Option #71

Nov/Dec 1996

Written by Neva Chonin
Photos by Michael Sexton

Mommy! Mommy!
Kristin Hersh In A Family Way

"I'm so small. I look like a fat little triangle with a circle on top," says Kristin Hersh, gazing down at her beachball-sized belly. "When I had a shaved head I looked like a snowman. Every day I should wear different costumes of different fat people throughout history."

Petite, cheerful, and five months pregnant, the Throwing Muses singer and guitarist relaxes poolside at a San Francisco motel. Her dark, freshly-washed hair is pulled back from her face and sensible tennies peek from beneath an ankle-length skirt. If Hersh is a picture of serenity, though, chaos reigns around her. Midway through a low-budget, crosscountry tour promoting the Muses' new album, Limbo, the band was forced to drive all night from Portland to get here, no one's had time to eat breakfast or lunch, and five people are waiting to shower in the Muses' single room before they rush off to soundcheck at tonight's venue. But as she watches her five-year-old son, Ryder, splash in the pool, Hersh's blue eyes look bright and calm.

"Mommy! Mommy! Watch out!" hollers Ryder, hitting the water in a booming belly flop. "Hey, Ryder-Ryder-Ryder," Hersh hollers back. The boy, all fair hair and eagerness, pulls himself from
the pool and trots over. "Hey, mom, did you bring your bathing suit?" he asks, tugging at her arm. "Yes, I did," she says. "Good, because I want you to come in the pool with me when you're finished with all your chat."

Hersh shakes her head, smiling. "He's been touring since he was about six months old. You know, he actually thought the Easter Bunny wouldn't find him this year because we were in an apartment in L.A. instead of on a bus. Poor little guy. He thought the Easter Bunny only visited tour buses." She laughs. "But the Easter Bunny found him, anyway. I made sure."

This doesn't mean that Hersh's life—or her music—is all amity and good vibes, however. A settled home life hasn't dulled Hersh's acerbic edge, and her lyrics on Limbo are full of sexual barbs and obsessional love-hate dichotomies. For Hersh, the ragged edges are what keeps life interesting. "If I played music that didn't stick
that messy, ugly, hard stuff in there, it would be shapeless and mushy and boring," she says. "To me that would be the worst thing in the world."

MUSIC AND MOTHERHOOD are Hersh's twin loves, and pregnancy isn't the only item on her 1996 agenda: after 10 years and six albums, Throwing Muses have left their long-time home at Reprise to form their own label, Throwing Music, in a joint partnership with Rykodisc. The move, Hersh hopes, will allow the band greater freedom with less commercial pressure.

"It's been a long time coming," she says. "We actually loved Reprise, but we will never be a major label band. They are obliged to work the band most likely to have a hit that week, and we can't survive that. This way we can pay our rent, we know who we're playing for, we don't get a bunch of meatheads at our shows who just want to hear the single, and we own our own masters."

Upcoming Throwing Music projects include Hersh's second solo album and reissues of Throwing Muses' two early 4AD releases. With Rykodisc handling marketing, distribution and publicity, Hersh and her husband/manager, Billy O'Connell, run daily operations from their Newport, Rhode Island, home. To cut expenses, shoestring-budget videos for the new album were compiled from the band's home video footage. "It cost maybe $10 and I think they're our best videos ever," Hersh says proudly. "You can't tell the difference in quality. They're just funnier."

Limbo also marks a stylistic shift for the Muses, moving away from the lush orchestration of 1995's University for a spare, clean, guitar-driven sound. Hersh's voice retains the casual control she's demonstrated in all her best work, rising easily from the hushed croon of "Serene" to the droll pop delivery of the album's first single, "Ruthie's Knocking." Yet while songs are rife with the unexpected chord shifts and odd time signatures that have long been the Muses' trademark, Limbo doesn't jerk and pull as much as flow in gentle ripples.

The same thing could be said of Hersh's life. After 15 years of wrestling with the difficult, symbiotic relationship between her creative talent and her bouts with mental illness, she seems to have found a balance between emotional stability and the thrills of creative disjunction.

Hersh's willingness to venture into rugged emotional turf has often been as psychologically traumatic as it's been artistically rewarding. When she was 14 she says she began experiencing visits by voices and "song bodies" that used her as a channel to the external world. By her late teens, the songs and voices became increasingly
invasive, causing hallucinations ("things crawling out of the wall," she says) and, if she tried to suppress them, physical convulsions. "If I didn't write a song I was supposed to write, it would play louder and louder in my head and my skin would get all prickly like there were electric shocks, and I'd just start poking and have a seizure," she says. "It was like it turned into energy, sound energy, that shouldn't have been in my body. If I'd just accepted the songs as a gift from the beginning, they would have said what they had to say the way they do now," she sighs. "But I was so young, and all I could think was, 'Damn! I'm crazy."'

At 30, Hersh has made peace with her muses, and she credits lithium for the change. "It takes the fog and confusion away," she says. "I learn a lot of good lessons when I'm on lithium about the way a brain should be, and I can carry those with me when I'm not on it."

She leans forward, watching the play of light on the pool as she fiddles with her sunglasses. "You know, a couple of months ago, for the first time in my life I wrote a song in my head and I was excited about it. I knew that it was there, I could hear it. I had to take care of the kids all day, but I knew that I was gonna write it and that it was gonna be good, and it was gonna be a positive thing. I can't tell you what a difference that is."

