Welcome to Switched On Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And today we are joined by a very special guest.
Would you mind introducing yourself? It's me, Jessica Hopper. Jessica Hopper is live in the studio. We're 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 change 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 land a long form reported story about music history. It's almost on a distance.
So in some ways we really had some really great producers and writers this season, including a Carly Rae whisperer. So I got to, you know, help sort of pick what we're 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 through line to them that became pretty apparent in the different ways that a lot of them were trying to connect the sounds, ideas, stories, mythology of music's past and reconcile it in the present moment, which I think given how much Me Too has sort of shaped so much how we're thinking about music in the last few years, it's not surprising to me. That's why 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, that 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 Power's 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 in 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 your 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 it's about to be new to Charlie.
Let's listen to the band Fanny. That's the live version of Charity Ball by Fanny. Can you tell us a little bit about this band, Jessica? So Fanny were a band fronted by two sisters, June and Jean 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 had only been in the U.S. for a few years, they're Filipina 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 in that particular time and space, they go to L.A., and they get signed fairly quickly. And they're signed to a priest in the early 70s. So their peers in that time and space are like really good friends with Lilfy and Fanny Ray and David Boyce are totally obsessed with them. And 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 a pre-use and kind of towards the 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 the piece, they were David Boyce'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 Fanny and was like, came backstage and told them, it's 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 the runaways.
So they're like, I mean, there's so many things about 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 by queer 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, you know, 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 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, they talk about all these things, you know, they're basically like, like the non-grody Sunset Strip band house.
So people love to come over there and they would wake up and, you know, Lil Feet would be like jamming or Dave Mason would be like, you know, play, 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, from these men who were considered to be like the giants of the era, 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? And how were they being written about where these people that they were surrounded by actively promoting them or because they were so unthreatening or just didn't consider them. It's like, you're so much a groupies hanging out with us. It really sounds like, especially when you read, you know, this letter that they would write 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 for 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 girl 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, you know, 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's 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 a phenomenon like Suzy Quattro, 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 phenomenas, and Hart, you know, are still two, three years down the road, from when Fanny 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, hearing 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 Cherry Ball. So in some ways, this is like classic 70s kind of country blues rock.
We're hearing 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 have a lot of personality. Also, you know, Cherry Ball is sort of, like, their best-known sort of, I think, quasi-anthemic, and I think the fact that that song with all these, like, sort of hallmarks of, like, this is very, you're like, this is from California in the mid-70s. Like, exactly. You can place it, 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 their work is, you know, sort of anthology ratio is available on those streaming platforms. But that a lot of their other work, you're like, it's kind of, for me, timeless in the same way that, like, T-Rex is, 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 Cherry Ball is, like, kind of not, you know, exactly where it's from. 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's 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 the 73, 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 Fanny 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 their 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 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 Gaye classic, and here you really hear them, like, keeping that, the original spunk and shuffle of the Marvin Gaye recording, but also adding this, like, kind of indefinable quality that's totally their own. I like them shakers. Me too.
What? Oh, my God. Well, also, it's like, once I found out that they were very much, like, contemporaries of the movie, I was like, oh, this makes, like, way more sense. Like, that they're, like, their proverbial tight bros are Baby Bonnie Rae and Luffy.
It's like, oh, yeah, no, got it, okay, cool. And you're about the production. There's stuff in there where it's, like, oh, yeah, that feels entirely contemporary. Yeah.
So one more question about Fanny before we move on to another Lost Note. How would music history look different? Were Fanny a part of it? So a lot 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 Janis Joplin. Oh, but Joey Mitchell.
And there's all these different sort of origin points. You know, Fanny were the first all-female band signed to a major label. You know, there was other bands that were signed around that period, and, you know, some, I mean, basically all of them relegated to a series. 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, 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 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. finding this lineage and braiding myself into it, feminist history within rock, because so much of it has been erased. Listen to Disgrazed Land wherever you've got your podcasts. I love that.
