Three’s Company

[November 14th, 2007]

When Joanna Bolme calls herself an “old-school Portlander,” she ain’t kiddin’. A member of Sean Croghan’s now-defunct, cultishly lauded pop-punk outfit Jr. High and current member of both Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks and Quasi, Bolme, 39, has proven herself a most ubiquitous Northwest bass player over the years. And that all goes without mention of her stint with local jangle-pop heroes the Minders and her all-girl garage rock cover band, Shadow Mortons, featuring Rebecca Gates (the Spinanes) and Janet Weiss (the Jicks/Sleater-Kinney/Quasi). Fresh off tour with Quasi—of which she’s now an “official” member—Bolme told WW why Portland needs more bassists, and why she doesn’t talk about (ex-boyfriend) Elliott Smith.

WW : You’ve toured with Quasi before. Why make it official at this point?
I guess we just took pictures for the press ’cause we were gonna go on tour. I’ve been officially in the band for over a year now.

How hard was it to join a duo as tight—personally and musically—as Quasi’s Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss?
I met them at a potluck at Rebecca Gates’ house in 1991 or ’92, so I’ve known ‘em a long time. It’s not like I’m walking into something I don’t know. [It is] intense—despite the fact that they used to be married, they’ve been playing music as a duo for years. Walking into any duo situation and trying to be the third person [can] be a little strange.

You’re like the Kevin Bacon of Northwest indie-rock bass playing. How did you get started?
I haven’t really played in all that many bands. I’ve just been floating around for a while.

There are so many bands here now. In the ’90s, was it just easier to know everyone in the scene?
Oh yeah [laughs]. For sure. At that time, the core music scene was centered around Satyricon, the X-Ray Café and then maybe La Luna a little bit later. Those three clubs, basically, were it. On any given night, you’d be out at one of those places…so you saw all the bands eventually. There were probably 15 bands in that scene—the core ones that, I guess, got the scene a little bit known. There’s 350 bands in Portland now.

You’ve gained some notoriety for helping to put together Elliott Smith’s last album, From a Basement on a Hill.
Yeeeah.

You sound apprehensive…
I don’t really do interviews about Elliott too much. I can talk a little bit about my involvement in that record, but it’s probably not gonna get past that.

I imagine it’s a difficult thing to have people bring up all the time…
Yeah, I don’t do that many interviews, anyway.

Did you do more around the time of Basement ’s release?
No.... [Producer] Rob [Schnapf] and I said we’d do two interviews, and we did the two and that was it. One of the interviews [for the New York Times], the person that was doing the interview [Los Angeles magazine’s RJ Smith] fabricated that I burst into tears in the middle of the interview, which was not true. That’s why.

Janet seems like an intimidating drummer to share rhythm duties with. Her style is really abstruse and instinctual.
Well, for me, she’s one of the easiest drummers to play with. That might be because I started playing with her a long time ago. The time that we first started playing music together, we were not nearly as skilled musically as we are now [laughs]. So, I’ve sort of watched her grow and become a better drummer and the same for her with me. I’ve listened to her music, Quasi and Sleater-Kinney, throughout the years, so it’s easy for me to play with her ‘cause I sort of know where she’s coming from. So, yeah, I think maybe for other people, she would probably be a pretty hard person to [play] with. But when we were looking for somebody to play in the Jicks after John [Moen] left [to join the Decemberists] she was a natural person, aside from the fact that Sleater-Kinney had just broken up. It was like, ‘Oh, I know I can play with her.’ Trying to get a relationship going with somebody you haven’t played with...can be really…complicated.

Does playing with Janet in the Jicks help you craft a chemistry with her, outside of her relationship with Sam in Quasi?
For sure. With the Jicks, there’s a lot of jamming going on. Quasi’s stuff is definitely free improvisational in places, [but] the Jicks is just kind of a little looser about everything—even the structured parts can totally break down at some point. Yeah, we have developed a—we look at each other a lot and listen where the other person’s going, like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna go off there with you for a while.’

With which band, Quasi or the Jicks, do you have more of an integral part in the creation of songs?
You know, when I joined Quasi, they had just put a record out (When the Going Gets Dark), so we were pretty much playing that. I’ve been a Jick for seven years now, so probably that band...I’ve worked on a lot more songs with them.

So it’s not like Stephen [Malkmus] comes in and says, “This is how we’re gonna do things.”
No, for some songs he’s like, ‘Oh, I have this bass part already figured out.’ And that’s cool, ‘cause it’s usually good. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I don’t wanna play that ‘cause it’s not as good as something I’d make up.’

Does being an official member of Quasi take anything away from its “power-duo” image?
Well, I think I’m kinda gonna blame my friend Rebecca Gates again. The Spinanes sort of [sighs] ruined indie music because they eliminated the bass player. You never missed it in that band; [Rebecca] has a very heavy-duty guitar sound...they were so good that I think a lot of bands were like, ‘Psshh. Duo? Yeah! I’ll just play guitar and you play drums and that’s it. It’ll be totally fine.’ But a lot of people didn’t bother to come up with a good guitar sound that filled up the low end…so, in a way, I’m on a mission to remind people that bass guitars are very important in music, and they actually do serve a purpose. When people are like, ‘Wow, it’s just so much heavier.’ It’s like, ‘Well, duh.’ [laughs] Stop playing music without bass guitar. Get a bass guitarist. There’s definitely enough musicians in this town.

You don’t need to be a one-man band.
Get a drummer, get a bass player, get somebody to play that keyboard part, or get rid of that keyboard part. Try to make music live as you’re playing it.

We’ve gotten pretty far away from that.
That’s one of the reasons I don’t go see a lot of bands. It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s one of those bands that plays along to a tape. Well, that’s…boring.’ It might be good on record, but I can stay home and listen to the record.

Our previous music editor once said that no one’s a Quasi fan first, that Quasi fans exist because they’re fans of Sam or Janet’s other bands first...
I don’t agree with that. There’s definitely people that are just Quasi fans. Sam used to be in the Donner Party, and he already had pretty hardcore Sam fans before Quasi, [so] maybe Donner Party, but it’s a totally different-sounding thing.

Guys are always telling me, “I love her.” Did you know that you’re something of a heartthrob?
Well, no. That’s kinda funny. I kind of think of myself as being a tomboy. Maybe guys are into tomboy girls these days, which would not be a bad thing…