Maureen

"Music is everything one listens to with the intention of listening to music."
-Luciano Berio

My exposure to music has been a defining part of my life. At first, it was my Dad's Barbra Streisand, Carpenters and Frank Sinatra LP's echoing through the halls at night. Later, louder music bled through the bedroom walls of my siblings (Led Zeppelin on one side, Joni Mitchell on the other). Then there was my prized AM/FM clock radio where I listened to Chicago's WLS (AM pop), WLUP (hard rock and Cheap Trick 20 times a day thank God) and WXRT (obscure alternative) as my tastes grew with my height.

A defining factor early on, I think, is that my best friend in grade school, Stephanie Brown, had a brother who designed album art for various Warner Bros. Records artists, including The Stranglers and The Tubes. My first-ever concert was seeing--and meeting--The Stranglers when they came to Chicago. I think I was 12. Her brother set it up and we went with her Mom backstage. Stranglers frontman Hugh Cornwell was very nice to us and it was not until years later when I really got into their music that I realized how lucky I was and how the exposure to what others might think was dissonance shaped my openness to taste and image. If not for that early exposure to different kinds of music besides AM radio, I would not have, years later, given The Butthole Surfers a second listen after the shock of first hearing their music and the sonic worm hole it opened up.

I owe a lot to that grade school friend. Without her punk rock and new wave enlightenment, I would have thought the Journey songs being played incessantly on the radio must be the good music. My friend used to wear Patti Smith t-shirts in gym class. I wonder if I ever would have joined Babes in Toyland if not for her. Later in high school, we saw Black Flag together. Who knew that many years later, Henry Rollins and I would share the same manager?

Still, with all this punk rock and new wave, the earlier influences still stuck with me. I was a Joni Mitchell fanatic and even tried out for our 8th grade talent show singing "My Analyst Told Me" from her album "Court and Spark". It was lyrical material far out of the realm of what most kids in my Catholic school were doing, and alas, I didn't make the cut. I even had a special dance to it. (In the end, my choice of song was an intuitive foreboding of what lay ahead for me in my 20's.)

Through my Joni Mitchell-loving sister I was introduced to the interweaving of Carole King, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, The Eagles, and the best of all - Jesus Christ Superstar. What a great rock album that was--and everyone knows the Judas songs are the best. (Many years later, noise rock band Cows covered 39 Lashes--I still listen to that track often.) The Hair movie soundtrack came out somewhere in there and to this day I know every song by heart.

So a middle class girl emerged from the confines of midwestern Libertyville, Illinois rooted deeply in singer/songwriter 70's Americana, seminal punk rock, hard rock and a dose of heavy metal--forever hard-wired to be receptive to their particular strains and nuances. By the time I hit University of Minnesota, that odd mix sent me to the indie record store bins forging my own peculiar tastes: Bauhaus, Leonard Cohen, Funkadelic, Psychedelic Furs, Jennifer Warnes (!), Killdozer, Scratch Acid.

In Minneapolis, I found myself living in the heyday of an indie-rock scene with The Replacements, Husker Du, Soul Asylum, Babes in Toyland (before I joined), and The Jayhawks swirling around me and all of us drinking beers at the CC Club on Monday Pitcher Nights. Who knew we would all end up on major labels?

Through the tastes of a boyfriend in the afore-mentioned band Cows, I delved deeper into the underground post-punk noise scene. My friend (and Babes in Toyland drummer) Lori Barbero hosted every band who came through Minneapolis. After every show of whatever great underground band toured through Minneapolis, it was off to Lori's house for an after-party. I MET the Butthole Surfers. I MET Scratch Acid. Through an engineer friend of mine I met Steve Albini after a rare Rapeman show--someone whose music I had devoured since his first Big Black EP.

During the end of my Minneapolis years, I started playing bass quite by accident. A real accident - my brother got his hand caught in a pasta machine and gave me his bass. I lived on one side of a walking bridge over Interstate 35W--on the other end of the bridge was Babes in Toyland singer/guitarist Kat Bjelland. I asked Kat to walk over and help me because though I had started playing the bass I had no idea how to tune it. She taught me how to tune it and what the names of the strings were and to this day that is all I know. If you told me to play an A, I'd have no idea where on the fretboard that was. I'd just have to play the open string for you. Kat taught me:
E (Elizabeth)
A (Anderson)
D (Does)
G (Good)
for a six-string you add:

B (Bass)
E (Electric)
Elizabeth Anderson Does Good Bass Electric. Thanks Kat.

