July 16th, 2009
Interview: Jessica Hopper, Author of “The Girls’ Guide To Rocking”
Chicago-based writer and cultural critic Jessica Hopper comes to the area on Sunday to read from her new (and first) book, The Girls’ Guide to Rocking — a fun, enthusiastic, and comprehensive handbook aimed at tween and teen girls that details everything from choosing the right instruments and musical gear to finding bandmates, writing lyrics, recording songs, soundproofing your bedroom, putting on shows, dealing with stagefright, touring, and tons more. I’ve know Jessica for a long time — for a decade she ran her own publicity firm, Hopper PR, repping tons of great indie-rock bands; she’s published a legendary zine called Hit It or Quit It; and I’ve always dug her critical writing in numerous media outlets (including her brilliantly incisive and controversial Punk Planet essay “Emo: Where the Girls Aren’t,” which really put her on the map as a writer) — and the fact that she would pen such a great, and crucial, book like this is just a natural. I caught up with Jessica over the phone last week from her home in Chicago, as she was getting ready to embark on her book tour:
So this is your very first book tour…
Yeah, I’ve done reading tours which is really different. We edited the book like seven full times, so I would guess I’ve read the book all the way through probably 30 or 40 times, so as a result I knew the parts of the book that are going to read well. The parts where I’m talking in first-person or I’m talking about touring, or there’s kind of a long narrative, because there’s a lot of the book that I can’t read because it’s like, “…and then you do this, and this is why you shouldn’t buy a guitar at Sam’s Club.” That’s one of the only parts of the book that my publisher cut at all because I said that you should never buy a guitar any place that sells big bags of dog food.
Well, that’s pretty good advice.
But the thing is, I would really love it if my book could be purchased in a Sam’s Club or people who live in the…the…
In the sticks?
Yeah, I was gonna say people who live in “the ass end of Georgia,” but that might be the whole state, I dunno [laughs].
Well, I guess those are the people who probably need the book the most.
Yes, exactly, because they don’t have rock camps there, you know? As somebody who was born in Indiana, where most of my relatives live, I understand how all-pervasive NASCAR culture is once you get outside the city. So that’s who…I don’t wanna say that’s my intended audience, but that’s part of my hoped-for audience.
When you were writing the book, did you write it to “that girl” — did you visualize a certain girl you wanted to convey all of this stuff to?
Yes. I did. I mean, I didn’t have a particular girl in mind. But it was…I wrote the book that I wanted at that age. The book is basically everything I wish I had known and more, you know, because as I write in the introduction, initially I was thwarted by some ignorant members of the JV bowling team. But we weren’t, like, the punks, we were the dorks. So I didn’t have access to some people who might have been a little more inclusive and just said, “You, know Jessie, just go ahead and do it,” which is what I believed, but I was like, “Well, these guys, they do Jane’s Addiction covers, they might know better than me.” So there was a part of me that was like…the 15-year-old pissed-off, something-to-prove me was in some ways the one that wrote that book. I don’t know if you saw the essay I did with Largehearted Boy last week?
Oh, no, I didn’t.
I did a “Book Notes” thing about how I only listened to Led Zeppelin almost the entire duration, that I listened to Led Zeppelin for like 12 hours a day while I was writing the book. Go look at that, because that’s where I kind of detail how Led Zeppelin got me there, because, in part, my first foray into playing, I started a band the day after I got my guitar with my best friend in the summer between 9th and 10th grade. We were not good, that did not stop us. Neither of us had any…I think she had played piano or something, but we had absolutely zero music experience but it was just like, “We don’t care, we’re starting a band.” And her brother and his mean, kind of vaguely hippie classic rock dudes, they had their band and they’d be upstairs totally stoned or whatever and come downstairs and be like, “What’s that? I bet you can’t play a G7 chord,” and, I mean, I would be, like, literally ready to cry because it’s like, “Jeez, I just got this guitar last week.” And a lot of girls I knew had that same kind of conundrum, people telling them , oh, you have to be a certain kind of good, and this is what good looks like. Good looks like playing “Smoke On the Water.” You know, I went to my second guitar lesson when I was 15 and, like, I only had a couple CDs or whatever but I was super into them, and I knew that some of the grunge bands that I loved were really into Neil Young, so I went out and got the brand new Neil Young CD, which was Arc-Weld, so that was where I started. And you know, I loved Sonic Youth, so I got it instantly, so I went to my guitar lesson and I was like, “I want to be like Neil Young, I want to do this feedback,” and all my questions were about that, and “I also want to learn how to play Shonen Knife songs.” And the guy was pretty much disgusted and was like, ‘Why don’t we start you with ‘Smoke On the Water’,” and I was like, “Why don’t I never come back here.” So, you know, all the girls I knew had experiences like that, and that’s totally…that resentful 15-year-old wrote the book as much as “Jessica who worked in the music industry for 10 years and went to shows every night.”
