From Q Magazine
No Title
Words by Phil Sutcliffe
Words by Phil Sutclife
At 6, Kristin Hersh was a hippy commune kid whose babysitter was
on acid. At 22 she had a brain tumour and thought evil spirits wrote her songs. Finally,
at 31, the rock'n'roll mom is very nearly alright.
When Kristin Hersh was 16 she was knocked down by a car.
Flattened, she levered herself up on an elbow and saw that one of her feet was missing.
"I thought, you can't be in a band if you only have one foot! That's when I
screamed," she laughs. Happily, the errant extremity was found round the back of her
leg and duly reattached.
She potters about the kitchen with baby Wyatt on her left hip,
her right hand busy pouring tea for her Q house guests or guiding six-year-old Ryder, who
is being educated at home, through some arithmetical posers.
Home for Hersh and husband/manager Billy O'Connell is
hacienda-style and isolated in upland desert near Joshua Tree National Park, California.
They moved in a year ago. Their outdoor speakers broadcast selections from Billie Holiday,
Sinatra, Vic Chestnutt and R.E.M. to an audience of wily coyotes, roadrunner and cacti.
They came by their 40 acres after Hersh's 1994 solo debut, Hips
and Makers, sold 300,000 copies worldwide--modest, yet twice as many as any of the seven
albums recorded by Throwing Muses, the band she fronted and wrote for back in Rhode Island
from 1982 until their demise two years ago.
**************
CRITICALLY LAUDED, Throwing Muses were the essence of American indie: hard-hitting,
adroit, angsty, with lyrics tending to the frayed-nerve, severed-head view of
relationships. Perhaps they surrendered their chart chance back in 1989 when Hersh's
step-sister Tanya Donelly wrote designer hit single Dizzy, and disgusted with themselves,
the band refused to promote it. Significantly, two years later when Donelly left to from
Belly, gold-disc action ensued.
Come 1996, Throwing Muses still desperately wanted to carry on. However, with an enormous
debt to Warner Bros in America, fiscally, it was no dice. On the other hand, Hips and
Makers suggested that harsh Hersh aesthetics could prove more palatable via acoustic
guitar and the odd drop of cello. Hence, her second solo album, Strange Angels, out this
month. But her advocacy of the principles which, she believes, made Throwing Muses special
remains high voltage.
For instance, "lie" has always been a key word in her lyrics. " I have
trouble reading fiction because I think, you just made it up! You are lying! It's
fake!" She declaims and laughs simultaneously, a characteristic compromise between
her friendly manners and gimlet blue eyes. "I'm a geometry buff and words have
balanced shape in my mind. Writing lyrics, it's playing with mouth shapes. When my mouth
feels like it's telling the truth they just spill out. Lies catch in my throat."
She's very severe on confessional songwritters' who beat their breasts and self-express
without bothering to communicate.
"That kind of nakedness, that puking on other people and selling it. I really
disagree with it. When I play, I can disappear and the songs are instead. I'm pro
repression. Repress and until you die, I say. I 'm sick of these therapy victims who think
they have to express all their feelings to you. On a tour bus it's very polite to not talk
about your feelings."
With Wyatt at her breast, she pulls her feelings about music and children together.
"When you see your baby, you realise that you are not the story. There's no humility
in saying that, it's just plain that all your energy should go there. It's helped me to
come to songwriting too with that perspective. All my energy should go to that little
creature, the song or the baby."
******
KRISTIN HERSH'S LIFE has been full of babies. When she was six her parents moved out of a
full-on, LSD-friendly, feed-the-rats-'cos-they're-people-too hippy commune near Sheffield,
Alabama, and into straightish Newport, Rhode Island. AS soon they arrived so did her
brother David, and Hersh found one of her twin vocations.
"I carried him around with me, changed his diapers," she recalls. "I just
thought it was my job, I don't know why."
When she was 11, it got more complicated. Their parents broke up, custody was shared, and
she took to protecting David from the emotional impact of events such as their father
leaving them in the middle of the night because a voice in his head told him to aim for
Death Valley.
At 17, she moved into her own place with her boyfriend, Andrew, and within a year she was
pregnant. Throwing Muses' first record, the Chains Changed mini -LP, was just out and she
toured until she was eight months gone. Soon after the birth she was back out on the road,
babe in arms. "Dylan thought the band were aunts and uncles," she says.
"And we had a deal with Howard Johnson's hotels so the rooms all looked the same and
he thought we were home every night."