At that time I lived in a warehouse-type building where noise was not an issue and I invited people who actually knew how to play to come over and "jam"--with me playing by ear--so I could learn. To this day I cannot stand the term "jam" but have never been able to conjure an appropriate one-word alternative.

Soon I formed a band, M&M Stigmata, with a Minneapolis local genius with severe psychiatric problems--Peter John. His plan was this: book a show first and THEN start writing & practicing. Sounded good to me--deadlines make for real motivation. We got booked in an opening slot at the Uptown Bar on a weekend. Kat came. Peter John was too drunk to play his guitar, which he informed me midway into our first song. So he just sang--our show was bass, drums and vocals. Like a deer in the headlights, I forged on. Kat told me that she started seeing me differently then because I was this "normal" girl in the scene and what the fuck kind of person goes up and does that, especially with Peter John? God rest his soul, by the way.

Somewhere in there, I began dating David Sims from The Jesus Lizard and soon I was off to Chicago, living in an apartment David shared with his entire band. I still remember how odd it was that the minute we got to Chicago, it was Steve Albini's house that I parked my U-Haul in front of (because The Jesus Lizard's neighborhood was not a good place to leave a U-Haul overnight) and it was Corey Rusk, owner of Touch and Go Records who gave me warehouse space to store all my belongings. Everybody was so welcoming and made me feel instantly part of it all.

It was weird at first. Hell, I used to live in a crappy little apartment in LA for a year with two of my few possessions being a tape recorder and a cassette of Albini's band Big Black's first EP that I played over and over. And storing my piano and crap at Touch and Go? I had bought most of my records from Touch and Go for years. KILLDOZER, my favorite band, was on their label for chrissakes! Corey, the owner, being the total sweetheart he is, would pay band members between tours to come in and shrink-wrap stuff or fold promo posters to mail out. Me having just moved there and not found a job yet, he invited me to join in. I remember working alongside David & Mac from The Jesus Lizard and Michael Gerald of Killdozer and for just a moment thought how fucking bizarre that was, the four of us on the floor folding stacks of Urge Overkill posters. (I remember playing with Killdozer in Europe years later and just thinking, "how did I get here?")

Chicago at that time was a bigger version of what Minneapolis had become a few years back. Within a year I started playing bass again with Albini's then-girlfriend and some other Chicago scenesters I met through The Jesus Lizard. We were called Cherry Rodriguez. It was an all-female band with a male frontman whose vocal hero was John Brannon from the Laughing Hyenas, i.e. primal screaming. I played bass. Albini was at our first show. His girlfriend told me he said something complimentary about my bass playing, which gave me the false impression that I could play bass--but that illusion ended up serving me well. I think the bar held about 20 people. So, it was packed, but you know. Humble beginnings.

Not much later, I got a call from my old friend, Lori Barbero. Babes had been touring hard for years (and staying with me in Chicago when they came through) and had just signed to Warner Bros.--the same label that had employed my grade school friend's brother. Michelle Leon, the original bassist, wanted to quit the band. Her boyfriend, Joe Cole, Henry Rollins best friend and tour manager, had been walking home from the store with Henry and was shot dead. Michelle couldn't handle the tour, the upcoming major label debut recording--she wanted out. Did I want to join?

"Hell, yes!" was NOT my first reaction. First of all, it was horrible circumstances by which this opportunity came my way. There were other considerations. I didn't want to move back to junkie-infested Minneapolis - I had already lost some friends to that. I had a pretty good job at Columbia College's English Department and was going to school there for free, and I was already in a band. At that time, Babes were doing OK, but they toured HARD, and it wasn't something you could make a living at. Or so I thought.