I guess there’s people who will say that there’s a joy in figuring it all out for yourself — like when you figure out the settings on a certain guitar pedal or whatever and you realize that’s how your favorite band got that sound — but more often than not, it’s the frustration of not knowing or being able to figure things out that cuts a lot of people off from pursuing their creative urges from the start. Do you see both sides of that?
Oh I do, I do. I play guitar pretty weirdly — you would never guess I’ve been playing for as long as I have because I am not a terribly committed player, but one of the reasons, you know — and I write about this in the book — it’s like, I have kind of a weird outside style, and that always made me an asset to the bands that I was in. Part of the reason I play that way is because I didn’t play with people for a long time, you know? In part because I was shy, I was scared, I had bad first experiences, but also it was like, lots of times I didn’t have good people to ask for help. And, you know, when I got a little bit older, because I stayed in my bedroom or whatever, there was all this stuff that I didn’t know and I would be in bands and for other people it was just kinda common knowledge and I’m not trying to qualify it as just “boy nerd knowledge,” but it generally was, and, like, I didn’t have a basic understanding of how my amp worked. Things like that. And, you know, part of it was pride, but part of it was I never wanted to look like the dumb girl that didn’t know anything. Sometimes it was embarrassing to be 23 and asking some totally basic question. A lot of the things I would kinda do, I did them by feel, and I think there’s plenty of room in the book for girls to feel all that out, because one of the main things in the book is saying, “You’re gonna figure out how to do it your own way, and doing it your own way is the right way.” You know? I think for me it’s really…I just really want girls to value what is naturally coming out of them, what they are inclined to make, and not think that they have to be like, “Well, the Doors are rock and roll and that’s the template.” I think one of the really good things for a girl who’s making music now, whether people like her or not, is that Taylor Swift, at 17, had two records that made Billboard chart history — she had the number-two and number-eight record or something like that in the same year, and they were songs that she at least co-wrote, if she didn’t write the whole thing, and she’s 17. We didn’t have iconic girl pop stars writing their own songs when I was that age. It’s a rad development to see teenage girls being self-made pop stars. Not necessarily self-made, but it’s their own work, and there’s 40,000 people watching Taylor Swift play at Staples Center because she’s singing about things that mirror their life, and that’s no less valuable and and that’s no less rock and roll. Dudes have had the last 50 years to sing about the women that they’ve loved and lost, you know?
It’s cool because in the book you reference all kinds of music — despite your own background, you’re not just saying that indie-rock or punk or whatever is the only kind of music worth pursuing.
I really didn’t want to do that because I think that’s alienating, and it’s like, the girls who start with Demi Lovato might wind up being into black metal. I tried to make the book really ecumenical in that way — that was one of my major goals, because I don’t think punk rock’s a better way of doing anything.
Even though you’ve kind of come up in that tradition?
I don’t necessarily think that’s the one right way to do it. I just want to encourage all girls to play music and see it as a viable form of self-expression. The main thing, the totally big picture, is that the most fun I’ve ever had in my life is playing in bands and playing music with my friends and especially touring, and I want every girl to have that opportunity and to think of that as something she can do and to have the know-how to make those things happen.
