Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

by Carrie Brownstein

Perhaps it was my lack of commitment that prevented me from making friends. I spent my days listening to records and trying to ingratiate myself to a roommate named Aimee who had grown up in Olympia. In my vision of Olympia, it was mythical. It was Paris or Berlin in the ’20s, it was the Bloomsbury group, it was the cradle of civilization. I sensed Olympia would be my salvation, where I needed to end up. It was also tiny. I assumed that every denizen of that town was a young punk, walking around with a bag full of 7-inch singles and a fanzine, and in a band. But Aimee had never heard of these bands from Olympia. So she graciously let me proselytize to her about her own hometown, a town she was likely relieved to have departed, off to bigger and better things. I regaled her with tales of indie labels. I played her Heavens to Betsy and Bikini Kill cassettes and KRS compilations. She tried to be helpful, filling in geographical gaps in my knowledge while I filled in musical ones in hers. Aimee became an ersatz lifeline for me, a temporary and tenuous pathway to where I wanted to go. It was a pitiful and one-sided friendship, and one I probably remember with more fondness and importance than she ever will. She was a placeholder for me, just some unwitting kid from Olympia who would serve as a stand-in for my dreams and aspirations.

In that fall of 1992, she brought Mudhoney to Western. We learned that there was going to be a surprise guest, and that the guest would be Nirvana. They would “open” the show. When Nirvana took the stage, they played in front of an audience that didn’t really expect or deserve their presence—which was probably all they had hoped for at that moment. I, of course, completely took for granted the fact that they likely felt lucky they could still surprise anyone, that they could sneak onto a stage and play a normal show, that they could open for friends in a small college town in their home state, that they could pretend to still just be some normal guys. I took for granted that set, the ease and exuberance of it. They played mostly off Nevermind, just three people with the best songs you’ve ever heard, scrappy and guttural and really loud. And as openers for Mudhoney you could really hear the context from which all this was happening: chainsaws making sonic carvings, hollowed-out selves amplified and discordant. There was some thread of sweetness underneath, a melodic sense that hit you in the back of the throat and made you want to raise up a weary, tentative fist, hoping that gesture would mark you as having been found, or ready to no longer feel lost.

Fliers went up for Bikini Kill, Heavens to Betsy, and Mecca Normal. The three bands were coming to play at the Showoff Gallery in downtown Bellingham. I had been listening to Heavens to Betsy every day. They had a six-song cassette that intrigued me in a way nothing before had. It was a combination of Corin Tucker’s voice and the lyrics. The beautiful parts were edged in disgrace and disgust; it bordered right on ugly the whole time. The singing was louder than it needed to be—did she even need a mic? The music was rudimentary, the drums like an uneven stagger, a determined but ungraceful late-night walk home, the guitar or bass playing just a pattern that repeated until it was an incision—but it was the voice that really cut through. The voice asked to be listened to but it did not beg or plead, it dared and challenged, it confronted but needed no reply from the listener. Any sadness was also defiant: it was not the wail of mourning but of murder. And there was so much I wanted to destroy.

An important person shows up here, is named for the first time in the book.

At the time, Riot Grrrl was a movement that the mainstream press was desperate to understand. News outlets continually attempted to infiltrate the underground, never to really get a handle on it, only serving to mischaracterize its impact. Heavens to Betsy was a wolf in sheep’s clothing: two small women who took up very little physical space on a stage. Typically when a two-person band performs live, they find ways of compensating for their diminutive population via aesthetic amplification and augmentation. They surround themselves with a cityscape of amplifiers; they use drum risers and lighting to create formidable shadows, a landscape of giants; they find ways to add a sense of largeness. But Corin had only her handmade guitar that her father had helped build. It was a crude piece of machinery painted matte black, and it looked like a home appliance that had been melted down in a fire. And she played with the tiniest of amps, an orange Roland cube with one speaker, the entire thing the size of a carry-on suitcase. No pedals, no tuner. She was accompanied by Tracy Sawyer, the drummer and occasional bass player Corin had dragged along with her to Olympia from their childhood hometown of Eugene, Oregon. Tracy backed up Corin tentatively but proudly, stubbornly, the way a younger sibling would, with a secret and shy courage. The noise they made in Heavens to Betsy was vicious and strange. It completely changed one’s notion of what it meant to be powerful onstage. It was not...

This is perfect.

Heavens to Betsy came across as the most serious of their peers. You stood up, you listened, and you were quiet. They were like really loud librarians. And as the audience, you better shut the hell up because you’re in the library of rock right now.

Haha. Thus is great.