Born in Los Angeles, California. Lived in L.A. and San Francisco, California, in the ’80s, played guitar for Boris, Horace, Doris, and Dolores (circa 1981), and sang for Tex & the Horseheads (circa 1982–present) and Texorcist (circa 1989). Currently lives in Austin, Texas, and plays in the band Hey!
I WAS ABOUT EIGHTEEN when my boyfriend introduced me to punk rock. I wasn’t playing music yet. He was playing the Sex Pistols. I wigged out. I really liked it. I went with some friends of mine down to the Masque by Hollywood Boulevard. I started watching a lot of punk bands. At that time, I was trying to jam saxophone, like these jazz people in back of Los Perritos on Hollywood Boulevard. Way in the back, there was this little room with a little table. I used to jump on there and try to jam jazz. Then punk rock happened.
I got in this band called Boris, Horace, Doris, and Dolores. I was with them for about a year. I got fired from the band because I was such a horrible guitar player. It was disastrous. I was supposed to practice, and I never did. There was another band before that, around ’80, but we only played a couple shows. I hooked up with Jeffrey Lee in ’81. Then things really started changing.
I was going to play in the Gun Club, but I only played one show and got fired from the Gun Club. Poor Jeffrey Lee. He really worked with me for a month and everything. I played my heart out, but evidently it just really sucked. The band just said, “Look, Jeffrey Lee. It’s either her or us.” He couldn’t fire his whole band. I understood. He felt bad about it, but that’s when he thought of us starting another band, and that’s what started Tex & the Horseheads. This was around the end of ’81. It was Jeffrey Lee and me and the Vodka Brothers, but it was mostly Jeffrey Lee and me, because we were traveling a lot. We were going from here to there, and we would just pick up people. We would pick up a drummer and a bass player. It would be him on guitar and me on vocals. We were just horsing around and having a good time.
It was pretty much Tex & the Horseheads in the ’80s. Around ’89, I got in Texorcist. I think it was the ’90s when I got involved with the Ringling Sisters. That lasted for about a year. A whole slew of bands. I’ve been in a trillion bands. There’s bands I’ve been in that I don’t remember the names of. I used to have kind of a bad rep, because I was jumping from band to band at one time. I was having a hard time. The first bands I was in, I was playing bass and I was playing guitar. Nobody would let me sing, because my voice was so weird. I freaked people out. They would just go, “Oh my gawd!” With Tex & the Horseheads, I never really quit the band. Everybody always quit me. The way I look at it, I’m still with Tex & the Horseheads, but nobody else is. The new band I’m in now is called Hey! I’m in the band with Lisafer from 45 Grave.
The fact that I’m a woman is not really an advantage to me. I’m kind of a little schlub. I’m not that great-looking or anything. I pretty much operate on personality and my voice. I mean, I look all right, but it’s nothing to scream home about. Sometimes people would be genteel towards me because of my gender, but as a rule, they wouldn’t be. In fact, some people would take advantage of that. You know how it is out there. It’s a jungle out there. Some people are very kind, and some people are very unkind. As you go through life, you try to figure out how to detect which ones are which. It’s not ever easy.
If you know how to make it happen, I don’t think it matters what gender you are. Really, it’s a matter of business sense. I just don’t happen to have that business sense. I don’t blame it on me being a woman. I just blame it on my brain. In some cases, being a woman does get in the way if you let it, but it’s also in your mind.
I’m definitely part of the outcast club. I’m down with outcast sisters. I also feel like I might be different in the sense of the kind of music that I’m putting out. It’s definitely hard to put it in a genre. It’s hard to tell people what kind of music I play. That doesn’t help the situation, either. I just try to write songs and call them songs, and I can’t put them in a genre. That might be what sets me apart. I can’t really fit into a slot.
If it wasn’t for punk rock, I don’t think anybody would have listened to me, because it was punk rockers that totally tolerated my style and let me play solos and everything. Punk rock made it possible for people like me to go out into the daylight with our blackness and crawl out into life. It was totally a good thing. Still, after a while, you have to put on your big girl pants and just say, “Well, it is what it is.”
Back then, it was fun and exciting. I was a single lady out there, whooping it up. I was having a pretty good time. Everybody was partying. There were some really bad things that happened, but I usually don’t highlight those things. Whatever you do, there’s going to be some good and bad stuff going on.
Sometimes I feel like a punk and sometimes I don’t, but I still feel a connection. When I’m touring with somebody, the first thing I do is look for the punks. They’ll tell you where shit is. Punks will always be the friendliest people.