Born in 1966 in Los Angeles, California. Worked as a photographer in L.A. in the ’80s and played bass for Sugar Babylon (1984–1986) and L7 (1986–1996). Currently plays bass for L7 (the band reunited in 2015) and continues to work as a photographer in L.A.
I GREW UP IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, in Los Angeles. My father used to take me to a bookstore as a treat on Sundays and let me pick out my own books to read. I gravitated to the music section. I was ten or eleven. That’s when there was sort of a popularity of punk rock books coming from the U.K., which I think influenced a lot of people who were in Los Angeles and were older than I was.
Later on, I had a babysitter who took me to a Ramones show when I was eleven. Then, when I was twelve or thirteen, I started to go to shows in Los Angeles. I was a minor, so it was very difficult to get in. I think there was a big divergence that happened in ’81 between what we can call punk rock and what we can call hardcore. When hardcore started, when I was about fourteen or fifteen, that was what I was truly more interested in, because it was a suburban youth movement as opposed to punk rock, which was almost like an urban art statement movement. It was really sort of the aggressive nature and actually the masculine nature of hardcore that I was ultimately attracted to and a part of. The hardcore movement combined a lot of outdoor sport-type activities, like skateboarding. I think that there were a lot of women that participated in it. It was just in this more traditional perimeter role.
My initial involvement in hardcore was going to shows in Hollywood at places like Madame Wong’s, the Starwood, or the Whisky. I was always interested in photography, so I took pictures. It was part of how I got in for free and met people.
I participated in helping with hardcore fanzines that were in Los Angeles. Eventually, I started to play music. For me, music came much later. Now that I’m older, ten years isn’t a big deal. Back then, year to year was a big deal. I didn’t really start playing music until around ’84. Punk had already gone up and gone down. Hardcore had already dissipated in Los Angeles by ’84 and moved back to the suburbs. The Olympics came to Los Angeles. There were curfew laws. It was harder to throw shows. That’s when I started playing music.
As far as being female, for me, punk rock almost seemed fifty-fifty with participants. When we talk about movements or cluster movements in pop culture and art, we are looking at the influence of not just bands, but people who did fanzines, who did radio shows, who promoted shows, who promoted parties, and who had art surrounding it.
Because I grew up through punk rock, I saw bands like Alice Bag, Castration Squad, 45 Grave, and the Cramps. There were women that were playing music, so it didn’t bother me at all to pick up an instrument and play hardcore or to listen to Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, or Bad Religion and think I could play that or be in a band like that.
My tastes started to change. I met Courtney Love and I met some other very strong, interesting, funny, diverse women that were involved with hardcore and punk rock. I formed a band with Courtney and moved to San Francisco. I played there for a few years. It was called Sugar Babylon. This was the same time as punk rock and hardcore were happening in Los Angeles and where all that divergence happened. I still have this thing in me where music was sort of this athletic sport at the same time that it was movement and performance and not a contained craftsmanship, but it was explosive and big feeling. I got that directly from Black Flag and the Circle Jerks and all these big, masculine boy bands. It was going out and being physical and experimenting with your body as this form of expression outside of traditional, trained sports. And also from watching skaters like Jay Adams, who just passed away. We dated for a while and he was a big influence in the skate scene and what was happening.
I think that there wasn’t a mechanism back then to get a fucking girl on a skateboard. I hate to say it like that, because it sounds like I want to say that my life was just super open and not stopped by anything. I look back and the men in my life were positive. They weren’t saying, “Oh, you girls can’t skate.” They weren’t like that at all, and especially the guy skaters. They actually gave me skateboards and they were supportive. They wanted me to play guitar and gave me amplifiers. I got a lot of that kind of support. It’s interesting, because music ended up being something I had to fight for after a while, so I always wonder about that.
There is a difference between an academic middle class and growing up as a woman in the academic middle class. If you were becoming an attorney or you’re getting into medicine, you’re going to face issues because that’s a world dominated by men, but I grew up in a working class environment, so there wasn’t anywhere else to go other than where men go. I would’ve been expected to, even in the late ’70s or ’80s, to create a partnership with a man with a dual income. There wasn’t anything pushing me back. There was only support, because the only way to survive was with a dual income. I’m grateful that I never went to college, because I don’t have this riot girl mentality about repression of women and music. I’m often criticized for not having it.
