Sewing Truth

on Tattle Tale and travels in early/mid 90s folk-punk

I have one last show of the year, this Friday Dec 19th at Star Theater Portland, OR. Me and The Norway Rats open the night. Then I’ll be playing side guitar with The Minus 5 as we play the record ‘Dear December’ along with other holiday greats. Ok, here’s another journey in time…

Back to Olympia, Washington. 199something. A big reason so much DIY culture came out of our small town was that we weren’t paying much attention to the mainstream. We lived in collective houses with no TVs. I missed most of what was on commercial radio completely. Creative time was focused on running down our own trails and seeing what we could dig up from the mulch of our rain sodden existence. My ears were focused on post-hardcore bands, other Northwest songwriters, and obscure strains of traditional American Scots-Irish trad. It’s the stew that would inform the combination of folk, punk music, and politics on my first proper album Riffraff which has echoed down the years in wonderful and strange ways. It was an amazingly fruitful time for a lot of people and it’s an energy I’ve carried with me ever since. Olympia was an epicenter for what the music industry would call “grunge”, the Riot Grrrl movement, and the lo-fi indie rock sound and aesthetic that would rise above all of it to carry well into the next century. In the Venn diagram of those three cultural strains stood two young women armed with a cello and acoustic guitars - a duo called Tattle Tale.

Madigan Shive and Jen Wood were in their late teens and made music that could be transcendentally beautiful and then pivot to being furious, experimental, and dissonant. The material was queer, feminist, and revolutionary and existed mostly in all ages spaces. Their voices blended in harmony and unison and would occasionally build to a scream or something almost trance-like. It’s hard to describe how powerful it was to see two teenage girls with this kind of talent and charisma at a time when alternative music scenes were still worshiping shirtless muscled men screaming over heavy riffs. Tattle Tale released a cassette on the Kill Rock Stars label in 1993. Given our overlapping politics and acoustic instruments it was natural that we ended up paired on bills together and became pals. If I have the chronology correct, the first time was on the Evergreen State College campus in the round with the crowd sitting akimbo on the floor. There was a particularly memorable multi-band bill at the Oddfellows Hall in Seattle on Capitol Hill (that show gets it’s own upcoming essay). Also in Seattle, Tattle Tale and I shared billings at the collective vegan Black Cat Cafe where our social and activist community converged over steaming plates of veggie scrambles and direct action planning meetings.

Tattle Tale and I had a plan to release a split 7” together. This was enough of a concrete idea that it was added to their tour poster. They were going to put their song ‘Little Silver Hands’ on one side and I had a song called ‘Saint Paddy’s Day’ about the refusal of the New York City Saint Patrick’s Day Parade to let Irish Lesbians and Gays march under their own banner. I can find no record of this song anywhere in my notebooks or archives and have only the vaguest recollection of how it may have gone. I played it a lot so I am amazed there isn’t a warbly cassette in a box somewhere. We changed the plan to instead include my song ‘It’s Not Ok’ - where I did something resembling rapping about OK cola, Beavis and Butthead, and vacuous corporate rock.

Alas Tattle Tale broke up before we could get to recording the 7”. I wish we had made it happen earlier but things go that way sometimes… bands break up, sometimes reform, sometimes are lauded in hindsight, and sometimes drift away with only those who’s lives they touched carrying the music around in their hearts. Before the band ended in 1995, a full length Tattle Tale CD ‘Sew True’ was released. I love this music to this day. The only place to hear the album currently is on youtube. Most famously the song ‘Glass Vase Cello Case’ from this album was used in the queer coming of age comedy ‘But I’m a Cheerleader’ in a pivotal scene.

Jen Wood has released a good few excellent solo albums and sang vocals for The Postal Service on their hit record ‘Give Up’ including the single ‘Such Great Heights’ and the duet ‘Nothing Better’. Madigan created the chamber pop band Bonfire Madigan and has toured and recorded under that moniker ever since. In the early 2000s she and I both found ourselves living in New York City and I played side guitar with her band for a spell. The late great producer and creative iconoclast Hal Wilner was a fan of hers and one night he was in the crowd to see us play at Piano’s on the Lower East Side. I was pretty star struck by Hal but he was very kind to me that night. That same Summer I watched Madigan duet a Neil Young song with Cat Power on one of Hal’s famous curated tribute shows in Prospect Park Brooklyn.

Back in the 90s there were other people playing acoustic music around the NW punk scene - Kaia Wilson from Team Dresch put out solo songwriter records, K records artist Lois, Mary Lou Lord, Pete Krebs from Hazel, and Elliott Smith of Heatmiser. These were all people I got to see play in tiny rooms and shared bills with most of them (and in the case of Kaia and Pete, still do!). In like-minded territory at the same time, downtown NYC birthed the anti-folk movement fostered by Lach and Roger Manning, and a woman with a shaved head from Buffalo was cutting a swath across the decade while beating the living crap out of an Alvarez. ‘Folk-punk’ as a genre would have a bigger moment by the early 00s with reverberations into today’s roots music world. Music communities in the late twentieth century could feel somewhat Balkanized and you had to find your people. In the middle of all the noise, there was a sense of solidarity among those of us with our arms clutching acoustic guitars.

Thanks for reading! Now that I’m off the road for a bit, these missives will be rolling in more regularly and I’m excited about excavating more music, posters, and memories. Please check out and support the ongoing music work of these amazing artists.

Jen Wood on Bandcamp - https://jenwood.bandcamp.com

Bonfire Madigan on Bandcamp - https://bonfiremadigan.bandcamp.com/