The Girls Blog To Rocking

Jessica Hopper, author of The Girls Guide To Rocking, is currently out on a 12-city publicity book tour, and has agreed to share her adventures with Fender News in the blog below…

8/19 Cleveland—first day of tour

Rolling into Cleveland for the first night of the tour, I was panicking. Flooding. Tornado warnings. People driving 12 mph on the freeway with their hazards flashing dimly through grey sheets of rain. People don’t normally brave these sort of conditions unless, say, they have an arc at their disposal. I rolled up to the reading spot and LIKE MAGIC the clouds parted and the sun came out. I went inside and the clerk said, “This came for you,” and handed me a box. Cupcakes from a friend’s mom. An auspicious enough beginning for the tour. Gifts and clouds parting.

Katie Stelmanis and band arrived in short order, though a few hours later than they’d expected. Crossing the border from Toronto, they had been detained, as the border guards didn’t believe they were in a band because they are girls. They were convinced it was a cover for one of the girls attempting to illegally immigrate—because you know when you move, the first thing you bring is four other people, almost no clothes and your vibraphone. After a few hours they let them go, but with one caveat: Maya, the drummer, had to check back in at the border in four days, which meant in the middle of the tour. Otherwise, she could never come back to the states again. Which, given that she’s been studying percussion for 17 years (since she was 8) would mean her career as a touring musician would be all but over. We mull our options, none of them are great and most of them are just shy of total hassle. Though, really, such is the way of tour and posse-travel.

Ghost Bees with Carmen and Maya.

My reading went great—there were way too many people to fit in the event/reading room at Visible Voice (huge music book section, a must-stop if you are passing through) and so they moved me out into the side yard/courtyard next to the book store and we dutifully dried the chairs for people. There was a 3-year-old in the front row KNAWING upon a dinosaur toy who would occasionally shout a word I had just read, “GUITAAAAR!” “VENUUUUE!” like she was my backup singer/cheerleader.  Met a bunch of cool girls young and old from the Cleveland scene and a woman from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came out and told me about how they are honoring Janis Joplin this year. I am going to have to make a trip back just to check it out—Pearl was the first record I think I really fell in love with, around sixth or seventh grade—Jimi (Hendrix) and Janis were my gods.

After the reading, I raced over to the cool old bar where Katie and her band and the tour openers, Ghost Bees, were playing—and most of the crowd from the reading had made it over too; the bar was able to do all-ages for the night. The place was very Cleveland—seemingly untouched since about 1965, The Happy Dog looked divey without being divey.

We all sidled up to the bar (me with my kiddie cocktail) and hatched the plan. Katie and Maya and their guitarist Carmen will return to Canada after the Baltimore date, stay in Canada for two days and then meet up with us for the last 3 days of the tour, and I will take Romy and Sari—the Ghost Bees (and also Katie’s backup singers—a 2-for-1 kind of deal) in my car, so there will still be a band with me, and Maya won’t be grounded for life by the immigration officials. Everyone played a great set, though we loaded out and headed up home while the last band, Beardo Bandini, was still playing, which was poor form, but everyone understood that Katie and her band were exhausted from their epic drive and stint in detention.

8/21 Cleveland to Pittsburgh

We stayed with my aunt, who regaled us with stories of her all-girl band in southern Indiana in 1965. They had to breakup because the drummer’s parents were the richest people in town and thought it was disgraceful to have a daughter in a rock band, thus thwarting my aunt’s rock dreams.

We hit the road for Pittsburgh, where our show was coinciding with the last night of an art show at the venue, Garfield Art Works, which had these epic, 25-foot long strings of paper dolls running the length of the room and was kind of weirdly appropriate for the theme of the tour. Some cool teenage girls who were into metal came out, and some younger girls came with their entire families. Katie and I got interviewed for the paper, and Katie kept her sunglasses on, like a true rock star.

My favorite part of the night so far is when Katie’s band starts the show and people go from chatty inattentive to stunned silence, elbowing their friends. Katie’s voice is huge and everyone in the band sings like an angel and plays like a pro.  Neither her band nor the Ghost Bees have toured much so people aren’t familiar with them, but they win people over instantly. I really feel like I couldn’t have picked better bands to come with me on this tour—three girls in the band have been playing since grade school, and two are self-taught—and all are incredible talents. The show goes well, they sell a ton of merch and Carmen (the guitarist) stops talking about going home. She has never been on tour and is a nervous traveler. We are all hoping once she started having fun, all her nerves will subside—it would be a real shame if she wasn’t able to do this or other tours—she is a total shredder. Her dad is a famous guitar maker in Canada and she started playing Leadbelly songs at age three.

We crash at my friend’s house on the edge of town—the cool thing is that since the shows are early we are loaded out and back to wherever we are staying by 10 p.m. Our tiredness is psychosomatic, people going, “Oh, I am so tired,” because you think it’s 2 or 3 a.m.—the time it would normally be when we are loading out.

