Beyond Breasts… Beyond Beauty… Female Musicians With an Agenda!

Female Musicians Breaking Barriers in Salt Lake’s Underground Scene

Ordinary Girls

“Show us your tits!” yells a crowd of boys at a black metal show in Colorado. “Show us yours!” shouts Brita and Carol of a young FistFull, a band who has since gone on to rock heavier, harder and deeper than most bands in Salt Lake. “It’s humor,” says bassist Carol Dalrymple, “that gets you through.” A strategy for success? After poking fun at the crowd’s misogynists, the girls of FistFull succeeded in drawing a crew of ladies to the front for a mosh pit. 

When she was playing with Power Tools for Girls in the early ‘90s, Julie Styer remembers two Provo bouncers who wouldn’t let her past the entrance to warm up for her band. She was just a girlfriend, they said. “You guys are fucking assholes,” she responded. “My band is headlining tonight.”

Girls across the Salt Lake underground know that being a musician is different when you’re not a guy. Some accentuate the difference between women and men, finding power in the distinction. Others blur the line. But what makes Salt Lake women unique? And what are they doing to bridge the gender gap today? 

Making Room

Getting to that place — under the lights with a mic and a captive audience — is a challenge for anyone. For girls, perhaps, the road is rockier, fraught with nay-sayers that include parents, peers and club owners. Tracy Brewer and Angie Eralie of Chubby Bunny know. When they were forming their band in December 2000, they saw a club of boys who knew the lingo, the codes, the rules. 

“We invited ourselves,” Brewer says. It wasn’t easy for Chubby Bunny to figure out the basics: buying equipment, booking shows and networking with musicians. These difficulties, they say, led them to create what is arguably the most visible and organized girl musician support system in Salt Lake City: the UGGLIES web community (Underground Girls Getting Loud, Independent and Electric in Salt Lake City), available at utahunderground.net/ugglies. It’s a meeting place, they say, for female musicians to trade tips, find band members and locate shows that feature other female musicians. Eralie says, “When I was 18, I couldn’t restring my guitar. I can do it now and other girls should be able to learn how without feeling intimidated.” 

Lindsay Heath, the energetic drummer for Redd Tape, loves the website and hopes girls will come out of the woodwork more often. “Although the scene might not exactly welcome girls, it’s crucial that we involve ourselves to remind the boys that they don’t own it,” she says. “I’ve been teased and patronized for too long by misogyny and chauvinism. I’m totally aggravated and ready to scream, and suddenly, I’m [able to] voice my rage into an amplified exposure. [Female musicians] need to be recognized as nothing less than revolutionaries. We are the minority in a male-dominated system.” 

Even gaining access to that system, however, can be a challenge for those on the outside. People urge girls to play flutes, not drums. They sing in choirs instead of playing bass in rock bands. They get “catty.” So say the girl musicians in SLC, but the symptoms can be found almost anywhere.

“You walk into an equipment store and they’re like, ‘Hey, it’s a chick,’” Eralie says, who provides advice through the UGGLIES site on locating girl-friendly stores. Lindsay chooses to bring boys with her when she goes shopping for equipment. “If I don’t make it a point to bring a male along every time I go to a music shop, I can plan on being charged double,” she says. 

KeIIy Green, the ferocious singer and guitarist behind the vegan-punk-rocking trio Teen Tragedies, gets flack even though she is the head employee of an equipment store (Salt Lake City’s Guitar Center). “People second guess me and I’m the fucking manager,” she says.

Others, like Debi Graham, are irked by unfair gig payment. She is the lead singer, acoustic guitar player and driving namesake for Debi Graham and the Full Band. Originally from St. George, the well-spoken Graham has molded her band into an aggressive blend of loud folk rock — but failed to join her male counterparts on the higher end of the payment scales. In shows, Graham plays hard. When she lights the stage with her acoustic guitar and graceful figure, audience members tend to expect something soft, feminine. “When I start throwing on my overdrive pedal, people think again,” she says.

Being paid less than her male counterparts — and witnessing the transactions herself — is a sore spot for Graham. “Most of the clubs in Salt Lake are male owned,” she says. “A woman-owned club makes all the difference.” At certain female-owned clubs in town, she says, she comes home with $500 in her pocket, as opposed to the $200 average she can expect from most male club owners. She fights the inequity by persisting with the owner and continuing to book shows at establishments that pay her poorly. That, she says, has earned her respect — and fairer wages.

