Switched on Pop - The Greatest Pop Stories Never Told (with Jessica Hopper)

Episode Date: June 4, 2019

On the KRCW series Lost Notes, Jessica Hopper plumbs pop music history for the most important stories never told. She brings us a bevy of lost gems, from Fanny, an all-female quartet of rockers that was one of David Bowie's favorite bands, to the Freeze a late-70s punk outfit now coming to terms with the offensive lyrics of their youth. Tune in to discover another side of pop, one that's rarely been heard.  Songs Discussed:Fanny - Charity Ball (Live Version)Fanny - Ain't that PeculiarThe Freeze - I Hate TouristsCat Power - The Greatest Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors,

and book right in the app. Download the eater app at eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switch John Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm a songwriter Charlie Harding. And today we are joined by a very special guest. Would you mind introducing yourself?

It's me, Jessica Hopper. Woo! Jessica Hopper is live in the studio. We are so thrilled to have her with us. Author, Critic, and now host of the KCRW show Lost Notes. It's true. I'm the host and executive producer for this season as one of the rotating hosts that they have, which changed every season. But it is exciting, and it is also exciting to be here.

Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining us. So give us a brief introduction to what Lost Notes is all about. So Lost Notes basically does deep dives, reported pieces, documentary. that really tries to get towards stories that we haven't heard a thousand times or new perspectives on history that we may know. And this season, I got to work really collaboratively with the other producers and the show's creator Nick White

to field stories, but also go out to folks where I was like, you know, I know somebody's got this piece, and places that you can pitch or even, like, land, a long-form reported story about music history is almost non-existent. So in some ways, we really had, you know, some really great producers and writers this season, including Henneefo Dorekibb. Friend of the show. Friend of the pot.

A Carly Ray whisper, a resident expert. So I got to, you know, help sort of pick what we were going to do this season and then shape it into the stories that they became. And as we pulled this season together, the stories that we loved kind of had a throughline to them that became pretty apparent in the different ways that a lot of them were trying to connect sounds, ideas, stories, mythology, of music's past and reconcile it in the present moment,

which I think, given how much me to... has sort of shaped so much how we're thinking about music in the last few years. It's not surprising to me. I think it's very much in the air to be thinking about music, lineage inherited sort of history and mythology about what we're listening to and what we're engaging in. And what does that mean? So we just had all these really great stories that most of them were

pretty retrospective in nature. Like, I think the most recent one is Hanif's episode. That's like a letter to cat power about the greatest. And the idea of music that can save your life and sort of puncturing this idea that people performing or issuing some sort of like really heavy work, the sort of assumption that they're transformed by it. And they come out the other side. and like, you know, artists can sort of be healed by that

and sort of that idea around cat powers, the greatest in particular. So really what became pretty evident to us as we picked through what we felt like were the strongest stories and the strongest storytellers and things that seem to be kind of speaking to each other is that it really was just about legacy. And so, I mean, it's a real treat for me as someone who, you know, the last couple of years mostly been working as an editor, are different places. And I really, really love it in part because through both podcasts and other

documentary forms, you can tell stories that don't get told. Yeah. And we're excited for the upcoming season. You know, this is a show that, as you said, both sort of excavates maybe forgotten musical works of the past and revisits maybe more familiar works from a fresh angle. you brought up this idea of legacy. That's something I'm excited to tackle on our show because we tend to be very concerned with the now and the present and the fleeting present almost. So this is kind of a chance to step back

and think about how maybe some of the music we're talking about today will ramify through time. So what we're going to do is first we'll preview actually some of the conversations that you're having on your show and then we'll step back and think about how this might apply to the kind of work we're doing on our show where Pop might be headed and what we might be missing. But let's kick it off with some incredible music that I think was new to me. I think is about to be new to Charlie. Let's listen

