Just the facts: Within the past few days, the Creation Records and Slowdive Facebook pages posted notices to their followers to be sure to engage with the newly created official Slowdive Twitter feed. That Twitter feed’s first four followers were four of the band’s members. Though no tweets have been posted by the band yet, singer Rachel Goswell and other ex-divers have, for the last several days, been posting a countdown that seems to be pointing to January 29.
 

 

 
And so now speculation abounds that Slowdive may be making an announcement on that date—and might that announcement be of a reunion? Given that the band is within the target zone of the standard 20-25 year nostalgia cycle, and that shoegaze godfathers My Bloody Valentine and bro-gaze champs Swervedriver have already taken the reunion plunge, it seems like a tantalizing possibility. Though their hastily recorded 1991 debut LP Just for a Day fell victim to a shoegaze backlash in the UK press, Slowdive proved that they were more than just the sum of their bowl cuts with 1993’s brilliant and luminous Souvlaki, and followed it up with the minimalist experiment Pygmalion in 1995. All these years later, it’s the strange and adventurous (and kind of Talk Talk-ish) Pygmalion that stands as my favorite of their albums, but at the time it was not a fan fave, and the band was dropped from Creation records almost immediately after its release. Three of the band members changed their name to Mojave 3 and continued on the 4AD label, and they’ve remained intermittently active under that name.
 

Slowdive, ”Alison” from Souvlaki
 

Slowdive, ”Blue Skied an’ Clear” from Pygmalion

More Slowdive after the jump…

 
My love of “AM Gold” is well-documented on this blog, and I defend the soft-rock/easy listening genres of the 1970s as an artistic movement of intimacy, reflection, and pathos. John Denver? Absolutely! Let’s open the windows, and smell the fresh air! Thank god, I’m a country girl. Bill Withers? Great! I’ll make some chamomile tea and we can wrap ourselves in kaftans! Carol King? Just give me a flowing maxi dress of natural fibers, I think I’m ready for motherhood. And Janis Ian? Do you even have to ask? Janis Ian makes me want to paint my apartment burnt sienna and avocado green, put on “At Seventeen,” and do some fucking macrame.

There’s a lot that’s great about Janis Ian. Yes, “At Seventeen” is a beautiful feminist anthem of isolation and loneliness, but her first hit, “Society’s Child (Baby I’ve Been Thinking),” is also remarkable. Released when Ian was just fifteen (she wrote it at thirteen), “Society’s Child” told the story of an interracial relationship. Despite its “Leader of the Pack” teen-melodrama sound, it was actually banned on the radio. While the lyrics are pretty earnest (she was thirteen, what do you expect?), her subject indicated a serious-minded commitment to social justice. (And that didn’t come out of nowhere. Ian’s family were serious leftists, and often under surveillance for their politics.)

In 1993, at the age of 42, Janis Ian came out as a lesbian. She then immediately shocked her fans by appearing on Howard Stern’s radio show. Below is Ian’s 1994 defense of the appearance, penned for The Advocate. It seems like they have a legitimate friendship, which doesn’t surprise me—Howard always struck me as “the gentleman’s shock jock.” (I don’t really see her being friends with Mancow, right?) After the interview, you can even see video of Ian performing “Seinfeld’s Girl is Seventeen with Double Ds,” a parody of “At Seventeen” with Howard; the lyrics are reworked to mock Jerry Seinfeld’s then relationship with a 17-year-old high schooler.

And this is what’s so great about Janis Ian. For all her humanity and insight and the vulnerable beauty of her music, Janis Ian does not give a fuck about your approval.
 

I did Howard Stern last year, and joined the ranks of the Politically Incorrect.

I love doing Howard. I’ve done his morning radio show, his E! television show, and his disgusting New Year’s Eve special. (Don’t ask.)

I like Howard. He treats me with courtesy, and he recognizes my relationship as valid. In fact, he tried very hard to find an appropriate term for introducing my partner. After rejecting “Mr. Ian”, “Mrs. Ian”, and “Her Better Half”, he finally settled on “Mr. Lesbian”, a term we find appallingly funny and poignantly correct.

Stern is currently running for governor of New York, and I’m betting he’ll get over 50,000 votes. Why? Because he touches people - although by his own admission his penis is too small to touch much. (Another reason to like him: who was the last man you heard admit to that?)