I was always encouraged to do everything that I could do, and that’s what I think that the biggest influence that punk rock had is. I think that there’s a certain time in a woman’s life, when she’s like fourteen to twenty-one, where she thinks she can do anything. She can do anything, and punk rock and hardcore encouraged that mentality. It was that DIY-you-can-do-anything-in-this-scene.
In 1986, I joined L7. I played bass. I sang. We’re doing a documentary with L7 right now. I was a visual person and I started videotaping very early, so they asked me to start to go through this 150 hours of home video, which is just me holding a camera in a tour van while we’re making jokes. It’s like the worst nightmare an editor will ever have.
My experience now dictates how I felt then, so it’s very hard to create a narrative over it. I came from a really harsh background of child abuse. I started doing heroin very young. The drugs just stabilized me so I could go forward with my dreams and just be able to do it and climb onstage. I didn’t worry if I was good enough or bad enough. Didn’t worry if I was pretty enough or fat enough or too skinny or whatever. I just didn’t worry about anything. It’s a complete relief of self. So it’s very difficult for me to tell my story, because it also coincides with a drug that supports it.
I didn’t drink. I didn’t smoke weed. It was just this small, continuous amount of this one drug that helped with whatever my issues were at that time besides addiction, like ADHD, focus issues, insecurities, self-esteem. It’s really hard to tell people, “Hey, here’s how I did it!” I get sensitive about talking about that. The other girls in L7 have different experiences. I know people drink to relieve self-esteem, but that’s the whole challenge when you’re a young woman. It’s being relieved of that sense of self and not taking anything personally.
I got clean before L7 became popular. It was in the ’90s, so right when we started picking up and going forward with larger shows, not club shows, like hall shows. We toured a lot. We all had day jobs and pitched in to get a van. This was like ’87. Because of punk rock, I’ve been a booker. I knew what it would look like for a booker in, say, Cincinnati. You were sitting there with phone books, looking up record stores and saying, “What are your venues? Do you have phone numbers?” We were just calling them up and booking tours like that ourselves. That all came from punk rock.
I really just wanted to be onstage, so that I could have access to sex and drugs and be able to see shows. There isn’t any freeing statement beyond what probably any dude wants when he sits in his bedroom and plays guitar, because he just really wants to get laid and he has a good hyperfocus on how to play. I didn’t have an experience much beyond that or a statement beyond that based on my gender or sexually or identity or anything. I just wanted to play music, so I was blessed without people in my ear going, “What’s it like being a girl in rock?” Thankfully, no motherfucking feminists were around me at that time to ruin my fucking experience.
Being involved in the music scene and the punk-to-hardcore transition influenced every aspect of my life. It influences my perception any time I enter a collaborative situation that might have a goal. I know how to be a part of the group. I know how to be a leader. I know how to be a support person. I think that, sexually, it influenced me too, because I really do prefer guys that came up through that scene. I’m single. I have a lot of access to sex, and there’s a certain male I prefer, and it’s somebody who came up through that also. I don’t want to be laying around in bed after sex and having to explain how weird it is to see Henry Rollins on TV. I don’t want to explain that to somebody. I want them to just look at the TV and we both snicker and we both know.
I think my involvement in punk rock, which bridged into what we’ll call grunge and what we’ll call riot grrrl and scenes that came right after, were really the last true eras of that style of collaboration. The last era of the written fanzine, the last era of the radio show that you had to tune into in block time. Kids today have a different experience and are having their own and awesome cool experience, but our generation was the last. Anyone who continued music through the ’90s definitely experienced the last of that. I love the Internet. I think it’s done great things for music. Things are just different.
I think that what I learned from punk rock and hardcore and rock and roll, whether it’s Chuck Berry to the Beatles to the Stones to Black Flag, is you write about your experience. This type of music is experiential. So, I wrote a song called “Everglade” about a girl’s experience about going to a show. I sat there thinking, I’m going to create a story about my experience, because I don’t know what it’s like to be in your shoes when you go do what you’re doing. I can empathize, but I can’t talk about or try to create what I think people are going to relate to.
As an adult, I feel so honored that as a fourteen-year-old I was able to have a voice in the movement with other fourteen-year-olds. There’s just so much work to do around the world. When I hear women in the Middle East got ahold of L7 tapes, that’s where it really is. I think younger women see me as somebody who has done something with her life that’s admirable. I’ve lived a life worth living.