teenage gang debs

Scissor Girls live, 1995, Laramie, Wyoming: nuclear. Scissor Girls in Laramie ’05 would likely end the same, but ’95 was three years before the murder of Matthew Shepard, before the town got talking about things, before the diagnosis was gangrene. Laramie ’95: even just riding a skateboard down Grand Ave in ’95 was cause for drive-by ridicule.
Me, by that time I’d been soaking in Sonic Death and touched by the hand of Genesis P-Orridge and Teenaged Jesused and Pussy Whipped—god bless all mail order everywhere, forever—for all of ’94, my favorite music writer was whoever wrote the blurbs in the Kill Rock Stars catalogue: that person’s language was pure energy.
But without visual aids, the noises I marveled at were mysterious squall. I knew someone had to be MAKING them, but the corporeal reality of a human being skewering a fret with a drumstick might well have been jabberwocky. I didn’t yet comprehend music as reaction in that manner. Self-reflexive and often medicore, my environment provided no tactical outline.
Bikini Kill jilted us. They wouldn’t play in a Laramie bar even for all ages night—and maybe warned off by the liner notes to Kill ‘Em All: “Fuck You Laramie, Wyoming,” when Metallica played the Cowboy Bar (actual name) and were embroiled in unknown fracas, presumably with fists and busted Coors bottlenecks.
As such: Scissor Girls were the first all-girl band I ever saw play live.
The openers were Homeless Wonders, a Screeching Weasel-worshipping high-school pop-punk band fronted by twin brothers. (I think they are still together.) Their songs were G-C-G and sparkle-cheeked, but what I remember most about them was Azita. Scissor Girls’ lead singer and driving force.
Here was this squeaky clean boy-band, too young to drive, playing pubescent hits like “Punk Rocker Fantasy” in a shitty, college-town, quasi-cowboy-themed bar, whose name at the time had some connection to Wile E. Coyote and/or the Tasmanian Devil (the most popular tattoo of the year locally, according to the neighborhood inker), while Azita, this diminuitive woman wearing goggles and brown platform nurse shoes danced like electro-shock therapy, sending her arms jerking in double-jointed, 45-degree angles. She moved like an oil rig. She was volatile by being. My boyfriend-y character, who listened to only three albums constantly for the duration of our relationship—Paul’s Boutique, Bizarre Ride II and A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing (all GREAT albums, but on repeat for six months, no)—deemed Azita the weirdest chick he’d ever laid eyes on, cut out before she took residence on Tazmanian stage.
(Also, I must note, binary critiques of humans and social groups like “weird” v. “normal” were important to the town’s general disdain for plurality—essential for maintaining the order of civilization, like in Babylonia. You can see why I left.)
Here, it’s hazy; I remember more the ways my mind was blown by SG Army than specifics of their set. I know they melted time, picked apart rhythms and threw away the too-clean parts, the too-right parts, anything easy or predictable. Azita sqwaked and twittered and dug for black gold. Someone said deconstructionist and I’d say more Pandora’s Box; they didn’t split hairs, exactly, but they loosened the guitar’s wabi-sabi from its creakiest convention. It was confrontational, in a way I don’t think Bikini Kill would have been, at least to me right then—it was subtle and it was art and it was somehow outside the bounds of rhetoric. Their confrontation slipped a note under the door. It was dual-smackdown of nice-girl notion and that-year’s-alt-nation-hits, which, let me tell you now: the sound guy was likely playing Surgery in between songs.
Why this, now? Okay. Last weekend, Azita played Dunes, with a piano in four pieces and three boy bandmates reading from sheet music on stands. (How Joe Pass.) It was the Sat nite crowd—DJ was sweet on old Glass Candy 7-inches, folks took on a slight air of jaded whether they wanted to or not, but maybe it was just cynicism in the wrong light.
And the posters, silk-screened in hot pink with a skull, read “AZITA (ex scissor girls),” led her to apologize in earnest: “Sorry if you came here because the sign said ex-Scissor Girls; sorry if I’m ruining your dance party.” Apologizing for her past, maybe apologizing for the fact that she refined her art to include very of-Chicago, Steely Dan-fetishizing, guitar-jazz-in-a-piano-bar tunes. Either way, the SG kids in the front looked bored. But this time, the note under the door said Azita’s voice holds the secret: her vocals are just enough askew that she sounds and looks like a shark while singing them, milky and froggy and her jaw opens at two different angles. She bit the air in parts. She wore Top Gun sunglasses. (I will note that Azita’s Enantiodromia was one of my favorite records of last year solely for her strange, imposing, horsey vocal charm: superimpose the milk-chunks from Fagen’s low register as dominating timbric factor. I need more QT with Life on the Fly, but overall, the bullseye of her vox get bad-aimed with fancy rock arrangements, and the aforementioned accompanying players, who have all played in every band on Drag City since the beginning of time.)
But, though more demure and blazered than before, she produced the subtle awkwardness that compelled me to SG music ten years ago—a vaporous, almost true-situationist ripple through a set of references and expectations. A pea under a mattress, with focus but little effort.
Les Georges Leningrad followed and there was dancing—the same choreographer as Azita at the Taz bar. They’re fit but they know it. I’m not trying to argue the one-vs.-two “do something/or I’m bored,” but I will say, on the whole, I like surprises.
I also wish bands in the oughty-four would leave the face masks to the NBA. (Rip Hamilton, so post Neon Hunk.)