I remember the riot happening and needing to get to
the Embassy to get our demo from Jen Smith. I didn't have a tape of our music, and I needed to
practice the songs. I also wanted the time capsule of what we'd done together. Somehow Jen
Smith had the only cassette of the demo that we recorded and was going to dub it for everybody.
Isn't that funny? She had the only means to dub this cassette. That's how we had to do things
back then. I had to cross the police lines and go through to Mt. Pleasant, breaking curfew during
the riot, to get this cassette from Jen Smith's bedroom. Why it couldn't wait or she couldn't mail
it, I do not know. Jen Smith was writing to Allison and said that Molly and Allison needed to
come back to DC. They had blown away the scene with their goofy antics. Jen wrote something
like, “If you come back, there's gonna be a girl riot.”

And Tobi brought the “grrrl.” She had been talking about “angry grrl” zines for a while. When I
was doing my fanzines, Teenage Gang Debs and Action Teen, zines were mostly a male thing.
The only female zine editors I knew were me, Tobi Vail and Donna Dresch. There were very few
women making their own publications.

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Throughout the '80s, the world was run by baby boomers. Every single aspect of mainstream
publications was what baby boomers wanted to talk about. Gen X wasn’t old enough to have
those kinds of jobs yet. Fanzines were super important because that was the only place we could
read and write about what mattered to us. I just thought, “There's nowhere I can read about what
I'm interested in, so I'm gonna have to write it myself.” People like Donna Dresch and Tobi Vail
were making fanzines about their scene and the music they were into. That was the only place
you could read about that stuff. Weeklies like the Washington City Paper would never have
written about Bratmobile. Even underground publications wouldn't have written about that stuff.
Gen X had to be in control of something, and we had to do it ourselves if it was going to happen
at all.

Tobi sent me the first issue of the Bikini Kill zine while I was in college. Living in the UMD
dorms was not a great experience for me. My brother's years at Maryland were the ultimate
coolest ever. He was there with the very beginnings of Slumberland Records, what became Black
Tambourine, Mark Robinson and the beginning of Unrest. It was not like that for me. I was
feeling pretty isolated, because the school people around me were not into weird underground
stuff. Everybody I knew who was into this stuff was older or living in a group house. I had a few
hours before class and just sat in the dorms and read that zine cover to cover. It absolutely blew
my mind. I suddenly felt that I had the secret to the universe. I sat in class after reading Bikini
Kill fanzine and felt everybody else was an alien. I went back to the dorms and thought my
roommate was an idiot. Bikini Kill were saying, in writing, things that I hadn’t heard before. I
didn't take women's studies classes. It was life changing for me. I wanted to be in my girl gang
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with my bandmates, but I was stuck out in College Park. I couldn't wait to get with like-minded
people who understood that.

My relationship with Sassy magazine began in the fall of 1990 when they wrote about my
fanzine Teenage Gang Debs and made it the second "Zine of the Month" ever. They took me
seriously from the beginning. I had been a pen pal of theirs, I went up to New York to visit them,
and they were extremely open about letting me intern there. Basically, I could do no wrong. Any
kind of weird underground culture I wanted to expose them to, they were like, “Of course, we'll
totally write about that.” It got into a mainstream publication, which was a big deal at that
time. This was right when people say that punk broke, when Nirvana was kind of letting the
underground out, right when things were starting to get weird. Sassy had sections like "Cute
Band Alert." When I started my relationship with them, “Cute Band Alert” started to be girl
bands more frequently. Bratmobile and Bikini Kill both got “Cute Band Alert.” Obscure fanzines
became "Zine of the Month." So I never had quite the anger about the media co-opting riot
grrrl or whatever you want to call it. Sassy was the first mainstream publication that ever wrote
about riot grrrl. I was happy about that, 'cause I think the work should be out. If you think about
it that way, it's much better than keeping it clique-ish, keeping it super underground. With a thing
like feminism, the word has to get out to everybody. It can't just be this insular thing, or you're
not helping who needs to hear it.

I was allowed to be a taste-maker, and what a weird person to pick. I was never told no. I was
never told that's not cool. I was always told yes. We were never in a practice space saying to
each other, “What you're playing isn’t good.” None of Bratmobile have ever been that way with
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each other. I thought the world was like that. I worked with Sassy until they folded in 1994.
Those women were forward-thinking enough to say, “Wow. What these kids are doing is cool,”
or, “We need to showcase more feminism in this magazine.” They were already doing anti-
dieting ads. They were doing a lot of progressive stuff.

