Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl Read online

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2015 by Carrie Brownstein

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brownstein, Carrie, date.

  Hunger makes me a modern girl : a memoir / Carrie Brownstein.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-59954-9

  1. Brownstein, Carrie, date. 2. Women singers—United States—Biography. 3. Singers—United States—Biography. 4. Women rock musicians—United States—Biography. 5. Rock musicians—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  ML420.B8196A3 2015 2015024629

  782.42164092—dc23

  [B]

  The names and identifying characteristics of certain individuals have been changed to respect their privacy.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  For Corin and Janet

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: 2006

  PART 1 // YOUTH

  Chapter 1 The Sound of Where You Are

  Chapter 2 That’s Entertainment

  Chapter 3 Disappearance

  Chapter 4 No Normal

  Chapter 5 Born Naked

  PART 2 // SLEATER-KINNEY

  Chapter 6 Schooled

  Chapter 7 Self-Titled

  Chapter 8 Call the Doctor

  Chapter 9 Mediated

  Chapter 10 Hello, Janet

  Chapter 11 Sellouts

  Chapter 12 Dig Me Out

  Chapter 13 The Hot Rock

  Chapter 14 Help

  Chapter 15 All Hands on the Bad One

  Chapter 16 One Beat

  Chapter 17 Opening Up

  Chapter 18 The Woods

  Chapter 19 Be Still This Sad Year

  PART 3 // AFTERMATH

  Chapter 20 Shelter

  Chapter 21 Home

  Epilogue

  Photos

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  2006

  I only wanted one thing on tour: to slam my hand in a door and break my fingers. Then I would go home.

  I had shingles on the right side of my body, brought on by stress, a perfect triangle of blisters that flickered and throbbed with a stinging electricity. At night I could barely sleep from the discomfort, flailing about in a twin bed in a dingy European hotel room while a bandmate dozed a foot away from me. During the day, on the long drives between European cities, I rode in the back of a Sprinter van, pressed against the firm handshake of the seat, rigid and without any give. I watched DVDs of an American television show on my computer, the first season of a drama all about plotting an escape from prison. Occasionally I glanced at my fingers and thought about how hard I’d have to slam the door.

  On May 27, my band Sleater-Kinney arrived in Brussels, Belgium, to play a venue called Le Botanique. The shingles virus made me a loner. Janet had never had the chicken pox as a child, and thus I was contagious to her. After Janet checked in with her sister, a doctor in L.A., the term “airborne” entered the conversation. But I already felt liminal and weightless, outside myself, a series of free-floating particles that only occasionally cohered into humanness, into arms and legs. Tour reassembles you; it’s a fragmentary and jarring existence even without an added illness or malady. But now I could not find the floor; I was outside the room, outside myself. The three of us hung around backstage before the show: fluorescent lights, a mirror, buckets of ice, a picked-at deli tray. Corin gingerly helped button the back of my shirt, careful not to touch me or get too close. It’s okay, I thought, this isn’t my body, I’m not here.

  The show was about to start and I couldn’t feel a thing.

  Sleater-Kinney was my family, the longest relationship I had ever been in; it held my secrets, my bones, it was in my veins, it had saved my life countless times, it still loved me even when I was terrible to it, it might have been the first unconditional love I’d ever known.

  And I was about to destroy Sleater-Kinney.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE SOUND OF WHERE YOU ARE

  I’ve always felt unclaimed. This is a story of the ways I created a territory, something more than just an archipelago of identities, something that could steady me, somewhere that I belonged.

  My story starts with me as a fan. And to be a fan is to know that loving trumps being beloved. All the affection I poured into bands, into films, into actors and musicians, was about me and about my friends. Once, in high school, I went to see the B-52s. I pressed myself against the barrier until bruises darkened my ribs, thrilled to watch Kate Pierson drink from a water bottle, only to have my best friend tell me that to her the concert wasn’t about the band—it was about us, it was about the fact that we were there together, that the music itself was secondary to our world, merely something that colored it, spoke to it. That’s why all those records from high school sound so good. It’s not that the songs were better—it’s that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled, oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now.

  Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we’ve lived. To get a sense that we have already journeyed through something—survived it, experienced it—is often so much easier and less messy than the task of currently living through something. Though hard to grasp, nostalgia is elating to bask in—temporarily restoring color to the past. It creates a sense memory that momentarily simulates context. Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain. Finally, nostalgia asks so little of us, just to be noticed and revisited; it doesn’t require the difficult task of negotiation, the heartache and uncertainty that the present does.