to the band Fannie. That's the live version of Charity Ball by Fannie. Can you tell us a little bit about this band, Jessica? So Fanny were a band fronted by two sisters, June and Gene Millington. And they were kind of on the California garage rock circuit in northern California, in particular, in the late 1960s. You know, they came up alongside Credence. And they were not like any other band that they were playing with. They were two teenage sisters in a rock band. they were they had

only been in the US for a few years their Filipino immigrants and they were incredible songwriters and players and incredible musicians at a time when there was at least to their knowledge they didn't know any other

women any musicians that were like them and so they come up they come up in that particular time and space they go to L.A. they get signed fairly quickly. And they're signed to reprise in the early 70s. So their peers in that time and space are like really good friends with Lilfie and

Bonnie Rae and David Bowie's like totally obsessed with them. And, you know, they hang out with the stones. I mean, they're like really, really like they are hanging in the thick of it. Right. And they make a couple records for reprise and kind of towards that. end of it, they're like, we're going to get you guys matching outfits. You know, because all women in the band was really considered novelties, even though they were, you know, as we talk about in the piece, they were David Bowie's favorite band. I mean, he still talked about that in the

90s. And so they, around 75, 76, they do their last record and break up in fairly short order and they're just not really remembered outside of, you know, references and kind of just feminist-minded music books and histories. They're not really, and when they're written into a lineage there, they're talking about sort of predating the runaways and, you know, Kim Fowley saw Fannie and was like, came backstage and told them this like 74, 75 comes backstage to tell them. I'm going to do what you're doing, but I'm going to make money off of it.

And then a year later, there's a runaways. So they're like, I mean, there's so many things who read this story. I think I say in the piece, they were often the first and only of what they were. And they were barely out of their teens, you know, being in front of biqueer women. I mean, just absolutely pioneering in every possible way.

And then they've basically been essentially written out of history. And so when we go back to their legacy in this piece and kind of talk about being pioneers, there's parts of it that they're like, well, you know, that's a very modern reading of how things were and we didn't even think about it at that point. And, you know, asking these questions, like, did you ever think about getting a man in your band?

And they were like, men wouldn't play with us. Like there was no, we were not considered a threat or competition And so, you know, they talk about in the piece about they had like a band house that was considered like a really kind of like a safe space off the sunset strip. And because it was clean and well appointed and they talk about all these things. You know, they're basically like the non-grody sunset strip bandhouse. So people love to come over there and they would wake up and, you know, little feet would be like jamming or Dave Mason would be like, you know, play. I mean, whatever you think of Dave Mason. but, you know, jamming in their living room, playing in their living room, or they could be like, hey, well, show me how to do this.

And because people weren't threatened by them, they could basically demand lessons or instruction or whatever from these men who were considered to be like the giants of the era. It just didn't see them as any sort of competition or threat. And so that's how they learned. And as you can hear, they're an incredible band. Oh, absolutely. So they had the privilege of being surrounded by these absolute stars, and yet they didn't take off. And I'm curious, how was their legacy forming in that era? How are they being written about?

Were these people that they were surrounded by actively promoting them or because they were so unthreatening? They just didn't even consider them. It's like you're just a bunch of groupies hanging out with us. It really sounds like, especially when you read, you know, this letter that David Bowie writes to Rolling Stone that we read in the piece, once people saw them, they were just like, holy fuck. But there's even some advertisements at play on the piece where everything about them is real like, you know, wink and a nod, you know. And even by the people who were behind the record at Reprise, just the idea of all women in a band, it was just seen as kind of an extension of girls. groups, which people thought they were a fad. People just thought it was somehow like a construction

or that they weren't essentially a real band. But I think for people who saw them, and obviously, whether it was these predators like Kim Fowley, or it was people who treated them with incredible reverence like David Bowie or bands that brought them on tour, you know, it was really So much of their legacy, I think, was shaped by people at that time, just not regarding them as real as just novelty. And that sounds like even the record label responsible for them treated them as a novelty and couldn't. They wanted to have them wear matching outfits and basically turn them into like a gimmick, a gimmick band, you know. And also the other thing, too, is just people. they were so far ahead of their time, and the times were just about to start to catch up with them.

