1996

Written by Johnny Huston

Hersh's Kisses

THE THIRD TIME I TALK TO HER ON THE PHONE it's August 1996. She and Throwing Muses have just finished playing a show in what she calls "Ew Nork"; I'm in my apartment, stressed about a rapidly approaching newspaper deadline. For a while the conversation isn't an interview. Kristin Hersh mentions she turned 30 two days earlier. I say I'm 28 and babble something about losing the spirit of my youth. "You're much smarter once your spirit goes," she kids. "I was stupid all through my 20's-- just last week I was stupid. Now I'm going to be crotchety. [Adopting crone voice] I don't like anything!"

We talk about places to live in America. I'm in San Francisco; Kristin has just spent time in Southern California. "It feels like you're on TV in LA, like you're in a human habitat. The bad things about LA are funny, and when they stop being funny, it's time to go. It's a kooky place. It was made by people recently, so you can see what they decided to do--sociologically it's fascinating. " The above quote contains one of Kristin's favorite conversational words: kooky. Most of her favorite words end with the letter 'y'. Her voice is an affectionate growl. She laughs a lot and has reason to--she's funny. Our chat's next thrilling subject, weather, inspires this proclamation: "If you're not a fur-bearing mammal, you should wear a sweater sometimes." From there, we move on to healthy eating habits and vegetarianism. "If you don't take care of yourself you get ugly and stupid," Hersh remarks. I hear a high-pitched voice in the background, and Kristin stops for a moment to talk to her five-year-old son, Ryder. When she returns, I ask about touring. Her tone gets a bit weary. "Moving onto the tour bus is like moving into an old apartment. Ryder was really worried this year that the Easter Bunny wouldn't find him in our apartment because we weren't on a bus. Isn't that sad?" She laughs. What bands do the children--Hersh also has a ten-year-old, Dylan--of a rock mom listen to? "The Ramones make them so happy--they start pogoing like they have the pogo gene. And they like Nirvana, Vic Chesnutt, and Robert Johnson. But Hank Williams makes them weird and twitchy. " For the third time, Kristin is pregnant, and for the third time she's touring while pregnant. This time she's demanding some basics. Her previous beer-and-coffee road diet ("At the start of a tour, the reviews say 'power trio' and talk about how muscular we are as a band. At the end, they say, 'Kristin Hersh is so frail I can't believe she can lift a guitar'") has been replaced by a soy-milk regimen. "And we're asking people not to smoke in the clubs," she adds. "It's weird not having a haze around--it can be disconcerting." Still, anyone who's seen Hersh perform knows that she's not really there during her songs. Her eyes stare, transfixed by a vision only she can see. Her solo acoustic shows of 1994 were startling for many reasons-- name another alt-rocker who can hypnotize a crowd for over an hour with just a voice and a guitar--but mainly due to a stark contradiction: first off, she'd be possessed by a scary song; next, she'd be telling a three-minute goofy story. "I know performers who look at the people while they play," she says. "I don't know, I guess I'm not cut out for many facets of this job. But the songs do have to happen between me and the audience. As goofy as that sounds, it does seem to be the truth." When I mention her acoustic shows, she groans. "[Playing solo] was like taking an exam. Everyone was silent. No one was drunk. But it was a good thing to learn, because if I made the songs happen in the room--if I really did disappear instead of leaning on craft--everyone liked it. They didn't even mind that they were paying 25 bucks." The next time I see the Muses play, a few weeks later, the songs don't really seem to "happen in the room." It's a hot night in Portland. The club is half- packed, the crowd is half interested, and the sound is small and leaden. Kristin seems detached between songs, like the show is a chore she wants to finish quickly. I move from spot to spot trying to find the best place to meet the music. I never find it. The following evening, I see the Muses in San Francisco. The club is packed with devoted fans. The sound leaps from the speakers. At one point, during "Hazing," Kristin's eyes get wider and darker, as if she's going further and further into the song. Up front, I think about my favorite concert metaphor: the musician's and audience's souls mixing into an electric, invisible cloud specific to that particular time and place. That may sound goofy, but it's happening here.

