Riot Grrrl: Allison Wolfe of Bratmobile talks about zines, feminism and her new band, Sex Stains

from Dangerous Minds:

Photo by Conor Collins

 

Allison Wolfe, iconic 90s riot grrrl and Bratmobile member hasn’t stopped playing music since their break up in the early 2000s. In fact, she has gone on to be in several other bands such as Cold Cold Hearts, Partyline, Deep Lust, Cool Moms and most recently Sex Stains (whose debut album comes out September 2nd.)

I chatted with Wolfe about her new band as well as zines, Bratmobile, being a 90s female musician and an inspirational feminist.



Before Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman started Bratmobile, they had a riot grrrl fanzine called Girl Germs:

“Molly and I met in the dorms at the University of Oregon. We weren’t in the same room but we shared a wall and we would knock on the walls. We became best friends and started plotting to do all of these things. We were fairly young girls who were getting politicized who wanted to have a voice and participate. We really wanted to have a girl programmed radio show but it turned out that the University of Oregon didn’t have a college radio so I think Tobi Vail encouraged us to do a fanzine. We started the fanzine before we started playing music or did the band. It was a good way to have a voice when we didn’t have any other means at the time. We didn’t really know what we were doing but it was fun. Our first issue had an interview with Calamity Jane. It had scene reports and a lot of it was a reaction to grunge which had completely taken over the Northwest and was too male dominated. We wanted to have a girly voice.”

Photo by Pat Graham

 

From there they began travelling to Olympia often to hang out. “We were a band in theory. We had been travelling up to Olympia on weekends and telling everyone we were in a band called Bratmobile.”

Calvin Johnson called them and told them he had set up a show for Valentine’s Day 1991 and wanted them to play with Bikini Kill. At this point they were not truly a band so they had to scramble to get songs together. “We went to our friend Robert Christie and were like ‘What do we do?’ He loaned us his practice space and let us use their equipment and but we didn’t know how to write songs. He said to listen to a bunch of Ramones records but I thought if all bands listen to the Ramones in order to start bands then I wouldn’t and I vowed to never listen to them which isn’t exactly accurate but I never owned any Ramones records or listened to them that much.”

Allison said she listen to a lot of female rap and hip hop before the band started such as Salt n’ Pepa, Yo Yo, Bytches with Problems, TLC and others. “That was a big influence on us, all these really awesome, kinda goofy but politicized women in rap and hip hop that weren’t commercialized yet. It was more politicized. They had messages that were pretty important. Also, the first Batman movie had come out and Prince did the soundtrack and the Batmobile was an influence on us naming the band Bratmobile.” Their first show, which was just her and Molly at the time, was pretty much a capella. “There was a little bit of guitar and drums going on but not much… We jumped off stage and Kurt Cobain walked in right then and I walked up to him and said ‘You missed us!’ and handed him one of our fanzines.”

 

 

At the time, most female bands were lumped into the category of riot grrrl while only a select few actually were. For example, true riot grrrls were Bikini Kill, Huggy Bear, Bratmobile and Heavens to Betsy while L7, Babes in Toyland, 7 Year Bitch and Hole were not. “Their music was different and they were doing a different thing and they certainly never called themselves riot grrrls. This was pre-internet and everything was so much more regional then. The riot grrrl network was based on who knew who and who hung out with who, which was based in Olympia or in DC whereas those bands didn’t live in any of those places. That whole division was really mostly created by the media. People listen to the public record and the public record is a bunch of lazy journalists who couldn’t think of anything else than to throw all women into riot grrrl. It was irresponsible and lazy and inaccurate and it turned us against each other when in fact each mixtape I made had a song by one of those bands on it. We all respected and like each other. I was pen pals a bit with Kat (Bjelland) and went to 7 Year Bitch shows when I could.”

In the late 90s a lot of the riot grrrl bands were breaking up. Wolfe that was hard because “it felt like it left a big hole.” However, she says “A lot of young women in punk and indie music were inspired by riot grrrl or awesome 90s musicians like 7 Year Bitch, Babes in Toyland, PJ Harvey and L7. That moved things forward a bit.”

Wolfe is also responsible for the creation of Ladyfest (a music festival that is still very popular today and happens in many different cities) which first occurred in Olympia in 2000.

“It stemmed from this riot grrrl gathering that had been organized by the EMP (Experience Music Project) who were about to start their museum in Seattle. They had approached me and asked if I would help them get former riot grrrls together to do an oral history. That was the first time a lot of us formal riot grrrls had been together in the same room and we just talked about riot grrrls. There was such a backlash at the end, everyone was trying to separate themselves from it or move beyond it. It was the first time we felt we could be together and talked about what had happened, but also feel validated. Out of that gathering I started talking with Corin Tucker a bit about how we were all still doing cool things separately and if there was somehow we could harness those old riot grrrl energies and do something together. I thought Olympia in 2000 would be the perfect place and statement.”

