“People don’t want to see women do things they don’t think women should do.” — Joan JettThat was the case back in the 1970s, when Jett and the Runaways were trying to make it in the macho world of rock.
These days, women aren’t the novelty they once were in popular music. But they are still the exception, part of the much smaller minority.
“Things are better, for sure,” said Betse Ellis, a longtime player in the local scene, “but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.”
“It’s less of a deal, but saying it doesn’t matter anymore is a little like saying, ‘There’s no more racism,’ ” said Lauren Krum of the band the Grisly Hand. “It makes me want to be extra-positive and supportive of other women in music.”
Our music world is populated with lots of women who rock, in every sense of that word — women doing things people used to think women shouldn’t do, whether they’re fronting a band as a singer or lead guitarist, writing songs, producing and promoting concerts or showcasing music from a commercial-radio pulpit. Here are a dozen who play various roles in the Kansas City music scene, adding to its fire and luster, feeding its heart and soul.
Kristie StremelKristie Stremel’s history in the Kansas City music scene goes back to 1995, when she was 21 and part of the all-female band Frogpond.
“The ‘women in rock’ thing back then was still kind of different and exciting,” she said. “In a lot of ways it helped us.”
After leaving Frogpond, she started the band Exit 159, then launched a solo career that has lasted well beyond a decade. She has put music aside a few times, including a six-month stretch when she didn’t pick up a guitar. But each retirement was inevitably temporary.
“Being a musician is like getting a bug,” she said. “Once you catch it, you can’t do anything else.”
Stremel takes on the occasional freelance graphic-design project to help pay bills. But for the most part she is a full-time solo artist, touring the Midwest, running her own music enterprise, Stremeltone, and building a studio so she can make her own records.
The key to longevity and survival is discipline, said Stremel, who recently celebrated her eighth year of sobriety.
“You’ve got to find a good balance,” she said. “Music is a lifestyle, but it’s also a business. You’ve got to spend your money carefully. And you’ve got to respect yourself and respect the business and make it grow and keep growing.”
Brandy Gordon, Rachel Christia, Erica TownsendIt’s no small feat to stand out in an 18-piece Afro-Cuban/funk/soul/hip-hop orchestra, but the ladies of the Hearts of Darkness have become one of its most conspicuous and most appealing elements.
Brandy Gordon, Rachel Christia and Erica Townsend joined the band in 2009. They were three friends with little live music experience but plenty of talent and energy. Their friend Les Izmore, who had just become HoD’s vocal frontman, was able to persuade the band to give them a chance.
“The first practice Rachel, Brandy and Erica showed up for was our final rehearsal before the Crossroads Music Fest 2009,” said Bob Asher, horn player and co-founder of the band. “They brought so much excitement and energy to that rehearsal, Pete (Leibert) and I just looked at each other and nodded. We had them on stage with us six days later and that was that.”
Since then, “the ladies” have polished their game and become an integral part of the show.
“You don’t see many women fronting a band as large as ours,” Gordon said. “We try to bring a lot of energy to the shows. We help get the party started.”
They do that by laying down background vocals, taking lead vocals and busting some slick dance moves.
“The stage presence of our front line is one of our strongest assets as a band,” Asher said. “We can’t exist without our ladies, and there isn’t anybody I know in the world who could replace them.”
Alicia SolombrinoOpportunity doesn’t always knock; sometimes you have to wake it.
You could say that’s exactly what Alicia Solombrino has done lately. Two years ago she made over the Beautiful Bodies, the band she started almost seven years ago.
“We are 180 degrees away from our old sound,” said Solombrino, the band’s lead singer and co-songwriter. “The old stuff had lots of energy and punk attitude but no real songs or melodies. The new sound is rock, alternative and pop. It’s aggressive, almost metal, but it’s pop. You can dance to it.”
That new sound has generated some appeal outside the music word. In September, a remix of the Bodies tune “She’s a Blast” was played during New York Fashion Week.
“My friend Brad Walsh does all the runway music for (fashion designer) Christian Siriano,” Solombrino said. “Christian liked another song of ours, ‘You’re a Risk,’ so he asked me to send more music to Brad to see if one might fit in the show.”
She was in New York when the remixed “Blast” was featured during Siriano’s showcase.
“It was the finale song,” she said. “It was amazing. I was freaking out.”
Two very big things appear to be in store. It’s too early to let one of those cats out of the bag, but the other is already loose. The Bodies have launched a Kickstarter campaign to help finance the recording of their next record. It will be produced by John Feldmann of the band Goldfinger, who has produced records by Panic at the Disco, Good Charlotte and Used.
“It’s going to be expensive,” Solombrino said, “but it’s an amazing opportunity.”
Her brushes with opportunity don’t surprise her closest friends, who know how devoted she is to her band, its music and its live performances.
“She is true to herself and her music, no matter where she is” said Kim Baldwin, former lead singer of the band Flee the Seen and Solombrino’s co-worker at the Uptown Theater. “Whether she’s in front of thousands of people or just hanging out in our office together at work, she’ll do the same Michael Jackson dance moves and love every minute of it. I’ve witnessed it countless times.”
