There’s a Simpsons episode where Lisa shows up at football practice and shouts “That’s right! A GIRL wants to play football!” The coach (Flanders) tells her, “That’s great!” and points out all the other girls who are on the team. Lisa noticeably deflates and mutters that football isn’t really her thing.
This is the scene I think about when I remember the beginnings of Sophomore Level Psychology, the “all-girl, all-rock” band I was a part of here in Ottawa in the early 2000s. I wasn’t passionate about being in a band because I loved playing music. I’d been in a short lived band previously in Peterborough and it was… fine. Rather, I was Lisa Simpson, showing up in Ottawa and shouting “That’s right! A GIRL wants to be in a band!” at the city of dudes with guitars. There were very, very few female-fronted bands in Ottawa in 1999. Even fewer all-lady bands. I wanted to form one. For spite.
The first bandmate I met was Natasha, who came into my life when I took over the job she’d previously had at a very woo-woo health food store called The Wheat Berry. Because we were both cheerful ladies in our mid-twenties with unnaturally coloured hair and vintage clothes, the other people who worked at the health food store kept saying we should meet. When we eventually did I found out that her partner owned the record store where I’d been spending my time and money since moving to the city. It felt like fate.
I still have a note that Natasha wrote me, asking when “this band of ours” was going to form. She quickly took the initiative and introduced me to our drummer Misse and Misse’s guitarist friend Nina. Natasha bought a bass, I dusted off my seldom-played telecaster, and very soon the four of us became a band.
At our first practice we chatted awkwardly and flubbed our way through a cover of Cub’s “New York City”. We realized that our amps weren’t loud enough. We drank herbal tea and talked about what our band name could be. I wanted The Esther Greenwoods after the main character in The Bell Jar, which tells you a lot about my mindset at this particular time in my life. Natasha wanted us to be Tankini. My suggestion was confusing. Hers was perhaps too on the nose for a group of women deeply influenced by Bikini Kill. But the name we ended up with - suggested by Natasha’s sister based on a throwaway line in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer-wasn’t the catchiest band name either. It was just the name that no one deeply hated.
There’s a magic to being in a band. It’s a blatant clique- you’re either in or you’re not. This appealed to me. I also loved the behind the scenes elements, the practices, the songwriting, and conversations we had while standing in Misse’s basement with our instruments. I liked all of that way more than I liked performing.
Natasha was the one who had the biggest dreams for the band, the one who wanted to go full steam ahead and take each next step. Writing songs led to booking gigs which led to mini-tours which led to recording an EP. I didn’t always feel like we were ready to move ahead like that. I know that Nina and Misse also felt like we weren’t “good enough” to keep trying to make inroads in the music scene. We all wanted to get better. But without Natasha’s ambition, we never would have taken any of the brave steps we did. We recorded our album at a real studio. We played at Ladyfest New York. We wrote more and more songs. We opened for some of our favourite bands.
(I’m the one in the kilt)
Eventually our band fell apart, with misaligned ambitions and personal gripes bringing about the end of it all. Some of us (not me) went on to form other bands and some are still playing music even now, twenty four years later.
The reason I wanted to write about this all now was because my forthcoming book has a major plot point that centres on the main character having been in an all female punk band while in her early twenties. The break up of the band was so formative for Allie, my main character, that she’s lived her life in its shadow for a decade by the time the book begins.
I learned a lot from being in the band and I did use some of that in my book. When Allie talks about being on tour and sleeping on the floor of a strange house beside an overflowing litter box, that’s absolutely something I did when our band played in Brooklyn. When she talks about people asking her and her bandmates if they all got their periods at the same time, that’s something that also really happened to us. There are elements of Allie’s memories about writing songs, about carrying gear, about choosing a band name that were all lifted from my own experience.
But the rest of Allie’s band story is not mine. My band ending did not destroy or even derail my life, for one thing. I didn’t lose complete touch with all my former band mates after we broke up. We never recorded a full length record for an indie label, or toured extensively or owned a van (Though we did once borrow one that a coworker of mine was trying to sell. It ran on propane (!) which we could only buy at one gas station in the whole city and the man working there advised us not to buy it for the asking price of $300). Unlike Allie, music wasn’t what I ever wanted as a career. Her story is her own. Which is way more fun, anyway.
March 2024 Songs
If you’re now curious about what our scrappy, early 2000s band sounded like, well, here is Ghost Light, which I think is my favourite of the songs we recorded. It’s a cool a weird song but also great illustration of why one reviewer said we sounded like we were trying to go in two different directions at once.
Allie’s band, The Jetskis, are described as being more pop-punky/screamy than my own band, and I picture them sounding a bit like late-nineties Sleater Kinney. Words and Guitar is one of my enduring SK favourites and it was actually the first Sleater Kinney song I ever heard, when it came crashing out of the tinny speakers of the boombox in my kitchen one night when I was up late listening to Brave New Waves on CBC.
Of all the bands my band opened for, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists were my absolute favourites (though The Gossip came close, they were amazing and Beth Ditto hugged me after we played). I think we opened for Ted Leo twice when the band was touring heavily and they were always the nicest people to chat with and the most fun to watch. It’s impossible to pick a favourite song from the band, but here’s Bottled in Cork which I will always love, and not only because one of the lyrics is “my haircut startled a Canadian…”
March 2024 Feelings
Instead of newer books this time I wanted to go backwards a bit and recommend two memoirs of women from the punk scene that I deeply enjoyed. Carrie Brownstein’s memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl is one of my favourite memoirs of all time. Her writing is incredible, the story is compelling, and when I finished it I did that “I don’t know why I’m crying, but I can’t stop crying” thing in front of my very perplexed husband who gently asked if I was crying because the book was really bad (it wasn’t). The story felt so personal to me because I went to see the band live so many times during the years that Brownstein is writing about. In between shows I was a hardcore fan, buying every record the day it came out and listening to their music constantly. By the time I was in my late 30s and the band was on hiatus I realized I’d burned out on them, and their music was just an unwelcome reminder of my turbulant 20s. I didn’t know until I read this book that Brownstein and I are the same age, and as I was riding out all the heartbreak and drama of my 20s she was doing the same. Her book renewed my love for her band and I hope she writes another book someday. (Also Corin Tucker please also write a memoir, thank you.)
Nancy Barile’s memoir, the perfectly titled I’m Not Holding Your Coat, details her heavy involvement in the early punk scene in the U.S. She wasn’t a musician but she was deeply involved in putting on and attending shows, writing about music, and watching as the scene exploded in real time. Her book manages to capture the frenetic energy of the time, and the love for this brave new kind of music that so thoroughly captured her interest. Barile is also a punk with a happy ending, she married the musician love of her life and started what seems like a very rewarding career as a teacher. She remains connected to the scene (a transcribed convo with her friend Ian MacKaye serves as the introduction to the book) and has carried the spirit of the music with her throughout her adulthood.
Thanks for reading! See you next month.
J.W.
Instagram : @JenniferWhitefordWrites