Happy 30th Anniversary to Lois’ second studio album Strumpet, originally released February 26, 1993.
In 1981, a decade before putting out a series of influential ’90s solo albums (the best of which is arguably Strumpet), Lois Maffeo left her native Arizona for rainy Olympia, WA. It all started with a T-shirt, surrounded by an aura of mystery. “My high school friend, Shannon, I had actually borrowed a T-shirt from her that said ‘The Evergreen State College’ on it, and people would ask, ‘What is that?’ and I’d be like, ‘I don’t know,’” Maffeo recalls in the early-aughts documentary The Shield Around The K. Eventually, Maffeo asked Shannon the meaning behind the T-shirt, and her friend looked embarrassed. “She was like, ‘Well, my uncle went there and it’s kind of, like, they don’t have grades.” Maffeo saw no reason for embarrassment—a college without grades sounded amazing to her: “I was like, ‘Oooh, no grades?! Awesome!’”
The Evergreen State College was, and is, an experimental state school founded in 1967, one of the few state-sponsored “alternative” schools in the country. Grades and majors don’t exist, and self-directed creative projects replace term papers. The school motto is Omnia extares!— “Let it all hang out”—and the school mascot is a geoduck, a mud-burrowing clam that unmistakably resembles a penis. The town of Olympia embraces quirkiness, geekiness, and wild eccentricity. In the ’90s, it became famous for being the town where Kurt Cobain wrote Nevermind, while living in bohemian squalor with his girlfriend Tracy Marander.
At that time, Olympia was also home to K Records, a label founded by enterprising Evergreen student Calvin Johnson, which brought a spare, poppy (sometimes even folky), re-imagined form of punk rock not to the masses, but to those in the know. A tight-knit cult of Olympia “Calvinists” had begun embracing Johnson’s genre of naïve “love rock” (often featuring themes of childhood) by starting unconventional bands themselves. “It was a whole community of geeks—they were even dismissed by punk rockers,” Michael Azerrad writes in Come As You Are. Nevertheless, Kurt Cobain was a fan and a bit of a Calvinist himself—he had a homemade tattoo of the K Records logo, a shield encircling the letter K, on his forearm. (“To try to remind me to stay a child,” Cobain told Azerrad.) And the Calvinists’ embrace of melodic pop as a legitimate variation on punk influenced Cobain’s own melodic take on punk and grunge.
Years before Cobain arrived in Olympia, Lois Maffeo met Calvin Johnson while they were both freshmen at Evergreen. The two became fast friends based on her record collection. “I remember that she had Nick Drake albums in her collection,” Johnson recalls admiringly. “Now, this is […] before anyone knew who Nick Drake was.” Maffeo was one of Johnson’s loyal sidekicks from the very beginning, as he built his “love rock” empire that came to include not only K Records, but a recording studio, a few different live-music venues, a vast network of international punk rockers, and, eventually, music conventions that brought bands and fans from all over the world to Olympia.
“I remember Calvin was reading this Andy Warhol book, and he was talking about how he really respected how Warhol had made the Factory, and had made this place where people had the space to create,” Maffeo recounts in The Shield Around The K. She wears a sleek black turtleneck, her hair tucked behind her ears, giving the distinct sense of being Olympia’s, or at least Calvin’s, version of Edie Sedgwick. “And I suddenly realized many, many years later,” she continues, “that that’s what Calvin had made, not for himself, but for his community – this place where people could access space, equipment, technology, art.” Despite Maffeo’s gushing over Johnson’s merits, however, it’s important to note that she wasn’t merely a sidekick, or a muse. She wrote for fanzines, produced music videos, played in bands, had her own all-girl radio show, and was an active participant in Olympia’s emerging Riot Grrrl scene, although she’s not overtly associated with it in terms of musical style.
I first became aware of Maffeo as an alternative music-obsessed teen in the early ’90s. The ’90s had come along at just the right time to salve my teenage anxieties about being dorky or weird, or not fitting in (and not really wanting to), and the music was a major part of that. I saw an ad for Maffeo’s 1992 debut Butterfly Kiss in SPIN magazine, along with a short article about the singer-songwriter who, like Cher, went simply by one name: Lois. Two things struck me: Lois looked nothing like Cher—she was makeup-free, unadorned, and had a bookish air about her. And her name, Lois, was offbeat and a little old-fashioned.