Styer drives the raw, screeching sounds of Power Tools for Girls, the bewitching, sexy power of Lovesucker, and the hard-edged punk discord of Silvox, and she wants people to take her as seriously as her male counterparts. 

“I care extremely that I’m taken seriously,” says the band leader, who is calling the shots, booking the shows, planning the practices and writing all the music and lyrics for her new project, which includes two other male members. Despite her pink and black hair and commanding presence, Styer is excited about the prospect of girls being able to blend into the background — and glad to see that more girls are picking up instruments. “l can remember a time when it was only me and Amber Jarvis of Mouthbreather,” she says. 

Today, Jarvis plays with Optimus Prime, and doesn’t consider herself much of a pioneer. “I don’t like to be gender-specific,” she says. Styer likes the idea of girl musicians playing their “novelty” down: “Now a girl can be in the shadows,” she says, “and it’s not a big deal. Women are playing more subtle roles, and that’s awesome.” 

One girl who “plays in the shadows” is Carri Wakefield, bassist for the Wolfs. Also having played in the past seven years with Tara, Furious Fire, Guitarchestra and Cobra, Wakefield is a seven-year stage veteran with an unassuming but solid playing style. With long blond hair, earnest eyes and a gentle manner, the masseuse-by-day seems an unlikely candidate for a rock ‘n’ roll bass player. “It’s not about guys or girls — it’s about rockers,” she says. “There [are] obviously more men than women playing, but it’s never been an issue for me. I want to have a good time, and I want to rock.” 

Misty Murphy, a guitar player of eight years who has just released a new CD (available at Graywhale), alternately ignores the male-female divide and rides it off, taking advantage of what some see as male objectification of women’s bodies. With a sexy stage persona, Murphy plays a powerful blend of self-described feminine rock. With surfer-girl beauty and a lithe, muscular build, Murphy plays up the dichotomy between her sensuously soft vocals and her heavy guitar playing. “In this town, it’s to my benefit,” she says.

A Woman’s Place

“It doesn’t take a penis to hold a fucking guitar,” Kelly Green says, guitarist and singer for the punk band Teen Tragedies. In a town where roughly one out of every five bands in the underground rock scene has a female musician — and maybe one out of 10 boasts a female band leader — some girls wonder if playing is a man’s job.

“Because I’m a girl, I always have to prove it,” Green says. “But I don’t think my music has anything to do with gender,” she says, pointing to the more obvious politico-vegan content of her lyrics. 

Victoria Johnson, the guitarist and vocalist for the all-girl band The Basement, is used to proving herself. “Male musicians have really low expectations of females,” she says. When a male coworker teased that he’d never met a girl who could do a guitar solo, she called him on it, promising to give him a lesson in female rock on their next break. “I have to drop all modesty and prove myself,” she says. 

Proving one’s self, Heath says, can also be quite rewarding. “I find myself, sitting behind a drum set, waiting for the guitars to tune,” she says. “I catch the concerned expressions of all the males in the room. Some actually say things like, ‘So you get to set up the drums for the drummer… huh?’ or ‘That’s awesome these guys let you play with them.’ I almost enjoy those comments; the events to follow always … bring me ultimate satisfaction.” 

Liza Law is a tough guitar player whose intelligent lyrics can barely be heard over the hard sounds of Nell Nash, her band. Wearing a boa, leather pants and a knowing smirk, she invents her own style on stage and plays as if she could care less about a supposed male gaze in the audience. That, she says, is how to beat it. 

“We’re calling bullshit on these motherfuckers,” she says, when asked about men who don’t take female musicians seriously. “We need to re-learn issues of gender … to redefine what it means to be girls.” Drummer Rebecca Vernon, whose fierce and primal beats fuel much of the goth-infected Violet Run‘s powerful stage presence, finds joy in confounding the gender expectations she perceives are handed down by Mormon culture. 

“Being Mormon pushed me into music,” says Rebecca, who attended BYU and is still active in a faith many fault for oppressing women’s rights. “It’s a potent way to escape, a form of empowerment.” Looking out through black-lined eyes as she prepares to set up her drums, she says, “I hope girls won’t be afraid to play, even if it’s male-dominated.” 