“I want energy at shows,” Solombrino said. “I want the band and the crowd to be exhausted. I’ve left our shows with cuts, bruises, even chipped teeth. Those were some of the good shows.”
Jeriney HomegrownLocal bands thrive on exposure, and there’s no better way for a band to share its songs with the local community than through the radio airwaves.
That’s where Jeriney Homegrown (her on-air name) plays a significant role.
Since 2005, she has hosted “Homegrown” on the radio station KRBZ (96.5 FM) — “The Buzz” — where she also hosts the weekday show “Middays With Jeriney.”
“Homegrown” showcases local music from 7 to 9 p.m. Sundays. Each show typically features more than 20 songs. Bands occasionally perform live in the studio. Filling two hours isn’t a big challenge, thanks to Kansas City’s loyal and fruitful music scene.
“There are so many talented musicians in our city, and not just in the alternative genre,” she said. “I’ve also learned that there is an amazing support system for live music.”
Jeriney’s radio career started at William Jewell College, where she studied music education.
“I wanted to become a band director,” she said. “After taking a job as a secretary in the campus radio station I kind of fell into radio.”
She fell into the “Homegrown” job when she filled in for the original hosts, who were members of a local band.
“They left for a tour (and) there was talk about getting rid of the show,” she said. “I took it over with a friend. The next thing I know I’ve been doing the show for almost seven years.”
“Homegrown” has made her feel somewhat like a den mother to the scene and its musicians, especially when she sees or hears a local band outside her own show.
“Like the time I was buying groceries and heard the Republic Tigers playing (over the P.A.) or turning on ‘Ellen’ and seeing Vedera,” she said. “I think of Kansas City bands as ‘mine’ and when they have success … I get very excited for my bands.”
Julia HaileIn 2003, after graduating from St. Teresa’s Academy, Julia Haile enrolled at the University of Missouri-Kansas City to study voice. But after two years of opera, arias and choral music, Haile decided her music roots were in other soil and she left the program.
In 2008, she found her true groove. That’s the year she was introduced to the Good Foot, a retro-soul band that covers Al Green, Stevie Wonder and some of the Motown songbook. The transition to another kind of classic music required some fine-tuning, but she is feeling more at home with every gig.
“My classical training has helped with my volume and tone, but I feel like with this kind of music I’m still finding and developing my voice,” she said.
Some of her bandmates feel like she has already found it.
“Julia is automatic,” said Adam Wagner, one of the band’s founding members. “She just doesn’t miss. She’s also able to kind of reinvent her approach to a song pretty frequently and do some surprising things with it.”
One of her signature songs with the Good Foot is the Jackson 5 hit “I Want You Back.”
“That’s one people really freak out on,” she said. “They seem to really love that one.”
So do some fellow musicians. When trumpeter Hermon Mehari and his jazz ensemble Diverse were putting together their tribute to Michael Jackson, Mehari asked Haile to be part of the project.
“Julia is not just my favorite female vocalist in this city; she’s one of my favorites of all time, hands down,” he said. “From a musical standpoint, she’s got it all: great sound, projection, pitch, rhythm, energy and style.” And classic soul.
Amy FarrandThe two decades she has spent as a musician in Kansas City have taught Amy Farrand a lot of lessons about sacrifice, endurance and commitment.
“There are a lot of late nights in bars in this lifestyle,” she said, “and the older I get the more sleep I require and I find I don’t want to spend all my nights in bars. But you have to. So you have to pace yourself if you want some sort of longevity as a musician.”
This year she plans to take her own advice. Last year Farrand played 119 shows, nearly all of them in Kansas City.
“Only three were out of town,” she said, “which is ridiculous. I’m still reeling from it. This year I’m going to do fewer shows and I hope to do more out of town.”
Playing less won’t be easy for someone who likes staying busy. Farrand plays bass in American Catastrophe and drums in Atlantic Fadeout, and she curates a weekly two-hour music/performance art show called the Weirdo Wednesday Supper Club. She also has a solo career going and is called upon regularly to play in special projects.
“Amy is what Xena the Warrior Princess would’ve been had she been from the Midwest,” said Shaun Hamontree, a bandmate in American Catastrophe. Having a full plate and so many balls in the air is part of who she is.
“When I’m not playing I’m not happy or fun to be around,” she said. “I didn’t start doing this to be cool or to get people to date me. I do it because it’s part of my soul, my DNA. And I’ll keep doing it until I physically can’t do it anymore. ”
Betse Ellis, Lauren KrumThey are nearly a generation apart but there’s a kinship to their music, which favors the country side of the rock spectrum.
Betse Ellis is a fiddle player, singer/songwriter and founding member of the Wilders, the old-time country quartet that recently announced it was going on extended hiatus. But while the Wilders are away, Ellis will play, a lot.
“I’ll be teaching weekend fiddle workshops,” she said. “I’ve done that the past three years over in Belgium, and I have a four-day residency scheduled this year in Alta, Wyoming. I also do one-day workshops in music stores.”