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It was a name I associated solely with characters in fiction: Lois Lane, Hi and Lois (the comic strip), and—this one resonated most for me—a geeky-yet-admirable character named Lois Waller who appeared in the book series of every ’80s girl’s childhood, Sweet Valley High. Never content to be bullied or relegated to the fringes, Lois every so often subverted the rigid social order of Sweet Valley, which revolved around identical blond twins Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield (Sweet Valley’s undisputed queen bees) and their popular clique. In one installment, Lois Strikes Back, Lois even gets revenge on Sweet Valley’s arrogant jock, Bruce Patman.
Eventually, I bought Maffeo’s album Butterfly Kiss, and fell in love with her sparse-yet-sophisticated songwriting, delivered with a secretarial seriousness and a lilting, almost imperceptible lisp. Despite the fact that Butterfly Kiss was among the first few full-length albums K Records released (until that point, the label had dealt mainly in compilations and singles), none of Olympia’s purported geekiness, or childishness, could be found on that record. Just a warm guitar tone, lyrics teeming with experience and depth of feeling, and lots and lots of heart. However, some of that subversive, scrappy, on-the-fringes ‘Lois’ energy I sensed from my introduction to Maffeo in SPIN is definitely apparent later on.
In 1999, Maffeo wrote prolifically for Seattle’s alt-weekly The Stranger. She wrote keenly and observantly about music, and comically about a trip to a rodeo. Yet her most memorable article is one titled “Henry Rollins: Fascist Bully.” “If he’s the voice of my generation, I’m going to start lying about my age,” she proclaims, and then goes on to describe Rollins’ propensity to sweat profusely and wear only thin nylon running shorts on stage. “All true Black Flag fans have been covered in Rollins' sweat and have seen his balls,” she writes, before declaring, “He's loud, angry about stupid stuff, and unfunny. He's a jock. He thinks he's the most honest man on earth. But he's just a guy.” (Maffeo’s venom, she explains at the end, stemmed from the fact that Rollins once publicly mocked Calvin Johnson, allegedly grabbing Johnson’s crotch in a show of macho, I’m-punker-than-you dominance.) Lois strikes back!
Another interesting Lois tidbit: she was once in a band called Courtney Love. After graduating from Evergreen, Maffeo moved to Portland in 1985 and became roommates with a woman named Courtney Michelle Harrison. One night, they began discussing potential rock-star names. They either mutually came up with the name “Courtney Love,” or Lois stole Courtney’s diary and learned of her plans there—it’s a point that’s been debated. Nevertheless, later that year Courtney took off for San Francisco with her best frenemy Kat Bjelland (the two would become a sort of grunge Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, feuding for years over who came up with their identical bleach-blond “Kinderwhore” look). Meanwhile, Lois made her way back to Olympia, and then Washington, D.C., crashing at Ian MacKaye’s Dischord House while playing guitar and singing in her new band, Courtney Love. Then, in 1991, the real Courtney’s band Hole released Pretty On The Inside, and Lois’ band disappeared as Hole became ever more well-known.
The next year, Maffeo went solo, embraced her own quirky given real name, and was all the more unique and dynamic for it. She was never going to be a brash, bleach-blond rock star, but as a pensive, confessional brunette, Lois was dynamite. I didn’t follow her career religiously, but eventually, after going off to college and gaining access to a wider variety of records, I bought Lois’ 1993 album Strumpet. While ’92’s Butterfly Kiss had been acoustic in the vein of Courtney Love the band, Strumpet introduced a dreamy electricity to Lois’ sound, and featured both Donna Dresch (of the band Team Dresch) and Codeine’s Stephen Immerwahr on bass, with Molly Neuman on drums.
In addition to turning her guitar electric, Lois flaunts an amped-up confidence on Strumpet. On the title song, she borders, charmingly, on braggadocio as she sings, “You say I'm walking around / Like I own the whole place / Well I do.” A bit later she boasts, “I make a scene / Read all about my scene / In a magazine.” By 1993, Olympia and K Records were a well-publicized cultural happening, and Lois was one of its darlings.
