Thunderbitches and the Whores of Folk

Alicia Dara looks back at her days in the '90s Seattle Grunge scene.

Alicia Dara in 1997.

In 1995, on my third night in Seattle, I saved a girl’s life.

Someone had told me a good band was playing at a club downtown, but I mis-timed the bus schedule and arrived too early. There was no one in the place except the bartender, a skinny guy with a wilted blue mohawk and a belt buckle that spelled out CUNTRY in Western letters. He was unloading a crate of Heineken, cursing loudly, and didn’t notice my entrance. I was wickedly thirsty but didn’t want to risk his rage, so I headed to the bathroom for some faucet water.

As soon as I opened the door, I knew something was wrong. There was a weird metallic smell in the room, and the air felt hot and thick, almost suffocating. The floor was slick and dark, stains on stains, but one of them was darker than the others. I followed it to the back stall and knocked softly. I heard a strange growl, and my heart stopped, but I shoved the door as hard as I could. It blasted open, and I gasped: a girl was slumped down on the floor, cloud-white and retching. Her long arm was splayed out in front of her with a needle beside it, and the tender crook of her elbow was gushing blood from a vicious, pulsing hole. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, somewhere beyond seeing. I was too shocked to scream for help, but I ran to the bar phone and called 911. Two muscled guys in crisp whites arrived in minutes, strapped an oxygen mask to the girl’s face, then slapped a giant bandage on her terrible arm. They’re made for gunshot wounds, one of them told me, but they work fine on junkies. He said the girl was lucky, that she would have died quickly if I hadn’t called them. I left the bar and took the bus home, shaking the whole way, willing myself to believe that if she could survive, I could, too.

A girl was slumped down on the floor, cloud-white and retching. Her long arm was splayed out in front of her with a needle beside it, and the tender crook of her elbow was gushing blood from a vicious, pulsing hole.

My path to Seattle was erratic and unplanned. Growing up in Vancouver BC I had taken a ton of voice lessons, and performed solo in countless concerts and musicals. My stage confidence was fierce, which made people think I should try for a performance career. After high school I got accepted to an elite conservatory in NYC that trained singers for Broadway. There I learned that most musical theater parts sung by women are written by men, which struck me as utterly insane and not worth pursuing. Original poems started appearing in my notebooks; I hummed them under my breath during classes, threading melody through each one. I taught myself to play guitar with an Indigo Girls songbook, using their chords in my first songs. I felt safe walking around in the Girls’ tracks for a while. The pain they wrote about was killing-blade raw, but they also pointed toward a place beyond survival, where there was love and healing for anyone who could make it there alive. After a dark and dangerous childhood, I needed to get to that place, and I was willing to forsake everything else to reach it. Sleepwalking through the rest of classes, I somehow made it to graduation, got my paper and I was free. Even better, I had 15 original songs that I could almost play. I brought them with me to Seattle, a place where I could feel Vancouver nearby but remain in the US, which is where I wanted to build my life as an artist.

I knew that Grunge music (at least the mainstream radio kind), which occupied most of the clubs and venues, was basically womanless. I was 21, wracked by social shyness, and lonely to the bone. I had no interest in playing that genre, but every Seattle musician had to travel in Grunge territory. Women had few choices for navigating the male-dominated hierarchy: you could melt yourself like honey and butter and attempt to flow around them, or you could crank up your amp and try to blast your way through. It helped if you were pretty, but not beautiful. Beauty was too risky: it implied unfairness, or lack of talent, or spellcasting. Some girls shaved and pierced themselves raw trying to escape it, or slid down dark hallways of drugs and mayhem. I refused to do anything that endangered my ability to perform. I needed to get onstage with my songs, and see where they could take me.

I left the bar and took the bus home, shaking the whole way, willing myself to believe that if she could survive, I could, too.