She will turn her attention to a solo career she has been nurturing for the past few years, one that took her to Scotland in 2009.
“I do solo shows with just me and two fiddles with different tunings,” she said. “I do some of the old-time songs like I did with the Wilders, but I also do songs that were important to me when I was growing up, like ‘Straight to Hell’ by the Clash. People don’t expect to hear that. It feels good. I’ve let go of some inhibitions.”
Ellis also has joined two local bands. She’ll play fiddle with John Greiner & the Sawyers and electric bass with Blessed Broke, the band fronted by friend Brian Frame. If there’s good news in the Wilders’ hiatus it’s that Ellis will still be active in a music scene she has been a part of since the early 1990s, including her days in bands such as Blue Museum, building a resume that is respected by her peers.
“I really look up to Betse because she does all these amazing things and cool projects and she doesn’t always talk about them,” Lauren Krum said. “She’s an inspiration to me.”
Krum is a singer who grew up listening to her father’s Motown records and admiring pop stars like Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul. For two years, she studied voice at Columbia College Chicago, where she learned to adapt to several vocal styles — country to soul. Her primary music vehicle is the Grisly Hand, an insurgent country band she and friends started in early 2009. She is half of the duo Ruddy Swain, with David Reigner of the Dead Voices, a band Krum sings with regularly. She has become a go-to singer.
“Lauren is fearless,” said Mike Stover of the Dead Voices. “On a Snuff Jazz gig last month, she sang a free-jazz Christmas song I’d written two days earlier.”
“Lauren’s blend of work ethic, attitude and talent is wonderful,” Reigner said. “She knows how to keep music fun while figuring out what’s best for the song.”
“Singing makes me happy because I have an amazing time doing it and I connect with people and entertain them at the same time,” she said. “That’s why it’s what I love most.”
Abigail HendersonAbigail Henderson’s music story began about a decade ago, when she was in her early 20s and in a country-rock band called Trouble Junction. That’s when she introduced the Kansas City music scene to one of its most sincere and compelling voices and personalities. Time has passed quickly, but she has filled it with lots of good music. And love.
“It’s weird being asked about doing it for a long time,” she said. “I started playing music late, I guess. I may always feel like the little sister, but then I look around and I am, alas, no longer that.”
Instead she is a stalwart in the music scene, someone other women look up to. After Trouble Junction, she crossed paths with the man she’d marry, Chris Meck.
“I met my match and I met my heart. I met a creative sparring partner,” she said.
They would start their own projects: the country-rock band the Gaslights, the folk-rock Tiny Horses and, most recently, the rock band Atlantic Fadeout.
Since 2008, Henderson has been fighting an aggressive strain of breast cancer. That’s also the year she and Meck helped start the Midwest Music Foundation, a nonprofit group that helps musicians deal with a variety of issues, especially the need for health care — a subject both are all too familiar with. As this was being written, Henderson was going through another regimen of treatments to fight the disease.
“I appreciate being included in the idea of a ‘scene,’ if we can take the weirdness away from the word ‘scene’ for a minute,” she said. “It’s the idea or sense of a musical community, in my mind. That’s what it means to me. And the artists in this (scene) have built an amazing world-class musical community I would stand toe-to-toe with any place.”
The life of a musician is filled with sacrifice, she said, such as “traveling and touring and questionable foodstuffs and compromising sleeping arrangements, sophomoric laundry high jinks, rotgut whiskey, freeway rants, record shucking, etc.”
But they’re worth the rewards: “(They’re) part of the drill. One does what one must do. Wouldn’t have done it any other way.”
Jacki BeckerHer 20 years in the music business have given Jacki Becker an unusual perspective on the rewards of live music.
“There’s nothing more amazing than looking at a full room from the side of the stage or from the balcony and watching people be completely free listening to live music,” she said. “There’s just nothing like it.”
Becker has been working in music promotions since she was in college at the University of Kansas. In 2001, she started her own company, Up to Eleven.
Her job is a labor of love, she said, one that requires a lot of planning and micromanagement and one that isn’t as financially lucrative as it used to be.
“There are a lot of pieces to put together for each show,” she said. “It’s January and we’re confirming shows in April and May. It’s a lengthy process and there’s a lot of work.”
She estimates her company works about 25 to 30 shows a month among the clubs on her turf — 25 venues in five states.
“We try not to hit 30 in a month,” she said. “That’s when we get into trouble. It’s too much, although I remember one time doing 50 in a month. That was crazy.”
The rewards come from working for years with the same bands, many of whom have become almost family, such as Death Cab for Cutie.
“Every time they come into town, if I don’t bring them something I’ve baked, they aren’t getting off the bus,” she said.
But the larger reward that comes from doing all the work required to put a show together is creating something a big crowd will remember.
“You look at the crowd and realize that people are going to fall in love that night, or break up or conceive a child or anything,” she said. “At that moment they are so free and happy, singing along and creating a memory that will stay with them the rest of their lives. There’s nothing greater than that.”
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