Into the Light
Raised on Shostakovich, Joan Wasser Is Making Good in Rock and Roll
by Tricia Brick
 |
 |
| |
Joan Wasser at TT the Bear’s Place. Photograph by Vernon Doucette |
| |
|
Along Mass Ave the Cambridge night is hazy and loud, clumps of rowdy kids in worn jeans smoking outside the Middle East nightclub, drivers playing the Hub lullaby on their car horns. But around the corner at TT the Bear’s Place, the crowd has just fallen quiet. In the spotlight, guitar in hand, Joan Wasser stands in a vintage red dress with a keyhole neckline and uneven hem, plays the first few notes of her set, and — with a rock star’s cojones and a knowing grin — clears her throat and spits on the stage.
It’s another night in the clubs for Wasser (CFA’93), doing what she loves most: performing, backed by a small band, as Joan As Police Woman. Symphony Hall it ain’t, though Wasser has played that venue too. During the first few years that she was touring the world as a member of the art-rock darlings the Dambuilders, Wasser also played in the BU Symphony Orchestra with her school of music classmates. She’s a classically trained violinist who chose BU, in part, to work with Yuri Mazurkevich, who himself had studied under Russian violin virtuoso David Oistrakh.
For Joan As Police Woman, Wasser writes the music and lyrics, sings, and plays guitar, violin, and Wurlitzer. Gutsy, jaggedly luscious torch songs like “Stagger into the Light” and “How Come You’re So Solid Gold?” are laced with a harmonic complexity that reveals her classical training. “I think Mahler’s so rock and roll — that’s my problem!” she says, laughing.
From the time she joined her first band — as a violinist — in her freshman year at BU, Wasser has brought to rock and roll her classical understanding of the science of music. “Joan makes music that’s not entirely accessible, in a world where people are less and less open to things that are difficult to listen to or are complex or nuanced,” says Dave Derby, her former Dambuilders bandmate. “She’ll do things in her music that are mind-boggling and amazing but also melodic and beautiful. I’m waiting for her to write the one song that makes the dumb-asses in suits say, ‘I’m going to spend a lot of money on this person.’”
The critics, at least, have taken notice. Print reviews have called Wasser “one of the indie world’s most dynamic and generous musicians” and her music “too beautiful to go unappreciated.” She may not be a big star in the conventional sense, but the list of people Wasser has played with and who respect her music is a who’s who of independent rock — among them Laurie Anderson, Lou Barlow, Nick Cave, Lou Reed, Jill Sobule, and Nathan Larson. She’s played Lollapalooza, the Montreal Jazz Fest, and Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
Still, she doesn’t expect her eponymous new EP to go platinum, and she doesn’t expect to sell out the FleetCenter anytime soon. Although she cares most about her solo project, she performs as Joan As Police Woman only about once a month, mainly at small hipster clubs and bars in Boston and New York City. She pays the bills by playing, singing, and arranging music for other people — among her recent gigs, New York cabaret act Antony and the Johnsons and Hal Wilner’s tribute to Neil Young.
Wasser is part of a generation of musicians who’ve dedicated their lives to making music on their own terms — and for whom success isn’t defined by gold records won or arenas filled. At a time when the music that’s heard by most Americans is determined by Clear Channel and its 1,200 stations, independent musicians have to be creative, not only in their songwriting but in how they make a living.
“I always find Joan inspiring because music is the most important thing for her, and I feel the same way,” says rock singer Mary Timony (CAS’92), who has played with Wasser since their freshman year at BU. “We both made sacrifices in life for it. When you choose to be a musician, to really do it, you sacrifice. You have to deal with being poor.”
How Come You’re So Solid Gold?
The name Joan As Police Woman reflects Wasser’s onstage love of dressing up, taking on new identities, messing with stereotypes. “I love playing roles,” she says. “That’s the whole basis of the name of my band: one day one of my friends said, ‘You’re channeling Angie Dickinson from Police Woman today,’” referring to the seventies television show. Since her Dambuilders days, reviewers have noted her charismatic stage presence — and her wild dreadlocks and space-age vinyl dresses. She likes tweaking expectations offstage, too. “One day she’ll be dripping in gold chains around her neck, and the next she could be in a sexy sixties garden frock and heels,” says musician Kendall Jane Meade (MET’94). “But she’s always Joan. She’s totally unique.”
Offstage Wasser is gregarious and funny, generous with her time and attention. She’ll sit across from you at the Middle East restaurant, tank top held together with safety pins, eyeliner smeared from the long trafficky drive up from NYC, and tell wild stories about performing in Dresden shortly after the Berlin Wall fell, for a crowd who “all looked like they were in the band the Scorpions, with mustaches and mullets.” She loves people of every shape, color, and kind, so that her punk-rock candor is cut by a gentle openness to anyone she meets. “I can completely blame my parents for that,” she says, “and I’ll thank them till the day I die.”
Wasser and her brother are adopted, and their parents raised their mixed-race family in Norwalk, Connecticut, “around a vast array of races, religions, monetary having and having-not,” she says. And when she talks about “loving diversity in general,” she’s never far from the subject of music. “Sometimes I do feel that I write classical pieces as rock songs, because I don’t feel like I have boundaries,” she says. “I wasn’t reared learning Bob Dylan songs that have three or four chords; I grew up loving Shostakovich. So sometimes I find some of the most complicated harmonies to be the most beautiful.”