The very first Seattle show I ever played, in the summer of 1995, was at a cramped, foul-smelling venue called Colourbox in Pioneer Square. My neighbor Charles, a sweet but burly blond from Florida, tended bar there, and that’s how I got the gig. Most openers, in their inexperience, played cheesy 70’s rock anthems that cleared the room. My secret weapon was my original songs, which added up to a full 40-minute set. They didn’t inspire rabid devotion, but audiences were kind and clapped politely after each one, which felt like encouragement. In any case they were much less disdainful than the Grunge boys, who would stomp around and jingle their keys while I was playing, rolling their eyes during my applause. At least at the Colourbox I had Charles in my corner. One night during my set I heard two guys from the next band talking through an open door at the side of the stage. Who’s playing right now? one of them asked. Some dumb folk whore, replied the other. I ignored them, but I made Charles lock them out for the rest of the night.

I wasn’t a great performer, but I always arrived on time and completely sober. That flagged me as reliable to the club owners, so I booked a lot of gigs. Most nights I filled up the hour before the real show started, usually three all-male bands in a row, each one louder and drunker than the last. They mostly left me alone, but some tried all kinds of shit, like offering to carry my guitar in exchange for a good tit wank. I thought about stashing a knife in my boot, but that seemed like some business that could go wrong fast. I bought an old leather jacket that covered everything from neck to knees. It was more camouflage than shield, but I wore it till it fell to shreds.

Finding other women to play music with took a while. I was too shy to approach them at their gigs, so I had to rely on fate or luck. Connie was my angel of mercy at a loud party in a moldy house by the freeway. Bad cramps twisted me into knots while I stood in line for the bathroom. Right before I was about to pass out, Connie stuffed a joint in my mouth and sparked it with a big brass lighter. A few tokes calmed the daggers in my uterus. When I finally recovered I spontaneously hugged her, and she patted my back and gave me her number for more pot. Con’s band Fusser sometimes asked me to open for them, and I felt honored. She had the first neck tattoos and septum piercing I’d ever seen, which made her seem dangerous to know, but she was sweet and funny and generous with applause whenever I played my set. I liked her band mostly because I liked her. Their songs sounded like cereal commercials sung by swarming hornets. Con pounded her bass like a bullwhip, lashing the room, sweat flying everywhere. Sometimes she wore a see-through dress made of nothing but bubble wrap, and popped herself against the crowd when her set was done.

I knew that Grunge music, which occupied most of the clubs and venues, was basically womanless…I had no interest in playing that genre, but every Seattle musician had to travel in Grunge territory.

Connie’s girlfriend was Dade, an older woman in her 30’s who had been close to Mia Zapata, the local singer whose violent rape and murder, just a few years before, remained unsolved and haunting. People were obsessed with that incident, and it was the biggest one of its kind until Kurt Cobain pulled his own trigger. Dade had clammed up about Mia eons ago, but she had plenty to say about the local music scene. I learned a lot from listening to her stories about 80’s rock shows in Seattle and Tacoma, but the heroes of her anecdotes were always men, the young Grunge pioneers. In her telling they were brave fighters who hated what pop had done to rock, so they turned up their amps and took it back, flogging away in small clubs until the world finally took notice. I never learned how Mia’s band The Gits factored into Dade’s history, or if she even liked their music. Dade went to every one of Connie’s shows, but she seemed bored and distracted, chain smoking her way through the night. She never hugged Connie or even held her hand between sets, but that would have only made the men horny, or angry. Queerness always felt like a safety issue in heavy Grunge territory.

Gigs didn’t pay much beyond a burger, so to supplement my income from retail jobs I taught singing lessons. Most of my students were Grunge boys who wanted to scream-sing like Chris Cornell. Those guys played and sang in bands that all sounded the same. I was looking for female influences that I could apply to my songs, which were full of blurry passion that I wasn’t yet skillful enough to weaponize. My neighbor Deena was obsessed with a local band called Bell, and she took me to see them play. Singer Vanessa Veselka was so powerful that you had to stand back from the stage, or be scorched to the bone by her rage and pain. After the show I stood at a distance and tried not to shake with wonder, but Deena bum-rushed her, fawning and pawing like a pushy dork. Vanessa was gracious, and shockingly bashful for someone who had just bled out her guts in public. Bell didn’t last long, and Vanessa left the city, but she went on to become a nationally respected labor organizer, known for her skillful compassion and hard work on behalf of people in bad trouble. She also published a memoir in which she gave barely a mention to her time in the Seattle music scene, which strikes me as further evidence of how fucking cool she was.

