Skip to main contentSleater-Kinney seduced Janice Ordal-Odrane, and now the 32-year-old mom, pregnant with her second child, finds herself in a former porn theater, in strange company.
It's a sweltering July night, and Ordal-Odrane is at the Aladdin Theater in Southeast Portland, waiting to see her favorite band. For the 26th time. And she's far from the only victim snared by drummer Janet Weiss and guitarists Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker. Ordal-Odrane is surrounded by mohawked punks, squealing pre-teens with Britney hair, butch women in neckties, patchwork thrift-store shoppers, suburbanish parents in sandals. There's even a gray-haired, grandmotherly type, sporting a black T-shirt emblazoned with the alarming demand SHOW ME YOUR RIFFS, eager as the rest to witness the Portland band some (specifically Greil Marcus, considered by many America's foremost rock critic) call The Greatest in the World.
This is Sleater-Kinney's first Portland show since January, and one of the first since the band ended an 18-month hiatus to record its forthcoming new album, One Beat. The fans at the Aladdin, to put it mildly, are psyched.
Why? Ask everyone in the room and you'd probably hear several hundred slightly different explanations for the 8-year-old trio's allure. Some would cite the fiery punk-rock feminism the band has championed throughout its career. Some would wax eloquent about the heady lyrical brew of politics and personal revelation on albums like Call the Doctor and Dig Me Out. Others would rave about Brownstein's terse lashes of guitar, or the way the waifish 27-year-old bookworm transforms into a swaggering, leg-kicking, windmilling siren on stage. And Weiss' unshakable poise behind the kit, where she flicks her jet-black coif to a propulsive beat, would certainly earn praise.
For Ordal-Odrane, it's about the melodies--that, and the shattering wail wielded by Tucker, like her the mother of a little boy.
"My sister says it's like nails on a chalkboard," Ordal-Odrane says of Tucker's singing. "But it just gets me emotionally."
All this, plus an assist from the media, has helped Sleater-Kinney put the fan back in fanatic. There's the guy from the Bronx who flies repeatedly to the West Coast to see the band perform. There's Mike from Atlanta ("Mikey's been with us for a long, long time," says Brownstein), who filmed a documentary called Sleater-Kinney Ate My Homework. There's Bruna from Brazil, who arranged a screening of Mike's film in her homeland. There's Jimmy, who heard the call when he was 17 years old, isolated in small-town Michigan. There are thousands of people who spray cyberspace with debate over everything from the band's lyrics to its publicity photos to how you say its name--"Slee-ter" or "Slay-ter"? (it's "Slay-ter").
There are scores of websites paying homage to Sleater-Kinney in English, in Dutch, pour les francophones, et cetera. And there's the guy who mails Tucker lottery tickets every month.
"I thought about skipping the Aladdin show," says Kevin Chan, a 20-year-old Portland State student from Dayton, Ohio, with classic indie-rock bed-head and a ragged Sleater-Kinney patch pinned to his tote bag. "But that would be like if my parents came to town and I didn't bother to see them."
As the band prepares for the Aug. 20 release of One Beat, its first album in two years, excitement in this global community of fans nears fever-pitch. The long break has fans ravenous, but it also leaves Sleater-Kinney facing a quandary. Granted, it's a quandary most musicians would kill to have, but still: When a band has always conquered all it's surveyed, what next?
For the uninitiated, Sleater-Kinney's story goes like this:
In 1994, Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein started a band in Olympia, Wash. Tucker, the daughter of a University of Oregon psychologist and a medical technology specialist, and Brownstein, whose mom writes about wine and food for a small Northern California newspaper and whose dad is a veterinarian and amateur poet, were both students at famously freeform Evergreen State College. "I got credit for performance art in which I was wearing nothing but a black slip, holding a huge knife and screaming at the audience," Tucker recalls. "We call this the 'expressive arts.'" Tucker majored in documentary film studies; Brownstein studied sociolinguistics.
