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Stand by your band The Geraldine Fibbers are a little bit country, but leader Carla Bozulich is a lotta rock'n'roll by CHRIS YURKIW
"A part of that whole misconception is our fault," says drummer Kevin Fitzgerald, who gives me the dirt while Bozulich folds her laundry and watches Harriet the Spy. "I mean, we started out doing country covers as just a goof. And Carla had some country-flavoured songs, which meant a lot to her then because she was with Ethyl Meatplow, so it was something different for her to do." Bozulich says that she hadn't been much of a fan of industrial music either, but what attracted her to the now-defunct Ethyl Meatplow was the intensity of its performances in L.A.'s queer/fetish fringe. Indeed, the Fibbers' first album was called Lost Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home, but why such a loaded title as Butch this time 'round? Doesn't that just fuel the second biggest misconception about the Geraldine Fibbers--that they're an all-lesbian country band? Bozulich isn't even a dyke and I didn't have time to bounce that one off Kevin Fitzgerald. "A lot of the album has to do with AIDS," says Bozulich, "so I tried to think of a title that would put people in that realm. And I think 'butch' is a really interesting concept. For instance, the woman on the cover is not a bull dyke, but she is butch. I think it's a frame of mind--butch or not butch--because it has to do with being a person who can stand up to whatever comes in front of you." In her late teens, the 31-year-old Bozulich was convinced that she just couldn't stand up any longer, but she thought that if she was going to lay down and die she was going to do it on her terms. She was a cocaine and heroin addict who lived on the street and turned to prostitution to pay for the habit, but her desire to beat the overall powerlessness she felt ended up getting her off the drugs too. "That's more than 10 years ago," says Bozulich, but while those experiences still mark her songs, she finds it "pretty hard to talk about that stuff in interviews." She wouldn't talk about it to Spin in their current September issue, so the magazine took quotes from a confessional article Bozulich had written back in 1992 for the death-theme issue of the L.A. fanzine Ben Is Dead. "I never, ever would have said, 'Oh yeah, by the way, I was a junkie whore.' I would never exploit myself that way," says Bozulich. "They obviously have an agenda. I mean, how else does a little band get attention in a big magazine? In the context of the article that I wrote, I thought it was a really good piece of dark humour. It was stuff taken from my real life, and I was very proud of it." The Geraldine Fibbers and Sofa are at the Jailhouse Rock Café this Saturday, Sept. 6 |
The Geraldine Fibbers play hardcore country rock, right? Not exactly. Sure, they've got a fiddler who accentuates the odd country inflection, and then there's those George Jones and Dolly Parton covers. But what dominates the sound of the Los Angeles group is surely the guitar clanging to match Bozulich's throaty singing. Even superficially they seem to have more to do with Babes in Toyland or Sonic Youth than Son Volt or the Jayhawks, so what's with all the talk about twang?