Women had few choices for navigating the male-dominated hierarchy: you could melt yourself like honey and butter and attempt to flow around them, or you could crank up your amp and try to blast your way through.

Nobody knew Vanessa outside of the city, but everyone could recognize the scene’s most famous woman. Some girls seemed to have moved to Seattle for the sole purpose of becoming the next Courtney Love, craving both her meteoric career and her warped-couture style. It was considered deeply uncool to care too much about how you dressed, but Courtney clearly loved fashion and had money to spend on it, a fact I can verify from my time as a salesperson at Urban Outfitters in the Capitol Hill district. The store carried a huge selection of edgy ripped denim, to save us from The Gap’s mom jeans that no self-respecting musician would wear. Courtney asked for six pairs of ink-black jeans in a large size, and when I asked her how she was planning to wear them she said, With a belt and without underwear. On her way out of the store she began coughing athletically. I was drinking from a breakroom bottle of water and offered to bring her one, but she held out the empty coffee cup in her hand and asked for a swig, which I gave her. She slammed it back, kissed my cheek, and swaggered out the door in her pink Prada platforms.

Courtney’s songs had high levels of snark, sex, and rage in them, but it was nothing compared to the Riot Grrrls over in Olympia. Stupid angry thunderbitches, the Grunge boys called them. Their fierce loyalty and support of each other was legendary, and their female solidarity extended to women everywhere. One of Connie’s friends met Kathleen Hanna on the side of the road outside of Tacoma, when Kathleen made the Bikini Kill tour van pull over and tend to the friend’s overheated radiator. I knew a girl who woke up in the care of Molly Newman of Bratmobile, after she’d been dosed with roofies and left defenseless in the back of a club in Everett. Molly dragged her outside and fanned her with a garbage can lid until she was well enough to be walked home. You couldn’t be too careful back then, as ever, with your personal safety in the clubs.

Some of the other girls, the tall stunners with raccoon eyeliner, were desperately seeking connections to local Grunge superstars who they believed could catapult them into big careers. They were whippet-thin and wore their flannel shirts like flags, waving hopefully at the big tour buses that parked outside of Mercer Arena. One summer a tanned brunette named Laurie, who had actually studied opera, was brought onstage to sing backup at a big Grunge show. That one instance kept all those girls strung out on hope for years. Very few ever made it into that world, but rumors about them all of them were predictably vicious: just more sluts in the rock and roll slutstream. Laurie moved to LA and became a talent agent, booking bands to play in movies and TV shows. As far as I know she never performed on stage again.

My secret weapon was my original songs, which added up to a full 40-minute set. They didn’t inspire rabid devotion, but audiences were kind and clapped politely after each one, which felt like encouragement.

By 1997, Grunge’s grip on Seattle’s music scene had weakened considerably. Rock had become Alternative, and there seemed to be more room for women there, though not much. Once the Lilith Fair swept in and started putting multiple women together in the same show, the bookers realized how much money could be made that way, and that started to change everything, and made more room for women’s voices, although mostly for white women. Yet the music business itself remains heavily male-dominated to this day. Like many women I learned to produce my own music so that I could have as much control as possible over the results. I played in a band that made one EP and broke up. I made five solo records and did mini-tours of the Northwest, adding Vancouver, LA and New York when I could.

I never broke through as a recognized artist, but I gained faith in my own creativity, enough to sustain my enthusiasm for writing and playing original music, which I still do almost 30 years later. Spending time in that scene, and observing how hard it was for women to break through, also informed the career I’ve created as a speech and presentation coach who works almost exclusively with women. Grunge may have passed into history, but misogyny is a deafening roar that continues to drown out women’s voices in almost every industry.

Eventually many of the female musicians I met in the Grunge trenches decamped to other music genres, like Indietronica and Electropop. I dabbled in those styles, but it didn't take. Ask anyone: I’m still a folk whore to the core.