Same story with Ryder, Billy's first son: trouperly gigging until contractions threatened,
and family unit presently reconvened on the tour bus. "Ryder loves the buses. He
decorates the ceiling over his bunk with glowstars and he has his puppy to cuddle."
Hersh's pregnancy with Wyatt in 1996 did shake her faith in the resilience of her wiry
1001b frame. Five months in, her midwife consigned her to bedrest with a warning that all
her on-stage "screaming and yelling" could trigger a dangerous premature labour.
Even so, Wyatt hit the road in the middle of winter, aged two months.
Hersh always thought she would have four children, but after the problems with Wyatt she
was advised against having any more. Still, there had been her kid brother too.
"Every five years or so, this string of boys," she coos. "I think they take
care me more than I take care of them¡K."
If babies were a blessing, songs have occupied a more ambiguous place in Hersh's life. At
14, she told a doctor that, like her father when he got the call to go West, she could
hear a voice in her head. She was diagnosed schizophrenic. Prescribed drugs and spells in
hospital followed.
She thought of her other voice as Bad Kristin and believed it wrote most of her songs. But
she would not accept being stuck with t for life. A year on, after prodigious IQ test
results promoted her to an "accelerated" educational schedule, she started a
university psychology course, hoping to learn how to cure herself, "but all I did was
find out that Freud wanted to sleep with his mom". About the same time, with Donelly,
she started the band because "it seemed so positive compared to being crazy."
******
STRUGGLING TO MAINTAIN a front of normality, she often suffered cerebral seizures in
hotels or dressing rooms and her arms were filigreed with small cuts, the result of
self-mutilation syndrome referred to in Delicate Cutters (from Throwing Muses' 1986
self-titled album). At times, she was suicidal: she has recalled an early gig where she
went to collect the band's $50 fee and the club owner pulled a gun on her. She screamed at
him, "Go ahead, shoot! It'll take some of the pleasure off me."
There was a tour blighted by a sinus tumour and, finally, in 1990, came an implacable
crisis. Still harassed by her "evil" other voice, she was further assailed by
Throwing Muses' first break-up. Then their first manager sued Hersh for alleged- and
denied--non-payment of various sums, and her recently exed-boyfriend took her to court and
came out with custody of their car, their house, their bank account and, worst, Dylan.
By the end of year she was in hospital again. The old diagnosis was refined to bi-polar
disorder, a variant on a theme of "split personality". But she got talking with
a night nurse. " I still think about her all the time," says Hersh. "She
asked what was going on in my life. It's odd, but no one had done that. I told her, and
she said, You're not crazy, your life is falling apart!"
Hersh felt strangely comforted. Longer term support came from O'Connell, formerly
"vice-president for Throwing Muses" at Warners. He talked her through crisis
after crisis with Bad Kristin(using a hypnotic technique referred to in Counting Backwards
on The Real Ramona LP). Soon they married.
*********
AT THE HACIENDA in the desert, O'connell is showing he too can deal with domestic matters
on-handed : his left hand holds the managerial mobile to his ear while his right stirs a
pot on the cooker. Family life is looking good.
The idea that Strange Angels amounts to a love letter from Kristin to Billy is not denied.
"I was not the marrying kind," Hersh avers. "But he talked me into it and
I'm glad he did. There have been bad years I can't believe we got through, and I don't
think we would have if we hadn't named the bond. Thank God we did."
Even her songs are behaving themselves rather better than before, through Bad Kristin
hasn't necessarily renounced all claims. When, after Hersh's terrible 1990, Throwing Muses
reformed, she says, "I felt like I had a head full of songs and they were pounding at
me". But since then, as she puts it, "I made a deal with the songs that I
wouldn't censor them if they didn't come knocking at my door and following my family
around. So I don't have anything to do with them any more and they don't hurt so much,
they don't make me weird."
That's despite coming off her medication since her pregnancy with Wyatt began.
"With Lithium it's good idea to take a few years off. It makes your hands shake and
it can damage your kidneys. But while I was on it I learned so much about how to see
clearly that I take those new philosophies with me. Even so, I do keep thinking, I've paid
my dues and shouldn't I know how to be by now? I disagree with that madness-equals-art
thing. I don't see why someone who isn't seeing clearly should be able to speak for other
people.
"I'm tired right now, though. I've been fighting pretty hard lately. Which is hard
for Billy too. I've been on tour and with the baby I'm up all night, my defences are down.
I have to work to make sure my brain doesn't lie to me."
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This article submitted to me by Tzero. Thanks a bunch. (He also typed
it in by hand) |