Most accurate Babes history I've come across in a long time

Mon, 26 May 2008 21:31:18 -0700

Found this tonight looking for something else. It's worth reading through I think.
Maureen H., basser

http://neonangels.blogspot.com/

Thursday, November 1, 2007
Girls, It Ain't Easy Vol. 1

This is part one of an ongoing series of posts dealing with our everlasting love affair with women who pick up mics and amps. Far from a Women Of Rock Issue point of view these posts do not aim to further that separate but "equal" condescension. We aim to single out and pay tribute to lady artists who have inspired us over the years and played an integral part in the evolution of not only our aesthetic but, duh, music in general. Enjoy.

It's the good girls who keep the diaries; the bad girls never have the time. - Tallulah Bankhead

Remember when we were young and impressionable?

Ah, girls. We love girls. Long have we loved them! When we were a mere babe staging My Little Pony vs. Lego wars in the basement with our bemused neighborhood playmates and dancing about to "Erotic City" in nothing but an oversize black t-shirt(our little black dress, if you will) we were convinced we were actually meant to be among them; completely and utterly we felt the gender hand we had been dealt was a crime against our true nature. Again and again we cried(loudly, with tears) to our poor, tortured mother, "I wish I were a girl!"

We envied them their complexity, their sense of fun, their moxie, mystique, long hair and soft skin; they laughed and cried, wore pants and skirts. They were praised and admired for all the things we so wanted for ourselves but were taught it was wrong to desire. Our domineering and intimidating father (an officer in the Marine Corps for 33 years), while not always unkind and occasionally bordering on sweet, remained a mystery to us along with the rest of our own sex but our mother and three sisters we felt we understood completely. They were images of perfection to worship and resent for the advantages we projected on them.

Our love for and envy of girls dominated our psychology for many years, well into adolescence and young adulthood but naturally, over time, our ideas of what it meant to be a girl(and our notion of whether we were meant to be one) evolved and expanded. We came to love the chainsaw guitars and howls of Babes In Toyland and playfully amateurish antics of Bratmobile with a fervor once reserved for Madonna Mondays on MTV, which we faked illness many times to watch in lieu of going to school. We became absorbed in the zine culture of the 90's, reading about girls' impressions of girlhood and finding a flipside to our femmetastic fantasies in their tales of insecurity and frustration with being almost always underestimated and/or patronized by men, other women and society in general. It seemed clear to us that girlhood, while undoubtedly noble and certainly worthy of praise, was not all we had cracked it up to be.

Rather than envy we felt comfort in the idea that we were not alone in trying to figure our young world out. Girls were our true comrades, reflecting our burgeoning identity struggle back at us in a way we could relate to rather than react to. Girlhood seemed no longer an untouchable ideal and more a matter of fact that we might never fully comprehend but could certainly support and identify with in our own queer way.

We hear you're big in England. We think you should move there.

As we have already just mentioned Babes In Toyland was among the favoritest bands of our youth. We LOVED them. Still do. At one point we had plans of starting a Babes In Toyland cover band with our friend Raquel to be called Swamp Pussy. Some ideas are better left in your head, right? We still regularly throw them into our DJ sets, usually at the end of the night when we have space to thrash about like a wounded animal and sing at the top of our lungs. Though they were unquestionably influential figures in the early 90's rock scene, their success was eventually eclipsed by the media's riot grrrl witch hunting and a spunky blonde megalomaniac by the name of Courtney Love(two things that took considerable inspiration from the band). This is their story, as best we can tell it, along with some songs and videos you'll definitely want to hear and see.

Kat Bjelland's Babes In Toyland were key figures of the early 90's underground rock scene. Prefiguring both Hole and riot grrrl and in tandem with a scene later to be dubbed "grunge" their jagged guitars, tribal and punishing rhythm section and ferocious vocals provided a template later elaborated upon, borrowed from and appropriated by any number of bands of that era. Tales of the Babes' origins are a bit murky, coming as they do from the pre-blog/Wikipedia/MySpace age when information about underground bands was passed on mostly through printed-on-the-fly fanzines and word of mouth(members of the band dispute various aspects of Neal Karlen's account of their rise in his 1994 biography of the band). What is known is that Bjelland and Courtney Love, along with Jennifer Finch(later of L7), were inspired to start a band after seeing early all-girl political upstarts Frightwig at a gig in San Francisco in the early 80's.

The band the three started, a subject of some legend of its own, was called Sugar Babylon(or alternately Sugar Bunny Farm/Sugar Babydoll) and according to Kat mostly amounted to taking a lot of pictures and maybe playing a couple of shows. Kat has often downplayed the significance of this period, stating it was the "the smallest thing [she's] done musically." However, the band did record a handful of demos(until recently available on the web at katbjelland.com) which were erroneously credited to a later Kat/Courtney collaboration, the Pagan Babies.

