The Roches’ Showbiz Blues
“At this point, we don’t have a relaxed feeling of being successful and happy. There’s a lot of pressure and anger and pent-up frustration.” Terre Roche, the most voluble member of the New York folk trio whose debut Warner Bros. album, The Roches, is receiving national critical acclaim, speaks in carefully measured cadences. Hypersensitive artistes in the philistine pop world, Roche sisters Maggie, Terre and Suzzy are notoriously skittish with the press, and it’s only after an hour of tense conversation — the four of us sprawled on the grass beside the Charles River in Cambridge — that they begin to open up.
“I can’t talk to anyone these days who’s not relating to me as one of the Roches,” complains youngest sister Suzzy. “You ask a question, and one thing comes out for three different people who are basically trying to get away from each other. In my experience of being around the Roches, there are a lot of spears flying.”
“That’s not my experience!” protests twenty-seven-year-old Maggie Roche, the group’s senior member and most prolific writer. Maggie speaks with the pained solemnity of someone struggling to communicate through a catastrophic grief. But even as they disagree, the three sisters exchange a look of protective love that excludes the rest of the world. Sisterhood, biological and political, is a fundamental ingredient of the Roches’ sensibility. Depending on their mood and on the song they’re singing, they can exploit it for wacky humor or ominous solidarity. But if sister acts have traditionally emphasized similarity, the Roches insist on a fierce individualism.
“We’re all very different personalities with different opinions,” Terre says forcefully. “It creates a three-sided, three-dimensional thing.”
Maggie and Terre Roche were entering adolescence at the time of Beatlemania. It’s easy to imagine that as teenagers, these irreverent, luminously intelligent women secretly resolved not to run after the Beatles but to grow up to be like them. And in a way they did — within a folk, feminist, Seventies, New York bohemian framework. A sleek gamin sporting a Jean Seberg haircut, Terre, 26, is the trio’s poised, sarcastic spokesperson. Shy and darkly mysterious, suggesting reservoirs of rage and strength, Maggie is their aesthetic theorist and spiritual mother. Suzzy, 22, plays the rebel and the clown, her tempestuous slapstick rock & roll personality neatly undercutting her sisters’ artier tendencies.
Though the Roches have been hailed as leading lights in the so-called New York folk revival, the point is really that they represent the best and brightest of a new generation of middle-class pop intellectual artists who were teenagers at the time of Woodstock and who are just now reaching maturity. The previous generation — Dylan, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell — shared the righteously romantic attitudes of the Sixties counterculture. The new generation, having inherited that culture’s shattered hopes, evinces skepticism rather than certainty, and its political style is more eclectic and off beat than rhetorical.
By cavorting around in weird combinations of thrift-shop threads and sports gear, the Roches deliberately contradict their serious folk image. The same iconoclasm applies to their songs. In addition to their own material, their repertoire includes such oddities as a three-part a cappella version of the “Hallelujah Chorus,” the old Ames Brothers hit, “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane,” Little Eva’s “The Boy I Love” and Bob Dylan’s “Clothes Line Saga.”
The Roches’ own songs, many of them arranged in close, swooping harmonies, are laced with deadpan one-liners (“You can go south in winter/Be what you are a goose”) that don’t make their songs any less serious, only less obviously so. Where Joni Mitchell’s ballads of erotic disenchantment bleed, Maggie Roche’s are wryly philosophic. “I know these girls, they don’t like me/But I am just like them,” she wrote about wives and mistresses in “The Married Men.” The Roches’ music is correspondingly cool and exploratory. Embracing barbershop, Irish traditional, Andrews Sisters swing, Carter Family mountain music, doo-wop, work songs and children’s songs, as well as Joni Mitchell, it succeeds in keeping the listener constantly off-balance.
More than ten years of work have gone into the Roches. Maggie and Terre began singing professionally in the late Sixties at Democratic fundraisers in their hometown of Park Ridge, New Jersey. They were brought up Irish Catholic; their father, John A. Roche, was a speech-training consultant who developed a taped language-skills course called Speechmaster. When the duo were offered a tour, Maggie quit Bard College, and Terre dropped out of high school. “One by one we left home/We went so far out there/Everybody got scared,” Terre wrote in “Runs in the Family,” a song that suggests the danger and the personal cost of making bold decisions early in life and sticking to them. Among other things, this meant having to support themselves on and off with secretarial and waitress jobs.
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