Cindy Lawson's "Long Live the Resistance!" EP
Ex-Clams/Whoops Kitty Frontwoman Returns to Her Punk Roots on New EP
As Rowdy Roddy Piper so cannily noted, there’s a time for chewing gum and a time for expressing yourself and Minneapolis musical mainstay Cindy Lawson simply ran out of gum. That’s the simplest way to explain her loud, left, punk and proud 4-song EP, ¡LONG LIVE THE RESISTANCE!, a snarling blast of Minnesota not-so-nice addressed to the jackbooted interlopers of ICE, and their ilk. It's what the situation called for in Lawson's estimation.
“I recorded a bunch of songs, but the more recent songs were just getting madder and madder,” Lawson reports. “Then earlier this year, that shit went down. [The public murders by ICE of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.] So it's like I had some pretty love songs, and then I had these pissed-off rock songs. I would have have people listen to them and say, ‘This would not work on a single record.’”
“I just decided to make it a four-song piece that was basically fuck 'em,” she laughs. “It just seemed the best way to kinda capture this moment, and to get these songs out for people to hear.”
Lawson’s unabashed in her sentiments, as on “Eat the Rich,” where she suggests there’s a “special place in hell for people like you, can you feel the fire?” The searing garage-punk of “Burn” is chunkier than a cherry cluster bomb and twice as devastating, as she calls out conservative misogynists and reprobate racists:
“You kill what you don’t understand / does it make you feel like more of a man…
I’m unimpressed with your sub-mediocrity / You long for a past that never existed / your default mode is cruel and twisted”
Lawson comes by the grimy four-on-the-floor rumble and pedal-to-the-metal attitude honestly. She led one of the first all-female punk acts in Minneapolis in the eighties, The Clams, playing their first show in October of 1985.
Girls Just Want To Have Fun
Lawson was at the forefront of a burgeoning lane as in Minneapolis, and across the country as women started pushing their way into the growing underground scene. (This next part’s gonna be a real trip down memory cul-de-sac for certain local heads.)
“At the time there was a cover band called the babysitters, and then there was also a cover band called, No Man's Land. They did metal,” Lawson recalls. “A couple months before us there was the Blue-up? I had an ad in the Sweet Potato or City Pages looking for other female musicians and Rachel Olsen actually reached out to me, just to say hello and that she had started an all-female band… then Lori Barbero started getting Babes in Toyland together, which was a four-piece before they became a three-piece and then there was the Zuzu Petals and Smut.”
Like many of her generation, Lawson didn’t really see herself as a musician or performer at first. It took seeing the Suburbs at the Longhorn for it to really click for her. Not only was it possible, but it had a certain grimy mystique to it.
“In the '70s, the bands were on huge stages playing arenas,” she says. “[But] when I snuck into the Longhorn, everything was so exciting and different and powerful. Everybody was sweating, wearing their new wave suits, you know? Everything about the way they presented themselves, the way they danced, and the way the people reacted to them – it was just a revelation, and really cool to see. A couple years later, how Têtes Noires paved a path of, ‘We don't have to fit in a box of what you think an all-female band looks like.”
Clams Soup Too Soon
Lawson voices regret that the Clams ended as quickly as it did. It was undoubtedly a lot of fun, but it was also a whole new thing. In retrospect, they probably burnt each other out when with a little more patience they might’ve lived beyond the end of the honeymoon.
“Once you get saved or enlightened by the idea of rock and roll and how it's not exclusive, anybody can do it, anybody can be in a band, once you get that idea, and you get your band together, and we, the four of us women were living in each other's pockets. It was extremely intense,” Lawson recalls.
“We had a black van, and I just know that when we pulled up anywhere and the door opened, probably like tons of smoke came out, and we fell of the van,” she laughs. “It was an incredible time, and so unlike anything else that it's almost hard to describe.”
There’s a naive optimism that leads you to attempt things no thoughtful person would, and that’s why we have nice things, to some extent.
“You're in your 20s, and you and feel like you can do anything,” Lawson says. “You feel like the sky's the limit, and why isn't everybody recognizing how amazing you are. The smart-assery and just kind of ‘We're too fucking cool, and if you don't like it, fuck you.’ You know, that kind of attitude.”
But like Icarus, they flew too close to the sun and didn’t bring sunscreen.
