The Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band
Retro Fetish: The Chicago and New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Bands
Issue #24
Second-wave feminist groups the Chicago and New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Bands re-release their original 1972 recording, with bonus tracks from Le Tigre
By Ann Heppermann
Published: June 1st, 2005 | 1:27pm
Papa Don’t Lay That Shit on Me is a feminist history lesson that you can dance to. The Rounder Records reissue of the Chicago and New Haven’s Women’s Liberation Rock Bands’ 1972 release, originally titled Mountain Moving Day, helps document the 1970s second-wave feminist movement when women were making strides in issues like reproductive rights and shattering stereotypes of what women could do — like start a rock band. And the women in the Chicago and New Haven’s Liberation Rock Bands set to take the “cock” out of “cock rock.”
“Our desire to start a band had something to do with the fact that we were listening to and dancing to music that was degrading to us,” explains Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band member Patricia (Miller) Matthews who played guitar, banjo, and other string instruments. Case in point, Matthews notes: the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb,” a catchy danceable power-happy song with lyrics that leave a little something to be desired.
Both bands formed in 1970 when the feminist movement was in full swing. Kit McClure, who played trombone and tenor sax in the New Haven band, (and is now the leader of the all-women Kit McClure Big Band in New York) remembers how she got on board during her first week of college. “I was part of the first class of women accepted at Yale. And I ran into this girl on a street corner who was passing out leaflets about a women’s conference. She told me how at this conference women were going to get together and jam and that anyone who wanted to be in a band should be there. I went and within two weeks, we started to write music together and play some gigs. The rest, I guess you would say is history.” And the New Haven band quickly gave birth to a sister band in Chicago. Feminist and scientist Naomi Weisstein heard about the East Coast women’s rock band from a friend who was in the New Haven band and decided that she, and other women in Chicago, needed to rock.
Many of the groups’ members — there were eight in New Haven and six in Chicago — came from a musical background. But none of the women had ever played in a rock band before. They had to overcome that barrier that comes with most fledgling bands — the ego to not care if you suck … at first.
Chicago member Pat Matthews remembers how the very first show at Chicago’s Grant Park was a little rough. “It was horrible!” Matthews laughs. “But it was also fun. By getting up onstage and doing it, we realized that we’re onto something here and that there was something really powerful about playing in the band. At our second gig, we got a standing ovation and saw just how much the crowd really got into it. It was like we were a flower bud that was starting to open up.”
The bands not only challenged the stereotypes of who could pick up a guitar (or as in the case of the funkified 1970s, the trombone or the flute) and start a band, they challenged the typical rock show experience. The Liberation Rock Bands kept the lights on to encourage audience members to dance, set their volume at non-earsplitting levels, and included spoken-word performances as part of the show. The resulting concerts were more like celebrations.
“It was a liberating experience for a lot of the women in the audience,” Matthews says. “Once, there was a show in Pittsburgh where a woman came up and handed me a note. It said, ‘Thank you for letting me dance.’ I kept the note for a number of years.”
And you can hear the liberating good time on Papa Don’t, thanks to restored recordings of the Chicago band’s live performances. The album opens up with a track called “Play it Again Frenzy,” in which you hear women yelling, “Play it again!” Apparently, the bands often acceded to the request, sometimes re-playing a song three or four times.
The bands toured all around the East Coast and chose to play at campuses and feminist gatherings rather than at the usual bar or concert venue. They even played at women’s prisons. McClure remembers how her favorite show was at a Connecticut women’s prison where the New Haven band caused a mini dance riot.
“The women prisoners were told to stay seated in their folding chairs by the guards. Well, we started playing the song ‘Sister Witch,’ and one side of the room got up and started dancing. When the guards finally got one side of the room to sit down, another group of women were up and dancing. And then when that settled down, another group of women were up. Finally, they had to shut the show down.”
It’s easy to see why the music had convicts up and dancing when they weren’t supposed to be. The songs were straight out of the ’70s, with plenty of funky bass lines and groovy solos that could go on and on. Mix that with a positive message and the women could feel good about shaking their asses and letting their hair fly. These songs were rallying cries to encourage women to not only get up and dance, but to get up and take action. “Abortion Song” captures the urgency of women’s struggle for reproductive rights in the few years before Roe v. Wade. “Secretary” was a call to women stuck in dead-end jobs to get out. This mix of music and message is what makes both bands precursors to the Riot Grrl movement of the 1990s.
Jennifer Baumgardner is a feminist writer who wrote the liner notes for the album. She says that the album is an important part of feminist history.
“Rock was the lingua franca of people expressing their rebelliousness and freedom. Women needed to be a part of that. These women were using pop culture as a way of fighting the system. They were the precursors of the Riot Grrl movement that would come about 20 years later.”
In fact, the album makes an actual connection between second- and third-wave feminists. Papa Don’t includes two tracks by feminist rockers Le Tigre — “TGIF” from Feminist Sweepstakes and a duet of sorts with the Chicago Women’s Liberation Band.
Both the Chicago and New Haven bands split up after about three years. McClure says the New Haven parted because, like a lot of bands that start in college, half of the group moved to New York while the other half stayed in Connecticut. The Chicago band, on the other hand, had a more difficult breakup. According to Weisstein, the band began “arguing too much and rehearsing too little.” Luckily, Weisstein had the foresight to cart the recordings from Chicago to New York (and the various moves within the city) and made sure that with every relocation the movers did not forget “the tapes.”
Weisstein believes, that with the current administration, the time is ripe for the music of the Women’s Liberation Rock Bands to reappear. The words on the original album still resonate for today’s feminists: “What we all want to do is use the power of rock to transform what the world is like into a vision of what the world could be like.” Amen sister.
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