Words and Guitar

On Tuesday, Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney spoke at the New School, as part of their series with non-fiction writers. She started off by reading the introduction she wrote to a forthcoming book about the Rock and Roll Camp for Girls. It was good, though not unexpected, her descriptions of the camp’s greatness and necessity more valuable because of their source, but also just the kind of thing you’d expect from a member of one of the greatest bands of the last decade.

One of the greatest bands? Yeah. Greil Marcus introduced her, noting that for ten years Sleater-Kinney played some of the loudest, most surprising and all around best music there was. It’s great to hear a critic of Marcus’s stature (and generation) say this, though in the small, overheated room packed mostly with riot grrrls and their younger sisters, it was also kinda strange.

Next, Brownstein read a longer essay that started off being about the Portland neighborhood where she lives, an apparently un-hip place called Hollywood (named after an old local vaudeville-turned-movie theater). It began as a meditation about the authenticity of places like these, and the quirky specifics of this one in particular. Then it shifted to a discussion of Mark Lindsay, Portland native and former member of 60’s band Paul Revere and the Raiders (who have a MySpace page!). Not long ago, Lindsay opened up a shiny palace of neon lights called Mark Lindsay’s Rock n’ Roll Café, right in Brownstein’s understated, old-fashioned neighborhood. With photos of Lindsay in his prime projected on a screen behind her, Brownstein described her process of coming to terms with the gleaming establishment – from rage and embarrassment, to curiosity, to a deep and supposedly unironic love (due mostly to the place’s bizarrely sincere authenticity, and menu items like the Yaws Top Notch Hamburger and The Cornfurter).

She had a lot of insightful things to say about the weirdness of fame, and her own ideas about how to safeguard one’s legacy and the items that embody it (hint – she’s not so into the display of Lindsay’s guitars of a wall of his restaurant, nor his silly Raiders-era outfits encased in Plexi glass in the dining area). When the Experience Music Project opened in Seattle in 2000, the museum bought Brownstein’s first guitar to put on display. Seeing it there afterwards, she said, made her realize that the guitar is an object that’s meaningless out of context and without a voice.

Carrie Brownstein’s going to be doing a lot more writing, including an essay for a forthcoming anthology on Bob Dylan. She’s also collaborating with Fred Armisen on some video shorts, which you can check out here. She was adamant about never being “just” a musician. After her reading and some innocuous questions from Marcus, someone in the audience just came out and asked the question everyone was wondering: Why Did Sleater-Kinney Break Up?

“We were done,” she shrugged. And it made total sense.