While reading the book, I was thinking about all the various things you’ve done in your career, and that you’re a pretty good role model in the sense that you’ve seen so many things through, whether that’s writing this book or starting bands or being a music critic or starting your own PR firm. What has it been in your life that’s driven you from the idea stage or desiring to do all of these things, to actually going and doing them?
Oh my gosh. You know, it’s a couple things. I could say, “I’ve always been really ambitious!” and that’s kind of weird, but anything that I ever got really excited about, I just started doing it and kinda figured it out as I went. I started publishing a fanzine and writing about music when I was 15 and I had never done that before. I had never felt particularly “called” as a writer, which is funny. I almost did it out of spite in a funny way — there was a publication in Minneapolis and I didn’t like the way they were writing about Babes in Toyland and I had been in punk rock for all of four months and I was totally obsessed with Babes in Toyland, and I called them and I was like, “I think you guys should let me do an interview.” I’m actually friends now with the woman who got that voice-mail and she was like, “You guys, I think we should have this 15-year-old girl write about them” and they were like, “No way.” But eventually I got a job there in high school, but it was like, they wouldn’t let me write about stuff and I was like, “I’m gonna start my own magazine then!’ And that’s basically my whole, like, ‘I’m gonna do it my own damn self then!” I might as well be some cranky old farmer or something. You know? Blame it on my feminist mom or something, but I never thought, like, “That’s something that I can’t do.” I did PR for 10 years for bands that people pretty much previously didn’t not really give a shit about, and it was like, I have this idea that “I know this seems really strange, but I want to do PR that feels ethical,” and it was an extension of writing, like, “I know I understand these bands….” The things I’m passionate about, it’s like I’m evangelical about them. You know? It’s like, I have this information, I want everybody to have it.
What about the writing — the criticism that you’re doing now?
What drives me to do that? I want people to know about good music. And I think that as someone who considers themselves a firm believer in the radical power of feminism, and that I have a voice that people seem to pay attention to, I feel like I have an opportunity to offer a perspective that is not typical for some of the media in which I get to appear. Rock criticism for many, many years was dominated by dudes, and a lot of the pop critics at newspapers are much older guys who are still like, “John Fogerty’s still got it!” And when they write about female performers, they’re always qualifying their looks and stuff like that, so there’s a part of me that’s like, I’m gonna write about whatever, the radical gay disco band, in the newspaper. To me, I kind of have a seditious streak like that. And I feel like that’s the same way with the book. I want to empower 11-year-old girl drummers, because that’s gonna upset some of the norms of the world, you know? That’s my big goal. I’m trying to enact a cultural paradigm shift in everything [laughs]. Not to be too Jesus-y about it, but we all wanna change the world somehow, right? Sort of? I’m trying. I know this isn’t cure-for-cancer stuff, but a lot of the people I know have had their lives changed and given meaning by having avenues for playing music and audiences for their feelings and their output.
How important was the layout of the book, the way the information is delivered on the page?
I just wanted it to look fun, and not like a textbook. That was my main thing. And the people at Workman [Publishing] were so wonderful, and they really let me have full freedom with the book. There were very few changes…the whole way through I had an incredible amount of freedom. And I got to pick who illustrated it – Anders Nilson, who I dunno if you know his work with Fantagraphics, but we went to high school together.
Did you pitch Workman the idea for the book?
That’s the funny thing about the book. I remember the first time thinking, “I wanna write a book like this,” I was probably 16. Because I remember sitting on my bed having this phone conversation with the girl who was playing drums in the band I was in at the time, and I said, “I wish there was a book for us, I wish there was a book that would explain how to do this.” Because we were so flummoxed by like, how do we even get a show? How do we do this? We just wanted to do it, but it’s really frustrating when you’re first starting to play. You have these expectations and you kinda know what being in a band looks like, but it’s like, you can’t make it go. So anyway, that was 17 years ago talking about wanting that book, and then thinking I wanna do that book. So since then I have been literally thinking in the back of my mind, “This is the book I want to do.” But the last five years I had just been freelancing my butt off and just kept thinking, you know, there will be a time where I’ll stop for a couple of months and I’ll write a book and I’ll send it to people, but I didn’t quite know how it worked. And then two Junes ago I got an e-mail from the woman who became my editor at Workman, Megan Nicolay, saying, “Hey, I have this idea for a book and everybody I asked who should I get to do this book said you, and I asked my brother, and he had your phone number.” Her brother is Franz Nicolay, from the Hold Steady, and Craig [Finn] from the Hold Steady is, like, my oldest friend. He saw the first show I ever played, he was one of two people there. So we share a very special memory. I think he was 19 and I was 15. He’s introducing my New York reading, actually. But yeah, she had asked a Bust staffer or somebody and their brother and they were both like, “You should talk to Jessica.” Because I think, I don’t wanna be like “Anybody that knows my writing or knows me knows that that’s the book I’d do,” but it’s kinda true.
