Rain clouds and ROCKRGRLS
Soggy in Seattle
I’m up in Seattle for a few days as part of a holiday-adjacent family visit. It’s typically cold and dreary in the Northwest, which is keeping me inside more than not. Staring out the window, looking at the urban skyline got me thinking of my earliest visits to the seaport city.
The first time I visited Seattle was in 1991 when I was scoping it as a possible place to live. We drove up from Santa Cruz in a VW bus and it rained the entire time. I recall being afraid for much of that drive. More than once, we pulled off the highway to wait out a downpour in some roadside diner. Wet, damp, gray. It was an easy ‘no’ and we eventually moved to Colorado, a far drier state.
More than a decade later, I drove up to Seattle from the Bay Area with a guitarist to play a show as part of the second ROCKERGRL Music Conference. The three-day event was an offshoot of ROCKRGRL magazine, a groundbreaking, unabashedly feminist, publication about all things women in music founded by Carla DeSantis Black in 1994. ROCKRGRL was the first national publication for female musicians in the United States. It rejected sexist stereotypes, challenged rape culture in music, lauded the diversity of music genres women were making and playing, and brought forth two namesake conferences.
The 2005 conferenced featured three nights of showcases all over the city’s clubs, pubs, pizza parlors and coffeehouses — I played a dark cafe with a bunch of other songwriterly types somewhere north of downtown — as well as panels, workshops and a trade show. It was radical to have an all-women’s event that truly focused on women musicians and everyone was stoked to be there. I was excited to sit near the front row to hear Bonnie Raitt and Anne Wilson talk shop and hear Johnette Napolitano discuss home recording. Of Seattle itself, I mainly recall how cold and damp it was outside, how steep the hills in downtown could be and driving home in one fell swoop.
I’m not sure if it was before or after the conference, but ROCKERGRL published its last issue that same year1. Magazines and music are hard industries in which to stay afloat, although the pioneering Black didn’t stop rallying for women in music after stopping publication. A few years later, she founded Musicians for Equal Opportunities for Women (MEOW), and hosted another, all-women’s conference, MEOW, in Austin in 2013. I attended and played at that as well, which again featured a lot of amazing women musicians, but, as ambitious events often do, didn’t gain enough traction to continue. But just because something doesn’t last, doesn’t mean its influence isn’t still felt. The same issues that plagued women in music in the 90s still persist, but are more likely to be called out, and in general, I’d say the musical landscape is far more diversified. Just thinking back on visiting Seattle in the aughts, I’m itching to pick up the guitar that’s sitting here waiting in the corner….
In December 2008, the ROCKRGRL Magazine and conference archives were acquired by Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, to be included in their collection of American Women’s History artifacts.