Band seeks cliché female bass player.

Jess Fogarty

(photo by Jaqueline Jane)

I always wanted to be in a band.

When I was 14 or 15, my mother bought me a bass and I taught myself how to play. Why a bass and not lead guitar or a drumkit? Because all of the best bands (the ones I loved at the time, at least) had female bass players. At the time I had bleached platinum hair and wore a lot of black lace and combat boots and I really, really wanted to be D’arcy Wretzy from The Smashing Pumpkins – a woman with the power to stand up to the legendary ego of Billy Corgan.

Earlier that year, I’d taught myself a whole heap of easy skate punk tunes and tried to convince my friends to start an all-girl punkrock band. We’d be awesome, and there wasn’t really anything that I’d seen like that around. I mean, sure, there was the Riot Grrl movement (KATHLEEN HANNA!) but the music we listened to was all male-dominated, singing about blowjobs and girls (thanks, Blink 182). Alas, whilst I spent my post-homework evenings trying to write songs, the other girls spent their time chatting online to their latest crushes.

Fast-forward about five years. I was 19, at the Hydey watching my friends debut their band on a bill with another friend’s band. During the in-between I’d gotten an acoustic guitar and taught myself how to play chords (our uni parties invariably involved drunken singalongs accompanied by piano and guitar), and also how to play Nine Inch Nails songs on piano. I turned to my friends and said “I want to do this. I really want to be in a band.”

One of my friends turned around and said ‘What do you play? Our bassist wants to play keys, so we’re looking for a bass player.” I replied with the standard: “I’m not that good, I taught myself”-self-deprecating answer and we arranged a practice – which led to me becoming (as I would refer to it) the ‘cliché-female-bass-player’ in an otherwise all-male band.

The first few months were strange. The boys had been playing together for so long, that it was a bit like being the new kid at school, even though I already knew them. The band already had so many songs and I just kept quiet and learned them and didn’t really offer any creative input, but as I became more comfortable with the boys, I began to change parts (the bassline on ‘Noise Pop Band’ being a particular victory that set me against Jim, our singer-songwriter, but with the other boys saying “Jim, that sounds awesome, you can change your part to make Jess’s bassline work!”).

I finally stopped feeling like a girl who’d accidentally joined a boy’s club.
Our first gig was a Campus Bands competition at Curtin University. Out of the thirty-ish musicians in the six bands playing, I was the only girl. And I felt that. Being onstage as the only female, not only in your own band, but in every band on the bill - you feel like you’re being judged because of your gender. I’ve heard people say that “having a girl in the band” is a good thing. The reason has nothing to do with subverting the paradigm that males make superior rock stars, or showing that gender has no effect on a person’s ability to rock-out, or that the woman in question might be amazingly talented. No, the main reason that it’s good to “have a girl in your band” is because “if the band sucks, at least there’s eye candy.”

I remember fretting about what to wear to the gig. Should I emphasise my femininity as a fuck-you to those people who think that girls can’t play instruments? Should I dress in a manner that wouldn’t draw attention to the fact that I was female? I don’t remember my exact decision, but I do remember that my skirt ripped as I got into the car and I had to change my outfit last minute – plain black skirt, black t-shirt and black flats. Looking at the photos, I’m quite definitely female, but not particularly eye-catching.

After a few gigs, I finally became comfortable being “cliché-female-bass-player” and realised that I was actually playing in a band, and I was actually a musician (I kept feeling like someone was going to call me out on the fact that I’m not that good and all the fun would be over – although this probably had more to do with being nervous about playing gigs). As our band established itself a little more, I became confident enough to ask for what I wanted, rather than deferring to the knowledge of the sound techs (invariably cranky aging men who know better than everyone and look at everyone as though they’re annoying small children), and admittedly even used my “feminine wiles” (read: manners) a few times to get some particularly ornery techs on side.

During the year or so that the band played shows, as I became more confident in my skills as a musician, I started to flaunt my femininity. Short dresses, make-up, heels. I even sang and played toy accordion on one song (although, a comment from a friend after one gig which implied that I was intentionally acting cutesy and pretty when singing and playing my accordion never sat well with me). I was told that I was the only person worth watching in the band – not because I was “the girl” but because I was the only person that didn’t stand stock still on stage. And the best praise I’d ever gotten had nothing to do with my gender, but my talent as a musician. There was no barbed comment of “you’re pretty good – for a girl.” One of musicians from one of the bands we used to play with told me that I was the constant in the band. I held everything together when the singer was off-key, or the drummer lost the beat entirely, or whatever else went wrong.

That moment felt like a victory.