Women of Rock Oral History Project (review)

In articles published in 2004 and 2005, Rolling Stone, that cultural arbiter of all things hip, released an encyclopedic list of the one hundred most influential musical artists in rock history. Just eight, as it turned out, were female, only one of whom reached the top ten (the late Aretha Franklin, slotted at number nine between Ray Charles and Little Richard). Female rockers fared even worse in the magazine's list of the top one hundred guitarists, where only two, Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell—ranked #89 and #75, respectively—made the cut. Extending glaring omissions such as these to other modes of criticism both academic and popular, Marion Leonard observes that "analysis of gender and rock has often begun with the premise that rock is created and performed by men or that it exemplifies a masculinist culture" (Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power [Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2007], 1). Troublingly, when journalists do recognize female performers, they often "erase the history of women who have spent many years working in the music industry as practicing musicians" and "re-identify rock as a male preserve" (Leonard, Gender in the Music Industry, 34).

Tanya Pearson's ambitious Women of Rock Oral History Project is actively working to challenge this assumption and the aura of canonical authority that envelops male-dominated rock histories. Launched in 2014, it joins a handful of others driven by a similar ethos, from the similarly titled (but more modest in scope, in terms of its oral history collection) Women Who Rock archive at the University of Washington to Stacy Russo's recent book, We Were Going to Change the World: Interviews with Women from the 1970s and 1980s Southern California Punk Rock Scene (Solano Beach, CA: Santa Monica Press, 2017) and Susan Whitall's Women of Motown: An Oral History, now in its second edition (Memphis, TN: Devault-Graves, 2017). Pearson, a PhD student in the department of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the project's founder and director, has amassed a growing collection of over thirty video interviews, most of which are one to two hours in length and appear to have been shot in the artists' homes with minimal editing. The quality of the high definition videos is excellent, and all but one of the interviews was conducted by Pearson herself.

Anyone who has spent time doing long-form interviews with professional musicians can attest to the challenges that come with interviewing these particular narrators, especially the ease with which some settle into familiar narrative scripts used in previous interviews ("So, I first started playing at the age of …"). Drawing on her own experience as a musician and intimate knowledge of the genre and many of the musicians involved, Pearson develops a genuine rapport with each artist that clearly translates to the interviews themselves. In her interview with Kat Arthur, a veteran of the Southern California punk scene and lead singer of Legal Weapon who died in October 2018, Pearson excitedly reveals that she is a fan, and Arthur responds in kind, sharing frank assessments of the challenges women face in the music industry: "You'll take half a dozen guys that have minimal talent, and they'll get over faster than a woman that has a lot of talent. And the woman will have to work twice as hard, three times as hard, and put up with a lot more havoc."

The narrators range from those who have enjoyed high levels of commercial success to others whose influence is reflected more in local scenes. Veruca Salt cofounders Louise Post and Nina Gordon, who landed a midnineties hit with the single "Seether," were among the first to be interviewed for the project. Gail Ann Dorsey, a remarkable bassist and vocalist who was an integral member of David Bowie's band for two decades, is featured in one of the more thoughtful interviews in the...