75-76 is when you really start to see a lot of women artists charting with material that they wrote based on their own lives. Then you also see phenomena like Suzy Quatro to a lesser extent. You know, the runaways, runaways obviously bigger outside of the U.S. than they were here. you know some of these larger phenomena and heart you know are still two three years down the road from when Fannie is ostensibly at their peak as you say this is incredible music

let's listen to a little bit more of this track and hear what people were responding to then and now because for me at least like listening this for the first time it's like uncovering and you're like on an archaeological dig and you just made some, you know, you just unearthed some like ancient Roman fresco in perfect condition and you're like,

what, how did no one know about this? This is incredible. Let's fast forward to this ripping slide guitar solo a little bit further in the live version of Charity Ball. So in some ways, this is like classic 70s kind of country blues rock. It's we're hearing a 12 bar blues. we're hearing like ferocious slide guitar and honky tonk piano.

It's a lot of fun. But there's also, I think there is something you listen to this band. You're like, oh, this isn't just another one of these outfits. This isn't just... They had a lot of personality musically. And also, you know, Charity Ball is sort of like their best known, sort of, I think, quasi-anthemic. And I think the fact that that that song with all these like sort of hallmarks of like, this is very...

You're like, this is from California. Right. In the mid-70s. Like, exactly. You can place it pretty, you know, by some of its musical hallmarks. But the thing is, a lot of their other work, and especially when you hear the production on it, it has a timelessness to it. And so, and their work is, you know, sort of anthology reissue is available on most streaming platforms. But that a lot of their other work, you're like, it's kind of, for me, time.

timeless in the same way that like T-Raxes, where you're like, some of this was so far ahead of the game that we're still catching up, but that because, you know, they're making records at Abbey Road, there's also kind of such a purity to it that, like, you can't date the production and you're like, when is this band from? A lot of their other work is timeless in a way that Charity Ball is like kind of not, you know? I mean, you know exactly what's right. But that was one of the things that felt like such a revelation when I started to get into their discography is that that timelessness, that some of the greatest music from the

70s, you're like, oh, we were just figuring this out still in like the 90s, what you were doing in 1973, you know? I feel like I've got more listening to do. Not only listening, I can't recommend enough that everyone go watch clips. of Fannie on YouTube, especially for me this performance of Ain't That Peculiar, where when you see them live, you get not only their sound, but they're dynamic, they're having fun, they're like interacting with one another. It's really a breath of fresh air. And they were like 20. It's unreal. It's crazy. But isn't rock and roll supposed to be

extremely serious and not fun? Well, you're absolutely right. Let's listen to a bit of that recording, which I think gets at this quality you're talking about, Jessica. This is a cover of a Motown Marvin Gay classic. And here you really hear them like keeping that the original spunk and shuffle of the Marvin Gay recording, but also adding this like kind of indefinable quality that's totally their own. Like them shakers. Me too. Well, also it's like once I found out that they were very much like contemporaries of low feet,

I was like, oh, this makes like way more sense. Like that they're like their proverbial type bros or baby Bonnie Rae and Lilfee is like, oh yeah, no, got it. Okay, cool. And you're right about the production. There's stuff in there. It's like, oh, yeah, that feels entirely contemporary. Yeah. So one more question about Fannie before we move on to another lost note.