THE FIRST TIME I TALKED TO KRISTIN HERSH ON THE PHONE was in 1987. The Muses' American debut album House Tornado had yet to be released. I was writing about them for a fanzine some pals and I put together. I don't have a tape of the interview. My main memory is of the ugly blue shag carpet in my bedroom, which I used as a desk while transcribing it--by hand. The finished article was rife with keen observations by my teenage critical mind. Confusing hyperbole with profundity, I favored adjectives like "amazing" and phrases like "searingly emotional and individual." But, Kristin managed to put a few good quotes in amid the goddess worship. About songwriting: "It's a good thing there's a place for it in society or it would be really strange. I mean, to bang on a stringed box and move your vocal chords and put words together is odd." Playing the Muses' 1986 debut album at the record store where I worked, I used to feel exposed and embarrassed when "Hate My Way" and "Vicky's Box" blared over the speakers. They were the most nakedly honest songs about teen identity trouble I'd heard, and I was a teenager with identity trouble. Also, in sheer terms of sound, they were a shock. The chord and tempo changes were sudden and severe. The words were disjunctive. And Kristin's voice--simultaneously old and young, weak and strong--rejected "prettiness" for a more untamed, personal beauty. I remember sending a tape of Throwing Muses to my best friend Tracey. The first few times she played the album, she didn't connect with it. Then one day in her bedroom she truly heard "Hate My Way" and burst into tears. From that point on, talks about Muses' songs that signified on "so many different levels" (our favorite phrase of the time) were a central part of our bond. An aspect of the Muses both of us intuitively responded to was the volatile sense of self in their songs. During "Hate My Way" as Kristin travels a traumatized interior landscape, identifying with broken things and people, victims and victimizers, each word takes on a new, radical vocal/verbal meaning. One of the song's many object-metaphors ("I'm TV") uncannily articulated what Tracey and I both, individually, were struggling with at the time--an inability to draw boundaries between our insides and the outer American societal garbage. "A home is your body, a home is your parent's home, it's your married home, it's your country, it's life itself," Kristin said in that interview, when I asked about her lyrical references to boxes, cages, and homes. "But if you're young, if you're a teenager, you have no self-concept, no idea of where you're supposed to belong. Things come very readily to you--you just feel what's happening in the world and it happens in you, and it's hard to tell the difference." Though Kristin was only a little older than me, she was far wiser. Her maturity may have stemmed from the fact that she was already a mother (not yet two then, Dylan knew a few words, including "surfboard" and "Dave"). But it also seemed like part of her being. As for me, back then, I felt like the opening character in 'Vicky's Box', an unhappy, closeted "queer" trapped and numbed by the cyclical repetitions of everyday life. And "Vicky's Box" did what my all-time favorite songs have done: It hit me like a revelation, showing me something about my life that I didn't know.

THE NEXT TIME I TALKED TO KRISTIN HERSH ON THE PHONE was in 1992. In less than half an hour, conversation ranged from music to strange crimes in Providence, Rhode Island (where she grew up). "Rich people are always doing crazy things," Kristin said, after I asked if she'd lived near infamous alleged poisoner Klaus Von Bulow. "No one locks their doors or bikes in Providence, but these bizarre things happen. A friend of mine's sister was flayed alive. And this guy was taped to death not long ago--he taped his head until he died." In the five years between the first two interviews, Kristin had separated from Dylan's father and lost a custody battle, had surgery to remove a tumor from her sinus cavity, and been diagnosed with "bipolar disorder" after years of seizures. She'd also gotten married and had another child. But the only Kristin I knew was the one on the Muses' records. On 1989's Hunkpapa, she tried--and failed--to work successfully within traditional song structures and commercial production; on 1991's The Real Ramona, she tried again and succeeded. During this time, I had love affairs with other bands--in my rock writing, I used My Bloody Valentine and Morrissey to wrestle (pretentiously) with gender and sexuality, my (unoriginal) obsessions. But the Muses remained the main soundtrack to my life, the music that was me. While Kristin was making records and having children, I was wrapped in typical early-20's behavior: studying and substance abuse. College-damaged, I tried to intellectualize her music during the interview, drawing comparisons between her songs and the ideas certain authors (Julia Kristeva, Kathy Acker) had developed about fragmented female identity. "I think daily life teaches more [than books]," she replied.

"You don't have to tear it apart, it's visceral rather than analytical, it goes right into all of your senses and comes out of your heart and mouth." Kristin's creative approach remained practical: "Three different notes vibrating against each other--that's what I've based my career on," she noted with a laugh. When I said her compositions weren't statements so much as states of being, she drew a series of less critical, more practical analogies. She likened songwriting to "meeting someone", and songs to "people, gods, ghosts" that "happen in my hands and face." As she put it, instead of telling stories, "the songs take everybody on their ride. They use sweaty words, color words, words your mind jumps at. By the time I get to screaming, you're ready to scream, too, because the song's doing it, not because you're think- ing, 'Wow, I really care that her boyfriend walks all over her, so l guess I feel like screaming, too.'" My favorite Muses song of the time, The Real Ramona's "Red Shoes," showcased a marked change in Kristin's perspective. This is a love song, albeit one that digs beneath rote gestures and declarations of affection to interior ties and rifts. Midway through, the lines "Eyes closed/You close them in the dark/What do you think you can see?" nail the psychological (rather than merely sexual) intimacy that comes from sleeping with someone. But it's the final line--"I become you"--that pushes "Red Shoes" beyond the tidy longing of romantic convention into total identification with another. Double entendre doesn't capture the meaning/feeling Kristin gives those three words: They are a vow, a threat, and more. The same month I talked to Kristin the second time, the Muses released Red Heaven, their first album without Tanya Donelly. The transition to trio was somewhat awkward, Kristin compensating for lost dynamics with increased distortion. As usual, I was drawn to the most dramatic moments, particularly "Furious," where Kristin's singing, once fractured, was powerful and defiant. ("Every time I go live life for a while, then come back to the music, my voice is doing something different," she said.) More impressive than Red Heaven was the live, limited-edition, solo acoustic disc accompanying it, a recording that forecast the brilliance of Hersh's 1994 official solo debut, Hips and Makers.

