|
|
who
we are
AND HOW WE GOT HERE
(Editor's
Note: These are the 1972 liner notes from the album Mountain
Moving Day which featured both the Chicago and the New Haven
Women's Liberation Rock Bands)
 Both
the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band and the New Haven
Women’s Liberation Rock Band were begun about 2 1/2 years
ago by women in and around the women’s movement in our two
cities. At that time some of us were already musicians who had
gotten an education in sexism by playing in male bands. Some of
us were fugitives of high school marching bands, folk music groups
and Mrs. Porter’s music recitals. Some of us had stashed
unplayed instruments under our beds years ago. And some of us
were would-be musicians, learning to play for the first time.
All of us wanted to create a new kind of band and a new kind of
music, though we had no clear idea how to do that.
We
knew what we didn’t want: the whole male rock trip with its
insulting lyrics, battering-ram style and contempt for the audience.
We didn’t want to write the female counterpart of songs like
“Under My Thumb,” “Back-Street Girl,” “It’s
a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” where men say to
us ‘you’re beneath contempt and we will celebrate your
degradation.’ We had to think of some other way to make a
hit besides bumping and grinding like Mick Jagger, raping and
burning our guitars like Jimi Hendrix, or whacking off on stage
like Jim Morrison. We didn’t want to pulverize our audience’s
(and our own) eardrums with 1010 decibels. As performers we didn’t
want to get off by trashing the people we played for, and we didn’t
want to have a star backed up by a squad of secondary musicians.
But
what did we want anyway? We knew that we wanted to make music
that would embody the radical, feminist, humanitarian vision we
shared. And the lyric were the obvious place to begin—the
field was wide open. Most of the rock songs women have sung till
now were about the pain men cause us—the pain that’s
supposed to define us as women. We didn’t want to deny that
tradition (women struggled hard for the right to sing even that
much) bvt we wanted to sing about how the pain doesn’t have
to be there—how we fight and struggle and love to make it
change. At first it was easiest to write new lyrics to old songs,
but as time has gone on we have begun to write entirely new material
(the record contains examples from both these phases).
We
also had to demystify the priesthood of the instrument and the
amplifier— move and set up the equipment, find the fuses,
fix the feedback, mike, monitor and control it all ourselves.
We had to try to break down the barriers that usually exist between
performers and audiences by rapping a lot between songs about
who we are, what we’re doing, and where our songs come from.
Whenever possible we’ve played in places where people can
dance, done some theatre and comedy, passed out lyrics so people
could sing with us, and invited other women to come and jam with
us.
The
hardest thing to deal with was the music itself—what could
we make out of such a motley collection of tastes, backgrounds
and instruments? We had started from scratch, not by fitting accomplished
musicians into traditional slots. We had no leaders, arrangers,
managers, agents, roadies—even equipment or instruments.
We thought of the bands as collectives, so we wanted to learn
together and work toward eliminating the inequalities of (musical)
power that existed among us. Our progress has been slow and difficult-it
has come out of thousands of hours spent practicing, teaching
each other, taking lessons, listening to other bands, jamming,
writing and working all kinds of things out with each other. Over
the past 2 1/2 years each band has evolved its own material and
style which is partly the result of the combination of instruments
we happened to end up with and largely the result of our efforts
to make collective, non-assaultive joyful rock music.
WHAT WE DO:
We
are the ‘agit-rock’ arm of our respective women’s
movements. In Chicago this means we are a chapter of the Chicago
Women’s Liberation Union (more about this later). In New
Haven we are all members of New Haven Women’s Liberation.
We go places where leaflets can’t go—college dances,
women’s conferences, rallies, benefits, festivals, prisons
and miscellaneous events. And perhaps we say things that leaflets
can’t say because we have music and performance to help us
generate for those few hours while we’re playing some glimpse
of the world we’d like to see happen. Some of our jobs have
been more than just exciting—we and the audience have shared
in a deeply-felt celebration of our vision. At others we’ve
been met with bad vibes, hostile men, inadequate electricity,
freezing weather.
We
charge for our performances according to what people can pay,
and so far have spent our earnings on equipment, transportation,
food, drink, rent for rehearsal space and donations to the women’s
movement. We don’t see the bands as profit-making (all of
us have other jobs which support us) but as part of what needs
to be done to change the culture of this society.
What
we all want to do is use the power of rock to transform what the
world is like into a vision of what the world could be like; create
an atmosphere where women are free enough to struggle to be free,
and make a new kind of culture that is an affirmation of ourselves
and of all people.
CWLU
We
in the Chicago band wanted to add just a little note about the
organization that we’re a part of because we feel that it
has been important to us and to the women in Chicago. This is
the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, which is the only on-going
radical feminist organization of its type in the country. In its
three years it has provided a political unity and sense of direction
for much of the women’s movement in Chicago. Some of the
projects included in the Union are:
Women’s Graphics
Collective (original feminist art & posters) Liberation
School for Women (alternative education for and about women)
Health Project (which fights to keep city maternity centers
open and offers pregnancy testing and health referrals)
Work Work Group (to equalize salary and job differentials
for city employees)
Womankind (a women’s newspaper)
Speakers Bureau
Rape Crisis Center
|
|