Howard operates from the theater of honesty in a way very few performers dare. He says things I’m afraid to say, and admits to feelings I’ve overheard on tour buses and in mens’ locker rooms when no one thinks I’m listening. He’s thoroughly uncomfortable with gay male sexuality, but he also excoriates anyone who would deny their right to consensual sex.

The fallout of doing Howard has been both educational and frightening. People writing to my “fan club” who identify themselves as politically correct are ‘horrified’ and ‘furious’ that I find any common ground with him. The hate mail contingent seems to mistake theater for reality—and their own bigotry for enlightenment—threatening us both with “dire consequences”.

I’m at a loss as to why they find the friendship so dangerous. Howard’s “Lesbo Dial-A-Date” is one of the hottest shows on radio; during it he treats us exactly like he treats his heterosexual female guests—snidely, with double entendres flailing.

Yet my mail assumes that because many of the guests on Dial-A-Date are women with big hair and harsh rural accents (yes, I consider a heavy Brooklyn accent rural), who strip/spank/tease with gleeful abandon, he’s “victimizing the lower economic strata, who can least defend themselves”.

Excuse me? Do they mean that if you have a sixth grade education, you’re less capable of deciding what to do with your body than if you have a Ph.D? Is someone who makes less money also less capable of choosing their own path? I find that attitude incredibly patronizing, and demeaning to all women.

Political correctness is a form of censorship. I learned about censorship in 1966, when as a 15-year-old singer/songwriter I saw my record “Society’s Child” banned across the United States. Disk jockeys were fired for playing it; a radio station in Georgia was burned to the ground for the same reason. Now that it’s being called a “standard” in the books, everyone forgets that when it was released it was attacked by the politically left-wing as well as the rabid right.

I learned about the dark side of political correctness at the same time. The right-wing hated me for encouraging miscegenation, and my left-wing friends jumped on me because the white girl in the song gave in to peer pressure and stops dating her black boyfriend.

When “At Seventeen”, which I recorded in 1976, received five Grammy nominations—incidentally the most any solo female had received to that date, but who’s counting?—I was accused of selling out to the commercial interests. People said I was “mainstreaming my message” by using strings on the record, “disguising my message with pretty words and music”.

Still later I was attacked for going to South Africa during the apartheid years, though I took an integrated band and played to integrated audiences and (unlike Linda Ronstadt and various black Americans who will go unmentioned here, but couldn’t order dinner there) avoided Sun City. The same English committee that prevented Johnny Clegg, probably the best known white South African artist in the world, from performing at a tribute to Nelson Mandela because he’d performed in his residence country of South Africa, also banned me from playing in England.

And when I came out loudly last year in the media, someone wrote “I find your lesbianism suspect now—where were you in the 80’s when we were fighting for our rights?”

As a matter of fact, I spent a good part of the 80’s trying to get a record deal, because no record company would take a chance on a gay 40-year-old female who’d already had two careers. My partner and I mortgaged our home so I could make the album Breaking Silence. Howard Stern and singer/songwriter John Mellencamp, both dismissed in a recent article I read as “misogynistic breeders”, were the only performers to back me with air-time and money before my record broke and got its Grammy nomination.

 
Janis Ian’s letter continues after the jump…
 
“Society’s Child” on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967.

 
There are memes of clueless models awkwardly posed with guitars they have no idea how to hold, let alone play. Very unlike singer-songwriter-guitarist Kat Bjelland of Babes in Toyland, Crunt, and Katastrophy Wife, who turns fifty this week. She has often looked like a model and really does know how to play her Rickenbacker 425.

Kat is also remembered for her early ‘90s “kinderwhore” look, of which she, Courtney Love, and The Divinyls’ Chrissy Amphlett were co-creatrixes. I’m not prolonging the War of the Schmatte over who invented the look first. It was easy to pull together if you had access to a good but cheap vintage clothing store and wore a single-digit U.S. clothing size. Fabrics like velvet and that one weird thick ‘70s polyester blend were almost indestructible, and if you actively sought out twee infantilizing styles, you could buy a wardrobe of dresses for under $50. Add some maryjanes, MAC Red lipstick, and voila.

