Dream Babies, Girls and Girl Groups of the Sixties

She: The Raunchiest of 60s Daughter Groups

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Who were these explosive, boundary-busting women—and why didn't they kicking down every door in front of them, incite a daughter revolution, and take over the world?

Analogy by Cargo Commonage/Kami Jeanne Atwood

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7-inch unmarried encompass for "Outta Reach" past She on Causeway Records.

Illustration courtesy Causeway Records

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When I ask Sally Ross-Moore if she and her sis Nancy were "rebellious" teenagers, she lets out a low, knowing chuckle. "We were," she says. For a infinitesimal it sounds similar she might elaborate, but instead she trails off, lost in a hazy, individual memory of the band that she and her sister channeled their runaway free energy into.

In an interview with another journalist about a decade ago, though, her sis had been more than happy to fill up in the blanks. "We'd get upstairs in the state capitol building to the rotunda and spit on senators' heads!" Nancy said, recounting the sisters' favorite after-school activities. "And we used to go kicked out of moving-picture show theaters all the time." Other extracurriculars included milling effectually their hometown of Sacramento, playing pranks on salespeople in overpriced boutiques (Emerge, who's now sixty, would enquire to effort on child-size garments and so throw mock tantrums when the shopkeepers suggested a larger size), and—the preferred entertainment of most teenage hell-raisers in the early 1960s—going to rock shows. After ane particular concert (a Beach Boys evidence in 1964, on a school night no less) Nancy had an feel that would change the girls' lives forever. "I woke upwards—I'd merely been asleep about 15 minutes—and I'd had this clear dream, vision, whatever you want to call it, of a group of girls onstage. In my mind information technology was only like the Embankment Boys, but girls." Emerge and Nancy (then 13 and 17, respectively) showtime chosen their band the Id, then they switched to the Hairem ("That proper name got pushed on us by someone else …nosotros never did like information technology," Sally recalls), merely the name they finally settled on was, simply, She. "We were women," Emerge says. "Yous might likewise figure information technology out in the starting time."

I first came upon She'due south music decades after its inception, thanks to a collection of their songs put out by British imprint Ace Records, called Wants a Piece of You. Though I wasn't effectually in their heyday, I've always had an analogousness for the kitsch of '60s daughter groups like the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, and Goldie and the Gingerbreads: the matching outfits, the angelic harmonies, that hair. Judging past what I'd heard about She, I figured Wants a Piece of Y'all would exist more of the same.

But cipher quite prepared me for what I heard—particularly coming out of frontwoman Nancy Ross's mouth. "I had my first homo a little after I was ten," she snarls in the opening moments of the psychedelic incantation "Bad Girl," before launching into a serial of unruly, protopunk shrieks ("I taught you to scratch and to bite!") that would brand Jim Morrison chroma—or, meliorate notwithstanding, bow down. Driven by the slinky, unhurried pulse of Sally'south bass and Nancy'due south taunting cool, She's sound falls somewhere between psychedelic pop and garage rock. It's at once dreamy and grounded past grit—head in the clouds while boots insistently stomp the floor. Which isn't to say they couldn't write a memorable popular hook, as well (She wrote all their music and lyrics, also equally played their own instruments). The raw, Farfisa-driven "Like a Serpent" ostensibly takes the familiar form of an early on girl-group "advice song" (like the Marvelettes' "Likewise Many Fish in the Sea"), every bit information technology warns the female person listener of a polish-talking bad boy's tricks, but both the audio and lyrics ("All the girls he makes get the shivers and the shakes when he moves … like a ophidian") were much coarser than any '60s girl-group song I'd heard. "Da Doo Ron Ron" this was non.

But She'southward music was at its most radical when it was about something other than boys, which was pretty much the only topic that other girl groups of the time were concerned with. The Jefferson Airplane–esque "Braids of Hair" recounts a dream Nancy had about attention a utopian Woodstock-era music festival. "Not for Me" is a fiery (and gender-neutral) proclamation of independence ("Don't wanna look like the guy who lives next door"). And the sprawling, six-minute carol of innocence lost, "When I Was a Footling Girl," yearns for the days of catching pollywogs and splashing in mud puddles with a childhood best friend. At a moment when the image of the male Svengali (à la Phil Spector) still loomed large over girl groups, She's unbridled, uncensored expressions of female subjectivity and desire—years before Janis! An entire decade before punk!—were staggeringly ahead of their time. As scholar Jacqueline Warwick writes in her book Girl Groups, Girl Civilization (2007), female person musicians in the mid-'60s were expected to "pose no threat to the accepted beliefs virtually propriety." But She sounds and then oblivious to the mores of the era that they might every bit well be time travelers from the hereafter.