Visual Stimuli

Styer, on the other hand, finds power in female sexuality. “In America, sex sells,” she says. “Smart women understand that sex is power, and you can be damn sure I’m going to take advantage of that. Then I can fuckin’ show ’em that I rock.” 

Women interviewed for a recent City Weekly story depicted the sexy Murphy as a tramp with no talent, riding on sex appeal. “I show cleavage. I think it’s funny when people are intimidated by that,” she says. Sexualized representation of women in the media doesn’t bother Murphy, who brands herself with sensual images on her own CDs. Utilizing her sex appeal is a perk, she says. “I express my boyish side — I rock climb, get dirty and for my girlish side — going shopping, doing my hair,” she says. “Ignoring any of these aspects would be a shame.”

Still, other bands find power in projecting and exploiting female stereotypes. That empowerment, for some, is distinctly feminine. Such is the case for the girls in the Eastern European downtempo collective The Stove, led by vocalist Kristin Muirhead and violinist Katya Murafa. “We are women,” Murafa says. “We bring things only women can bring — love, warmth — but when we are done playing, everyone is intimidated, speechless. We’re out of people’s comfort zones.” 

Indeed, The Stove’s powerfully delivered mix of eerie hip-hop, jazz, classical music, haunting melodies and Eastern gypsy accents are not what an audience might expect of two self-described “feminine” girls and a quiet beat man in the background. Their otherworldliness and nearly supernatural communication with each other and the audience confront an eye eager to objectify. 

Murafa, classically trained and playing violin since childhood in Russia, and Muirhead, a four-and-a-half-octave vocalist who used music to escape Utah Valley, playfully point out that they would perform with or without their beat mixer, Eduard. “We’re a chick band,” responds Eduard with a smile, “and I’m the first to say it. They don’t necessarily need me.” 

The dark-eyed Katya — who, with her visibly pregnant figure, is perhaps the most “feminine” of any female musician in Salt Lake — knows people have their doubts about The Stove when they ascend the stage. “Some bands we’ve opened for have been suspicious when they look at us,” she says. “We’re not scared. I’m pregnant and I’m playing and I don ‘t care.”

Passing It On

“The rawness of the bass, the power is a beautiful thing,” says Carol of FistFull. “It’s the super low-end, something you can feel.” That power, however sublime, is something Carol wants to share with other girls. Through performance and mentoring — Carol has taught bass playing at the University of Utah — she’s hoping more girls discover their own “super low-end.”

Johnson, the 19-year-old guitarist and vocalist for the all-girl act The Basement, sees the solution in information sharing. “Networking is made difficult by a society that fails to encourage girl-girl team playing — at least when compared to boys,” Johnson argues. Thus emerges the “cat fight” phenomenon. 

It’s an obstacle, Wakefield adds, no one should put up with. “One thing that really pisses me off is when women slander each other,” she says. “It bothers me when they don’t show each other respect.” Murphy wonders where her competition is — why they don’t invite her to do shows with them, why she’s not included in the “Little Lilith” type festivals. For her, support seems far off. “I think I’ve been left out,” she says with a laugh. “Maybe it’s an oversight.” 

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Heath speaks of a nearly spiritual communion between herself and other women, particularly girls in the audience. Ultimately, it’s showing the guys, and especially the girls, that she can beat the hell out of her drums, that gives her satisfaction. “An exchange takes place within myself and the other females in the room,” Heath says. “Their souls pour into me, their desperate voids and desires to become something. I, in turn, send back every supportive wave of compassion I can find within myself.”

Benefit Show

Do girls rock like guys do in SLC? See for yourself. Join SLUG for an evening of girl power at Kilby Court on Friday, July 26 and Saturday, July 27. Performers include: 

Friday, July 26
Chubby Bunny
Violet Run
Redd Tape
The Stove
Debi Graham and the Full Band
Nell Nash 

Saturday, July 27
The Basement
Teen Tragedies
Silvox
The Wolfs
Misty Murphy
Fistfull 

Proceeds go towards Women Against Risk (WAR), a local nonprofit group. Visit slugmag.com/girls for more information on this show.