Rewriting women and rock

Rewriting women and rock
A new history helps set the record straight



By Dan Gilgoff


In the 1950s, male audiences jeered Big Mama Thornton if her voice sounded less than perfect, since she didn't offer much in the way of looks. Sixties-era production guru Phil Spector forced his wife, Ronnie, leader of the Ronettes, to drive with a blowup doll in the passenger's seat when he couldn't chaperone her himself. And Linda Ronstadt was so intimidated by male musicians when her solo career took off in the '70s that she constantly apologized for being "not that good of a singer."


These are a few of the less glamorous vignettes collected in We Gotta Get Out of This Place, a new history of female rockers by longtime Rolling Stone contributor Gerri Hirshey. Her book joins a flurry of recent literature aimed at setting the record straight on women's roles in the evolution of rock-and-roll.


Cre*** report. Part of the problem has been faulty attribution. Ronnie Spector says that she has read books "cre***ing a man for certain things and romanticizing what they did to discover me, and it's not remotely accurate." Although Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters get cre*** for laying down rock's foundation with the blues, the first black blues vocal recording was Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues," in 1920. In fact, women who sang the blues early on were actually better paid than men, with Bessie Smith earning nearly 15 times what the average black male singer made.


But history has also distorted the significance of acknowledged leaders in the field. Carole King, who wrote or cowrote rock staples like "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," "The Loco-Motion," and "Natural Woman," is a far less respected member of the rock pantheon than Jim Morrison, who gets cre*** for hits he didn't even author, like "Light My Fire." New York Times critic Ann Powers, who has e***ed and contributed to anthologies about female musicians, says that male artists continue to hog the historical spotlight. "Are there 20 biographies of Joni Mitchell the way there are of Bob Dylan?" she asks. "I don't think so." When Rolling Stone released its Illustrated History of Rock & Roll in 1992, only four of nearly 100 chapters were devoted to women. The Ronettes, the Crystals, and the Shangri-Las were squeezed into a three-page chapter titled "The Girl Groups." An entire chapter went to Phil Spector alone.


And there's been little written about the huge corps of women backup singers-like Cissy Houston, who laid down essential vocals on Van Morrison's "Brown-Eyed Girl" and Paul Simon's "Mother and Child Reunion," but who is often recognized for a different kind of contribution: her daughter, Whitney.


Of course, some of the inequity is merely an outgrowth of the gender politics of the music industry. We Gotta Get Out of This Place draws a timeline from the doe-eyed girl groups of the early '60s-bossed about by tyrannical record execs-to contemporary "anti-divas" like Missy Elliott, who presides over the mixing board during recording sessions, writes and produces for other artists, and oversees her budding empire along with her mother.


Certain women did well during the folk-tinged songwriter boom of the mid-'90s, but the late-'90s saw rhythm and blues artists like Macy Gray and Erykah Badu clamber up the charts and win critical acclaim, suggesting a modern openness toward women in a variety of genres. Now some female artists say the playing field is finally level. "All artists get treated like bimbos in the music world," says blues rocker Joan Osborne. "There's equal opportunity exploitation." Rocker Melissa Etheridge says that in the late '80s, "there was this rule that you couldn't play two songs by women back to back. But that's disappeared."


But other women still feel they're banging at the gates of the rock-and-roll establishment. "Women musicians are considered to be either a trend or a backlash," says Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls. "Outside of country and top 40, women aren't even on radio playlists right now." New York-based indie pop artist Rachel Sage concurs. "If Shawn Colvin and Bonnie Raitt put out albums in the same week, that's an issue," she says, "whereas David Gray putting something out the same week as Pearl Jam is not."





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