AltarNative.com | June 2001 By Matthew Kalinowski San Franciscans have always prided a progressive mindset, one that welcomes new ideas and challenges the status quo. The same can be said of the music scene here. The city by the Bay has, of course, pioneered the beat-driven dance scene in recent years, but even decades ago, America's most forward-thinking musicians called S.F. home. By the 1960s, the women's movement had picked up enough steam so that female-fronted San Francisco acts like Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane maintained equal footing with Hendrix and the Dead--- not out of pity or patronization, but just by virtue of their ability to jam with the best of the boys. So, following three-and-a-half decades worth of continued advancements for women's rights and equality, female musicians of the Bay Area enjoy that much more success and adoration, when compared with their male counterparts. Right? Well, sort of. Altar Native contacted three experienced, knowledgeable San Francisco-based alt-rock acts, all of which happen to feature female musicians. As it turns out, although we haven't lost any ground since the years that many consider to be rock's Golden Era, in this town there's certainly room for improvement when it comes to earning respect as a woman musician---or any musician, for that matter. First, the good news: at least some lady-led bands feel that their frontma'am may even provide the toehold needed to get noticed amongst a horde of bands featuring the standard male-dominated line-up. "It's never been implicit to us that we couldn't book a show or gain support from an organization or individual based on our gender," says Valerie Moorhead, who heads the modern rock quartet Enda. "So, if we've been victims of discrimination, I honestly have not been aware of it. And I certainly would not let it affect what we do if it ever was the case. On the other hand, there have been a few times here and there when we have even been at an advantage for having girls in the band when it comes to being featured for that very reason." Moorhead stresses that as an indie-based rock band, Enda still struggles with the same ordeals as any other group, regardless of their lineup. Moorhead is no stranger to the cause, mind you - after all, Enda did feature one of its songs on a compilation CD to help RAINN. "It's just that it's hard overall," she explains. "I believe there are aspects of being in a band that girls may shy away from, so maybe there is resistance on both sides, but I don't think that contributes to the big picture. It may not be so much that girls in bands are trying to fight for the attention given to male-fronted bands, rather I think we're all trying to fight for attention among bands, period." If that's the case, then Enda's impending full-length debut will no doubt snatch at least a good deal of that attention. Featuring Moorhead's plaintive yet powerful vocals and Jennifer Yee's emotive lead guitar work, Enda's newest material demonstrates with gripping effect the balanced tension between the Smashing Pumpkins' post-grunge songwriting skills and the Cure's melancholic moodiness. But Mauri Skinfill, guitarist/vocalist of the self-described "California girl rock" trio Glitter Mini 9, harbors a less optimistic outlook on the situation. Where do female musicians stand, in relation to traditional guy groups? "At a clear disadvantage," she asserts. "No question about it. People expect less of you in terms of musicianship and you're always laboring under some knuckle-dragger's misconception of how you're limited by gender. In short, you face more professional skepticism from the industry as a matter of course. Plus, if you're ambitious, you're automatically a harpy. Look at Courtney Love. The extent to which she's villified is mind-boggling." Glitter Mini 9 dares the complacent listener with a harmonized sneer: "We're all sluts/every last one of us," from "Cuckoo." Combining Nirvana's muscle with the smarts of That Dog and Liz Phair's feminine intuition, Glitter Mini 9 are poised to smash glass ceilings and double standards alike, with the release of their upcoming disc, "Break Up at the Rock Show." Once dubbed "San Francisco's own Sleater Kinney" by BAM magazine, GM9 have obviously thought through their role as torchbearers for the city's female rock scene: "I think we've always been conscious of what it means to work in a creative culture that's vastly male," Skinfill points out. "But identifying yourself in music is a complicated thing if you're a girl - Are you disrupting gender codes when you strap on a guitar? Or just replicating the posture of some guitar hero? Usually it's a combination. "Rock music has always been about inhabiting new personas---that's what makes it liberating and dangerous at its