RIOT GRRRLS just wanna have fun

IT’S (PROBABLY) a classic moment of dumb rock ’n’ roll television. L7 do ‘Pretend We’re Dead’ up against the fractel-storm backdrop of The Word. And midpoint, guitarist Jennifer Finch unbelts her Levi’s, the camera unsure how to react as she hip-wriggles the jeans down to knee-level.

The low-slung guitar conceals what’s now revealed, although a pan behind the band screens her bare bottom as the densely lumbering Grunge mini-hit grates to its conclusion, the vocalist collapsing back across the drumkit in zipalong chaos. And Jennifer shifts her guitar aside to shuffle off-set, her movements restricted by ankle-high denim, her pubics now tantalisingly public in a neglectful and bored fashion. Terry Christian is reduced to a helpless, squirming, deflated mess, mewling “Oh no, oh no,” as the last vestiges of his control dissolve in delicious nudity.

Now it’s U2’s Zooropa mega-fest at Roundhay Park, Leeds. Above the stage gantry, various access-TV inserts recorded at random earlier in the day flash up on massive screen for Vox-Pop soundbites. “I took a shit on the roof of my neighbour’s car,” brags one guy. Then a skinny girl in a body-stocking says “I just want to get something off my chest,” and she flips out a beautifully cheeky nipple to the 80,000 voyeurs in the mass seething mosh-pit beneath her.

Two apparently unrelated incidents. But beneath the surface, something significant is going on here. Neither L7 nor the Zooropa girl use their sex like, say, Madonna would: as a strategy for shock confrontation to agitate record sales. It’s more the Porky’s kind of trash-brain mooning from speeding car windows at other M-way users. It’s more a bratty up-yours attitude previously the preserve of rogue male rock ’n’ rollers.

Girls in 1990’s music are manoeuvring their way through the minefields of modernism by devising more and more outrageous experiments in life-style. They exist in a place where money might be tight, but pants are even tighter, in a cyber-zone of Sex ‘n’ Shopping ‘n’ Rock ’n’ Roll.

The politically correct position might be girls just want to have the right to choose. But girls just wanna have fun is more . . . well, more fun.

A year after the movement’s inception, to Riot Grrrls it’s never too early to detonate your future. To Riot Grrrls more and more equals less. Hearts, and other more intimate organs are worn on their sleeves. But Riot Grrrls are not just a new variant on the traditional Pop Porn-utopia. Rock was NEVER like this before. Youth Culture was NEVER like this before. Put together like a gender jigsaw gone wrong, Riot Grrrls are choreographed by the Baader-Meinhof group, and they’re brighter than bombs.

There’s a TV documentary about idiosyncratic 1960’s record producer Joe Meek, the Gay maverick who first master-minded a No.1 hit for a group called the Honeycombs, then blasted his landlady to death with a double-barrelled shotgun before turning it on himself. The Honeycombs had a girl drummer called Honey Lantree. The rock-umentary screens a vintage piece of black-and-white interview footage of the Honeycombs filmed as their ‘Have I The Right?’ storms the chart. The ‘boys’ are asked musicianly questions about songs and touring, but when they get to Honey they ask her “do you make cups of tea for the boys, and iron their shirts?” She seems to find the question neither unusual or insulting. The entire sequence is a seedy vignette of just how the musical and social mores of the time treated women during the early years of the pop era. To girls, rock ’n’ roll was a great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

To the decade that watched the Honeycombs on TV, a girl’s involvement in music was limited to one of two functions. They were consumers, or they were groupies.

Science Fiction novelist Mick Farren slummed through the Groupie era as part of sleazoid underground band The Deviants. He fictionalises their exploits in his rockist novel The Tale Of Willy’s Rats. Led Zeppelin straddled the world, mega-millionaire Rock Tsars who shagged and snagged on the jagged edge, adrift in a wonderful nightmare of new morality. The Rolling Stones – no slouches in the après-gig depravity department – did ‘Cocksucker Blues’, a tour to out-gross anything from the Zep chronicles. “I can see you’re fifteen years old, “leers a lascivious Jagger in ‘Stray Cat Blues’, “but I don’t want your ID/there’d be a feast if you’d just come upstairs.” And groupies come upstairs three steps at a time.

But the Deviants, who never rated a chart hit, also benefited form the sexual generosity of what Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter called ‘The Overnight Angels’, and the Stones called ‘Starfuckers’. In the novel, a groupie chasing the dubious favours of Willy’s Rats is persuaded into a Gang-Bang. “You’ve fucked with each member of the band individually, why not try us all together?” Needless to say, she does just that.