The irony-filled look was cute on some girls but made the rest of us look insane. Like a clone of Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, which a fair number of women did not find to be a drawback. I was old enough to realize that those outfits, outside the bedroom anyway, would have made me resemble a strung-out escaped mental patient with a cosplay fetish the morning after the worst Halloween party ever

 
Kat said earlier this year:

I was just wearing my clothes—I mean I’m dressing up of course, but I’ve always just bought thrift store vintage clothes, because they used to be less expensive, and pretty. And believe it or not, dresses are really good to wear on stage, they allow you to move your legs and kick and they’re really easy to wear.

Kat actually looked fantastic in kitten heels, tiny plastic barrettes, and Peter Pan collars. More important, however, was how very angry the blonde, fragile-looking china doll with the guitar sounded when she sang, screamed, and snarled. Kat formed Babes in Toyland in Minneapolis in 1987 with drummer Lori Barbero and bassist Michelle Leon (replaced by Maureen Herman), and the band, who had been inspired by Frightwig, in turn inspired girl bands like Bikini Kill and Jack-off Jill, though they never identified themselves as riot grrrls. The band’s energetic performances on the ‘90 Sonic Youth European tour and the ‘93 Lollapalooza tour (with Dinosaur, Jr., Primus, Arrested Development, Rage Against the Machine, Alice in Chains, et al) were remarkable. Kat’s delivery was intense and atonal, with her lyrics referencing fairytales (“Handsome and Gretel”), pain, rage, beauty, betrayal, and abusive parents, not sung with sweet, breathy, unsure vocals, but with a gut-wrenching maenad’s growl. But then there would be a joyful cover like “We Are Family.” You got the feeling she had a dog-eared copy of Anne Sexton’s complete works in her vintage handbag. NME called them “the true heirs of The Stooges’ unvarnished tumult.” 

Kat described to journalist Andrea Swensson the influence her band had on other female musicians:

...bands would come up and say, like Jack-off Jill, “You inspired us to play.” And it’s really nice. It makes me kind of shy when they say that, but I mean I saw a lot of girl bands, because they would inevitably stick us with all the girl bands in every town, good or bad.

—snip—

Sometimes they were pretty bad, but I don’t care. It was good to have women play. Now there’s tons of women bands! It’s amazing. I mean—I just want to make this point—I didn’t really think about purposefully making it all girls in a band. I wanted musicians who didn’t know how to play very well so then you could create a sound together, you know, all together at once. I played in bands with guys and stuff in Portland, and never really thought about it, but boy, other people sure make you aware of it.

Babes in Toyland were championed by John Peel and Neal Karlen, the author of Babes in Toyland: The Making and Selling of a Rock and Roll Band, but they barely lasted the entire ‘90s. Their break-up was long and drawn-out, with closure finally arriving in 2002 following legal wrangling over the use of the band’s name. Kat’s band Katastrophy Wife released two albums before Kat decided to take a break from music, concentrating on raising her son, recovering from mental health problems, and taking herbology classes. She says she is ready to get back into music, with at least an EP’s worth of material ready. There have been rumors of reunions in the past, but according to bassist Maureen Herman’s recent Facebook posts, Babes in Toyland will finally reunite in 2014.

Babes in Toyland, “Bruise Violet”:

Niagara during an early Destroy All Monsters show
 
I’m never quite sure how familiar folks outside the midwest are with Destroy All Monsters, but if you haven’t given them a listen yet, I highly suggest you do. There are no “real” albums, but in 1994 Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore released everything they recorded on a three-disc set called 1974-1976. Unfortunately, the Detroit punk outfit is most often mentioned in passing, usually as a reference to a more famous band; guitarist Ron Asheton of The Stooges and bassist Michael Davis of the MC5 were also members of Destroy All Monsters. The late Mike Kelley did his time in the band as well. Jim Shaw, too. Destroy All Monsters were an art/rock supergroup of sorts, albeit an awfully obscure one.

But not only did they produce some really interesting music, DAM boasted one of the great punk frontwomen in Niagara, who still performs in various projects. The only Punk Magazine centerfold besides Debbie Harry, Niagara has an incredibly compelling, raw presence, and she’s a total fox. It makes perfect sense that her paintings depict beautiful, brazen, dangerous women. In a 2010 interview, she said her work was a response to “women in art being treated like still life,” going on to say, “I wanted them to start saying what they are thinking, I wanted to see that mix of beauty and hardness in incredibly caustic women. And there is humor, you can see the humor.”