How would music history look different? Were Fannie a part of it? So lots of times when we talk about, I'm doing air quotes, women in rock, the point of origin is, you know, it's really subjective. There's people who are like, Joan Jett is the beginning of this. And then there's people who are like, oh, but Grace Slick, oh, but Janice Shoplin, oh, Joni Mitchell. And there's all these different sort of origin points. you know, Fannie were the first all-female band signed to a major label. You know, there was other bands that was signed around that period,

and, you know, some, I mean, basically all of them relegated to obscurity. But if we knew that better, I think we would see less of this continual, like kind of sliding on like, oh, where does women in rock begin? I mean, you read any Barney Hoskins, L.A. Rock History, you read this, you read that. And some of these women who were really pioneering people in that space, people who were alongside the folks that we consider to be the Vanguard, they're not there. And so I think about just in my own case, what would it be if I had read

read in these histories at this time, something that I could say, ah, there, this is where it begins, this thing that I feel so connected to, so part of so much of my work has been about, about, you know, sort of finding this lineage and sort of braiding myself into it, you know, a feminist history within rock, because so much of it has been erased. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough.

Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No. No.

No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement

agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America

Actually every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. I love that. You know, it makes me think that this is not just about sort of writing the historical record. And for some objective clarity, but in terms of how people like yourself, like us, like people, like young people coming up in the music world, situate themselves within that, within that history. I like that. So with that in mind, I want to move to another perhaps forgotten track. And this is by a band that was also new to me. So this has been a really fun experience.

This is The Freeze and their song, I Have. I hate tourists. They live on Cape Cod that they feel so much ownership over, and they say, my state. Like, get the fuck out of here. And to me, like, the pure teenagerness of, like, the ownership they feel over Cape Cod is, like, kind of. I mean, there's so many things about that song. But that's, for some reason, the point where I'm like, this is fucking ridiculous. As someone who grew up as a local in a New England summer beach town,

I feel them. This resonates. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Oh, you don't understand me. You're not here for the winter. So this is, you've already given us some great intel about the freeze. There are some, some youths from the Cape, circa late 70s.

And why their inclusion in your, in your lost notes roster this season? So Rob Rosenthal, the guitarist for the founding guitarist for the freeze. Nice. He is now. well known as a teacher of radio. He's a producer himself. And a lot of the people who are podcasters and MPR station workers throughout this country learned how to do radio from Rob.

But he started out in the freeze. And he pitched us this idea. It came really kind of fully formed of, you know, he left the freeze when he was, you know, maybe just going off to college. He's still pretty young. at the time they were a known quantity. I think he says in the piece they were like a third-tier American punk band.

And now at the ripe old age of 50 or something, I was trying to reconcile some of those lyrics and I hate tourists. And really he's done a lot of just thinking about and mulling and considering the ways that the punk scene he was part of and the music that he was. as part of making and writing, contributed to, you know, an air of ambient sexism and ambient misogyny within punk rock at the tail end of the 70s.

And so it's a piece about him returning to that time and space to trying to look with very clear eyes and listen to the music they made and reconcile it, but also reconcile it with his high school best friend. He's taken a very different path in life and is still in his 50s in the freeze. No way. I don't want to give it away, but I mean it really starts. The piece sort of starts in one place of being like something that's very relatable. I did something as a teenager that at the time I didn't grasp that maybe this was a totally shitty thing to do. Wow.

then you sort of dawn with that consciousness and kind of like, ugh, you know, cringe and carry it around with you. And he goes back to his friend who's like still in this band and is like, let's kind of like, let's talk about it. Let's hash this out.

And they've had really different lives. And the first time I heard it, I got really choked up. But I don't want to give it away. But, you know, I really think about, there was a Jeff Tweedy interview from a few years ago where he talked about being in how big.

Being in rock bands is one of the sort of sanctioned ways for men to be really like emotionally intimate with each other. And I feel like this piece, this episode that we did that started the season of Lost Notes really kind of showcases that. It's tender. It's tender. And then there's, you know, as much as people are like, I don't want to listen to two 50-something-year-old guys in a punk band having their like, you know, me too. self-reckoning. You go into it thinking that's what's going to happen and it's something much more complicated than some sort of o-fish teenage meacalpa's. Wow. That's a good pit. People are on the edge of their seat right now. At least I am. That's a good. You're selling this well, Jessica.