Wasser was raised playing the violin, but as a teenager she sold Jolt Cola at the Anthrax, a local punk club, where she cut her teeth on bands such as Black Flag, Bad Brains, Sonic Youth, and The Fall. In the boys’ club of the punk scene, she was influenced early by women musicians like Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and The Fall’s Brix. “I remember just being like, ‘Oh my god, they are all-powerful goddesses,’” she says.
Although she loved music of every kind, her own playing was focused on the classical. For college, she sought a liberal arts school with a distinguished music program — and in a city big enough to feed her craving for rock and roll. She applied for early admission to BU and didn’t consider another school.
At CFA’s freshman music orientation, guitarist and violist Mary Timony caught Wasser’s eye right away. “I remember Mary had blue cowboy boots on and a black scarf draped over her head,” Wasser says fondly. “I was like, ‘My lady!’” Timony too had been influenced early on by the punk scene, and the two young classical musicians quickly bonded in their passion for rock music.
“I thought I was going to do classical music,” Wasser says. “I loved, I loved, I loved listening to rock, but it didn’t make sense in terms of playing the violin. Mary was definitely a major force in my life. She was making these songs, and I’d play with her. We even played shows together as a duet, doing instrumental guitar-violin stuff.”
George Howard (CAS’92) was an English major who played guitar for the alt-country group the Lotus Eaters. The band was coming together, but Howard felt their sound wouldn’t quite be complete without a fiddler. He was walking through Kenmore Square one day when he spotted the scarlet-haired Wasser riding her bike down Comm Ave with a violin case strapped to her back. He remembers hollering something like, “Hey, you play violin?” — then he asked her to join his band. And the Lotus Eaters got a new sound.
“Joan’s a star,” Howard says. “She’s a ball of fire. I’ve worked with other classically trained musicians, and there’s always a moment when you say, ‘Just play whatever you want.’ Classically trained musicians don’t do that; they don’t improvise. But Joan took to it like a duck to water.”
The Dambuilders’ Derby first spotted Wasser onstage during a Lotus Eaters show at TT’s. He and guitarist Eric Masunaga had recently moved to town from Hawaii and were already getting some attention in Boston and elsewhere. Wasser’s rock-star stage presence convinced him she’d be a stellar replacement for the violinist who’d recently quit the band.
Wasser played her glitter-covered five-string violin like a second lead guitar, and her passion for punk rock helped give the Dambuilders the hard-edged sound that became their signature. She recorded her first album with the band in 1991, the year Nirvana’s Nevermind detonated alternative rock into America’s consciousness. Desperate to sign the next indie rock superstar, the major labels scrambled to find another alt-crossover band. The Dambuilders made three albums with Warner/Elektra/Atlantic’s EastWest label and toured with Top 40 groups like Better Than Ezra and Third Eye Blind. “We really capitalized on that ‘irrational exuberance,’ the music industry just throwing money at bands,” Derby says.
Even as the Dambuilders were recording for EastWest and touring internationally, Wasser was working her way through school as a cocktail waitress at Lansdowne Street clubs like Bill’s Bar and Venus de Milo. She also worked as a bike messenger, as a salesgirl at the vintage clothing shop the Garment District in Kendall Square, and as an art installer and bookstore clerk at the Institute for Contemporary Art. After graduating, she played in a number of bands, from indie rock projects like Mind Science of the Mind to the jazz group Sex Mob, and contributed violin to other people’s records and tours. “We’d always made a little bit of money,” she says. “I knew I was going to make my living doing this. I was going to figure out a way to make it happen.”
But the music industry was changing. The major labels’ indie-rock boom of the early nineties proved ephemeral, and musicians who weren’t interested in making radio-friendly commercial music soon found themselves expendable.
In 1996 Wasser moved to Brooklyn, where she continued to expand the circle of musicians who’d call on her for studio or touring work. When the Dambuilders dissolved the next year, she decided to devote herself fully to making it on her own. For years she had wanted to sing and write her own songs, but playing in other people’s bands had never really given her the opportunity.
And although as a kid she’d sung and tap-danced on community stages and had never lost her love of performing, in the self-conscious mire of adolescence she had quit singing. Her violin became her voice.
“The voice as an instrument, as your own instrument, is so exciting and so terrifying,” she says. “When you’re playing an instrument, the music is not coming out of your physical body. With singing, you got what you got. It’s like facing all your fears.”
Stagger into the Light
In 1997 her boyfriend, singer Jeff Buckley, drowned in Memphis. It was a turning point. She joined with Buckley’s band to play for his memorial service. “We started playing together and also grieving together,” she says. They continued to perform together as Black Beetle.
Black Beetle never put out an album. But as Wasser began writing her own songs and performing them — singing them — onstage, she realized that she wanted to take her music in a new direction. “Through that project,” she says, “I learned that I was interested in owning something 100 percent. At a certain point you stand up and say, no, that was compromising. And I will be the compromiser in a lot of parts of my life, but this isn’t one of them.”
She played her first solo show in 1999, while she was still part of Black Beetle, and over time her solo work became her central focus.
She describes her music for Joan As Police Woman as “American soul music,” encompassing country, R&B, and soul, punk rock and classical, the whole spectrum of songs that have shaped her life. Mahler and Marley, Nina Simone and Dmitry Shostakovich — to Wasser, it’s all just music, the woolly and wondrous sounds of everyday life, and she’s willing to follow wherever it takes her.