Strumpet begins with one of my favorite songs, “Evening In Paris,” dreamy and reminiscent of rainfall, as though hearing Lois’ hypnotic voice through a mist. She slowly seduces a lover with talk of flowers and the promise of a romantic evening in Paris, only for it all to lead to a vague, distanced frustration. “Red rover, red rover, send Lois right over,” she sings, and the song ends with an unresolved resoluteness. Then comes the rocking, rhythmic “Diopter”—with “kisses that taste like disaster”—and Lois’ voice pulsing with husky confidence when she sings, “Did I tell you, you look like your mother? Tie me up and I’ll tell you another.”
“Return (Your Turn)” is beautifully scattered and artfully discordant, the instruments playing off and against one another, and yet with an unmistakable ’90s coffeehouse vibe. In fact, the song wraps the listener in a comforting familiarity, like a childhood din made on a sun-dappled kitchen floor. The next track, “Trouble With Me,” continues in that vein of innocence as Lois opens with, “Sleeping on the floor /crawl around on all fours,” and then muses philosophically, “The trouble with me is that I’m trouble.”
There are similarities between Lois and her former roommate Courtney Love, and they’re most sharply discerned when Love performs acoustically. Love might have been notoriously dismissive of Olympia (“We look the same, we talk the same, we even fuck the same”) but she loves her a folk-pop melody. And so it’s hard not to hear Hole’s “Sugar Coma” from MTV Unplugged, and not also think of Lois’ “Sugar Rush” on Strumpet. While the Hole song pokes a finger into raw, searing, public grief (Love had just lost her husband), “Sugar Rush” explores the slowed-down solitude of being awake deep into the night, indulging sneakily in something sweet. But the way Lois intermittently switches “sugary” with “shivery,” over a grungy, tension-building melody, evokes anxiety and ecstasy in equal parts. Both women revere a song aching at the edges, and lyrics that evoke much more than they say.
Strumpet’s next song, “Wet Eyes,” is whispery and sparse, like sharing secrets in the dark, and features male-female vocal harmonies with Stephen Immerwahr in the vein of the Pastels. “From A Heart” takes that Pastels sensibility and dials it up a couple notches, conjuring the feeling of spinning on a playground merry-go-round. “Danger UXB,” named after the ’70s British TV series, is moodily crashing and dissonant, with an underlying sense of suspense and reticence—an unexploded bomb as a metaphor for romance.
The aforementioned, sweetly boastful “Strumpet” is one of those songs that make your heart swell, and it’s perfectly placed toward the end to create an overall unity of hope and ballsy-ness on the album. So that no matter what Lois might be going through with avoidant lovers, getting into trouble, indulging in sweet addictions, and getting lost in uncertainty, we know she’s going to be just fine. If only because she’s realistic about who she is, and who she’s not: “I talk too much / I laugh too loud / People stare at me when I'm in a crowd / I swear a lot, wear polka dot / I might be a social disease / But I can't be caught.” And then she launches into the jangly line about owning the whole place, and anyone who doesn’t immediately become a Lois disciple right then and there is seriously misguided.
The next song “MC” has more of that rhythmic rainfall Lois so often achieves with her guitar, and it takes us away from the raucousness of the previous track and back to introspection. Strumpet ends on a cover of the Zombies’ 1965 song “The Way I Feel Inside,” and Lois’ crystal-clear acapella delivery is just as haunting, melancholy, and interior as the original. “But until I can see that you’d really care for me / I’ll keep trying to hide the way I feel inside,” Lois sings, and the song ends with the eerie echo of a coin dropping to the floor, as it does on the original.
Lois put out a few more albums and singles in the ’90s and into the very early 2000s, and then stopped releasing music. She’s still out there—there’s a heartwarming 2018 video of her performing “Strumpet” (“I talk too much, I laugh too loud”) with a little girl on stage at a Los Angeles jazz club. And she still gives off the same aura, of being “the scene’s wiseass auntie,” as Rolling Stone once so astutely put it. But it’s hard not to look back with a sense that the wonderfully singular Lois didn’t get what she deserved from the ’90s, a decade she was so instrumental in helping shape and define. And so forever, #TeamLois.
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