best. As a girl band we're committed to reinvention, killing the tired stereotypes. It's not easy." Why not? It may have something to do with the city itself. "San Francisco has a horrid music scene for a city this size," grieves alt-folk diva Pi. She would know--- the San Francisco native hosts a singer-songwriter series at the Crossroads Café, and has double-billed with myriad local acts, more than a few of which also tout female musicians. "I'm thinking seriously about moving in the next couple of years," Pi confides. "I just have to figure out where to - I hope to do that by touring a lot. One issue for me is that I was born here, and I'm bored with it. The other issue is how much San Francisco has changed since I was a kid. It used to be a very creative place, and people really supported the arts. A lot of that has to do with economics, it used to be fairly easy to be poor in San Francisco and still have a high living standard - not so anymore." However, the bay area's Internet boom was largely to blame for said scope shift, which means that the area's recent tech troubles might, with any luck, lure the bohemian aspect back into town. In the meantime, Pi has found enough additional reasons to stick around, at least for now. "In general, I find the city to be very unsupportive for musicians in any genre, but there are a lot of female musicians here compared to other places, so people are used to seeing women on stage, writing and playing." Also, Pi has a somewhat vested interest in San Francisco, due to her unique musical style meshing well with the city's equally unique state of mind. "My music mixes a lot of stuff. It's the 'chick singer songwriter thing,' but it's also got an 'urban loopy sample DJ beat thing.' People in San Francisco can get their heads around it fine - in more rural places, people were like, 'why is this nice little girl getting funky with this stuff? Why doesn't she just sing with that pretty little voice?'" she recalls of her recent tour of the U.S. "They want chicks to be Sheryl Crow, and hip hop beats to be Eminem or Limp Bizkit - so I just confuse them. In general, I'm a city girl, and city people seem to relate to me better." She may soon take the Pi out of San Francisco, though it's doubtful that anything will take the S.F. out of Pi: her brand new LP, Irrational, relates a chock full of inimitably San Franciscan anecdotes of love and war, via bouncy melodies, acoustic strumming and playful keyboards over said hip-hop beats. However, even if a female musician does relocate to a different metropolis, she will still encounter many of the same problems suffered in the Bay Area, because according to Glitter Mini's Skinfill, the issue exists not within certain city limits, but rather lies embedded within American culture. "The discrimination you face as a girl band doesn't happen in explicit ways. It shows up much more in the way culture reflects your efforts in music back at you," she indicates, citing an example now circulating around print media: "There's a recent Jim Beam ad with a photo of a girl rock band---a trio of models--playing a show. At the foot of the stage are a bunch of fist-pumping, high-fiving guys. The tagline is: 'Sometimes you pay twelve dollars to hear bad music. Sometimes bad music is worth twelve dollars.' This was a huge print campaign that ran in pubs like Rolling Stone and it performs the worst kind of tired ideological work, trades in so many stereotypes. So you have to square-off against ideas like that." "Still, it's possible to make in-roads," Skinfill concedes, noting GM9's recent string of success. "I recently got interviewed for a feature in Guitar Player magazine, one of the last bastions of cock-rock tablature on the planet. It's not the pinnacle of personal achievement, but as someone who came to music late, and a girl to boot, it's not bad." Not bad at all---even Grace Slick never had that distinction. Instances like this prove that San Francisco's female rockers are in fact doing all they can to scrape and squeeze their way to musical success. Because girl groups still constitute the minority, an important source of support and inspiration comes from one another. Pi stays involved with Indiegrrl, an internet-based, exclusive networking group for women musicians. Glitter Mini 9 work with an all-woman team for all of their management, legal, and public relations needs--a group who has "miles of experience and takes no shit from anyone," boasts Skinfill. Even female musicians at the national level provide inspiration for our up-and-coming local acts. "Women performers like Courtney Love, Carrie Brownstein and Kim Deal aren't the reason I started in music, but are definitely the reason I've stayed in it," Skinfill concludes. "That, and the sheer pleasure of amplification."