Niagara’s first exhibit was in 1996, with the fabulously misandrist title, “All Men Are Cremated Equal.” While her noir femme fatales are her most popular work, her most recent stuff evokes more of a “dreamy, druggy ladies in absinthe ads” kind of vibe. Still, the super-saturated colors, campy, menacing femininity, and an old school sign-painter’s instincts give Niagara’s canvases the same exciting and distinctive edge she brings to the stage.
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

An early photo of Vargas, focusing on her beautiful face, and cropping out whatever masculine clothes she might have been wearing at the time.
 
A word of comfort to non-Spanish speakers: Mexican toddlers have a stronger command of the language than I do, but the first time I heard Chavela Vargas’ “Paloma Negra,” I knew exactly what she was saying. There are some artists that convey such an intense pathos without the benefit of a common language, even attempting to write about them leaves one feeling a little hackneyed, but I’ll do my best.

Chavela Vargas was born Isabel Vargas Lizano in Costa Rica in 1919. In the midst of an unstable childhood, she moved to Mexico at the tender ago of 14 to pursue a singing career in the burgeoning Mexican arts scene. For years she busked, wearing men’s clothing and smoking cigars. She carried a gun and embodied the machismo of her artistic idiom. Though she covered quite a bit of ground stylistically, Vargas was mainly known for her rancheras- traditional Mexican music performed with a single voice and Spanish guitar. Rancheras are often mournful torch songs sung by drunken men; alcohol provided a socially acceptable loophole for Mexican machismo to be shrugged aside for emotional and vulnerable performances. On the more rare occasion that rancheras were performed by women, gender pronouns were obviously switched to keep everything tidily heterosexual. Vargas simply sang to the girls.
 

Vargas in full poncho
 
It wasn’t until her 30s that her career began to flourish, kick-started by a brief but successful visit to pre-Castro Cuba. By the time she became popular in Mexico, she was as much known for her bombastic persona and unapologetic sexuality as she was for her powerful voice and intense performances. She would come to shows on motorcycles, smoke cigars onstage, imbibe heavily, and openly flirt with men’s wives during performances (many swear she took a few home with her). All of this was during a time when even wearing pants was scandalous behavior for a woman in Mexico. While she had a rich sense of humor, one of her stylistic trademarks was slowing down cheeky tunes, transforming what were originally dirty little ditties into something intensely erotic. The scandals cost her a lot of work, but Vargas had no interest in catering to anyone’s notion of respectability.

Much of her life is shrouded in rumor and half-truths. It’s said that Vargas walked with a limp due to an injury incurred while attempting to climb in the second story window of an ex-lover. (Given Vargas’ difficulties with alcoholism, this isn’t particularly difficult to believe.) It’s known that she was incredibly close to Frida Kahlo, even living with her and her husband, Diego Rivera, for a time. I’ve never found absolute confirmation that they were lovers, but it’s largely accepted as fact by fans of both artists. Vargas even made an appearance in the 2002 Frida Kahlo biopic, singing a ghostly version of one of her signature songs, “”La Llorona,” (“The Weeping Woman”). I urge you to listen to both versions back to back; Vargas’ age and alcoholism seasoned her voice with a quality I can only describe as post-beautiful.

While Vargas’ career was fraught with ups and downs, she virtually disappeared for about 15 years starting in the late 70s. Intense depression and alcoholism finally sent her into a long seclusion, but in 1991 she returned to the stage, happy, healthy and transformed. With her famed trademark innuendo, the 74-year-old butch lesbian declared her never-ending commitment to music at a concert in Madrid, saying, “When you like something, you should do it all night long.” She officially came out in 2000, at age 81, and played Carnegie Hall three years later. She continued singing and recording up until her death in 2012, at age 93.
 

Vargas and Frida Kahlo
 
Below is some rare early footage of Vargas performing her famous rendition of “Macorina,” a poem that she set to music of her own composition. During the refrain, “Put your hand here, Macorina,” Vargas’ own hand would wander between her thighs. It was her first hit, and it was originally banned in Mexico, a country that now reveres here as one of its great daughters. The lyrics:

Put your hand here, Macorina
Put your hand here.
Put your hand here, Macorina
Put your hand here.