Sleepy Olympia may seem an unlikely subcultural mecca, but Washington's capital is fertile soil for underground rock. Tucker and Brownstein had their musical to-the-barricades moment during the salad days of riot grrrl, a feminist punk movement of the early '90s. In its formative days, Sleater-Kinney (named for an Olympia road accessed by a now-oft-photographed I-5 exit) carried on riot grrrls' tradition of uncompromising lyrics and determined invasion of the rock-and-roll boys' club.
The group began in unprepossessing material circumstances. Brownstein telemarketed vacuum cleaners. Tucker worked in a camera store and temped after moving to Portland in 1996. (Brownstein commuted from Olympia for years before moving here last December.)
After working with other drummers, the pair hooked up with Janet Weiss in 1996. A former art student who, as a kid, knew celebrity madame Heidi Fleiss slightly ("A fairly unpleasant girl from the start"), Weiss has a dad who's a California lawyer and a mom who worked in the ad business. She sold classifieds for Willamette Week and would go on to work for high-wattage ad agency Wieden + Kennedy. Meanwhile, she played drums for highly regarded bands Motorgoat and Quasi.
Weiss proved to be the band's missing link, and Dig Me Out brought a sound that had been something of an inchoate stew into sudden, sharp focus.
Sleater-Kinney songs can be willfully awkward and discomfiting one moment, then burst into surges of irresistible '70s guitar rock or sugary classic pop. The two guitars--there is no bass--alternate between quarrel and cooperation, eschewing traditional divisions between rhythm and lead. Brownstein's driving vocals duel with Tucker's theatrical keening. Weiss welds it all together.
Call it punk, post-punk, riot grrrl, post-riot grrrl, indie rock, whatever. Love it, hate it, whatever. Sleater-Kinney's sound is instantly recognizable and 100-percent its own. Dig Me Out galvanized fans and the media.
In 1996, Rolling Stone opined that SK "embodies punk distilled to its purest essence." In 1999, Greil Marcus proclaimed the trio "the best band in the world" in a celebrated piece for Esquire. Marcus waxed millenary about the band's album of that year, The Hot Rock. "Like Sex Pistols records...[The Hot Rock] might destroy whatever came before or after," wrote Marcus. (Marcus has probably been SK's most prominent supporter, also lauding the band in Interview, Salon and The New York Times.)
Sleater-Kinney has never played the high-profile guest slot on Saturday Night Live, but two years ago comedian Ben Stiller felt free to drop the band's name as the punch line to an SNL joke about hitting on artsy college girls. Comic Janeane Garofalo once told a Portland audience that, even though she's not gay, she has a "crush on Sleater-Kinney, just like everyone else."
Despite this adulation, Sleater-Kinney's relationship with the press is decidedly...mixed. On the one hand, the band has justifiably slammed rock journalism for its many idiocies and superficialities. On the other, the three seem acutely aware of their own value as subjects and aren't shy about using it. When the band agreed to appear on WW's cover, for instance, they insisted on choosing the photographer and forbade WW to send a representative to the shoot. (Weiss, unhappy with the results, tried to schedule a make-up session, but deadlines intervened.)
The music media's ample coverage of the band, present company included, mostly springs from genuine admiration for its music and accomplishments. But if it sometimes seems the press is beguiled by the band, that's because it is. A desire to be the honorable exception, the one journalist who doesn't spew inanities about the trio's looks or their politics, probably colors many writers' approach to the band.
Sleater-Kinney has achieved this sway without much support from the two primary engines of modern star-making: radio and video. Radio, for example, in its current consolidated and homogenized form, has no room for bands outside rigidly defined genres or those who aren't signed with a major label.
"They've always been a little...eclectic," says a programmer for one local rock station, which has never played the band.
Even so, Sleater-Kinney scores at the cash register. According to Kill Rock Stars, the independent label in Olympia that's produced all of the band's albums since Dig Me Out, the band's last three discs have sold about 250,000 copies combined--nothing to give AOL Time Warner night sweats, but terrific for indie releases and good enough, in each album's case, for No. 1 on the College Music Journal's sales chart. While no one in the band seems to be living an ostentatious rock-star lifestyle, none is telemarketing vacuum cleaners, either. (Brownstein did do some substitute teaching during the hiatus. She's not sure it's her calling.)
