Gretchen Phillips - Just Right
by Sue Barrett
Now she’s remembering/
Now she’s feeling/
It is not dark/
It is not light/
It is just right
(Gretchen Phillips — 'Goons')
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Gretchen Phillips
pix by J D Samson |
Gretchen Phillips is a Texas native — born in Galveston, grew up in Houston (played in The Folk Group, with Sara Hickman, in high school). After moving to Austin in 1981, Gretchen became involved with the punk scene, being part of Meat Joy (Best Avante-Garde/Experimental Band in The Austin Chronicle’s 1984-85 Music Poll). Since then, Gretchen has performed solo and in bands, including Buffalo Gals, Girls in the Nose, Two Nice Girls (college radio hits with ‘Sweet Jane (With Affection)’ and ‘I Spent My Last $10.00 (On Birth Control and Beer)’), Dusty Trails, Lord Douglas Phillips, Gretchen Phillips Xperience, The Gretchen Phillips Ministries and the New York City dyke/fag duo Phillips&Driver. Gretchen was inducted into The Austin Chronicle’s 2000-2001 Music Poll Hall of Fame; recently recorded a new solo album (I Was Just Comforting Her); and is progressively re-releasing the Two Nice Girls’ recordings. Girls in the Nose features in Lee Fleming’s book, Hot Licks: Lesbian Musicians of Note.!
How did you become a performer?
My parents were in band — it was kinda folky and they played acoustic instruments. Their gimmick was that my father collected instruments from all over the world. It was not a very big band by any means — they played mostly covers at Holiday Inn lounges.
I studied music when I was very young. I was also studying acting. And I thought that that was what I’d be — an actor/scientist. Then, when I was 12, Janis Ian was popular with ‘At Seventeen’ and she was on television a lot and I was cast under her spell. I think it was a combination of a good singer-songwriter that was topically relevant to my adolescence and her dykeyness that was so compelling to me. So I decided, at 12, to be a singer-songwriter.
When did you become aware of performers singing songs about lesbian lives?
I’d say it was with Janis Ian. I started to research her — to go to the library and look her up — and there had been a Village Voice article where she was talking about being bisexual. I was very affected by that — I think that it was because I wasn’t really out to myself yet, but was trying to imagine whether I was relating to these songs because they were actually lesbian songs. Thinking about her musically really, really, really helped me grapple with how things can be defined through music and what sort of feelings and longings can be expressed through a song that can be troubling, but not in a way that spells anything bad, but is in fact stirring and doesn’t necessarily offer an easy answer.
I haven’t ever played with Janis — but she came to a Two Nice Girls show. I’d set up the merch, I looked up, she’s the first one in line. My jaw dropped and I said, “You get everything for free, ’cause none of this would be here if it weren’t for you.”
How you go about writing your songs?
I don’t sit down every day — I’m not very workmanlike about it! Basically how it happens is that I get struck by lightening and I write a song.
Why do you write about lesbian lives?
I think that it’s fascinating. I think that because our perspective is under-represented, there is much to be said. I also had the good fortune of becoming very close, when I was 18, to a women here in Austin, Kay Turner — who was 15 years older and had been in many lesbian bands already on the east coast before she came down to Texas — and we started Girls in the Nose together. Kay really modeled for me a kind of songwriting that was about lesbian culture, in addition to it being about the specificity of “me and this girl”. And that is something that I love very much about Girls in the Nose and about Kay’s influence on me.
It is interesting to me to contextualize in terms of a cultural movement and where does lesbianism fit inside of the bigger picture? I have always been very, very interested in recruitment. I’ve always been interested in propaganda. I’m very interested in making lesbianism as attractive as possible. And I think that it’s important to talk about what else you can get when you choose to be a lesbian — which is, that you can get a community of geniuses who are fun and funny — which is definitely how I would describe my lesbian circles. So I need to be singing anthemic recruitment songs that tell how much fun it is to be part of this community.