Yeah, I think so.
Total no-brainer, right? So she came to me and I was like, cool, done deal — I had to show them that I could write in some voice that wasn’t snarky, cussing…that I could write something that was appropriate for a 12-year-old. So we did all these proposals, the whole back-and-forth, and finally you get the chance to start working on the book and I had a six-month deadline and in the middle of that my dad had an accident and I had to go out to L.A. and drop everything for three months. And then I came back and I was like, okay, I’m ready to get back to writing. And I wasn’t really, but I knew I had to, and they were like, “You have six weeks to finish this if it’s gonna come out next year,” and I was like, ‘Fuuuuck!’ So I was writing like 15 hours a day. I did three to four thousand words a day for 21 days, and I finished the book.
You spoke to a ton of musicians while making the book — Annie Clark from St. Vincent, Andrea Zollo, Craig Finn, Mia Clarke, so many others. Did you have a particular wish list of people you wanted to consult with?
I called anybody whose phone number I could get that I didn’t already have. The thing is, you say, “This is for a book for little girls on how to play music” and people would call me. No one says no to little girls!
I’m sure most of them also wish they had this kind of book when they were younger.
Yeah, and it’s kind of rad that I had access to… I’d be like, “Who knows about guitars? All right, well, I’ll call Jeff [Parker] from Tortoise.” And I know him because sometimes I babysit his daughter. You know? I was like, I am distilling the wisdom of some pretty awesome people. Or Annie Clark — we talked about pedals, but we really talked a lot about performing solo and how to do that and why it’s great and what are the hard parts.
It must have been a lot of fun talking to all of those people and hearing their stories and advice.
It was! I wanted the book to be like, everything is possible. The big challenges of the book were like, okay, this book is for someone who doesn’t drive, they probably don’t have their own money, or if they do they don’t have very much of it, and time is not their own, they might be up against the fact that no one in their house wants them to play music, they might live in an apartment, they might share a bedroom. All these things. Anything that’s a given for an adult musician, you hafta take that out of the equation. And fortunately, because a lot of the people whose expertise I sought our or would bounce ideas off of or say, “How was this for you,” so many of them were people who started playing music when they were 12, 13, 14, and they could immediately tap into that experience where they went from being an amateur to a pro. They had such a wealth of knowledge and they could be so empathetic to the plight of the 14-year-old shredder.
Did you have the book pretty well mapped-out from the beginning, all the stuff you wanted to include?
When we first had the outline I was like, “Oh yeah, this covers everything.” And then when I started writing it, I was like, “No, no it doesn’t! It has to be so much bigger!”
Still, it’s pretty comprehensive. What were some of the things you were forced to leave out?
Well, I simplified some of the recording stuff. The main things that got taken out — I had a really long thing about contracts and how they work, and some stuff that was more technical. I had a longer thing about copyright and owning the rights to your songs, and there is not really a short way to say that stuff. And my editor came to me and said, “Jessica, I know this stuff is really important to you, and it’s valuable information, but no one is gonna use this book to negotiate a contract. Especially if they’re in junior high.” She had a really good point. But all that’s for The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, Part 2 [laughs]. The “junior in college” edition.
Jessica Hopper (pictured above) will be at the Barnes & Noble in Exton, PA at 2 p.m. on Sunday, July 19th, followed by a 6:30 p.m. appearance the same day at T&P Gallery (1143 S. 9th St.).