The demos lend some credence to Courtney's insistence(after being kicked out of at least three bands by Kat) that if they could have settled their differences she and Kat "could've been the Beatles". That proclamation may seem a bit out of pocket but we contend that the band, all jangly guitars, sparkling melodies delivered in Courtney's pitch-challenged-if-charismatic style with angelic backing vocals courtesy of Kat, could at least have been early R.E.M.

Sugar Babylon - Cold Shoulders *Transferred from original cassettes. Turn this one up.*

Sometime in the mid-80's Courtney had an inkling that the next wave of new underground rock was going to come out of Minneapolis, prompting she and Kat's move to the Twin Cities and the formation of Babes In Toyland with local girl-about-town Lori Barbero (whom Kat was convinced would make a natural drummer despite lack of experience behind a kit) around 1987. Courtney was kicked out of the band not long after their first rehearsals. Courtney's version of the story, excerpted from an interview with Karlen for his 1996 Playboy profile of Love, goes like this:

"I was willing to give up my individual pursuits for a band. I thought a unified feminine force could be more powerful than me. And I was willing to take a backseat - to play bass and do backup vocals - when Kat decided I was an asshole."

Kat, in the same article, tells it a bit differently:

"Courtney practiced with Babes in Toyland only once, and it sucked," Bjelland said. "After that, it was like 'Bye, Courtney.'"

After Courtney's departure the line-up was eventually completed by bassist Michelle Leon (like Barbero, also new to her instrument). This incarnation of the band would go on to record two singles("Dust Cake Boy" on Treehouse records, "House" on Sub Pop), the Spanking Machine album and To Mother EP (both on Minneapolis local label Twin/Tone) by 1991. Subsequently, the band was championed by late UK radio legend John Peel and received much press in the music weeklies across the pond (as well as at home in no less than the New York Times), eventually leading to a gig at the Reading festival (documented in the film 1991: The Year Punk Broke). The attention paid to the band overseas fanned the flames of their tenuous hometown reputation, prompting one local fanzine to opine: "We hear you're big in England. We think you should move there."

Babes In Toyland - Ripe(Live Version)

The band was derided for exactly the things their fans loved most about them; what Kathleen Hanna(of Bikini Kill/Le Tigre) once described as "the most inventive [guitar] chords ever", Barbero's tribal drum style(played with the butt-end of her drumsticks), the propulsive and punishing bass of Michelle Leon(and later Maureen Herman) and Kat's inimitable vocal style. Following the UK press attention the band was the subject of pursuit by major label A&R representatives leading to their singing by Tim Carr(also responsible for siging the Beastie Boys and Megadeth) with Warner subsidiary Reprise. Michelle Leon would leave the band at this point following the violent death of her boyfriend, roadie and punk scene stalwart Joe Cole. Rather than let their efforts go to waste the band recruited friend Maureen Herman to join on bass.

The resulting album, Fontanelle, produced by Sonic Youth's Lee Renaldo, found the band's sound moving from the more ragged and cathartically ramshackle rumble of Spanking Machine and To Mother into a denser, less calamitous if not exactly softened wall of sound. Cleaner but still rough around the edges, it polished their sound without obliterating their personality. Although released to near-universal praise(receiving an A- from Entertainment Weekly and landing on Spin's 20 Best Albums Of 1992) the album, though enthusiastically supported by Carr and other members of the Reprise workforce, would languish in a puzzling obscurity until the video for single "Bruise Violet" was shown on that arbiter of 90's cool, MTV's Beavis and Butthead. When the cartoon simpletons declared, "These chicks rule"(along with Butthead wondering aloud regarding Kat, "Is that Cindy Brady?") it sent off a small firestorm of new publicity for the band, helping them to land a headlining spot on the 1993 Lollapalooza tour.

The video itself was Kat's wry comment on the debate about whether it was she or Courtney who had first adopted the "kinderwhore" style of babydoll dresses, platinum blonde manes and smeared lipstick they had both become known for(hilariously dubbed "The War Of The Dress" by the media). It features a biker gang of Kat-a-likes as well as artist Cindy Sherman(who had contributed the cover art for the Fontanelle album) as a Courtney-type figure that pursues Bjelland, who at one point strangles her.

Around the time of Fontanelle's release, the riot grrrl scenes in Olympia and Washington D.C. had the microscope of the media turned on them as well. Being a "woman in rock"(or more specifically an angry woman in rock) was being touted as new and dangerous. The media, in its usual amnesiac manner, had forgotten that bands like the Slits, the Mo-Dettes, Delta 5 and their more well-known counterparts Chrissie Hynde and Siouxsie Sioux et al. totally had, like, vaginas and stuff. Where those women had come up in the first wave of punk rock democracy the tide had turned back to an environment where women picking up instruments and writing songs on their own terms was seen as alternately subversive or merely "cute". A grassroots movement by young women to create a space for and support art made by themselves and their friends and to reclaim their place in their local music communities became a subject of national attention with articles in publications as diverse as Rolling Stone, the LA Weekly, the Chicago Reader, the New Yorker(!!!) and Seventeen magazine.