Your feet left the mat
And your skirt escaped
Seeking the boundary
On seeing your slender waist
The sugar canes threw
Themselves down along the way
For you to grind
As if you were a mill.
Put your hand ...

Your breasts, soursop fruit
Your mouth a blessing
Of ripe guanabana
And your slender waist
Was the same as that dance
Put your hand ...

Then the dawn
That takes you from my arms
And I not knowing what to do
With that woman scent
Like mango and new cane
With which you filled me at
The hot sound of that dance.
Put your hand ...

 
It’s outsider music’s Greatest Story Ever Told: at a visit to a palm reader, the mother of Austin Wiggin, Jr. was told that her son would someday marry a woman with strawberry blonde hair, have two sons after she (the mother herself, not the strawberry blonde) died, and that his daughters would form a celebrated band. Once the first two things actually came to pass, Austin hustled (or strong-armed, to hear some tell it) his teenaged girls Dot, Betty, and Helen into a band called The Shaggs, despite their showing little prior interest in or aptitude for music performance. Much money was spent on instrument lessons, voice coaching, recording studio fees, and pressing, all to realize The Shaggs’ wholly incompetent 1969 debut album, Philosophy Of The World.

This doesn’t happen very often, so when it does, it’s a thing to cherish. Sometimes, artists who have no idea what they’re doing and no conventional artistic gifts can still make profound, enduring and enchanting work, simply by being themselves.

Thanks to the cheerleading of folks like NRBQ, Frank Zappa, and Dr. Demento, Philosophy became a phenomenon years after its very quiet release (the label owner absconded with all but 100 copies). If you’ve somehow missed out on it, understand that this great album is in no typically understood sense a good album. Instruments and lyrics careen around each other, lurch into each other, fracture each other, and generally do everything except sync up. And yet, the Wiggin sisters’ ineffable and completely unaffected cheer and charm elevate it tremendously. Certainly, plenty of people listen to it and hear nothing more than the clatter of inept kids, and I will not deign here to invalidate that viewpoint. But those of us who hear magic in it - myself ardently included - swear by that album. Zappa famously hailed The Shaggs as “Better Than the Beatles,” and one can hardly imagine most of the K Records roster existing without them. The entire album is here:
 

 
Or if you don’t have a half hour to spare, just check out the representative (and legendary) single that launched a thousand ‘90s emo-chick tattoos, “My Pal Foot Foot.”
 

 
When their father died in 1975, The Shaggs called it quits, but now, 38 years later, The Dot Wiggin Band has emerged with a new album, Ready! Get! Go!, on the Alternative Tentacles label. The musicianship - to answer what must surely be the first question to cross a lot of minds - is perfectly competent. Seasoned players like Jesse Krakow and Laura Cromwell appear throughout, but they keep things much, much simpler here than in the work they’re otherwise known for, allowing Wiggin’s undiminished charm to show through. The album includes previously unrecorded Shaggs songs “Banana Bike” and “The Fella With A Happy Heart” along with new material, and culminates with a fantastic cover of Skeeter Davis’ “The End of the World.”
 

 
The long and the short of it all is that maybe The Shaggs weren’t just some flukey accident of naive dumb luck; if you liked them, there is so much to enjoy in Ready! Get! Go! that one has to be open to the likelihood that this is simply what Dot Wiggin sounds like, that she essentially possesses a tremendous uncontrived appeal. As she’s been a relatively anonymous wife and mother for decades now, this is not a comeback anyone would have expected, but it is most welcome.

This too-brief promotional documentary has some great clips and sound bites from the people involved in bringing Ready! Get! Go! to fruition. Enjoy.
 

 
There’s precious little that I could find out about Las Dilly Sisters, a singing duo comprised of two young Mexican girls who often appeared on The Banana Splits Adventure Hour. As readers of a certain age will recall, the Mariachi moppets chirpy repetitive songs were used on the program like maddening musical water torture.
 

 
But when Las Dilly Sisters wanted to rock, they could rock out like the best of ‘em, as heard here on their curious—but freakin’ genius—cover of The Standells’ “Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White”(!)

