Interview: Sleater-Kinney
Flashback, April 1996: Sleater-Kinney are playing a gig in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the basement of the local sushi bar Tokyo Rose. Their first big album, Call the Doctor, has just come out, and the basement is packed. Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein stand on the tiny stage with their guitars, just a drummer behind them. No bass, I guess. They ask the girls in the house to come up front and then start bashing away.
My friend Jeanine screams and throws her bra onstage. It hits Tucker’s mike, and Tucker lets it dangle there the rest of the show. None of us have ever heard anything like this. I can’t believe two guitars can make such a ferocious noise. Tucker and Brownstein trade off vocals in their hilarious sex anthem “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone.” “I swear they’re looking right at me/Push to the front so I can see,” Tucker screams. “I’m the queen of rock & roll!” My date waves goodbye and rushes up front. Some drunk dipshits with mohawks won’t stop slamming into people. There’s no security here, so my friend Darius tries to throw them out. I jump in and help him drag them outside. I haven’t been in a fistfight since elementary school, much less won one, but I know I’m going to win this one — where all this testosterone is coming from, I have no idea. Tucker says, “Are you having a problem, boys? Well, if you can’t handle it… we can! Right, ladies?”
We don’t just come out of that show with a new favorite band — we come away feeling like we can conquer the world, start our own bands, do anything. It’s the most amazing punk-rock show I’ve ever seen.
Sleater-Kinney started as just a friendly, low-key goof, two riot-grrrl guitarists messing around and writing songs in the living room. Over the years, they have improbably turned into one of the longest-running bands in American punk rock, and one of the best. Their songs are full of sex and love and loss and feminism and rock & roll — one of their earliest love songs is about wrestling with your lover on the bedroom floor, the aforementioned “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone.” The two guitarists used to be a couple; now one of them is married, with a kid. They’re punk rockers who climax their shows with twenty-minute guitar jams, covering oldies such as Bruce Springsteen’s “The Promised Land.”
When Sleater-Kinney started in 1994, there was room for creative expression in the commercial end of the rock business. Needless to say, now is not such a time. In case you’re reading this in the waiting room outside the cryogenic-defrosting center, women rock stars have been phased out, and the current biz isn’t friendly to either indie bands or woman power. Most of the other Nineties revolutionaries — Nirvana, Bikini Kill, Hole, the Breeders — imploded, burned out or faded away years ago. Sleater-Kinney have never had a hit, but for a devoted audience, especially what’s left of the underground, they are more than just the best. They are the last band standing.
All three members of Sleater-Kinney have reputations as tough customers — their shit-taking days ended before your shit-giving days even began. They’ll gladly vent their opinions about everything from the B-52’s (whom they love) to the new Liz Phair album (which they hate) to George W. Bush (just guess). They never learned how to tone it down, which only makes their fans love them more. They’re not sure where they can go from here, or even who is listening. They hate getting ignored by the mainstream, yet they’re proud of having built their own scene outside of it. Nobody has ever traveled this far using the punk-rock map, and sometimes it’s a lonely place to be. “It’s like a game of Marco Polo,” Brownstein says. “There’s all these people with their eyes shut trying to drown out the cacophony of the bad music, searching for each other in the dark.”
Interview: Sleater-Kinney, Page 1 of 3