The Sassy staff called me all the time. It was before the internet. They were about to interview
Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. They were kind of feeling it out, writing questions, and asked
me what I knew about them. They knew I knew people in the Northwest. I just said, “I think
they're on heroin.” But I didn't really know what heroin was. I was very sheltered, very naive. I
didn't think the writer was going to say anything. You wouldn't go to Kurt and Courtney’s faces
and say, "Erin Smith says you're on heroin!" I thought those were the rules of gossip. Courtney
started telling people that I was a stripping heroin addict. I found that out through Dale Crover
from the Melvins, who told me that there was a fanzine Courtney made with my face in it with
god knows what. When Nirvana played Saturday Night Live, Kathi Wilcox went up to New York
for it. She told me that Courtney was ranting about me right before the SNL performance.
"You're friends with Erin Smith? She's been talking shit..." Then Eric Erlandson, the guitarist in
Hole, came up to me at a show in ‘92 and said, "Hey do you wanna trade needles?" I was super
naive still, had never drunk a beer. I was like, “What?” I think Courtney put him up to it. I don't
know why he thought it was okay to talk to a 19-year-old like that, but he did. Later, in ’95, Patty
Schemel, Hole’s drummer, came up to me at Lollapalooza. She was actually happy and nice. She
wasn't trying to trade needles. I've been scared of Eric ever since. I'm a little afraid to be on
record saying this even now, because of Courtney.

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One time, much later, I was in Texas, and Jenny Hoyston from Erase Errata, who I love and
admire, was drunk and talking to me. She was like, “The media just ruined riot grrrl.” And I
asked Jenny, "Well, how did you first find out about riot grrrl?" She said, "I found out about it
from Spin magazine 'cause I was from a small town." We can't be so pious, think we're too cool,
or think that everyone had access to this obscure underground network of zines, because they
really didn't. Jenny was reached because Julie Cafritz' sister wrote about it in Spin magazine. I
feel like there were clear benefits from outlets like Sassy, a well-known teenage girl publication.
That's where a lot of people we know first found out about riot grrrl. Something they were
reading and had a subscription to anyway suddenly became this subversive tool. I was one of the
people creating this subversive content for them. Someone like Ian Svenonius could be the
“Sassiest Boy in America.” The mainstream press was good in that it got the word out. That's
what we want.

Certainly, lots of ridiculously uneducated articles and stupid things were also written. I know
there were awful downsides to it. None of it involved me specifically, so I'm not as angry about
it. The parts I was involved in were positive. The people who heard about it from those
publications were people who went on to do brilliant things. I'm glad they heard about it. They
weren't able to go to cool punk shows in their small towns, because there weren’t any. They
didn't necessarily have a network of zinesters to connect with.

There were plenty of times I didn't talk. In retrospect, it's pretty funny. I remember when the
Washington Post called me at my parents’ house. Because I'd been in all these publications for
my own fanzine, they knew how to reach me. Somehow they knew I was part of riot grrrl. The
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Washington Post called, and they wanted to do an article on riot grrrl in late 1991. I must gotten
tipped off from other riot grrrls, so I said, "Only 50-year-old white guys read the Washington
Post. We don't care what 50-year-old white guys think."

I had been on the Sally Jesse Raphael show once for my fanzine. Somehow they knew I was part
of this band, and they had my name in their rolodex. I got a call from someone at the Sally Jesse
Raphael show with a heavy New York accent saying they wanted the "rioting daughters" to
debate David Lee Roth about feminism. I had been warned that this was going around. They
never got me 'cause I was in school and just heard them on the answering machine.

There were a lot of things I can name that we didn't do. I still feel good about the press that I did
do because I don't think it was horrible. I wasn't involved in the articles that people were really
angry about, where people were horribly misquoted or things were written that weren't true.
Those were a lot of people’s real experiences, but it wasn’t mine. I appreciate how regular people
got into underground music this way. People I know like Anna Garza got into it first through my
TV fanzine. Now she’s in charge of the girl rock camp in Houston, is involved in all kinds of
LGBTQ work, and has influenced hundreds of people.

