Happy 30th Anniversary to Babes In Toyland’s second studio album Fontanelle, originally released August 11, 1992.
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“The Babes are going to rock! And roll! And laugh! And rage! They are the new great woman band of the nineties, the decade of women! And now, from Minneapolis, Babes In Toyland!” – Dr. Timothy Leary, Lollapalooza ’93
Day after sweltering day, Babes In Toyland hit the stage of Perry Farrell’s zeitgeist-y and newly minted Lollapalooza festival in the Summer of 1993, assaulting the mosh pit with tsunamis of heavy sound, ear-piercing shrieks, and a take-no-shit attitude broken only every so often by drummer Lori Barbero’s deliberately corny jokes. Kat Bjelland, looking like a pretty-but-possessed platinum-haired doll, played her red Rickenbacker ferociously, punctuating it all with cat-in-heat wails, low moans, and guttural screams. Barbero beat the drums like a hard-hitting witchdoctor, her blond dreads flying everywhere. Tall, willowy Maureen Herman, with an air of punk-rock secretary, plucked at her bass while lurching back and forth in closed-eyed reverie. And whenever they played favorites like the combative “Bruise Violet” or the blistering “Right Now,” the pit became a roiling sea of glorious ’90s angst.
They were at the pinnacle of their career, the only all-women band on the bill, and the only band to be introduced by LSD pioneer Timothy Leary before every performance (Leary, who had his own “sideshow” at Lollapalooza—a talk about expanding consciousness—was a hardcore Babes fan). Every journalist on the tour absolutely crawling with media wanted to know what it was like to be a woman in rock. It was a question Bjelland especially hated. “We’re not a girl band, you fucker,” she told a male reporter a year earlier. “We’re just a band. Don’t you know the fucking difference?” Still, the attention felt good, especially when you consider that a little over a year earlier, right before recording their major-label debut Fontanelle, Babes In Toyland almost didn’t make it.
Named for the fragile soft spot on a newborn’s head, Fontanelle first got into my hands in a dusty Minneapolis record store that same summer Babes were on their Lollapalooza tour, or it might have even been the summer of ’92, when the album was first released. Either way, I was practically still a baby myself—a fresh-faced 16-year-old living in Germany as an American army brat—but my parents were from Minnesota, and so we went back every summer to visit. I kept up with all the stateside music releases via a SPIN subscription, and I kept detailed lists of everything I wanted to purchase during our summers in Minnesota. Fontanelle had made the list.
The photo of the creepy doll on Fontanelle’s cover intrigued me, as did the band’s reportedly heavy sound. Loud, antagonistic punk rock had stirred something in me for as long as I could remember, partly because my slightly younger brother Nik, who had been a skateboarding prodigy in elementary school—able to catch impressive air on a ramp and land all sorts of complicated tricks at the age of seven—had us spending lots of time at skate parks and competitions with high-schoolers much older than we were. At every skatepark, some sort of thrash—Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies—blared from some speakers. Until Babes In Toyland, I had never heard women rock as hard as those male-dominated bands. I also never would have expected Minnesotans, with their mild manners and über-politeness (“Minnesota Nice”) to rock like that. You could be passive aggressive, just not aggressive. With lines like “You fucking bitch, well I hope your insides rot,” the Babes were firmly in the aggressive camp.
Actually, the only, or the main, reason Babes In Toyland were from Minnesota is because Bjelland had decided to take off for Minneapolis after failing to launch a band—Sugar Babydoll or Sugar Babylon, depending on who you ask—in San Francisco with her best frenemy Courtney Love. “I like playing music, and she likes being famous,” Kat offered by way of explanation for why their band didn’t work out in Courtney Love: The E! True Hollywood Story. “It was too high drama. I just wanted to go play garage music and she wanted to be more pop.”
In Portland, not far from where Bjelland grew up, the two had struck up a fast friendship after meeting at the Satyricon nightclub, and then they took off for San Francisco as part of an almost spiritual search for the city that would host the next big music scene. We all know now that that ended up being Seattle, but Bjelland wasn’t completely deluded in her instincts towards Minneapolis. The city was home to Soul Asylum, The Replacements, Hüsker Dü, Prince, and a small but vibrant underground scene.
Lori Barbero, the daughter of a Filipino U.S. Army veteran and a Minnesota-Scandinavian mother, was the queen of that scene. With her bubbly personality, big laugh, free-flowing jokes, and ethos of inclusion, Barbero had been nicknamed “The Ambassador” by Minneapolis alt-weekly City Pages: “Just about every band that’s toured through here in the past 10 years has crashed on Lori’s floor. Hang out at any underground rock joint in the Western World and you’ll run into somebody who knows her personally.” Even Prince knew her, telling Babes biographer Neal Karlen that he remembered Barbero by the fingerless lace gloves she always wore when she waitressed at First Avenue, the Minneapolis nightclub made famous by Purple Rain.
Although Barbero didn’t play an instrument, Bjelland recognized something in the dreadlocked scene queen that told her Barbero would be an amazing drummer—maybe her booming laugh. Also, Bjelland wanted to form a band with people who didn’t have a lot of experience playing—that way, she figured, they would play from a place of raw, gut instinct. Love soon followed Kat to Minneapolis. “Courtney came out, practiced with us once or twice—on bass, which was probably not her instrument anyway—and then she stayed a little bit longer and a bunch of crap happened, and she split back to LA,” Bjelland said.
Soon, Barbero found Michelle Leon, a petite 19-year-old who had grown up in the upper-crust Minneapolis suburbs but had punk tendencies, and recruited her to the band. Leon was dating Grant Young, the drummer for Soul Asylum, and Young had an extra bass lying around his apartment. The Babes practiced and practiced, until they finally hit a sweet spot. They toured like crazy, playing in dingy little clubs all over the Midwest, and eventually, they recorded their first album, Spanking Machine, in 1990.