In the context of Portland's music scene, commercially inclined alt-rockers Everclear will probably always sell more records. Retro-jazz darlings Pink Martini will always have more glossy cachet. And yet if there's one current Portland band bound for the history books, it would seem to be Sleater-Kinney. The Experience Music Project, Paul Allen's multimillion-dollar bauble of a rock museum, has already enshrined the band with a splashy display and quizzed members for its project on riot grrrl history.
The irony, of course, is that Sleater-Kinney springs from the punk scene, the one subset of modern pop that greets success with suspicion. Resentment of the band has been a fact of its life for a long time; nor is ill-feeling confined to the self-designated underground. Many are just sick of hearing about them. Four years ago, the singer for schlocky pop-rockers Third Eye Blind felt obliged to take a crack at Sleater-Kinney's success, dismissing it as "a media-created band."
"People started saying we'd sold out about the time we signed with Kill Rock Stars," Brownstein says. "Kill Rock Stars, with its five employees or whatever, constitutes a sellout in some people's minds."
It is true that anyone looking for signs of hard-bitten militancy among the members of America's most famously feminist rock band is likely to be disappointed. In person, Sleater-Kinney is not angry, strident or severe. The three are disarming, friendly. Their lifestyles, as far as they discuss them, are hardly full schedules of revolution.
In fact, if you're scouring for evidence that Sleater-Kinney's gone soft, consider this: Weiss gardens. In fact, they all garden. Brownstein plays chess, reads philosophy books for fun and participates in a theater group. Tucker enjoys mystery novels; right now she's reading one featuring a pregnant, lactating detective.
"I always joke that we're the squarest rock band ever," Brownstein says.
And, most obviously, Tucker's a mom now. The birth of Tucker's son, Marshall, now a 16-month-old "wild child" according to his mom, was the most dramatic event of the band's time off. ("I made a record," Weiss says. "Corin made a human.")
"I didn't play music at all for a year," Tucker says. "My life was filled with different stuff. I think it was so important for our band to get a creative break and get ourselves out of the media spotlight."
The band's last album, 2000's All Hands on the Bad One, relied on a loose, fast-talking collection of odes to rock-and-roll womanhood. It was a direct reaction to The Hot Rock, an opaque and introverted record, itself a reaction to Dig Me Out's unexpected success. As a celebratory retort to the macho excesses of mainstream rock circa Woodstock '99, All Hands worked. Notoriously bitchy British rock mag New Musical Express called it a "victory through joy and cranked-up amps." But songs like "The Ballad of a Ladyman" and "You're No Rock n' Roll Fun" kept the focus locked on the band itself.
Even though Sleater-Kinney stands by All Hands, it's hard to escape the impression that the album represented a creative cul-de-sac. Write enough songs about the vagaries of being a rock-and-roller and you slide into self-parody, as a number of Metallica songs unintentionally demonstrate. "It was a selfish record," Tucker says.
Thus One Beat, so long in coming, has a lot to prove. How does a band with babies, mortgages and garden gloves add to an already formidable rock-and-roll legacy?
The Aladdin Theater show on July 17 provides a chance to road-test and hone new material before an autumn tour in support of One Beat takes SK to many of the country's premier rock venues. Of more immediate concern to the band, though, is the unique crowd and cause--the show benefits Portland's Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls. A one-of-a-kind summer camp, the weeklong how-to-rock symposium attracted 125 girls between ages 8 and 18; its connection to the show explains in part why the Aladdin is full of little kids and middle-aged parents as well as the standard rock-show menagerie.
In honor of the occasion, Sleater-Kinney has assembled a retrospective set, playing a couple of songs off each past album in chronological order. Screamy, squally, comparatively rudimentary blasts from the long-ago first record come first. Then the band hits stride with the anthemic songs the crowd loves and knows word-for-word--riotous, bracing, goose-pimple songs like "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone," during which Brownstein whoops maniacally and Tucker informs the world that "I'm the queen of rock and roll."
And then, history dispensed with, the new stuff.