Babes In Toyland was thrown into the riot grrrl fire (the media loves a good build-em-up-burn-em-down) by virtue not of their involvement in or tertiary influence on the scene but simply because they were loud and had boobs, too. While it is true that many key figures in the riot grrrl scene had name-checked the band and Bjelland as an influence the Babes themselves had not been direct participants in any riot grrrl activity. They were quick to brush off the "girl band" label, insisting that they were a band pure and simple, gender notwithstanding (in explaining the band's seemingly femme name Bjelland was fond of saying "We're all babes in the universe").

The politics of this are up for debate but while they downplayed discussions of gender in interviews there is no question that they supported their fellow ladies in practice. The band often played on bills with other all-girl bands(once playing a short set on borrowed equipment filling in for the Lunachicks when that band was late in coming to a gig) and contributed to L7'S Rock For Choice compilation.

Bjelland, in stark contrast to Courtney Love, has always seemed timid and a bit nervous when confronted with the concept of other people's mythmaking regarding her projects or the fashioning of herself into a feminist "icon". This would seem to be the most obvious reason for her reluctance to be connected to any movement, including riot grrrl (or, eek, grunge for that matter). Though she has repeatedly encouraged women to pick up instruments in the media she has dodged further exploration of the "implications" of her sex on her art not out of cowardice but rather a desire to just play music without the specter of gender politics.

Thanks for playing, ladies but we've got new fish to fry. Love, the Media.

While touring Lollapalooza the group would release the Painkillers EP, a compilation of studio recordings made during the Fontanelle sessions along with a live recording of a gig at New York's CBGB's, to capitalize on their escalating profile. Because of their busy touring schedule both at home and abroad their final album, Nemesisters, would not be released until 1995.

Despite receiving mostly favorable reviews(including four stars from Rolling Stone) it was clear that the ups and downs of the years since they first came to underground prominence had taken their toll. Kat said that she was aiming for spontaneity in the studio but it unfortunately comes off too often as sloppiness. Though the ragers("Oh Yeah" and "Memory" along with Herman's "Killer On The Road") and album opener "Hello" showed finesse, the album suffered from dirgey distractions like "Ariel" and lazy songwriting courtesy of Barbero on "Middle Man". This is not to make mention of a totally out of place cover of Sister Sledge's disco chestnut "We Are Family". Why, we ask. Why?

Despite single "Sweet 69" reaching the top 40 on the Billboard Modern Rock charts and the video garnering some airplay on MTV, it failed to match the sales of its predecessor and interest in the album waned quickly.

Moving into the second half of the decade, women in rock music were no longer a hot-button issue. Babes' and riot grrrl's influence had been distilled into the more mainstream successes of other formerly indie bands like Veruca Salt and the Cardigans and rock writers would soon be in thrall to the all-consuming media tornado of Kurt Cobain's suicide, the ever evolving rock opera that is Courtney Love and the deaths of gangsta rap legends Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. Raves would replace riot grrrl as the New Dangerous Thing in youth culture. The angry women in rock moment had come and gone and just about all involved breathed a sigh of relief and retreated back to their foxholes to lick their wounds.

Maureen Herman left the band after touring in support of Nemesisters, citing disillusionment with the record industry as a key factor in her decision, and though the band has reunited on several occasions since with different bass players(even once being rejoined by Michelle Leon) Babes In Toyland has been more or less effectively laid to rest since her departure and released from their contract with Reprise. Bjelland and Barbero have remained in Minneapolis and continue to play music, though not together,(most notably with Katastrophy Wife and Koalas, respectively) with Herman moving first into music journalism and artist management and more recently working with music site Fuzz. We miss you, girls! We're gonna start that cover band someday! Pinky swear!

Posted by The Royal We at 8:40 PM 4 comments
Labels: Babes In Toyland, Courtney Love, Girls It Ain't Easy, grunge, Kat Bjelland, riot grrrl

We have some stories

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 21:57:08 -0800

And I think it's time we start getting them down. This page has been boring for too long.

Lori's got all the great pictures. If anyone has a spare scanner (and Mac!) they can send her, that would be awesome! Best Polaroid collection in all the world. I've got to go up there this summer ammd scan all those. It's rock history - Lori knows EVERYONE. It was her house that everyone crashed at when they toured through town.

So many stories...OK, OK, I'll get on it...

Good night.

Won't Tell Video

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 23:28:08 -0700

David Roth made this. That's all that needs to be said.

Handsome & Gretel Live Video

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 23:22:56 -0700

He's My Thing Video

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 23:19:32 -0700

This is Maureen's Mom's favorite Babes song

Sweet '69 Video

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 23:08:45 -0700

Mini-documentary of Babes in Toyland

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:53:25 -0700

Babes commercial!

You can buy a Babes song for a song...OK for .99

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 17:54:27 -0700

The Babes store is open. Today my favorite song is Surd. I forgot about that one.