LEARNING TO THINK positively about her songs has been a long time coming for Hersh, who started Throwing Muses 16 years ago with her half-sister Tanya Donelly in the early'80s when the pair were in high school in Newport, Rhode Island. Joined by a high school pal, drummer Dave Narcizo, and later by bassist Leslie Langston, the band earned a devoted following on Boston's underground rock scene by the mid-1980s. The Muses were the first American band signed to the London-based 4AD label, and their dreamily discordant 1986 debut earned a wide cult following. But even as many of their alternative rock peers found success in the '90s, Throwing Muses' music proved too opaque and eclectic to appeal to a mass audience. At the same time,
Hersh was too busy dealing with the dissolution of her band to fret about commercial potential. After 1989's
Hunkpapa, Langston quit and moved to California; then, after a grueling tour in support of 1991's The Real Ramona, Donelly — who had already been moonlighting with the Pixies' Kim Deal in the Breeders— left to form Belly. Road-weary and pregnant with Ryder, Hersh retired to become a full-time mother. (Her first son, 10-year-old Dylan, divides his time between living with his father and mother in Rhode Island.)

In retrospect, Hersh says Donelly's departure was less a catalyst for the band's breakup than her own uneasiness with the pop-oriented direction of The Real Ramona. Income tax problems and a legal dispute with the Muses' first manager exacerbated the situation. "I was just disgusted by the whole business. The music wasn't being treated in the right way. It was becoming watered down and censored and trendy and gross stuff like that." 

For a while Hersh tried to concentrate on her "housewifey thing," but she says the itch to play music and
the voices in her head drove her back. So, in 1992, she, Narcizo and Langston reformed Throwing Muses as a trio (Leslie was replaced by Bernard Georges in 1994). The result was Red Heaven, the band's most
straightforward rock album, followed two years later by University, which sold ovr 90,000 copies, enough to make
it the Muses' most commercially successful album yet.

Today, Hersh still views the alternative rock phenomenon from a bemused distance. With a few exceptions—she cites Courtney Love—her evaluation of the new crop of women rockers, many of whom count Hersh as an influence, is especially unenthusiastic. "It just means more bimbos, as far as I'm concerned," she says. "Whether they call it 'art poetess' or 'angry young woman' or 'sensitive ethereal bitch lady,' it doesn't admit that women are funny or goofy or down to earth or three-dimensional or even intelligent. Instead of intelligent they use 'smug.' And you wouldn't like anyone who's smug; you wouldn't like anyone who's an art poetess or an angry young woman or an ethereal waif. They're not real people. It's like they can only take these little teeny pieces of what it's like to be a woman and it's all cartoonish."

INSIDE THE MUSES' motel room, the smell of soap hangs thick in the air and it's steamy enough to peel
wallpaper. Bernard Georges is entertaining his weary bandmates by dancing around in silver wraparound
shades, with a white towel wrapped in a turban around his two-tone braids. David Narcizo rolls his eyes behind
fogged spectacles; Ryder squeals with delight.

"The boys in my band are uncles to the kids," says Hersh, as she wipes condensation from the dresser mirror and attempts to apply makeup. "They help me look for health food and goofy stuff like that. They make sure I get enough sleep and load out for me. We're family."

If the band is her family, Hersh's husband is her touchstone and wailing wall. The two met in 1989 when O'Connell, then label manager for Sire Records, called Hersh to say he liked the Muses' House Tornado demo. Assuming it was a prank, Hersh guffawed uncontrollably through the entire phone call. "I remember the whole conversation," recalls O'Connell later, slouching on a couch on the tour bus." I remember sitting back in
my chair at my desk at Sire, wondering what was so funny. She just laughed and laughed, no matter what I said. So I finally stopped and asked, 'Is this funny in some way?' And that was it—after that she couldn't even talk she was laughing so hard. So I had one coherent sentence with her at the end of the conversation
where I said I loved the demos. She was fairly lucid for that. I got off the phone thinking, 'She is out of her freaking mind."'

O'Connell followed up the call with a visit to the band's studio. Hersh ignored him, reasoning he was too handsome to be taken seriously. "Then I realized he could do cartoon voices, and I was his forever," she sighs. "You just don't let one like that get away." They married in 1990.

"I remember when I met her I thought Kristin was a tough cookie, that she wouldn't put up with any bullshit," says O'Connell, watching as his wife directs the road crew. "And she won't. But once you get an inch beyond that, you know she's really goofy. I think that's why she's able to write real songs. She's truly just a goof."

FOUR HOURS AFTER ARRIVING in San Francisco, the band packs up and heads for soundcheck at Bottom of the Hill. Hersh chuckles over a laser-printed sign posted outside the door—"No Smoking tonight due to Kristin Hersh's Pregnancy!"—and sits down with a plastic cup of soy milk. "Feeding a baby in utero is a bitch on tour," she complains. "I used to sleep in all day and eat beer. Which doesn't sound like much of a health regimen, but it worked for me. Now I have to sleep eight hours a night and eat real meals. I'm at a loss; I have no idea what to do."

Ryder starts a game of no-rules pool while Hersh steps onto the tiny stage. I ask if the baby ever kicks during performances. She laughs. "Usually the kid is just kinda out when I play, but sometimes we play so long that he'll just start kicking the guitar, like, 'Shut up!' Which is kind of distracting because I'm always trying to disappear and not really be there, and that's probably the most grounding thing that can happen to you, being kicked by a baby."

Listening to Hersh talk about the twin loves of her life, it's difficult to tell where music leaves off and family begins. Bringing kids and songs into the world are inextricably entwined for Hersh: They arrive unexpectedly, you love them, and they leave to lead their own lives. "Kids," she cheerfully decrees, "are insane people
who live in your house. Luckily, they're really adorable and entertaining, or else you'd just kick 'em out."

Neva Chonin is assistant arts editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. She wrote about Sleater-Kinney and the Hardkiss Brothers in Issue 70.

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