Whoever had the idea for them to sing this, I salute you. This song appears on volume 3 of the legendary Girls in the Garage comps.
 

 
Pioneering female rocker Suzi Quatro was on tour in the U.S. in 1974 when the call came.

She was touring to promote Suzi Quatro, her debut album for Mickie Most’s RAK Records in the U.K., which had been produced by the unparalleled, fabulous, evil-genius songwriting team of Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn the year before. The album contained the well crafted Chinnichap compositions “48 Crash,” “Primitive Love,” and “Can the Can” but also included a cover of “All Shook Up,” chosen as the third single. Quatro had loved and emulated Elvis Presley – strikingly in her trademark black leather – since seeing him on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 when she was six years old. From that moment, unlike other little girls who went nuts upon seeing him for the first time, she wanted to be Elvis.

She was in a Memphis hotel room when she received a call from Elvis’ “people.” And, bless her heart, she had a panic attack. Talk about being “all shook up”!

Suzi said in a BBC interview this year:

I was on tour in Memphis and he had heard my version of “All Shook Up.” His people got in touch with me in the hotel room. Then he came on the line [open-mouthed shock] and he invited me to Graceland. He said, “Your version is the best since my own. How would you like to come to Graceland?” And I said I was very busy, no thank you.

The situation was, as BBC producer Mark Hagen later described it, complicated. Elvis was once again a bachelor, but Suzi was already romantically involved with her guitarist and songwriting partner, Len Tuckey (Surely a one-time pass could have been granted so that Suzi could hang out with the King?!)

Suzi discovered that she had been given the part of Leather Tuscadero on Happy Days on the day that Elvis died, August 16, 1977. She was devastated that she had turned down his invitation and would never have another chance to meet him. The regret has haunted her ever since.

During her memorable seven-episode stint on Happy Days from 1977 to 1979, Suzi sang “All Shook Up” and “Heartbreak Hotel” on the show, wearing a $2000 fawn jumpsuit made by Ukrainian “rodeo tailor” to the stars (including Hank Williams, Porter Wagoner, Gram Parsons, and Elvis), Nuta Kotlyarenko, a.k.a. “Nudie” Cohn. Her trademark jumpsuits were actually Mickie Mosts’s idea, not a tribute to Elvis.

[Mickie] came up with the jumpsuit idea, which I thought was a great idea. I wanted leather, without a doubt… I swear to God, I had no idea it was going to be sexy… It didn’t occur to me. I remember saying to him, “Oh, that’s really sensible. I can jump around and nothing will come out and I don’t have to iron it.” And then when I saw the pictures back, I went, “Ohhhhh.”

In 2009 Suzi finally made it to Graceland, when Mark Hagen made the documentary Suzi Quatro’s Elvis for BBC Radio 2. Suzi visited Elvis’ birthplace, all of his homes, talked to many of his childhood friends, and stopped in at Sun Studios on Union Ave in Memphis. It was already an emotional experience before she even reached the front gate of Graceland.

Suzi said:

I was in tears many times as I traced the footsteps of Elvis Presley who was, and is, the reason I do what I do.

She added her name to the stone wall filled with fans’ tributes running along the front of Graceland, thirty-five years late.

Suzi Quatro outside Graceland, below:

 
After the jump ‘Leather Tuscadaro’ gets her Elvis on…

 
Kurt Cobain was loud and proud expressing his admiration for The Raincoats when asked about his favorite music. Another all-girl band he championed was Shonen Knife. [Honestly, the guy seemed to have a lot of favorite bands]

Shonen Knife is a much-loved Japanese punk-pop trio that formed in Osaka in 1981. The original lineup was guitarist and vocalist Naoko Yamano, drummer Atsuko Yamano, and bassist Michie Nakatani. There have been several line-up changes over thirty-two years and Naoko is the only remaining original member.

Singing in English and Japanese, they write songs influenced by The Ramones and other early punk bands, surf music and garage bands, with catchy, sometimes silly, frivolous lyrics. They’ve written about cats, catnip, brown mushrooms, candy, sushi bars, mango juice, bison, banana chips and Barbie dolls. Their song “One Day of the Factory” appeared on a Sub Pop compilation in 1986. Early fans included Thurston Moore, legendary English DJ John Peel, and Redd Kross. Twenty alt-rock bands recorded a Shonen Knife tribute album (Every Band Has A Shonen Knife Who Loves Them) in 1989, but their American fame grew exponentially two years later.