I decided I could always go back to school if it didn't work out. They invited me up to give it a try. Duane Denison, guitarist of The Jesus Lizard, sat with me for hours and taught me all the bass lines and played Kat's parts. When I went in to the Babes practice space, I nailed it. They asked me to join immediately. It didn't hurt that we were all good friends already. Oddly, I missed the first audition because while I was driving to the practice space, I got pulled over. My passenger door handle was hanging funny and Minneapolis Police are very particular. They ran my license and I was promptly arrested for unpaid parking tickets from three years prior. Kat and Lori had no idea where I was. Later, they could not believe that I missed it because "normal" Maureen was in jail. I was punk rock after all. That clinched it. I didn't just join, I belonged.

4 1/2 years later - great, hard, wonderful, horrible, delightful, life-changing years, I quit the band. I got to play Lollapalooza '93 with my Libertyville high school friends Tom Morello in RATM and Adam Jones of Tool. Every night of Lollapalooza we were introduced by Timothy Leary, who was an avid fan. I got to record a Carpenters cover--a fitting tribute to my Dad's influence. I got to play at Reading Festival--twice--to a crowd of people who reached the horizon. I am so grateful for that entire experience. There were nights I was sharing the stage with the people I grew up listening to: Sonic Youth, Killdozer, NEIL YOUNG!, the list goes on. But I couldn't tour anymore. Nine months out of the year for 4 1/2 years--I was spent. I wanted to be a writer, so I quit. Everyone thought I was an idiot.

Within a few months I started writing for a local city paper. Then a friend at Touch and Go called me and said Musician Magazine was looking for a writer who was also a musician (mandatory for their writers) to do an interview with The Jesus Lizard while they recorded their new album with Steve Albini. Did they know anyone in Chicago who could do it? Hmmm... Wonder who could do that?

So of course I got a great interview, even though by this time David Sims and I were long since broken up. Soon Albini went on to another project, recording Jimmy Page & Robert Plant's "Walking into Clarksdale". My Musician Magazine editor thought since I knew Steve Albini, maybe I could get an interview with Page & Plant. Steve, always a generous friend, set me up with some contacts and I got the interview. With that, they hired me as Associate Editor. I, who had left college to join a rock band, was now an editor at a magazine. The catch? I had to move to Nashville, TN.

Luckily, I was at the end of some self-inflicted nightmarish personal relationship(s) drama and wanted to get the hell out of Chicago. So I went, blindly, to Music City, USA.

Oh. My. God. Nashville is another world. I loved my job and got to fly to England and interview Tori Amos; I learned a ton about the world of music journalism and made great contacts--but you just can't describe that town in words, you have to taste it from the alley all the way up to the one-hit wonder millionaire homes.

Within a year though, I hit a personal bottom and left the magazine. It didn't help that the publisher wanted to put a picture of a new microphone on the next cover instead of a picture of that month's artist featured in the "Musician Interview" as they had done for 20 some years. Within less than a year after I left, that great magazine was gone--killed by someone who didn't understand that music was a language and a magazine like ours let the PhD's & the beginners sit at the same table--and both learn from each other. And that's why the readers and advertisers loved it. But I digress...

I started bartending at a friend's club on Nashville's Lower Broadway. One day, this older guy who was playing in the band--daytime on a Saturday afternoon--came up to the bar on his break. He made a hilarious comment I no longer remember. Not to dis the south, but I was hungry for wit and intelligence. We talked a little, our backgrounds came up (he was a former music publishing executive and studio owner) and we both asked each other what the hell we were doing in The Bluegrass Inn on a Saturday afternoon, broke. This guy, Greg Humphrey and I, we started a business, Pollyanna, proudly named after my famously optimistic outlook in the face of utter hopelessness. I learned so damn much from Humphrey--and continue to--and I ended up managing artists, booking and promoting shows (even got voted best indie promoter--I tied with Chris Moon now of Nettwerk), and then produced a video of Hank Williams III that somehow got on CMT. And guess who Hank III's guitar player was? Former roommate and former Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison--the one who taught me those Babes bass lines. It was great to repay the favor and get him that gig and it was great to have a fellow Chicagoan in Nashville. Soon, his now-wife followed and I had more of my posse in Nashville.