Bated from the reissue's liner notes (which unfortunately characteristic annoyingly, tritely sexist descriptions like "[She ended the performance] with their classic 'Outta Reach,' Nancy grunting and groaning like the lusty wench she truly was") and a few short online blurbs, I couldn't find much information about She. How could this be? They were far and away the most fascinating and uncompromising '60s girl grouping I'd ever come across, but fifty-fifty in the canon of feminist bands they're a footnote within a footnote. I'd been full of questions well-nigh them since I first heard their music: Who were these explosive, purlieus-busting women—and why didn't they kick downward every door in front of them, incite a daughter revolution, and have over the world?

"We weren't good in the kickoff," Sally Ross-Moore laughs when I finally get her on the phone. (We've had to reschedule our chat because of an unexpected visit from her granddaughter. "Yep, the girl rocker is a grandma now," she writes me in a Facebook message.) Nancy started taking music lessons when she was very young, and (after her mail service–Beach Boys concert vision) she began writing her ain songs and teaching the bass parts to her younger sister. Their parents were unequivocally supportive, even when the girls got so serious about their music that the living room became overrun with amps and guitars. Did Mr. and Mrs. Ross have whatever objections to the songs' lyrical content? "I'm certain they did," Sally says (a recurring adjective she uses to draw the band is "raunchy"). "They merely didn't say. They knew amend. They knew we were going to do what we wanted to practice."

Merely the sisters wanted more than the living room, they wanted shows—a surefire mode, they reasoned, to attain the kind of people who'd somewhen assist them cutting a record. They assembled a couple of other girls to circular out the lineup, and by 1967 (Sally's junior twelvemonth of high schoolhouse) they were regularly booking gigs: frat parties, school dances, whatever place that would have them. But She had two strikes against them right off the bat: Not simply were they an all-female band, but they were an all-female band playing original fabric. "Back so, when you'd book a band, they wanted someone to come in and play other people's stuff. Information technology was very difficult. Nosotros just weren't taken seriously at all."

Only they kept at it. As their live show gained a local reputation, they began booking the occasional 1-off in San Francisco—unremarkably they were the openers for the openers (though the headliners were sometimes worth sticking around for: Grateful Dead, Steve Miller Ring, Quicksilver Messenger Service). "Nosotros hauled all our own stuff," Sally says, sounding equally proud as if she'd washed information technology that afternoon. "We didn't have guys carry it—and that was when amplifiers were big and heavy, also." The sisters liked being on the road; they always got along harmoniously and the drives in Sally'southward one-time station wagon were a gamble to clear their minds and spend time together. "Nancy never drove," Sally says. "We had this odd human relationship: The younger sis always collection her everywhere. The other band members ever drove with their boyfriends or their dads, but the two of united states of america ever traveled together."

In fact, Emerge says one of the hardest things well-nigh being in She was finding other girls who were as committed to the band as she and Nancy: "All our members came and went, so when you listen to our songs, the backing ring is constantly dissimilar. It was only a revolving door behind us," though it wasn't always the girls' faults. "Boyfriends didn't similar it. They didn't desire their girlfriends up there on the stage performing." (The Ross sisters, on the other mitt, came upward with a solution: "We simply dated beau musicians because they were the only other people who understood our schedule and our lifestyle.")

The ring kept at it for years, gradually edifice a local following. Equally the beginnings of the women's movement bubbled toward the mainstream, some things changed for women in music. In the tardily '60s, the Ross sisters were heartened by Janis Joplin and Grace Slick's sudden presence on the scene—but simply to a certain extent. "Not that I didn't love them—I did!—just they ever did take a whole group of men behind them, and it was generally men writing the music," Sally says. "There just wasn't a whole group of raunchy women out there, still. That was our biggest obstacle."

Eventually, though, their hard piece of work paid off. She cut a demo of "Similar a Serpent" at a local studio, and the group's first and biggest fan, Mrs. Ross, sent it to every tape company she could think of. Much to the girls' surprise, calls started coming in. A few unlike labels (including Liberty Records, afterwards an chapter of EMI) expressed plenty interest in She to fly them to Los Angeles. Having their selection of a few unlike labels, She decided to sign with Kent Records, the only company that seemed to understand the grandeur of their vision—the simply company offering a contract to brand a full-length record.

