Aged 18 and living in the suburbs of Seattle, Carrie Brownstein answers an ad in a local music paper: “Girl guitarist wanted, no wanky solos”. It turns out to have been posted by the Washington riot grrrl band 7 Year Bitch. To her shock, she gets an audition, so she puts on her dad’s suit jacket, a white T-shirt and a green baseball cap turned backwards, and sits on the sofa feeling like “a puffy cloud on a couch surrounded by women who were clearly thunder and lightning”. When she doesn’t get the job, she writes them a letter, pouring out all the psychological hurts that feed into her desperate need to be in a band – her mother’s anorexia, the stifling silence of her family home.
When she sees them around town in the months afterwards, 7 Year Bitch look at her with pity and distrust. “There is a gulf of misunderstanding between musicians and their fans,” she writes, “and so much desperation that the musician can’t possibly assuage, rectify or heal.”
Brownstein tried to bear this in mind years later when dealing with fans of Sleater-Kinney, the explosive Washington rock band she formed with Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss in 1994. The duo took root in the fertile soil of the riot grrrl scene – although as Brownstein points out, by this time bands such as Kathleen Hanna’s Bikini Kill had done a lot of groundwork enabling politicised all-female rock groups to get on with the business of playing.
Now 41, Brownstein has begun a second career, writing and appearing in Portlandia, an arch TV comedy about hipsters in Portland. “I don’t know if I would consider myself a musician now,” she says. She is the only woman to appear in Rolling Stone’s “25 Most Underrated Guitarists of All Time” list.
We’re living in the golden age of the female rock memoir, and one thing writers such as Brownstein, Viv Albertine and Kim Gordon have captured so well is the overwhelming sense of unease and awkwardness that drives people towards a life on the stage. These books are not magical tales of the lucky kid picked out for fame – Sleater-Kinney never had a hit single – but explorations of why that particular kid could never have done anything else. The portrait of the child that emerges here is complex and moving.
Learning the word “anorexia” from a friend, she taunts her mother with it relentlessly, inserting it into the lyrics of songs and singing it at her while she tries to eat. Soon after, her mother acknowledges her illness and checks into an eating disorder unit. When Brownstein is 14, her mother leaves, and from then on she is raised by her father, who later comes out to her. She becomes “stoical” as a teenager – which no doubt equipped her well for the diffident world of 1990s underground rock.
The most evocative sections of the book take place at the seat of the riot grrrl movement, Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington – the progressive, utilitarian arts school where everything, from class to band life, is a “dialogue” and her future bandmate Tucker keeps a label saying “RACIST” on her jar of Calumet baking powder (“I’m not sure why she didn’t just avoid the brand ...”).
The student Brownstein hovers on the edge of the crowd she longs to be part of, wearing men’s shoes, “lingering, muttering, waiting around”. She acknowledges the scene’s sense of humour bypass, too. “These people are so cool and so not funny,” she thinks of Heavens to Betsy, a band Tucker is involved in. Musicians would be harassed in the local amateur music press – the “zines” – for any “perceived racist/sexist/classist/ transphobic/whatever-ist behaviour”. Zine culture was the internet before the internet; Olympia was “the town equivalent of a wink”.
Going on tour is all about trying to find a clean place to sleep – an “endless, slovenly slumber party”. And sex? No thanks. She spends a lot of time engaged in platonic spooning with female friends, or trying to keep up long-distance relationships from payphones. Brownstein may not be laugh-a-minute but she has a great sense of the ridiculous. Sleater-Kinney turn to group therapists, Susan and Nina – “we became a 10-legged lover working through our issues”. She fantasises about life beyond the band, but when Tucker gets pregnant it incites a kind of suppressed panic. Brownstein interviews for jobs in academia, film and TV, and works as a substitute teacher. There is uncomfortable reading around her 2006 breakdown, which put the band on hold again (they have since reformed).
Sleater-Kinney got an unexpected shot in the arm in 2003, supporting Pearl Jam in arenas across the US; there was a new challenge in playing to larger audiences, trying to convert the hairy guy in the fourth row. It’s a strangely inspiring coda; a laying aside of old musical prejudices by a band raised to believe in the “toxicity of the mainstream”. Brownstein even gets a taste for guitar solos.
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