Sometime late that night, I check my phone and I have about 10 new texts—Ira Glass plugged the book and tour on This American Life. WOW.

8/22 Pittsburgh to Brooklyn

Today is a bit of a haul. Romy from Ghost Bees and Carmen from Katie’s band are my co-pilots. There is only room for two because Maya’s bass drum is in the back—we’re touring in two Honda Accords. The drum is borrowed from The New Pornographers, indie rock royalty; we are banking on it as a talisman of success for the tour.

Romy and Carmen, my Canadian payload. Both EXPERT in their knowledge of Joni Mitchell's career.

The drive was uneventful, we started keeping a tally of how many hawks we saw: 48. A plethora. Both Romy and Carmen are EXPERTS on Joni Mitchell’s entire career, tunings, discography—like even up through the 80s. We talk about Jaco Pastorius’ tragic life and death and I try to explain some parts of American culture that they don’t understand—like concealed carry gun laws.

The show tonight is a big mostly-girls line-up and should be pretty huge.  Our friends, Brooklyn hipster faves These Are Powers are headlining. My old friend Amanda Warner, who performs as MNDR, is DJing and playing on the bill. She is a trained jazz bassist and now is a total computer music god—she also recently turned down an offer to be the fourth Yeah Yeah Yeah in order to just focus on her own music, which I think might make her the coolest person I know.

The show goes off without a hitch—some teen girls come with their moms. All of them already have bands, one of them has been busking on her own since she was 14. Obviously, they have it all figured out already, but they bought books anyway.

After the show, we drove across Brooklyn to stay with my little sister, who lives in a loft in Bushwick. For safety’s sake, we unload EVERYTHING out of our cars and into our apartment. I tell the girls in Katie’s band, “Do not leave anything in there unless you are willing to part with it, even if it’s a hairbrush.” The next morning—like magic—I come out to a smashed window and copies of the book and some of the girls’ merch strewn all over the sidewalk. I left books in because, like, who is going to try and make off with 33-pound boxes of a book for teen girls? What I didn’t count on is someone tearing the trunk apart like a wolverine and tossing its contents into a puddle of fresh Brooklyn sewage water. Blurg! The wolverines made off with the stock stereo from Katie’s car, but not before ripping out the ENTIRE center console, making it almost undriveable. They also stole all her CDs and a box of muffins.

We spent the afternoon trying to dry everyone’s wet merch out without warping it, and frantically trying to find a mechanic open in Brooklyn who could push Katie’s console back into place. Eventually it go so late and dire, Ghost Bees and I had to head to Baltimore at top speed in order to still make the show.

8/23 Brooklyn to Baltimore

We got to Baltimore a half-hour after doors (9:30 p.m.), but the venue and the other folks on the bill were really exceptionally chill. Apparently, regardless of what time you list on the flier people show at 11 p.m. Eleven rolled around, and there still were not that many folks, maybe an even dozen. The promoter explains that he has been on a camping trip all summer, so the show-spot has been closed for six weeks, so maybe everyone thinks it is closed. Still.

My friend Rjyan Kidwell—better know as laptop whiz and Baltimore scene godfather, Cex—opens the show with a farcical lecture on the importance of celebrity culture. The premise being that everyone is so stressed out about the economy that no one is paying attention to the trivial ins and outs of celebrity “culture”—so he’s going to catch us up. He starts with a straight and normal report on Angelina Jolie and her children and then moves on to a string of more and more ridiculous and totally made up stories that concludes with a bit about Kevin Federline making an Emo-like experimental album that changes the world, and then stabs his own eye out with a stick at the MTV Video Music Awards to make a statement about art. Everyone who actually showed up for the show was crying with laughter.

I read and Ghost Bees played. They nearly sold out of the waterlogged copies of their album which were on extra-sale for $5.

8/24 Baltimore to DC

We got from B’more to DC in almost exactly 40 minutes and loaded in early so we could go cruise past the White House before the show. It was kind of a toss up though once we got to the venue, Comet Ping Pong, because they have AMAZING pizza and a room full of ping pong tables. I know that sounds ridiculous—seeing the nation’s capitol versus an hour of ping pong, but we have been riding in the car for hours all day and the thought of physical activity is enticing.

Nevertheless, the cruise past the White House won out, but we took a few wrong turns and only wound up driving past the USDA and the Washington monument. I felt bad but the Ghost Bees were ok with it. “Have you ever been to Ottawa, our nations capitol?” The USDA is even pretty cool by comparison, apparently.

The show was awesome, and I met some cool young drummers and guitarists and also got to hang out with Mary Timony, who is my guitar-idol from her days fronting Helium, and is also my friend. Pree and Lucia Lucia, two female fronted local DC bands headlined, and me and Ghost Bees ate about 81 pieces of pizza.

We were hoping Malia and Sasha Obama would make it out—they were no–shows.