Four young women met at Art School in Birmingham, England. One Saturday in 1985 their friend’s band needed an opening act. That afternoon they came up with three songs, rehearsed them and performed that night. They named their band We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It! Because, “Every song’s got a fuzzbox on it.” In 1986 David Geffen acquired the rights to their first album and took them for a ride on the Rock-N-Roll Rollercoaster. This slice of history was requested by my bandmate Todd Utley. He pulled this off his shelf and said, “Here, write about this.” I hadn’t thought about Fuzzbox in years. I have…
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Spring- “Everybody”
Last week we set the clocks forward and almost like magic spring happened. Suddenly it’s still sunny when I get off the bus from work. There’s daylight enough to take a walk before dinner. The hillside behind our house is filled with green shoots that will soon transform into color. Gaia bought a new green dress and the world is a better place. To celebrate, I walk over to the record shelf and grab Spring’s one and only album. A few years ago, my favourite old hippie friend decided that I was worthy of inheriting the boxes of records that his old roommate had left behind back in the early…
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A Few Reasons Why Dolly Parton Is a Total Badass
The theme for our playlist this month is “Men Covering Songs Written by Women.” When I heard this I immediately thought of “Back In The Good Old Days (When Times Was Bad) as done by one of the toughest men in the country music cannon, Merle Haggard. Legend has it that Haggard was inspired to pursue a life in music when he was a prisoner at San Quentin and saw Johnny Cash perform. His album “Mama Tried” contains the title song which boasts “I turned twenty one in prison doin life without parole.” Probably the toughest song on the album though is “Back in the Good Old Days” with it’s…
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The Big Mamma That Gave Birth to Elvis and Janis
“My singing comes from my experience…My own experience. I never had no one teach me nothin’. I never went to school for music or nothin’. I taught myself to sing and to blow harmonica and even to play drums by watchin’ other people! I can’t read music, but I know what I’m singing! I don’t sing like nobody but myself.” For March, Women In Rock is planning on putting together a playlist of men covering songs written by women. As I was brainstorming ideas, I thought of “Hound Dog.” I think most people know this song as done by Elvis. I think fewer know that it was originally…
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Hi, I’m Francis
Ever since I remember; there’s been rock-n-roll. Music is the first thing my cognitive mind latched onto. I’m a child of the seventies and a teenager of the eighties. Punk rock once saved my life. What I dug about punk was that it was outsider art. Most importantly it broke down the star/audience paradigm that created the rock star/groupie mentality that made rock music such a sexist-boys club through much of its history. In the late eighties I was introduced to the D.I.Y. punk scene through a group called The Dayton Anarchist Collective. It was a scene that was fairly woman centric. (In fact we spent a lot of time arguing…