It makes me think that this is not just about writing the historical record for some objective clarity, but in terms of how people like yourself, like us, like young people coming up in the music world, situate themselves 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 man that was also new to me, so this has been a really fun experience. This is The Freeze and their song, I Hate Tourists.
One of my favorite things about this song is that, these two kids who are like maybe 10th grade feel so much, 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 be like the pure teenager-ness 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 like this resonates. 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 youths from the Cape, circa the late 70s, and why their inclusion in your Lost Notes roster this season? So Rob Rosenthal, the founding guitarist for The Freeze, 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 NPR 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, and really kind of fully formed of, you know, he left The Freeze when he was, you know, maybe just going off to college. He was pretty young. At the time, they were a known quantity.
And he says in the piece that they were, like, a third-tier American punk band. And now at the ripe old age of 50 or something, he was trying to reconcile some of those lyrics in 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 part of making and writing contributed to, you know, an era 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, who's taking a very different path in life, and is still in his 50s in the freeze.
In the freeze. 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 gone with that consciousness and kind of, like, ugh, ugh, you know, cringe and carried around with you. And he goes back to his friend who's, like, still in this band and is, like, 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, it got really chucked 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 rock bands as 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 Nits really kind of showcases that.
It's tender. It's tender. And then, you know, as much as people are like, I don't want to listen to two 50-something-year-old guys in 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 oafish teenage mea culpas. Wow. That's a good fit. You're on the edge of their seat right now.
So I did this event with Hanif Abderkid last night, and one of the last questions we got in 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 Hanif 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 someone who was 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 say I had other choices, but really soon after I got into punk rock, I found out about Riot Grrrl, 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 peace, 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 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 accorded music as, you know, you can speak to.
So for me, that piece and hearing people sort of reconcile, some of that was also just really powerful for me to some who grew up 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've never had a punk rock band with all that. But I'm really thankful for you sharing that history. Yeah, you know, as someone who has been in teenage angsty punk rock bands, I really, I don't want to say it's never too late, but I think you should just go for it.
And there's ways to do it responsibly. Yes, punk yourself responsibly. Well, this idea from Hanif Abdurak, you have no nostalgia without interrogation. I like that.
That's a great mantra. It's sort of a faith without works is dead, his relationship to this next song, which is The Greatest by Cat Power. You know this one? Welcome back, college, yeah.
So this is, I mean, a powerful conversation 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? Talking about legacy, what is the legacy of this song to him? In Hanif's piece, which is the second episode of the 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 digging into 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 and 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're transformed like 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 tidy arc of like, they're better now, you know? Right.
And even the idea that that's what great artists 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 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 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 and 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 Reed, 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, 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 for them to bear witness to this time where she was not doing well and putting these songs out and the performance of these songs was like, it was like, it just seemed like seeing her around and that her work was moving through her like lava, it was not a, it wasn't like she's coming out the other side purified by the fire, which I think is really in part what Hanif's piece bears witness to. Each of these examples, Fanny, The Freeze, Cat Power, these songs are worth recuperating not just because they, just for the sake of it, just to be completist, just to be thorough. What I get from talking with you, listening to your show, it's 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, like 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 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 winner's histories that are often just handed to us and I just think, I 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 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 know, 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 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. Like if some of these people were raised up, were given due in their right time, what would we have inherited? Who would have been allowed to be a genius? And how would that have shaped our canon?
I think about that constantly. 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. I'm like, I need to know what David Bowie said about Fanny. I need to know how this conversation between the freeze went down. What did I need to say about Cat 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, 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, Nick Sloan.
And me, Charlie Harding. We're mixed, mastered, and engineered by Brandon McFarland. Our community manager is Sarah Terry. Our executive producer, John Carwa and Allison Rocky, we're a production of Fox Media.
You can find more episodes at SwitchedOnPop.com or anywhere podcasts live. Reach out on Twitter, wherever, at SwitchedOnPop. We'll be back next week with another episode. Until then, thanks for listening.