In the summer of 1992, Bratmobile went on tour across the country with Heavens to Betsy. None
of us had ever been to most of these states. Nobody had released any records yet. We didn't have
a product. Later, we had one 7-inch, the Kiss and Ride 7-inch. We didn’t get our K Records split
7-inch with Heavens to Betsy to sell until August, after the tour was over. Records would be
recorded and released a year later, because small labels hadn't gotten their act together with
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producing things yet. It's funny when you think about how these things ever happened. We were
doing so much, being involved in underground networks in each town, playing at the weird
venue with the weirdos who went to all the shows, not 'cause they knew who we were, but just
because they were into weird stuff and weird culture. I think that generally, during that first tour,
we got treated pretty well. I don't remember a lot of anger. Maybe it's the kind of places or cities
we played. Stuff didn't really get thrown at us. I remember a pretty warm reception in each indie
community we played. That’s how we met all these punk pockets of people that everybody
knows now. We met Tara Jane O'Neil and all the Louisville people, the Tribe 8 and San
Francisco crew. Corin Tucker had never even been to California before.

Fast-forward to May of 1994, Bratmobile got asked to play a show with Flipper at the Thread
Waxing Space in New York. We had not played together as a band since August of '93 in
England. We normally spent every school break together, but Molly had met her future husband
at this point and we didn’t do a spring break stint that year. We agreed to play the show on the
condition that they pay the travel, rent equipment for us, and provide some time and space to
practice, 'cause we hadn’t practiced in so many months. We were always doing stuff last minute.
We would practice the day before playing a show or recording a record. We had made a name
for ourselves by then because riot grrrl had been going for a few years. We were getting bigger
and bigger in all our time off and weren't really able to enjoy that or capitalize on that. At some
point Flipper was off the bill, we were headlining the show, and Blonde Redhead were opening.
We were crazy to agree to this thing.

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So, ta da! Molly flew in, Allison took the bus up from DC, and my brother drove me up. We
were staying at Julie Cafritz' apartment. I was ready for this. It was a little nerve-racking
knowing we hadn't played together for a long time. We got to the venue and practice on the
stage. Very strange. And there was no rental equipment. Time was ticking. How were we going
to practice? What were we going to do? We got practice equipment hours later. Allison was
getting all riled up from whatever was going on in her personal life back in Olympia and DC.
She was being accused of things I didn't think were fair. I was like, “Screw anybody that got her
head in this weird space, because now I'm dealing with the fallout. We're just trying to play this
show.” Allison was being mistreated, and the weird mood she was in was the last thing we
needed to deal with.

After finally getting the equipment, I felt like we were not getting serious about the practice. I
was trying to play the “Real Janelle” and Allison kept singing Danzig lyrics. I was like, “We
have to get down to brass tacks and practice. We're screwed!” It was just us three and my brother
there, who said, “Hold it together girls.” Then in walked Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, who
were there to hang an art exhibit. For some reason, Allison didn't recognize them. Kim and
Thurston were privy to our practice, and it was going very badly. They were gawking at us while
trying to hang an art show, god forbid. And we couldn't get serious. I don't think we got in a
whole set. It was going to be awful, that’s all I knew. I still have nightmares where I have to play
a show and there's no practice.

Allison was still extremely distraught about the stuff from back home. Somebody had messed
with her head. I told her, “They don't know you. Don't let anyone treat you like that, especially
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these horrible people from the West Coast.” Harmony Korine was in the audience. Jon Spencer
was in the audience. Of course, all of Sonic Youth were there. Julie Cafritz was too. Joan Jett
decided to come to the show. We hadn't practiced very well. I knew it wouldn't be great, but I
didn't think it would be horrible.

Then we found out that the girls from back home who had been messing with Allison not only
were in town, but Allison had let them in on the guest list. The “pest list!” I was like, “What?
Screw these people! I don't know who these people are, so why is she letting them into our inner
circle?” I didn't even know how Molly figured into this. God knows what she was doing. I felt
like I wanted to shelter Allison from these people, but she was her own worst enemy. I didn't
even know who she was anymore. Kim and Thurston and all these people who I idolize were
going to see this, and then Joan was there. I'd hardly had a drink in my life, but Joan was making
sure that I had many drinks that night. I made her hold the door for me in the bathroom. I could
hear whoever she was with from the Blackhearts through the bathroom door saying, "Are you
trying to get her drunk?"