“Not all pop fans are destined to enact their sexual fantasies in the oblivion of the back stalls,” suggested Richard Neville, editor of Oz. “Some make it to the stars’ dressing rooms and beyond. Known as Groupies, these people are the sexological phenomenon of the Sixties, as fashionable anthropological specimens as were the Trobriant Islanders in their day. Suffice here to point out that they are young, mostly female, plentiful, direct (“I’m over eighteen, I’m clean, let’s fuck”) and everywhere that pop stars are (“we even found them in Singapore” – Jimmy Page)”.

“We used to do it because we were just young and bored” adds Carmine Appice, a power-drummer who started out with Vanilla Fudge, joined Rod Stewart’s touring band, and wound up co-writing ‘D’Ya Think I’m Sexy?’. In an interview with Oui (May 1982) he recalls “we got Jeff Beck into it heavily. We used to have cum races with chicks. We’d have a chick give us both a wank and whoever came first would win. We used to go through all these sexual, fucking manias – me and Timmy (Bogert) used to have a thing called ‘The Finale’ with a girl. Timmy would be fucking her and I’d be getting a blow job at the same time, and the three of us would come together. We’d go “You ready? No? You ready? Not yet? What about you? Alright – here we go NOW!!!” But these are the kind of things that went on every day. Every day.”

Blow-jobs? Groupies suck cock like campaigning politicians shake hands. Frequency? “In Australia I had eighteen chicks in five days,” brags Appice. “The oldest was nineteen and the youngest was fourteen. The youngest one got the permission of her Mother.”

Some groupies eventually achieved celebrity in their own right. Suzi Creamcheese became mascot to the Mothers of Invention. More famous still were the Chicago Plaster Casters who developed their fannish enthusiasm into a programme of ennobling Rock Star’s penises in rigid Plaster of Paris. One of the girls stimulated the necessary phallic stiffness while the other applied the wet plaster, assembling a collection of erections that continues to exorcise the prurient fascination of rock historians. Jenny Fabian and Johnny Byrne promoted the life-style into literature with their novel Groupie, published by NEL, while Germaine Greer contributed a proto-feminist critique in Oz called “The Universal Tonguebath: A Groupie’s Vision.”

It’s all a long way from Honey Lantree making cups of tea and ironing shirts.

And today? I’m backstage with promoter John Keenan. “The young bands don’t have groupies now,” he explains, “and the old bands are all too tired.”

Carmine Appice agrees. “Nowadays it’s really calm. Nowadays the groupies fall in love with you, you know? It’s no more of the crazies.”

Sociologically, psychologically, and sexologically, it’s not too difficult to construct theories.

Throughout the juvenilia and pubertal fumblings of early pop – the ’50s and the ’60s – girls were largely excluded as active participants. Their role was to idolise, and to consume product. The stars were all pretty boys with Brylcreme quiffs and Presley pouts, boy-toy pin-ups in glossy teen-’zines like Rave or Mirabelle bought by virgins in training bras that strain with chaste or not-so-chaste lusts and desires. But the masturbatory dreams they fantasise alone in their bedrooms are not of replacing the stars, but merely of touching them. Adoring from afar in unrequited passions, longing for the day Peter Noone or Paul McCartney asks them out for tea.

Token white Pop Chicklets from Helen Shapiro to Dusty Springfield were telegenic Barbie Dolls who never menstruated or swore, and surely didn’t actually fuck. They were deliberately targeted at and sold to that same female audience. All of their greatest chart hits were the kind of heavily traumatic heartbreak ballads teenage girls trapped in the squelchy complexities of puppy-love could empathise with.

Denied access to the Rock ’n’ Roll World Party as serious participants, the Starfuckers of legendary excess gorged themselves on the only other alternative; the contact-high of intimate association with their gods available by opening their legs. They became players in the Pop Porn-utopia, if only for a single one-night stand in the back of a cold Transit van with the lead guitarist, while the rest of the band wait their turn . . . and probably the roadies too. Fame by proxy.

Elements of the groupie phenomenon have always been camp followers of stardom, and probably always will be. Fame, like power and wealth, is the most beguiling of aphrodisiacs. But as the gender equation shifts, then so does its more extreme manifestations.

Black Jazz and R&B artists always seemed to inhabit different cultural environments, breathing more exotic atmospheres. They always seemed more liberated, more raunchy, more adult. But they often paid extreme penalties for those freedoms. Janis Joplin fought and died in a rage of narcotic, vocal, and sensual adventures attempting to achieve the kind of serious sexual freedom and artistic respect extended to her role models ‘Lady Day’ Holiday and Bessie Smith. Leonard Cohen recalls an encounter with Janis – “I remember you well/in the Chelsea Hotel/you were talking so brave and so sweet/giving me head on an unmade bed/while the limousines wait in the street.”