  Now I can’t listen to some of these records alone, in my house that I have cleaned and organized, books arranged just so, sheets washed. The sounds don’t hold up. In these cases, fandom is contextual and experiential: it’s not that it happened, it’s that you were there. It’s site-specific, age-specific. Being a fan has to do with the surroundings, and to divorce the sounds from that context often feels distancing, disorienting, but mostly disappointing. I think of all the times I’ve had a friend over and pulled out records from high school or college, ready for the album to change someone’s life the way it changed mine. I watch my friend’s face, waiting eagerly for the “aha!” moment to arrive, only to realize that my affection for this intentionally off-key singing, saggy bass sound, and lyrics about bunnies isn’t quite the revelation it was fifteen years ago. “You had to be there” is not always a gloat or admonishment—often it’s an explanation for why something sounds utterly terrible.

  Y
et there is much music that survives de- and recontextualization and that needs no experiential reference point. In this case, the role of the fan is still to be a participant, and to participate is to grant yourself permission to immerse, to willingly, gladly, efface and subsume yourself for the sake of the larger meaning but also to provide meaning. It’s symbiotic. My favorite kind of musical experience is to feel afterward that your heart is filled up and transformed, like it is pumping a whole new kind of blood into your veins. This is what it is to be a fan: curious, open, desiring for connection, to feel like art has chosen you, claimed you as its witness.

  —

  I grew up in the suburbs of Seattle, mostly in Redmond, Washington, a once-rural town that by the late twentieth century was a metonym for Microsoft. Cities frequently deride or deny their outlying residents, thinking them callow; Seattle was my beacon and muse, but it was never really mine. My parents, both raised Jewish in Chicago, were quick to adopt the religion of Christmas, though I should acknowledge the transitional years wherein we awoke to scattered presents under a menorah. Poor Santa, arriving during the night with nothing to choose from but that menorah and a houseplant. Then my mother left when I was fourteen, seeking a cure for herself but leaving another form of sickness and longing behind. It was a childhood of halfways, of in-betweens.

  Until I was in high school, every concert I attended was an event, a spectacle. My first was Madonna. She began her Like a Virgin tour in Seattle, playing three shows at the Paramount Theatre, with a capacity of less than three thousand. It was 1985, and I was in fifth grade. An agreement was made between my father and my friend’s mom. She’d get up at an unkind hour on a Saturday morning so that we could wait in line at Ticketmaster, and my dad would stay out past his bedtime and accompany us to the actual show.

  I had my outfit planned. I wanted to wear what any self-respecting female Madonna fan would want to wear in the mid-’80s: a wedding dress. I even asked to borrow my mom’s, as if she’d be as flattered as she would have been had I asked to wear it for my real, future wedding. “That’s inappropriate,” I was told by both my parents, not just in regard to the wedding garment but also in response to my request to wear a crop top with nothing underneath it but a black bra. (I didn’t need to wear a bra at the time.) Even fingerless lace gloves were out of the question. I ended up clad in a short-sleeve Esprit button-up covered in pineapples and other exotic fruits, an outfit that did not land me in the local paper that ran a feature on the concert including pictures of fans waiting in line, dressed like Madonna.

  By the time the music began, I didn’t care that I looked like a cocktail server at a beach resort.

  Opening the show was a group of young smart alecks who no one in the Pacific Northwest had ever heard of—they were called the Beastie Boys. We collectively booed them in anticipation of our idol. Then Madonna came out and I remember only two things: she did multiple outfit changes and I screamed the entire time.

  When my father and I got home, I couldn’t sleep. I kept going in my parents’ room to regale my mother with details about what songs Madonna played and how she looked. “She’s high,” my dad said to my mother, laughing. And I was. It was a moment I’ll never forget, a total elation that momentarily erased any outline of darkness. There was light everywhere I looked.

  —

  A few years later, in junior high, I saw the Faith tour and witnessed George Michael run in tight pants from east to west and back again across the stage. From my seat on the center of the stadium floor, Michael was reduced in size, an action figure. But the experience itself was immense; the grandiosity was ungraspable, it was the Olympics, it was a mountain, it was outer space. In the middle of the show, my fourteen-year-old friend turned to me and said, “I want to give George Michael a blow job.” I was confused. Wasn’t I there simply for the songs, to clap my hands and scream, “I want your sex,” without actually wanting your sex? But when my friend inserted desire, an actual longing and physical response, into what I thought had been an abstract idea, I had to think about the ways music really made me feel. In that moment, among thousands of people, I was light-headed and sweaty. I could not contain a smile; my body was moving in somewhat innocent shimmies but also in shudders, an act that certainly connotes a deeper, reflexive, ecstatic response. I turned away from my friend, nodding in agreement that, yes, the reaction to this music was embodied, was intense. But I also knew in that moment that I would much rather be the object of desire than dole it out from the sidelines, or perched on my knees.