Photo by Debi del Grande

 

Today Wolfe is focusing her attention on Sex Stains. The band formed in LA when Allison kept getting asked to play in tribute nights. “I met various members of Sex Stains through those tribute nights. For each one, they were the person at those tribute nights that really stood out to me.” The band is made up of five members including Mecca Vazie Andrews, Sharif Dumani, Pachy Garcia and David Orlando. “I really wanted to be in a band with two lead singers.” Their record release show is September 4th at The Echo in LA. The album is being released by Don Giovanni Records. “They were the only label we approached. It just seemed like a good fit. We love the other bands on the label especially Downtown Boys, Screaming Females and Priests and we wanted to be aligned with other bands we believe in and that were slightly politicized.”

 

 

This September, Sex Stains hit the road. Tour dates include:

8/26: Los Angeles, CA @ The Echoplex (FYF Pre-Party show w/ Sheer Mag + Girlpool)

9/4: Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo (ALBUM RELEASE SHOW)

9/13: Brooklyn, NY @ Silent Barn

9/14: Baltimore, MD @ The Windup Space

9/15: Washington, DC @ Comet Ping Pong (w/ Coup Savage & the Snips, Governess)

9/16: Manhattan, NY @ Webster Hall (w/ Downtown Boys)

9/17: Asbury Park, NJ @ The New Alternative Music Festival (Don Giovanni Records)

9/24: Santa Monica, CA @ 18th Street Arts Center Beer and Art Festival

9/27: Los Angeles, CA @ American Legion Hall

10/23: Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo

Bonus video: Bratmobile’s “Eating Toothpaste”

 

Posted by Izzi Krombholz

"Don't Need You - The Herstory of Riot Grrrl" Documentary (39 min.)

Dig it.



from Dangerous Minds:

As an introduction to a brief but important music movement, or even just a simple nostalgia piece for people who were around at the time, Kerri Koch’s 2006 documentary Don’t Need You: The Herstory of Riot Grrrl makes for interesting and compelling viewing.

For a brief while in the early 90s it seemed Riot Grrrl was everywhere. It was a breath of fresh air in the male-dominated grunge landscape, though some of those grunge bands did their best to promote it and more pro-feminist ideals (the ghost of Kurt looms into view in a flowing, floral-print dress). But Riot Grrrl was met mostly with derision in the mainstream media, what with its core values of fanzines and localised press, not to mention of course feminism, self-expression and the forcing through of female self-determination in a male-oriented world.

Looking back now It’s hard to believe how much of an uproar some female musicians simply being angry could cause, but then as has been mentioned numerous times no-one wants to see women being angry (supposedly). Pretty soon Riot Grrrl was reduced to a simple concept of being merely “angry girls”, and made easy to dismiss. UK Riot Grrrl contingent Huggy Bear famously got ejected from the studios of tacky yoof program The Word (on which they had just performed) for heckling the presenters about their Barbie doll-imitating porn star guests. This got the band into the national media, but also sealed their fate as mere rabble-rousers while ignoring their efforts to create alternative spaces and dialogs. But still, Riot Grrrl was oppositional, it was dramatic, and it was fucking exciting.

Just as quickly as it bubbled up however, Riot Grrrl seemed to fizzle out. I guess my perception of this was skewed hugely by the mainstream UK music press, which was my only port of access to alternative music and culture in those pre-internet days. It was a mutual love/hate thing (more hate/hate I guess) with the performers and the scene itself withdrawing from the mainstream attention and the negative associations it brought. In a very interesting read called Riot Grrrl - the collected interviews on Collpase Board, Everett True (the editor of Melody Maker at the time, and the person chiefly responsible for breaking the scene in the UK music media) explains his own role and that of the press:

Riot Grrrl was basically about female empowerment – females doing stuff on their own terms, separate from men, making up their own rules and systems and cultures. Sure, men were welcome, but they had to understand that for once they weren’t going to be automatically given first place. (One of the reasons my own role in the gestation of Riot Grrrl as a popular cultural movement became so confused was that after a certain period of time I began to listen to those around me – female musicians, activists, artists, human beings – who felt that having such a high-profile male associated with a fledgling female movement was absolutely counter-productive. This is almost the first time I’ve spoken to anyone since then.)

Don’t Need You - The Herstory of Riot Grrrl is important because it lets the creators of the movement speak for themselves. The editing may be rough in places, and the story may jump around in chronology a wee bit, but you get to hear first hand from the original Riot Grrrls themselves what informed their third-wave feminist views and what inspired them to start their own scene. Featured interviewees include Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, Alison Wolfe of Bratmobile, Corin Tucker of Heavens To Betsy / Sleatter-Kinney and Fugazi’s Ian McKaye.