“Elsewhere, Fanny were starlets of early American all-girl Heavy Rock, fox-Core vixens playing such raucous full-frontal licks that their concert posters claimed ‘FANNY HAVE BALLS’; a disconcerting confusion of genders missing the point that they obviously lacked any such testicular appendages. The implication though, was equally obvious. That for women to play Rock like men, they must BECOME men.

Now, a year after their first splash, we have Riot Grrrls in a new cyber-zone of Sex ’n’ Shopping ’n’ Rock ’n’ Roll and it’s time to evaluate what they’ve achieved – and are achieving.

To antique television drones Huggy Bear is the smooth black hipster Mr. Fix-It of the Starsky and Hutch shoot-em-ups. But to Rock mythology they’re the Brighton-based band who nail phallocentric pop to its own amps, making their female identity a political statement. Accelerating the ‘Women in Rock’ faction into a hormonal dialectic. Messy and messed-up these virulent style storm-troopers launch deliberated assaults on the entire concept of male Cock-Rock divinity. The respect Janis Joplin had to battle for, Riot Grrrls take for granted. No-one dares condescend to them. They very obviously lack balls, but they rock like bitches.

Huggy Bear are three sonic sluts revved up on Punky PMT, plus two token males; Jo, Karen, Nicky, Chris and John, collectively “too ugly and stupid to be ‘cool’.” While their Riot Grrrls creation sharpens the cutting edge of guerrilla-beat providing the revenge of Honey Lantree and the vindication of groupies, arming them with chainsaws for a Rock re-make of Thelma And Louise.

Riot Grrrls are the sexological phenomenon of the Nineties, as fashionable anthropological specimens as were the groupies in their day. They are young, female, plentiful and direct. Riot Grrrls attack all aspects of sexism with an up-yours righteous rage buoyed up on obnoxious rhythms and guitars played like kalashnikovs. They scratch acid across all aspects of patriarchal power, from the ‘body fascism’ of ‘Supermodel Superficial’ by the Voodoo queens, the male-dominated musical media-ocrity in general, and all the Neanderthal misogynistic assholes in the world.

They skweam and they skweam and they skweam their radical polemical agitational propaganda over a distortion of severely abused guitars. They wear their hearts, and other more intimate organs, on their sleeves. And while they favour the empowerment of women, they castigate men for their every inadequacy. A Voodoo Queens lyric howls “I should have dumped you/when you didn’t satisfy ME!”

To feminists of long-standing it all might seem like yesterday’s style dressed up in today’s attitude and heavy boots. But if the sound has all the sex and charm of a high-speed autowreck, Riot Grrrls have vaginas with teeth. Theirs is a sound so confrontational they probably couldn’t entertain an ethical dilemma for too long, never mind a mass audience, but they stimulate the toothless old whore of pop into delightful new confusions. And that’s no bad thing. Girlie role models can never be the same again.

It’s probably not true that Riot Grrrls would deliberately cross the street to provoke a fight – no, they’ve already crossed the Atlantic to do it, and the sky seems to be no limit at all. Alongside Babes in Toyland, American originators Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Hole, Mecca Normal, and Dickless, Huggy Bear use a promiscuous arsenal of unsavoury armour-piercing texts like ‘Shaved Pussy Poetry’ or ‘Rubbing The Impossible To Burst’, aiming for all the correct G- (for guitar) Spots. “Who needs boys when you’ve got guitars?” demands Anjali of Voodoo Queens. They’ve got fuzz-boxes and they’re gonna use them. If love is the battlefield, and sex the weapon, they’re the gender terrorists, the Baader-Meinhofs of Suffragette City.

And beyond their strictest manifesto, Riot Grrrls provide a lightning rod for a generational change in attitude from L7 on The Word to the Vox-Pop nipple-flasher of U2’s Zooropa. Sure, there are other symptoms too. Bragging about sex with 14-year-old girls (with or without Mummy’s permission) don’t seem quite so clever in the more responsible 1990s. And then again, flying out for their first American tour Inspiral Carpets tell the press “Groupies? You can’t catch AIDS by having a Groupie give you a blow-job.” There are new restrictions on available sex-games. But new opportunities too. Groupies may be as dead as vinyl in the music industry, but while the groupies goal was the prestige of the Back-Stage Pass, Riot Grrrls ambitions are less sexually passive. They demand Access-All-Areas, despite the fact that many of their battles are already won.

Somewhere in rock there’s a sense of history in the making, and it’s happening before our very ears.