Blonde Redhead got through their opening set. No one knew who they were. They were on
Smells Like Records, so Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth was there with record moguls. I don't
know what the problem in the audience was, but some guy was screwing with the people who
were screwing with Allison. They said they got roughed up. I didn't know whether to believe it,
'cause they had already been saying horrible things and acting awful. These people were loose
cannons. I didn't even know what happened, if it was true or not. I don't want to seem heartless
about girls getting beat up at shows, but I just couldn't trust those girls.
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We were barely chugging through these songs that we had barely practiced. Then these girls
decided that they were going to take over our stage. They took the mic from Allison, and she let
them. She gave them the mic. I was thinking, “I'm playing this show in front of all these people I
idolize, and now Allison has given these girls the mic.”

Joan Jett decided to spend the entirety of the show next to my amp, behind me, while I played
these songs I hardly remembered. Joan just came up behind me, started giving me a pretty fierce
back rub, and said, "Do you want me to take care of them? I'll get 'em off of there!" I was like,
"No, Joan." So she just stayed there protecting my equipment and rubbing my back, while these
girls took over the mic. They were trying to shut the show down. It made me turn on Allison. I
felt that she had given away her power to these people who were full of crap and didn't deserve
any of it. Allison had not respected the effort we had all put in to get there, to practice and play.
It was the biggest show we had ever played. We kept starting and stopping songs. I think I tried
to knock Allison off the stage a couple times. In the end, these girls had taken control one too
many times. I got on the mic—and I never speak— and said, "I am not going to play shows with
you anymore!" I left the stage. Or Molly left the stage and somehow took all the merch. We
never sold any merch that night. I don't know how short our set ended up being. At least I got
some good back rubs out of it.

That was May 9, 1994, and the next week I graduated from college. It was hard. Every single
school break I had known had been with Bratmobile. I just felt like someone else took away our
power. Thurston Moore ended up writing it up for Art Forum, saying it was amazing
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performance art. People thought that it was actually an art piece. They didn't know if it was
really the truth that we'd broken up on stage. It was a great article with a great photo of me. I got
recognized at White Flint Mall while buying the Art Forum issue we’re in.

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Conclusion

“We never set out with a unified agenda about being women/girls making music, although we all
agreed that it was cool. We all have different ideas about a lot of things, but because we’ve been
represented and misrepresented so many times, the only way we have been able to represent
ourselves is by putting out records (which also unclearly reflect circumstances of money, time,
and state of mind) and doing tours whenever we can. Now we live in three different parts of the
country, so it’s even harder for us to communicate as a band, but if anyone would like to
communicate with us individually, please do.” (Bratmobile, 1994.)

Bratmobile’s statement in the liner notes of our final record, The Real Janelle, hinted at our
insurmountable differences and difficulties with self-representation that foreshadowed our
demise. Our experiences didn’t exist in a vacuum, and many of our peers and sister bands
seemed to be falling apart as well. With no clear vision or goals, riot grrrl was eating itself. We
all dealt with it as best we could—or wiped our hands of it and walked away.

While aiming to be creative, politicized and accessible, riot grrrl and the bands associated with it
fell short in many ways. Many of us were becoming socially conscious for the first time and
stumbled through it on the public stage. We were also coming to terms with our own freshly
excavated hardships. Understandably, riot grrrl didn’t speak to all women and felt exclusive to
some. Many of us could talk about privilege and oppression in theoretical terms but had little
connection to the real-life experiences of those we left out. Our ignorance and inability to
coalition-build took a toll on those who felt othered and on the efficacy of our movement.
93

Riot grrrl, as a whole, is remembered as not being very intersectional. I get that. Because riot
grrrl was so loose and undefined, it’s hard to know who, exactly, was involved and what they
were doing. For her part, Kathleen Hanna, who initiated the movement, was very intersectional
in her thinking; she constantly talked, read and wrote about intersectionality, before that term
was broadly used. Most of us original riot grrrls read and talked about broader issues of -isms,
but we usually wrote about our own experiences, which were admittedly limited. Though I
acknowledge the short-comings of riot grrrl and how they’re not acceptable to many, it’s hard for
me to dismiss the whole thing as simply a straight, white, middle-class feminism. It certainly was
in many ways and wasn’t in others. My only challenge of this notion is that I don’t want to erase
the vital existence and contributions of participating women who didn’t fit that mold.