Tell us a bit about some of your songs that tell of lesbian lives
‘Queer Song’ is about someone who wants to be queer but is afraid and someone telling her that you can be afraid, it will be okay, because I’m so in love with you anyway and you’re gonna get to have a happy life, you’re gonna get to be inside a community. It’s an anthem. It’s a recruitment anthem.
‘Meat’ is kinda of about the barbecue, the gathering. The barbecue is sort of our version of the pot luck. You’re potentially gonna have some lesbian drama — drink some beer, swap some wives, but you gonna have great fun!
What makes people more receptive, or less receptive, to songs about lesbians?
My theory for the success of Last $10 is that it is a lesbian song with a man in it center. It’s “he”, “he”, “he”, “him”, “him”, “him”, “Lester” this, “Lester” that, over and over and over again. So there is inclusion of men, rather than exclusion. I didn’t do that intentionally, but I certainly reap the benefits of a lesbian song with a man in it center!
In the 1980s and 1990s, to what extent were there risks associated with being an openly lesbian performer? Are there still risks today?
I don’t know that we knew what the risks would be when we started out. You don’t necessarily know about the gigs you didn’t get because you were out, because you didn’t get ’em and you didn’t necessarily hear that that is why you didn’t get ’em.
I think that on a deeper psychological level, I was scared that I would be killed for it. But I had a missionary zeal that made me feel like risking my life to say what I wanted to say. It’s a world of gay bashing. And so certainly being public means that you could be a public target.
People who I knew who came out later, after their careers were established — they might have read as really dykey, but they weren’t ever saying that they were — I think that they were afraid that they wouldn’t have a career at all, or they would have a career that to them felt really limited to “merely women’s music labels”, smaller audiences rather than their dreams of a wider mainstream success, that they would be marginalised.
I think that there are still risks today. That stuff swings back and forth. You know, the problem with homophobia is that its roots are in sexism — and that is, I think, the initial “ism”. I think the very first primary divide is “Is it a boy or a girl?” and that other oppressions are based on that notion of difference — the model is the sexual difference. Because sexism is such a gigantic and basic oppression, it’s going to take a tremendous amount to dismantle it on a tremendous number of fronts. And so you can have that homophobia and sexism reignited against you in waves due to a political climate over and over and over and over again.
What advice do you have for emerging performers?
Have fun. Try to be present for it. It’s scary. But you can miss a lot of it — it can become fuzzy and numb — so try to schedule in such a way that you’re not doing 90 dates in 100 days. For me, creativity is vital. What we need for world-wide liberation is for people to be in touch with their creativity. And sometimes it can happen that when you’ve gotten to manifesting your dreams — you’re in the recording studio, you’re on tour — you’re so flipped out, because it’s happening now, that you get scared and so you bring a case of beer to the recording study and you make sure that you have a bunch of beer in your rider for the gig and you can really miss it. So just see how present you can be, so that you can experience those magical moments of having a career.
Is it still difficult for female performers to be taken seriously/have a long career?
I’d say that that is something that has definitely improved since the ’80s and ’90s. You didn’t even hardly ever hear but a small handful of woman on the radio in the ’80s — there were the few that were selected and then that was it.
I really believe that people can make lives for themselves if they hone in on what it is that they want to do. For example, I have a certain size room [venue] that I have for many, many years thought that if this is the sized room that I end up playing for the rest of my life, that’s not a bad touring life. I think that dreaming is the way you can manifest these things. I think that it can be easy for people who start out in their 20s, to shift their priorities come their 30s — where fame isn’t important to them any more — thinking about a mortgage, thinking about a family, thinking about stuff that can really slow them down. And you see this with men and women. But there are women with totally sustained careers — Patti Smith, Yoko Ono, Marianne Faithful. We will always have forces against us, that is part of the current, that’s how life works — if it’s not an outside force like homophobia, then it’s your own f****** inertia or some personal thing that is going on for you. The degree to which it happens is how much do you love, just love, the creative process.
What have you been doing over the past year? And what’s coming up?