I think, so I did this event with Hanifabdurkeb last night and one of the last questions we got during the Q&A was someone asking us, you know, you both have written really sort of different pieces regarding emo and emo bands. It's a scene that I wrote a long piece about exiting and feeling very alienated from 15 years ago. And he said something really interesting in his response that was more or less like saying nostalgia without interrogation of that time and space is useless. It is to be blind, to be complicit to it. And I think a lot about as someone who was reared, reared themselves in punk rock, I guess,

who came up in that scene. And obviously, you know, way after the freeze, but the records I was told were, you know, canon and all the bands that I was supposed to worship and all of the ideas and histories and lineages that were supposed to be, you know, all those sort of cultural hierarchies within punk rock. There were so many things that I just felt so fundamentally alienated from. And I had, I don't want to say I had other choices, but really soon after I got into punk rock I found out about Riot Girl, which was just a happening right then. And I feel so grateful for that and grateful for the framework that it gave

me as a music fan and that there were also things that were antidotes to as Rob Calls in the piece, you know, the ambient sexism of so much of that music that was just anti-conformity and, you know, being caustic, and sometimes that was, you know, a lot of brutalized women in these songs and, you know, murderous, jealous boyfriends. And, I mean, granted, you know, that's not that different than, you know, murder ballads or, you know, a lot of these other things that are just inherited song forms as that go way beyond the history of recorded music, as, you know, you can speak to. So for me that that piece and hearing people sort of reconcile some of that was also just really powerful for me too as someone who grew up with with so much of that. I feel like you've just, I've just gone through an entire transformation from when I first heard this song. And the first thing that happened to my mind was, oh man, it's too late for me to have a teenage angsty punk rock band. That's the first thing I heard.

And now, like, here we are. I'm like, oh, my gosh, I'm so glad I never had an Axy punk rock band with all that. But I'm really thankful for you sharing that history. Yeah, I, you know, as someone who has been in a teenage, angsty punk rock bands, I really, I don't want to say it's never too late, but I think, I think you should just go for it. And there's ways to do it responsibly. Yes, you punk, punk yourself responsibly. Well, this idea from Hanif of Dorekib, no nostalgia without interrogation.

That's a great mantra. Faith without works is dead, but more sort of for the hand-wringing music nerds. So Hanif is, as you mentioned earlier, like a guest on the show as well. And I'm curious to listen and get a sense of his relationship to this next song, which is The Greatest by Cat Power. know this one? Welcome back college, yeah. So this is, I mean, a powerful composition.

You just have to listen to a few seconds. And already the, I don't know, a certain emotion starts to set in. I'm curious, what is Hanif's take on this, the leg, talking about legacy. What is the legacy of this song to him? In Hanif's piece, which is the second episode of this season, it's Hanif reading this open letter, you know, to Sean Marshall about seeing her during this tour and where he was at in that time and place and kind of dinging to this notion of songs that save your life and songs that sort of teach you how to live. And, you know, because it's Hanif, I mean, there's like

no way to give, you know, for me, like, just give you like this cliff notes, you know, justice to what he wrote, but really about hearing that record in a particular space in time, in his young life where he was struggling, and to see Sean Marshall during the greatest tour, which was later cut short, and she was really going through a lot of things very publicly, oftentimes on stage, and people, that was really a point where the sort of, that era of cat power experience was often unfinished shows and her really being beside herself. And if you were in the audience, really having to bear witness to that. But the piece also talks about, you know, records that teach you how to live rather than just survive.

And also the idea of how sometimes we think, oh, you know, artists have put out this heavy work, this thing that was like they just excavated their soul and threw it onto this record for us. to hear and then we think oh they well they're transformed like as it's as if it's like an exorcism you know and kind of this mythology of them coming out

the other side sort of purified by it and how we as music fans oftentimes want that want that tidy arc of like they're better now you know right and even the idea that that's what great artist

is supposed to be and that's what great artists do. There's something extremely tragic in that, especially to think that an album is written and recorded often long before it is released year, years, and then toured. And so there's something even more heart-wrenching to think about this music, which came from a really hard, personal, dark, difficult place, was then sort of drawn out over years. It's hard to imagine. It's hard to imagine room for personal transformation in the constant performance of that work. I think particularly we see this a lot in the legacies of women performers that they're oftentimes we want to only really bear witness to certain types of pain.