The Babes’ touring expanded to include gigs in larger cities, and it was that same year that Tim Carr, an A&R guy for Warner Bros./Reprise, discovered them one drizzly night playing the Pyramid Club in New York City. Carr was originally from Minneapolis, which is probably the only reason he decided to extend an already long night to see the Babes play—“I went out of civic duty”—but they brought the fire, as they did nearly every night, and Carr scratched away furiously in the little black notebook he always carried. He began pursuing them in earnest, because he “had never seen a girl band rock so hard.” In fact, as Karlen documents in Babes In Toyland: The Making and Selling of a Rock and Roll Band, Carr put his career on the line, pushing Babes so hard to his superiors at Warner Bros. that they often thought he was crazy.
And then, after Babes had signed a contract and were a mere two months away from recording Fontanelle, everything began to fall apart. After breaking up with Young, the Soul Asylum drummer, Leon had begun dating Joe Cole, a roadie for Black Flag. One night in L.A., Cole and Henry Rollins were mugged, and Cole was shot dead. Devastated, Leon could barely carry on, much less tour and perform night after night. Though they were gutted by the idea of leaving Leon behind, Bjelland and Barbero were determined to keep the band going, and they recruited their old friend Maureen Herman, who was studying in Chicago at the time, to play bass. Herman left her orderly life in Chicago, and her dreams of being a writer, for rock ‘n’ roll.
Babes recruited Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth to produce Fontanelle. The recording process was painstaking, and painful, but the resulting record is a work of art. The album’s opener, and overall centerpiece, is “Bruise Violet,” with its ominous pounding-drum opener, spat-out chorus of “Liar, Liar, Liiiiiiiarrrrr,” and spinning, careening melody. The song is about Bjelland’s rivalry with Courtney Love, Love’s tendency to follow her around, and her alleged copying of Bjelland’s signature “Kinderwhore” look. Carr, the A&R guy, pulled some strings so that his friend, the famous artist Cindy Sherman, appeared in the song’s music video as a “Courtney/Kat” doppelganger. (Sherman also shot Fontanelle’s scary-baby cover art).
If you didn’t know that “Bruise Violet” was about Love, it could also be about a lying, cheating guy—that’s the beauty of the song. The line “You’ve got this thing that really makes me hot,” captures a push-pull and passion of emotion, and the song is uncompromising in its enraged vehemence, which weaves throughout Fontanelle and knows no gender. Later, we hear it again on “Bluebell,” where Bjelland confronts two roadies for another band who attempted to sexually assault Barbero one night on tour: “You know who you are / You’re dead meat, motherfucker / You don’t try to rape a goddess,” Bjelland seethes and shakes and shrieks from the soul.
Meanwhile, on “Handsome & Gretel,” Bjelland cackles and catcalls while talk-singing all about Gretel, who admits to a stupid, vapid Ken-doll Hansel that she’s a proud and total slut: “My name is Gretel, yeah / I’ve got a sloppy-ass slot.” “Right Now,” my favorite song on Fontanelle, begins with languid drumming and an eerie bedtime prayer, before Bjelland shrieks like a banshee through half-clenched teeth. It’s this loud-quiet dynamic—a contrast between the understated and gothic and the all-out wailing and rocking—that makes Fontanelle such a beautiful fever dream.
“Blood” rocks and pounds hard, and its lyrics are vague, though it appears to be about some sort of degeneration of the drug-and-alcohol kind: “Dear liver, down on your knees / I never wanted to be alone,” but it’s layered with moments of ethereality, where between all the screaming, it’s obvious that Bjelland can really sing—and beautifully.
“Magic Flute” is a venture into the slightly psychedelic, and the only song to feature Barbero singing; she has a nice voice, low and lilting and with a dash of sass. “Won’t Tell” alternates between slow singsong and scream, while the following song, “Quiet Room” is a low-key, deft instrumental that breaks up the record’s hard rocking in an artful way.
“Spun” begins in languor and alternates with thrash-y bursts of screamo. “Short Song” brings us back to the full-on rock, with Bjelland punctuating furious playing with some of her heavy-metal “huhs” and “hahs” and guttural grunts. “Jungle Train” positively grinds and growls, and “Pearl” poses and preens in an Iggy sort of way. “Realeyes” pulses with lightning strikes of feedback, and culminates in a storm of screaming to the heavens.
Many albums would wind down at this point, but “Mother,” Fontanelle’s second-to-last song, twirls, drives, and hits with fists, while Bjelland sings of familial strife, likely influenced by her own mother’s up and leaving her at a young age. For the final song, “Gone,” Bjelland saved up all the beer bottles Babes had emptied during the recording process so that the sound of shattered glass accompanies the feedback-heavy instrumentals.
In the Christmas of ’94, I’d end up seeing Babes In Toyland perform almost all of these songs at the famous First Avenue. My parents had recently separated, and my dad and brother had moved back to Minneapolis for a year. My brother didn’t typically like chick bands but, ironically, Hole’s Live Through This (1994) had come out that year and Kurt Cobain’s widow had made him much more open to the idea of women rocking. So he had gotten us tickets to the show as my Christmas present.
The album I had bought in that dingy Minneapolis record store a couple years prior, though fantastic, didn’t come close to capturing the conflagration that was the Babes on stage, and I witnessed what A&R guy Tim Carr had, thankfully, decided to so doggedly pursue and capture after that rainy night at the Pyramid Club. “Acerbic scratched raw lyrics, quixotic chaotic melodies, Dionysian delivery, fiercely independent iron will,” Carr had scrawled in his little black notebook. And the rest is history.
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