“We just ran it into the ground,” sighs Lawson. “if I would offer advice to younger bands today, it's that you can take a break. You don't have to play every fucking weekend or every couple weekends. You can actually maybe take a month or two or maybe six months off.”
Almost Famous
After the Clams, Lawson had a brush with near-fame, when English bassist Sara Lee (Gang of Four, B-52s, Robert Fripp) recommended her for a gig playing with Steve Jordan, the legendary Late Night/SNL drummer, who graduated from drumming for Keith in his band the X-Pensive Winos to filling Charlie Watts’ shoe. (Making his previous gig in John Mayer Trio seem quaint.)
Jordan had a combo with Charlie Drayton (Rolling Stones, X-Pensive Winos, Divinyls, The New Pornographers) and Sara Lee called the Raging Hormones and, they had looked at different female guitarist/singer starting with Chryssie Hynde. He must’ve liked the feel because Jordan kept trying to replicate the vibe, with Britta Phillips (Jem), Cindy Wilson (B52s), Patty Donahue (The Waitresses) and even Carole King’s kid, Louise Goffin.
Then, in one of those rare fortuitous moment of the creative world you are literally living for, Lawson was recommended to Jordan via Sara Lee, who had solicited the late Lori Trewsky for female singer/guitarist leads during an interview for Trewsky’s magazine, Bitch.
“They flew me out and I practiced with them, and they decided to choose me to be in their band,” Lawson says. So she moved to New York.“I should have known knowing that history that it was gonna be doomed. You had people in the band who were pretty highly paid studio musicians."
“We had a showcase for all these record labels, this was '90, I think. But nobody bit," she says. "I can't help but believe it's because when labels are looking for new bands, they're looking for hungry people that are gonna sleep on floors and tour their ass off, you know? At that point, Jordan could just name a number, if somebody asked him.”
Jump Forward a Few Decades
Lawson had some other misfortunes beyond the failed band, and returned to Minneapolis, which turned out well. She formed another band, Whoops Kitty, in the nineties and afterwards settled into a life beyond the spotlight.
But when the pandemic hit, she got a bit antsy. She was working from home, watching TV while people were learning French and writing books with their newfound opportunity. It felt like a chance to try something. It sort felt like a necessity.
“It just felt like anything could happen and anything in a bad way,” explains Lawson. “So it was just really important to me to feel like I could create something that was worthwhile. I had been taking guitar lessons with my friend, Keith Patterson. So I wrote a couple songs and I asked a couple people to play on it and then I recorded them and put them up on Bandcamp.”
Sure enough a St. Paul musician, Georgia Conley Brahman (Miss Georgia Peach, Short Fuses, Beebe Gallini) saw her live, and loved the songs.
“She referred me to this guy in Boston who has the Rum Bar label, Lou Mansdorf. I sent my stuff to him, and he's like: ‘Wow, this is great. I wanna put it out, and wanna put out all the Clam stuff too,’” Lawson says. It was sort of a shock. “I wasn't even sure if it was just gonna be a recording project or if it was actually gonna be playing.”
But Lawson reached out to old Whoops Kitty guitarist Jerry Lefkowitz, and scene drummer Mark Deveraj (High on Stress, Heavy Sixers, Whiskey RNR Club Mpls), then recruited Kathy “PONY” Hixon-Smith, who plays bass in her husband’s duo, The Melismatics, evening up the chromosomes.
“It's really fun having another woman in the band, you know?” asks Lawson. “It just feels a little more balanced.”
That led to Lawson’s 2022 solo debut, New Tricks. Evidently there’s still more where that came from. While those were prettier pop/rock stuff, and she thought that would be the natural place for her, she kept coming back to these louder, more raging tunes.
“Things have been going down the shitter for a couple years,” she grimaces. “I mean, I'm still in love with my husband, and my kids, and I still have love you know, for everybody. But fucking A, I'm pissed off. And it's cathartic. A lot of women my age and older come up and they're like, ‘Thank you for screaming and yelling and, know, making a fuss.’
“I don't mind being political. Being sincere is the only way I can do this. If I'm not honest with how I feel, then there's just no point,” Lawson says. “As a human being, as a parent, you just have that sense that whatever we create now is the future for our children. Plus Minnesota is nothing without its mutual aid.”
To that end, profits from the record release, are being donated to the defense fund for the Minnesota 15.