I really busied myself re-issuing the first Two Nice Girls album. I knew that I was THE person to re-issue it the way I wanted it to be — ’cause I’m very particular. So I needed the packaging to be a certain way and I needed it to include certain things.
I’ve finished a new record and have to get a label for it. The record’s called, I Was Just Comforting Her, and it’s GRREAT! It’s really an epic saga of lesbianism — it’s long; it’s very multi-layered; it’s a dense slab. It’s not just a quick easy listen. It is, in my humble opinion, my masterpiece. It’s a pretty big sound — sorta akin to Chloe Liked Olivia. In terms of genre, the record is all over the place — a dance song, college rock, skiffle, country, an acoustic weeping ballad, southern rock, gospel rave up, Blondie pop!
I am working on a new Phillips&Driver album. We are almost through writing an album of disco — I LOVE disco — the music of our people! We just had a great show up in New York debuting the material and I’m pleased with it, it’s very strong.
I’m also in a lesbian short, Car Accidents and Other Coming Out Stories [premiering at the 2007 Austin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival], that was made by Anne Crémieux (you can see it on her website — http://cremieux.free.fr). There’s an exchange program between Paris and the University of Texas and my girlfriend and I went to Paris one semester and she also came to Austin and we befriended her. My whole life I’ve waited for someone to say, “I wrote a short film starring you behaving in a very slutty manner”! So we did the film and I also wrote the score. I love B movies — and I would call this a B short! I merely demo’d some songs and sent them to say, “hey, is this along the lines of what you want?” — and that was what was used — so it’s not final vocals, it’s just me in my room singing into a tiny microphone.
I had previously contributed to Barbara Hammer’s film on lesbian representation, History Lessons. I was very pleased to contribute music for a ’60s lesbian porn scene — I got to write some jaunty porn music!
And so how important is it for performers to sing about lesbian lives?
I think that if it is important to a performer, then they should do it. Specifically to me, it’s incredibly important. I would never want to settle for a “you” pronoun or a mischievous “I’m not gonna say” type of music career. I was advised to do that when I was younger. And I was like, “You’re crazy. I’ve got a f****** agenda here. And that is not going to serve it.”
There is a really amazing quote by a performance artist, Deb Margolin, who was talking about writing, and she said “the more specific, the more universal”. And I think that that is really true.
I think that you can get extremely specific about just how this girl made you feel and how you responded in an utterly and totally lesbian way and the depth of that honesty and the truth of your telling of it resonates to the most unlikely quarters.
Select Discography
Meat Joy — The Many Moods of Meat Joy (tape); Meat Joy (LP with hand-decorated covers) (1984)
Girls in the Nose — Girls in the Nose (tape) (1990); Chant to the Full Moon, O‘Ye Sisters (limited edition had a free “healing” crystal)
Two Nice Girls — 2 Nice Girls (1989; reissued 2007); Like A Version (1990); Chloe Liked Olivia (1991)
Gretchen Phillips —Welcome to My World And a Half (tape — hand-decorated covers) (1994) and CD reissue (2004); Do You Ever Wish For More? (tape) (1995); Songs To Save Your Soul (1998)
Lord Douglas Phillips — A Taste of LDP (2001)
The Gretchen Phillips Ministries — Seitan is Real (2002)
Phillips&Driver — Togetherness (2003)
More Info
www.gretchen-phillips.com
www.myspace.com/gretchenphillips
www.twonicegirlsmusic.com
Read the article and other interviews (Skim, Gretchen Phillips (Girls in the Nose; Two Nice Girls), Ripley Caine, Nedra Johnson, Bernie Bankrupt (Lesbians on Ecstasy), Ferron, God-des (God-des and She) and June Millington).
SUE BARRETT is an Australian music writer, with a special interest in women in music. She witnessed "the incident" at a Cris Williamson/Tret Fure/Judy Small concert that prompted Judy to write a coda for the song, 'Lesbian Chic'.
c. 2007
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