And we want them to be sort of purified by the fire of their demons. their darkness, their addiction, you know, that fit within broader tropes about women in culture, obviously, and broader expectations. Because I think in a lot of ways, generally, we're still not entirely easy with the idea of women artists. And what are the definitions, the edges, the boundaries of that? And I think, you know, going back to read a lot of old Cat Power Press last year when I did a story on her, I just was like, God, just to be saddled with this, but also to have had what for most people are usually very private moments on stage every night. And to be sort of, it was almost like she was sort of bound in contract with the audience and, and,

for them to bear witness to this time where she was not doing well and then putting these songs out and the performance of these songs was like it was like it just seemed like seeing her around then that her work was moving through her like lava it was not a it wasn't like she was coming out the other side purified by the fire which which i think is really in part was that Hanif's piece bears witness to. Each of these examples, Fannie, the Freeze, Cat Power, these songs are worth recuperating, not just because they, just for the sake of it,

just to be completest, just to be thorough. What I get from talking with you, listening to your show, these pieces are important because they serve as prisms through which we better understand the music that surrounds us, the myths we tell about music, the stories we tell about music, We need that more complete picture. And I want to end this conversation by stepping back and maybe issuing a sort of call to Charlie and myself to think about, you know, again, we're, like as I said in the very beginning, we're focused on the dominant narrative. Whether that's a narrative often dictated by the top 100 charts or certainly by the popular press of the moment. And we tap into that. And we try and offer a deeper perspective on whatever is the dominant narrative. But we're definitely part of that. I think to that end,

I think that interrogation of the things that we love in a real way is another I mean it is a function of loving music is to maybe be cynical about these winners' histories that are often just handed to us.

And I just think it's such an interesting time for music fandom and for thinking deeply about music and engaging in a lot of these bigger conversations, which is part of the reason that doing this season was so, was just, just felt like a gift, really, to be part of some of these conversations because I think a lot of people are trying to do this work and think deeply about these things. And it's not because anyone wants to go, all right, who's the bad guy of 40 years ago and you're off with his head. It's certainly not that.

But really, to think about who's missing from here and why? Because once you start to dig into that, you find so many stories about people being on the margins or the things that just curtailed amazing careers, because of time, place, race, class, all of these things, gender, that you just think about, I mean, I think a lot about the sort of phantom, the phantom world of what music might look and sound like

if some of these people were raised up, were given due in their right time, were what would we what would we have inherited who would have been allowed to be a genius you know and how would that have shaped our canon i think about that constantly yeah well to get a glimpse of what that phantom shadow world the alternate music history you can go listen to lost notes on kCRW or wherever you get podcasts all of the places where podcasts can be got. There it is. And I know you're hooked. You know, I'm like, what, I need to know what David Bowie said about Fannie.

I need to know how this conversation between the freeze went down. What did Hanif had to say about Cap Power? Jessica, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me, guys. I really appreciate getting to have this conversation with you and your listeners and your dog. Aggie. Aggie, do you want to say anything to the people out there? Aggie's on mic.

No. She's camera shy. Switched-on-pop is produced by me, Nate Sloan. And me, Charlie Harding. We're mixed mastered and engineered by Brandon McFarland. Our community manager is Sarah Terry. Our executive producers are in Shott, Karwa, and Allison Rocky. We're a production of Vox Media.

You can find more episodes at Switchedonpop.com or anywhere podcasts. Live. Reach out on Twitter wherever at Switched on Pop. We'll be back next week with another episode. Until then. Thanks for listening.