Most of us who had been associated with riot grrrl left it behind with a bitter taste in our mouths.
We focused on our failures and didn’t think of our work in that era as important or worthy of
historicizing. Mostly, we just wanted to sweep it under the rug and move on. We all continued to
make and do cool stuff, but separately, as individuals. We didn’t even talk about what we’d
achieved together. It took years before we found ourselves in the same room together again and
began to feel validated as part of a historical movement.

A decade or so later, riot grrrl became a hot topic in academia; I have sat for many thesis
interviews and spoken to several university classes. Although I’m flattered to have my work
validated and written into history, it’s time for us to tell our own stories. We strove to represent
ourselves back then and should continue to do so now.
94

This thesis does just that by presenting mini-oral histories of my band Bratmobile within the
larger context of riot grrrl. I gathered extensive interviews from the three members of
Bratmobile, piecing together what each of us remembers to create first-person narratives that
come from our lived experiences. The memories and perspectives of my bandmates conflicted
with mine in surprising ways that reinforced my commitment to honoring multiple truths. The
process of interviewing, transcribing and editing our stories proved to be more emotional and
time-consuming than I had expected. I worked more meticulously than usual because the subject
matter is close to my heart and we have often felt misrepresented. I wanted to get it “right” by
allowing the protagonists to have control over their own representation through this oral history.

Though I’m proud of Bratmobile and riot grrrl, I don’t feel that what we did during that time is
any more or less important than other cultural activists of the era. And that’s the point: that any
and all of us can come together to speak out in ways that make sense to us in our everyday lives
and communities. Within my peer group, there were many inspiring examples of young women
who fearlessly expressed themselves through cultivating their own raw talent. I would not have
pursued a life as a singer and performer without the backing of a supportive community.

Occupying the intersection of feminism and punk, riot grrrls took over the means of production
to represent ourselves and to create and participate in our own culture. We have moved on but
realize the power in telling our own stories. It’s crucial that the stories of marginalized people are
told, that their art is seen, and that they are written into history. People need to see images like
themselves reflected back at them in order to feel inspired, accepted, and not alone. Storytelling
95
reveals what’s human in all of us, connects us to a community, and bears witness to societal
struggles. When even one person tells me how Bratmobile or riot grrrl impacted their life
positively, it makes it all worthwhile. The personal is political, and the political is personal.

96
Bibliography

Marcus, Sara. Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. New York: Harper
Perennial, 2010.

McNeil, Legs and McCain, Gillian. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. New
York: Grove Press, 1996.

Neuman, Molly. Interview by Allison Wolfe. November 3 and 13, 2016.

Smith, Erin. Interview by Allison Wolfe. March 19, 2016.

Wolfe, Allison. Interview by Andrea Flores. January 1, 2017.

97
Discography

Bratmobile. Kiss and Ride. Homestead HMS178-7, 1992, vinyl 7-inch.
Bratmobile. Peel Session. Strange Fruit SFPSCD089, 1994, compact disc EP.
Bratmobile. Pottymouth. Kill Rock Stars 208, 1993, vinyl LP.

Bratmobile. The Real Janelle. Kill Rock Stars 219, 1994, vinyl EP.

Bratmobile/Tiger Trap. Throwaway/Words and Smiles. Four Letter Words FLW 008, 1992, vinyl
7-inch.

Heavens to Betsy/Bratmobile. My Secret/Cool Schmool. K PUNK 1, 1992, vinyl 7-inch.

Various. Kill Rock Stars. Kill Rock Stars KRS 201, 1991, vinyl LP compilation.

Abstract (if available)

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Asset Metadata

Creator Wolfe, Allison (author)

Core Title Girl germs, no returns: a Bratmobile oral history

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism (The Arts)

Publication Date 02/15/2017

Defense Date 02/15/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Bratmobile,feminism,OAI-PMH Harvest,punk,Riot Grrrl

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Anawalt, Sasha (committee chair), Kun, Josh (committee member), Tongson, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email allisoncwolfe@gmail.com,wolfea@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-338598

Unique identifier UC11258323

Identifier etd-WolfeAllis-5071.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-338598 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-WolfeAllis-5071.pdf

Dmrecord 338598

Document Type Thesis

Rights Wolfe, Allison

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA