Taste Test

Guitarist-singers Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein met in Olympia, Wash., in the early '90s, when they were playing in the bands Heavens to Betsy (Tucker) and Excuse 17 (Brownstein). Soon after, they formed Sleater-Kinney and released their first, self-titled, 10-song mini-album in 1995, with long-distance drummer Lora MacFarlane, who lived in Australia. Sleater-Kinney was patchy, but the dynamic range of Tucker's full-throttle whisper-to-roar and Brownstein's sharp, flexible yelp were already evident. In 1996, the trio recorded Call the Doctor, a supremely confident album that catapulted the band's status in the indie underground and turned them into critics' favorites overnight (it finished an amazing third in the Village Voice's year-end critics' poll). In 1997, Dig Me Out was even stronger, thanks to Hollywood-born Portlander Janet Weiss joining the band as drummer. Impressively, the band has lost no power as it has gained nuance, as 2002's sharply political One Beat demonstrates. Tucker sat out this Jury, which took place in Weiss' dining room in Portland on a blazing April afternoon.

Huggy Bear: "Her Jazz" (1993) from Taking the Rough With the Smooch (Kill Rock Stars)

Carrie Brownstein: That's Huggy Bear. "Shaved Pussy Poetry"? "T-Shirt"?

Seattle Weekly: It's "Her Jazz," which is sort of their hit, if you want to call it that.

Janet Weiss: They had a hit? [Laughs]

SW: When did you first start hearing stuff like this, riot grrrl stuff?

Brownstein: I guess right when we moved to Olympia. 1993. Huggy Bear actually came to Olympia but without [guitarist] Jon Slade, so Billy Karren from Bikini Kill had to play with them. But they came out with a sophistication that the other bands didn't—not necessarily musically, but they thought a lot more about aesthetics and the scene and the way that they presented themselves a little more, which was kind of impressive at the time. It looked like they were self-conscious. Olympia bands weren't that self-conscious, like Heavens to Betsy, Bikini Kill, and Bratmobile. They were just sort of out there. It just sort of made [Huggy Bear] different, you know? I think at a time when maybe people weren't synthesizing everything, like image and song and presentation, they were, where other bands were still trying to figure that out. I think it affected things in England more than Olympia. There were a lot of other small bands that sort of sounded like Huggy Bear without the passion of Huggy Bear.

SW: Was riot grrrl already starting to happen in a big way by the time . . . ?

Brownstein: It was practically over by the time we got there. They came before [Brownstein's first band] Excuse 17 started, or as we were starting. I think what happened was Bikini Kill, Heavens to Betsy, and Bratmobile went over to England, and there was this band Huggy Bear there, and they were, like, "We're in love with Huggy Bear, they're incredibly cute." [Laughs] They were interesting, their music was powerful and catchy and feminist. How they presented themselves in terms of gender wasn't strident, it was ambiguous—sexually ambiguous. I think the ambiguity of their band made them different from the more strident, in-your-face Olympia bands. And I think that people were really enamored by that.

By the time Huggy Bear came over, they played basement shows. It's not like now when an import-export from England comes over as an indie band and they play the Showbox for three nights and get signed to a major label. I mean they just came over and played basement shows across the country and then went back home. It didn't really start a fire, but people bought their 7-inches and played them at dance parties. It's just really different, like apples and oranges. Being drunk and listening to them in a basement, then going home and having a 7-inch to remember it by is a lot different than, like, them coming over, you know, then getting signed to, like, A&M, and then going back home and playing, like, a stadium. It just was small.

SW: When you moved to Olympia, was the strident political feel of the bands you described attractive to you? Or was it more of a scene thing? Did you go there with the idea that you were going to play music?

Brownstein: No, I wanted to go to college. [Laughs] I wanted to get an education, and it was a town with interesting people that were motivated and doing things differently than the Seattle scene at the time, which is what I came out of. People were supporting one another, and there wasn't an infrastructure for music there. So they, a decade before that, started labels so they could put out cassettes of their friends' bands. You could record in someone's basement and your other friend would put it out. It was a weirdly matriarchal scene where there were tons of women heading lots of different movements and doing a lot of writing and organizing. That was really different than what seemed to be going on almost anywhere at the time. It was just insular. [Olympia's] insularity is attractive when you're 18 or 19 and want to be with other people who are doing what you're doing, sort of a hypercreativity where all you want to do all the time is just, like, create and be around your friends and lose some of the self-consciousness that you naturally have as a teenager, and I think Olympia was a great place for a lot of people in late teens–early 20s to do that. It was a really supportive environment; you could form a band Wednesday, play on Thursday, and record on Saturday. Everything was really condensed and exciting for a few years there, and that energy kind of became reduced later on.