In 1970, She recorded more than than a dozen songs during the Kent sessions, simply in hindsight, Sally is unsatisfied with what the label had to offer. "Kent was more than of a Motown[-esque] characterization at the time. I don't think they quite had an agreement of how to mix stone music. … It wasn't a practiced fit." But the clash went deeper than production styles. Later on hearing the initial batch of songs, the label executives—fearing that the band's sound was too raw for a group of girls—acted out that fourth dimension-honored tape visitor cliché and demanded something more radio friendly. Nancy quickly threw together a poppy melody called "Boy Picayune Boy," which Sally calls to this day, with fresh disdain, "a fluffy, stupid, cotton-candy song." It's certainly the odd rail out on Wants a Piece of Yous, and listening in the context of the balance of their output, you can near imagine information technology being composed out of spite. Nancy sings the ultrasaccharine tune through gritted teeth. The whole song has the air of an errant tomboy who's been dolled upwards in ringlets and an exaggeratedly frilly wearing apparel and told to sit still in church building, repressed merely fidgeting just below the surface.

The single was fix to exist "Outta Reach," an agonized withal venomous ode (Nancy ends every chorus with a Patti Smith–worthy "YEAH!") to female in-betwixt-ness that feels like a thematic antecedent to No Uncertainty's "Just a Daughter" ("I'm then near and nonetheless so far/ I can't even bulldoze a machine"). But when the label started sending out the 45 singles, the girls were furious: Without telling them, Kent had released "Boy Lilliputian Boy" every bit the A-side and relegated "Outta Reach" to the B, guaranteeing that the former was preferred for airplay. The girls felt cheated, duped, and simply plain pissed. Rather than compromise, they ended their relationship with Kent (even as "Male child Little Boy" was, much to their embarrassment, racking up spins). With She's record contract and future in a land of limbo, everyone but the Ross sisters left the ring shortly later. Emerge and Nancy decided they were besides exhausted to find new members. Around 1971, rather than try to reconcile with the label and put out music they didn't believe in, She bankrupt up.

Decades later, a bootleg vii-inch of "Outta Achieve" backed with "Male child Little Boy" started making the rounds. (When a friend of mine heard I was writing this article, she texted me a picture of its embrace: a cartoon of two stylishly dressed female cats, ane of which is kicking a high-heeled foot directly into a male dog's crotch.) Since information technology wasn't an official release, the Rosses saw no royalties from information technology, just Sally says that, in a way, she was glad to see it out at that place: The contrast between the 2 sides of the tape speaks volumes nearly the gap between what the world wanted She to be and what they actually were. "All y'all gotta do is listen to that 45, ane side and then the other," Sally says, "and that pretty much sums upwardly our whole band."

The room feels heavy right after I hang up with Sally. Toward the end of our chat, she tells me that Nancy died in 2011 at historic period 62; though she'd given upwardly drugs and alcohol after in life, years of hard living in the '60s and '70s eventually took their toll. Given the dearth of information out there about She, I didn't know about Nancy's death until Emerge told me herself.

As this news sinks in, information technology strikes me what I've always found so compelling, and even oddly poignant, most Wants a Piece of You: how unfinished information technology sounds. The recorded output that She left behind is a sketch, a frustrating hint of what might have been had the earth been a petty more receptive to their vision, had a record visitor entrusted a group of aggressive, fearlessly blunt women with the resources to make the tape they wanted to make. Unfortunately, in the '60s, Nancy's dream of "just similar the Beach Boys, but girls" was just that—a dream, a more than progressive reality that was nonetheless just out of accomplish.

Nancy connected playing and writing here and there (including a stint composing children'due south music) until she died. Sally, on the other hand, pursued a career in child wellness services and didn't stick with music ("Bass was my instrument, and that's non actually something you sit effectually and play by yourself"), but she delights in the Facebook messages she gets here and there from fans—the large majority of whom are "very young men." "I tell them, 'I'm a lot older now, you know,'" she laughs. "'That was a long time ago.'"

A few years ago in the indie-music world, there was a popular narrative that female-driven garage stone bands (and especially those indebted to the sounds of the '60s) were making a "comeback," helmed by artists like Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, and Best Coast. I greeted their presence enthusiastically: From my vantage point, these bands added some much-needed diversity to the dude-centric indie scene and provided a gritty, revisionist spin on the stifled history of '60s girl groups. Talking to Emerge, though, reminds me of the limits of this narrative. These bands made an of import bear on, true, merely ane that was limited to underground communities. Sally hasn't heard of any of them, and she's still waiting for an all-female rock ring to break through in the 21st century. As she tells it, She'southward story is a refreshing reality check: a reminder of both the tradition of creatively suppressing female artists and the work left to be washed.

When I tell her the earth simply wasn't prepare for She, Emerge replies without missing a beat: "I'k however not quite sure they would be."

Lindsay Zoladz is a staff author at Pitchfork. Reprinted from Bitch (Winter 2014), an contained quarterly mag that offers a feminist response to pop culture.

Published on Apr 23, 2014

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