Kurt Cobain saw Shonen Knife play in L.A. in 1991 and immediately became an enthusiastic fan. He told Melody Maker in September of that year:

We saw Shonen Knife and they were so cool. I turned into a nine-year old girl at a Beatles concert. I was crying and jumping up and down and tearing my hair out - it was amazing. I’ve never been so thrilled in my whole life. They play pop music - pop, pop, pop music.

He asked them to open for Nirvana on their nine-date 1991 UK tour shortly before the release of Nevermind. Not many people had heard of Nirvana at that point, but Shonen Knife agreed. Naoko Yamano described Cobain as being very quiet but friendly.

Naoko told Metroactive:

We toured with him twice in U.K. and U.S. One day when we were touring, he asked to me how to play the guitar chords of our song ‘Twist Barbie.’ So I told the chords to him. Then I heard that he played the song at Nirvana’s secret gig. I’m very proud of it, because he is a great rock artist.

Grohl endeared himself to Naoko’s sister Atsuko by acting as unofficial drum roadie and helping them to set up each night. While in the UK they recorded their first John Peel Session on BBC Radio

Shonen Knife signed to Capitol Records in 1992 and released Let’s Knife, their sixth album. They played the Reading Festival with Mudhoney and Nirvana that year. In December 1992 they joined Nirvana on their midwestern American tour.

In early 1993 Dave Grohl and Cobain enthused about Shonen Knife on MTV:

Dave Grohl: They went into their first song and everyone seemed sort of baffled…They won over the audience by the end of the night. Every show, people were like almost in tears.

Kurt Cobain: I was an emotional sap the whole time. I cried every night.

Dave Grohl: You couldn’t help it!

Shonen Knife performed on the Lollapalooza side stage in 1994, the year Nirvana had been scheduled to headline.

The original Shonen Knife line-up onstage in 1992:

Joan Jett, a very young Billy Idol, Pleasant Gehman (of the Screamin’ Sirens), and Theresa Kereakes’ roommates’ little sister. Photo credit: Theresa Kereakes

Joan Jett’s Runaways-era apartment on San Vicente Blvd. in L.A. is one of the ten homes of “countercultural icons” featured in Emily Temple’s recent Flavorwire photo compilation. She used two photos by Theresa Kereakes, including the one above. Kereakes was one of the major visual chroniclers, along with Jenny Lens, of the glam rock, punk rock, and New Wave scenes in southern California in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

Kereakes described Joan’s apartment as a major party location and gathering place:

Joan lived in the mint-green painted stucco two-story apartment building on San Vicente Blvd. right behind the Arco gas station on Sunset. A year after this photo was taken, I would move into the other famous West Hollywood apartment I inhabited: 1140 North Clark St. (Motley Crue would eventually move in downstairs; Lita Ford would be a frequent visitor). But before there were two party palaces on either side of the Whisky, Joan pretty much hosted them all.

There were always visits from punks Joan met on the road.

Runaways songwriter Kari Krome recalled some of the mischief Joan and her friends got into at the apartment:

The Runaways were just teenage girls. That’s what rock’n’roll’s about,” says Krome. “The hookers, at that time, were on Sunset down by Rodneys. Joan, [roadie] Kent [Smythe], and the rest — I think [manager] Scott [Anderson] may have been involved — would harass the hookers. You know, it was the stupid shit you do when you’re a kid for fun. Hose somebody down. Except you’re on Sunset with a seltzer bottle and a crazy tranny is chasing you. Bad girls, beep beep!

Other icons whose homes are featured then-and-now are Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, Janis Joplin, Andy Warhol (his Lexington and 89th apartment in New York), Steve McQueen, Jack Kerouac, Owsley “Bear” Stanley (of LSD fame), Kurt Cobain, Freddie Mercury, and Kurt Vonnegut.
 

The exterior today of Joan Jett’s onetime Sunset Strip apartment.
 
The Runaways live in Japan, 1977, below:

 
Via Flavorwire