THE THIRD TIME I TALK TO KRISTIN HERSH ON THE PHONE I want to ask about the changing nature of her love songs. Tracks on The Real Ramona and Red Heaven address a male figure with bitter detachment--not as "you", but as "him" or "it." But from 1994's solo debut Hips and Makers onward, Kristin's music has a newfound trust. While hardly restful, it is content, built from a belief that someone is willing to ride alongside through the emotional peaks and valleys. "Thank you for chaining me to the bed/That was sweet," Kristin sings to a "sad brother" and "sunny lover" on "Tango", one of many recent compositions that render a relationship through dance imagery. Limbo's choreography is surreal: Kristin and her loved one shift shapes and leap into new surroundings with each line. The settings are still domestic, but Kristin's largely traded the kitchen-sink drama of early Muses records for another part of the house: the bedroom, site of dreams and sex. Though lines like "I wanna wake with your weight on me/Arms around/ My favorite sound/You make" (from "Mr. Bones"), have a tone of familiarity that comes from a shared history, the main constant of Limbo is change. But instead of talking about her new music, Kristin tells me about Throwing Music, the label she and husband/manager Billy O'Connell have started in conjunction with Rykodisc. "At the outset," she says, "We [the Muses] told everyone we weren't a major-label band, including the majors. When we signed with Warner Bros., I don't know what we were thinking." I remind her she was young at the time. "And stupid. I didn't even know what a producer was-- they'd come in and talk about the songs, we'd ignore them and make the record, and then we'd give them 30 grand." Now, commercially at the height of what she calls "success with a small s," Kristin has seized control. "We own our own masters," she notes. "We want jobs--to work as musicians without playing the [hit-making] game." Though she hopes to work with other bands, Kristin will initially use Throwing Music to "flush the pipes" with her own projects. Nearly a decade after their celebrated UK debut on 4AD, Throwing Muses and the Chains Changed EP will get official American releases on the label. In addition, five songs from the group's pre-4AD period--which included an ultra-rare 7-inch in a 10-inch sleeve with cover art that looks like a high-school yearbook/scrapbook--will be part of the package. Though Kristin's far from excited about her juvenilia ("Those songs deserve no more than to disappear forever"), the enthusiasm of fan/Muses drummer David Narcizo motivated her. "He actually forced me into the studio to record songs we played when we were 15, that were stolen out of his bedroom," she says. "I told him, 'You're the producer, this will end in tears.'" Kristin also hopes to record a second solo album soon at Stable Sound, the same barnlike studio where she created Hips and Makers ("there are little horse girls there with hats and jodhpurs"). One thing could get in the way of this plan: her belly. "When we get back from this tour, I might be too fat to make an acoustic record," she worries. "You can sling an electric guitar around your side Chuck Berry-style, but you can't do that with an acoustic guitar." Much has changed in the ten years since I bought my first Throwing Muses album from a goth clerk who scoffed that the band sounded like the B-52's. Back then, Kristin was almost alone as a woman in rock, save for a few Bangles and baubles. "I guarantee you, the more women you take out of a band, the more successful it will be," she told Puncture in 1991, going on to argue forcefully that "bad music is evil." Today, bad music often stems from the magical marketing genre alternative once used to dismiss the Muses. And much of this bad music is made by women: as one of them says in a chart-topping song, "Isn't it ironic?" Kristin has a right to be irritated, and she is. Of female performers she says, "Most are one-dimensional. Maybe it's just impossible to see women in 3-D, because it's men who we're used to seeing as having lots of different aspects. But they choose these ridiculous stereotypes, like 'angry young women' and 'art poetess' and 'ethereal'. As far as I'm concerned it's just 'bimbo'-- if you yourself don't present yourself as a three- dimensional person, then you're a bimbo."

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