  Yet the music I was hearing and the concerts I was witnessing were also mystifying and inaccessible. It was the ’80s, and much of what I loved was synthed-out pop and Top 40 music, more programmed than played. The music was in the room and in my body, yet I had no idea how it had been assembled or how to break it apart. If I wanted to learn a Madonna song, for example, I’d obtain the piano sheet music and plunk out an anemic version of it on the keys, so wholesome that I was re-virginizing “Like a Virgin” right there in the living room. I practiced David Lee Roth stage moves—well, only one: JUMP—and entered my elementary school talent show as a dancer accompanying a band of sixth-graders playing Ratt’s “Round and Round.” I remained merely a fan, an after-school bedroom lip-syncher and a family-gathering thanks-for-humoring-me entertainer, with no means of claiming the sounds as my own.

  Then I bought my first guitar and saw my first punk and rock shows.

  Buying your first guitar in the suburbs does not entail anything that resembles the folklore. There is not an old bluesman who gifts you a worn-out, worn-in instrument, with a sweat-and-blood-stained fretboard, neck dusty from the rails, possessing magic but also a curse. Rather, you go with your mom or dad to a carpeted store that smells of antiseptic, where everything is shiny and glistening with newness, where other parents are renting saxophones or clarinets for their kids to play in the school jazz band, where some other kid is being publicly denied a drum kit on account of his parent’s sanity. The cheapness, the vagueness of brands, the generic aspect of it all screams “WAREHOUSE FOR THE NONCOMMITTAL.” I left with a Canadian-made solid state amp and a cherry red Epiphone copy of a Stratocaster. It was the first big purchase I made with my own money. I was fifteen.

  In tenth grade, a few of my friends were old enough to drive, and I started making my way out of the suburbs and into Seattle on the weekends. Some of the shows we saw were at big venues, like the Moore or the Paramount Theatre: the Church, the Ramones, Sonic Youth, the Jesus and Mary Chain. But most of the time, we’d go to smaller places like the Party Hall or the OK Hotel, and we’d see Northwest-based bands like Treepeople, Kill Sybil, Hammerbox, Engine Kid, Aspirin Feast, Galleons Lap, Christ on a Crutch, and Positive Greed.

  Here I could get close to the players themselves. I could see how the drums worked with the guitars and bass, I could watch fingers move along the frets and feet stomp down on effects pedals, I saw the set lists taped to the floor, and sometimes I was close enough to see the amp or pickup settings. I observed the nature of the bands, their internal interactions, their relationships to one another, as much as I listened. It seems obvious, but it was the first time I realized that music was playable, not just performable—that it had a process and a seed, a beginning, middle, and end.

  Everyone who plays music needs to have a moment that ignites and inspires them, calls them into the world of sound and urges them to make it. And I suppose this form of witness could happen aurally; perhaps it’s as easy as hearing an Andy Gill riff or a Kim Gordon cadence and knowing intuitively how that all works. Then you form those sounds yourself, with your own hands and your own voice. Or maybe you see it on a video, in footage of a musician who finally translates and unlocks what you thought was a mystery.

  For me, however, I needed to be there—to see guitarists like Kim Warnick and Kurt Bloch of the Fastbacks or Doug Martsch of Treepeople play chords and leads, or Calvin Johnson and Heather Lewis from
Beat Happening, in the wholly relatable attire of threadbare T-shirts and jean shorts, enact a weird nerd sexiness, strangely minimal, maximally perverse. I could watch them play songs that weren’t coming out of thin air or from behind a curtain. I needed to press myself up against small stages, risking crushed toes, bruised sides, and the unpredictable undulation of the pit, just so I could get a glimpse of who I wanted to be.

  CHAPTER 2

  THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT

  As a child I was engaged in a continuous dialogue with fantasy, escapism, and performance, from conducting mock interviews with the posters and pictures on my bedroom wall (I had so many questions for Madonna, the members of Duran Duran, and Elvis), to attempting to turn the woods behind my house into a restaurant (a task that involved sweeping the forest floor and nailing planks into fallen logs that would serve as tables), to spending hours concocting and recording an outgoing answering machine message that could serve the dual purpose of functionality and an audition, to dressing up as a clown for my sister’s birthday in lieu of my parents hiring a real one. I had very little desire to be present, only to be presentational, or to pretend.

  I was enamored with the past, the anachronistic. I didn’t feel like I was misplaced and in the wrong era, it’s just that my obsessions often tilted backward in time. I exalted the old movie stars. I watched black-and-white films on AMC, setting the VCR to record Dark Victory with Bette Davis or Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve. I collected coffee-table books with Cecil Beaton photographs of Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant, and Gary Cooper. I read Katharine Hepburn’s account of filming The African Queen and bought James Dean posters for my wall. When I was about ten years old, I saw a commercial on TV for a Time Life record collection of doo-wop songs, ordered them COD—cash on delivery—then hid when the mailman showed up with the package while my mom paid up in order to save face. Any embarrassment I caused my mother—that she momentarily had to pretend to be a suburban housewife with nothing better to do than order music off the TV to listen to while she vacuumed—and the subsequent scolding I got was worth it. Soon I could dance around in the rec room to such out-of-date hits as “A Little Bit of Soap” and “A Teenager in Love.”