One Beat is a remarkable album--a borderline classic-rock opus that experiments with some base ingredients of American music. The band's old (and, admittedly, often great) self-referential manifestoes are gone. One Beat has black-curtained love songs, delirious pop songs, even a walloping Portland-pride anthem called "Light Rail Coyote" that deserves to become the city's answer to "Sweet Home Chicago." On a blazing '60s dance-floor soul number called "Step Aside," Tucker belts out, "This mama works 'til her back is sore/ But the baby's fed and the tunes are pure." It's definitely a statement of girl-power unleashed, but it's more Loretta Lynn or Tina Turner than Bikini Kill. "Sympathy," the album's final, searing blues track, just may be the best song the band's ever written.
At the Aladdin, it becomes clear that SK has raised its game when the band launches into a song from One Beat called "Combat Rock." The stuttering, martial, quasi-reggae song steals its title from an old Clash album, and it's about war.
The pop world has greeted America's post-Sept.11 militarism in completely pusillanimous fashion. There have been the predictable kick-their-ass-take-the-gas anthems from the country crowd, and Canadian classic-rocker Neil Young provided George W. Bush a ready rallying cry in the form of "Let's Roll." But with the exception of Bruce Springsteen's new album with the hoary E Street Band, a cycle of Sept. 11-inspired songs, attempts to deal with a world turned crazier, meaner and more dangerous with anything like intelligence or dissent have been hard to come by.
"We were sort of waiting to see who would write the protest song," Brownstein says. "And there was this moment of disbelief--why does it have to be us?"
Into the breach, then, these three Portland women with domestic leanings. One Beat breaks out the brass knuckles on aggression, nationalism and the president who, as Tucker puts it on "Far Away," "hides, while working men rush in to give their lives."
"Far Away" chronicles Tucker's horror as she sits nursing her baby at home, watching "the world explode in flames" on TV. To paraphrase Bush, the sadness quickly turns to anger on "Combat Rock," when Brownstein demands to know "since when is skepticism un-American?"
The war songs are just one element of an album swirling with dark portents and blessed with the broadest musical palette the band's ever drawn from. But they are perhaps the handiest way to look at the greater vision Sleater-Kinney claims with One Beat. When you're 20, being angry at the sexist structure of rock and roll is righteous and valid; when you're 28, that anger is still righteous and valid, but if you haven't sensed the presence of a larger world out there, maybe you've said all you need to say. Sleater-Kinney has a lot more to say, and the brass to say it. The band is not content simply to rehash past glories; in fact, the exciting thing about One Beat is that it could fail.
"You hope people will understand that your endeavors will evolve," says Brownstein. "But you have to be happy with it either way. You wish people wouldn't want your art to remain static, and would appreciate that you're challenging yourself. That's not always the case."
Sad but true. Looking around the Aladdin, though--at wide eyes and bobbing heads, at people trying to sing along with new songs even though they don't know the words yet--it seems more likely that the many seductions of Sleater-Kinney will continue.
The Aladdin Theater once showed the Linda Lovelace vehicle
every weekend; Sleater- Kinney played the Aladdin with bands Mother May I and Shemo on July 17.
Carrie Brownstein calls Bertrand Russell's
"my summer book."
The largest online Sleater- Kinney discussion group is the Yahoo list "wordsandguitar," with more than 400 members: www.groups.yahoo.com .
For more on Sleater- Kinney and
, see www.killrockstars.com .
For a history of the riot grrrl movement, see www.emplive.com/explore/riot_grrrl/index.asp .
Before starting Sleater- Kinney, Corin Tucker played in the band Heavens to Betsy; Carrie Brownstein played in Excuse 17.
For
's slightly giggly, but mysteriously award- winning, coverage of
, see www.wweek.com/html/cultfeature042600.html .
The second annual Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls took place Monday- Friday, July 15-19, at the Mississippi Rising Ballroom on North Mississippi Avenue. See www.girlsrockcamp.org for more information.
Sleater- Kinney is scheduled to play the Crystal Ballroom on Sept. 27.
WWeek 2015