Eventually, however, I longed for northern impatience. I moved to New York to pursue writing-ish comedy filmy aspirations. Fast forward through the struggling, ugly New York period (there were some highlights, writing for Rolling Stone & AOL, being a producer at VH1, working at Miramax, but I was a total mess). After the stunning experience of being in Lower Manhattan for 9/11, I went back to Nashville and started working for a music publishing company Greg Humphrey had started. Again, I learned a lot about licensing and this and that, but it wasn't where I belonged. I went back to Chicago to recharge. It took a while.

At about the perfect time, I got a call from my brother who had a friend he worked with at Google who was starting a music company called, uh, Fuzz. His friend wanted to ask me some questions and maybe get some introductions. Soon, I started working for them, and here it is a year and a half later, and I am still here at Fuzz and loving the entire experience (not just saying that because my boss might read it). It is tumultuous and exhilarating because I care about it the way that I cared about my band. It is similar in so many ways, except I don't have to tour, no one takes pictures of me and I don't carry sharpies and duct tape in my purse.

My musical formative peculiarities show on the job as well. Take Greg Garing--an infamous anti-Nashville establishment anti-hero. I strongly encouraged him to get his music up on the Fuzz site. I wanted everyone in the world to hear "Dream Too Real To Hold". His voice will kill you. That is the entrenched singer/songwriter root still in me that I love. I had heard legends about Garing in Nashville, but met and became friends with him and his wife in New York where he had ignited a similar Americana scene there with his Alphabet City Opry. His efforts landed him on the cover of the New York Times Arts section and Billboard. I couldn't help but make some introductions for his next recording project and he's now played with drummer Mac McNeilly from the Jesus Lizard and Pinkus from the Butthole Surfers. Americana + Psycho-punk + Noise-rock = ????????? Can't wait to hear a new record.

Then there's USSA to balance things out and bring my love of masterfully-crafted heavy noise rock into the mix. Luckily, Fuzz the label became interested in Duane Denison's new band, USSA, which he started with Paul Barker from Ministry. Duane had kind of started "consulting" for Fuzz and it just went from there. With two successful bands in his resume and a young toddler, this guy still tours like he's just started playing in bands. I just saw USSA live three times last month. It was musical food I needed so, so badly. It is not the Jesus Lizard (or Tomahawk or Ministry) and doesn't try to be, it's USSA: the most original, searing, dynamic, accomplished and genuine live show I have seen in years--the kind where you wish you could instantly beam in your friends so they don't miss it. Of course USSA publicity talks about Duane and Paul because of their past bands, but their singer, Gary Call, is a vigorously talented secret weapon and Guiness-Book-of-World-Records-holder-for-fastest-drummer Johnny Rabb stands out in his precision and soulful intensity. I am not selling you, I am fucking telling you. They tour the US starting next week so check their tour dates on Fuzz and fucking go. That Fuzz played a part in this record (The Spoils) coming into the world has been truly a peak for me.

You can see why I call myself the Forrest Gump of Indie Rock the way all these people and events connect and intertwine. I don't know where things will go from here, how these or any artists will fare in this changing music business. I don't know what Fuzz will evolve into--it's already come SO far, it's getting more amazing every day and we all have so many ideas we can't wait to make a reality. If only our head engineer Phatduckk could be cloned fifteen times but the clones didn't smoke.

I am indebted to so many people along this crazy path with its twists, turns and trenches. Even the tragedies turned out to be, at worst, opportunities and, at best, near miracles. I am glad just to be blogging on a website that I was a small part of making real.

Now, the internet is one big open record bin and people have unlimited access to every type of music from artists at any level or down any niche worm hole. My reality is that music plays a bigger part in my daily life than I am generally aware of. We search for music we like and then people and ideas come with that music--some become lifelong friends. We come into contact with people we would otherwise not know through music--witness the critical mass in social networking activity around music.

Music is the core that runs through my entire experience--though I never planned on being a musician or working in the music industry. If there was a nice word for infection, I'd say it infected me. It's apt that the word music is derived from the Greek word muse--a source of inspiration. Music consistently and historically transcends its role as a commodity--it is a force that impacts and changes lives. I guess I wanted to remind myself of that today. So there you go.