Happy 30th Anniversary to PJ Harvey’s debut album Dry, originally released March 30, 1992.
I can’t remember which image first introduced me to PJ Harvey—whether it was her chapped lips pressed against the CD jewel case on Dry, or if it was the stark black-and-white portrait of her smiling impishly with wet hair in mid-air on the cover of Rid of Me (1993). The two albums were released in such close succession, and have so many overlapping themes, that I often think of Rid of Me as a continuation and building on of Dry, or of Dry as a purposeful, conceptual Part I to Rid of Me’s Part II.
Rid of Me is full of gristly, visceral anger, and it was written after the breakup of Harvey’s first-ever romantic relationship. The album is a splendid shock, and a masterpiece. Writing about Rid of Me for SPIN in 1993, Joy Press said that listening to it for the first time made her think of a quote by Diamanda Galás: “Women need to think of themselves as predators rather than prey.”
On the other hand, Dry is radically chafing and, yes, angry, but also remarkably vulnerable in that it documents in confessional detail a young woman coming of age and into her sexuality, knowing full well that it’s a raw deal but determined to make the best of it anyway.
Harvey was in her very early 20s when both Dry and Rid of Me were made, and she had grown up fairly isolated on her family’s sheep farm in Dorset, in the south of England. Still, she had a wicked, whip-smart sense of things, which could be witnessed in her interview with Jay Leno in ’93 when she described in minute, excruciating detail, with a sly smile, her wringing of sheep’s testicles on her family’s farm, until said testicles dropped off.
I’m pretty certain I bought both albums, Dry and Rid of Me, at the same time. In ’92/’93, I was growing up on an American army base in Germany, and, though there were plenty of kids at my high school who were into “alternative” music, they were mostly just into grunge. So, the main way I discovered new music was through subscriptions to Rolling Stone and SPIN, which I would pore over like textbooks or primers, keeping detailed lists of all the artists and albums I wanted to check out. Then I would buy them with my babysitting money whenever we visited my grandparents in Minnesota in the summers.
The first song of Harvey’s that hooked me was “Sheela Na Gig,” with its chorus of “Gonna wash that man right outta my hair.” It’s a line from the 1958 film South Pacific, about life on a naval base in Polynesia during WWII. The song is full of sass and it’s sung by Mitzi Gaynor, hair full of Technicolor suds, with a backup chorus of the other women on the naval base. For obvious reasons, South Pacific used to play constantly on AFN, the Armed Forces Network, the only American television channel available to us in Germany.
Gonna wash that man right outta my hair—I remember my former babysitter Debi, platinum hair like Mitzi Gaynor’s, swaying her hips and singing along with the TV. Debi babysat us, a whole gaggle of kids, when she lived in the army housing across the street from our elementary school, and because babysitting was one of the only jobs available to army wives. Her husband Ned was a major who was planning on getting out of the army soon, and Debi kept her couch covered in plastic until they could move back to Utah and she wouldn’t have kids roughhousing all over it anymore. She loved us, though, and we loved her, and I think that’s part of the reason I loved “Sheela Na Gig.” Years later, it made me think of Debi, a modern-day Mitzi Gaynor trying to make the best of life on a military base.
Debi’s Mormon sensibilities would have surely been tried, though, by Harvey’s interpretation of South Pacific’s most iconic song. The title of Harvey’s version—“Sheela Na Gig”—is taken from stone carvings, called sheela na gigs, that appear on castles, cathedrals and other fortresses throughout Europe, but mostly in Ireland and England. In short, sheela na gigs are carvings of naked women exposing their genitals—spreading their vulvas porno-style. It’s where the song’s second chorus comes from: “Sheela Na Gig / Sheela Na Gig / You exhibitionist.”
The song makes use of Harvey’s beloved Pixies’ quiet-loud dynamic, with verses spoken over a sparse rhythm juxtaposed against a wailing chorus over raucous, rollicking guitars. Harvey sings of trying to get her lover’s attention—“Look at these my childbearing hips / Look at these my ruby red, ruby lips / Look at these my work-strong arms”—only for her lover to answer with, “You exhibitionist.” Borrowing a line from another movie, Stephen King’s 1976 blockbuster Carrie, Harvey’s lover scoffs at her breasts—“Please take those dirty pillows away from here.” (Later, on Rid of Me, we see another odd mashup of pop-culture references on “50 Ft. Queenie,” which combines Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie” with 1958’s Attack of the 50 Foot Woman).
Much of Dry deals with the theme of a young woman’s pride in her ripening sexuality, only to be ruthlessly rejected for it. This theme can be seen on the album’s opening track, “Oh My Lover,” where the narrator pleads with her beloved in the first line to not cast her aside—“Oh my lover, don’t you know it’s alright / You can love her and you can love me at the same time.” Taken literally, it’s full of humiliating codependency. But I’ve always interpreted it as wildly tongue-in-cheek, apparent in how Harvey draws out those first words with gasping, gothic melodrama—Ohhhhhhhh myyyyyyy loooooveerrrrrrr. And why else would her lover speak the words of Carrie’s wacko religious freak of a mother on “Sheela Na Gig”—“take those dirty pillows away from here”—if not to highlight his utter absurdity?
We see the same dynamic on “Dress,” Dry’s first single, where Harvey gets gussied up in a “filthy tight” dress she’s picked out in hopes of pleasing her lover, only for him to condescend, “You purdy thang, but I bought you beautiful dresses,” ostensibly meaning dresses that aren’t so slutty. The black-and-white video, shot by Harvey’s longtime friend and collaborator Maria Mochnacz, features a vintage paper-doll theme. Much like “Sheela Na Gig,” “Dress” is such a rocker that it’s easy to entirely ignore the words of Harvey’s lover in favor of the thunderous walls of sound. Put on that dress / I’m going out dancing.
At the end of my sophomore year of high school, I had just met Shana through the school play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “I thought you were a bitch when I first saw you,” she told me once backstage, which made me like her even more. There were four of us—Shana, Nikki, Koryn and me—and we were going out dancing all the time. The drinking age in Germany was 16, and so, depending on one’s parents’ willingness to let you go out, the nightlife was your oyster. My parents were in the middle of a divorce, and so their attention was elsewhere. Nikki’s mom was only semi-cool. And Koryn’s mother was strict. Shana’s parents? Their one rule was: If you puke and miss the toilet, you have to clean it up.
So we stayed over at Shana’s apartment on base nearly every weekend, taking taxis out to the university section of the city, which had the best nightclubs. Our favorite was the Schwimmbad, a multi-level rock club with packed, sweaty dancefloors on five different floors. It was several months before I would have my first real boyfriend, and every time I think of that summer dancing, I’m hard pressed to think of another time when I felt more beautiful and free.
The second song on Dry, after “Oh My Lover,” is “O Stella.” This time, we get none of Harvey’s exaggerated gasping in the first line, only the matter-of-fact “Stella-Marie, you’re my star.” It’s likely a play on “Stella Maris,” another name for the Virgin Mary, given that the narrator looks upon Stella like a statue—“Stand on ground, look up at her / Just hanging in gold stone / Just hanging there, face froze.” But the song contrasts sharply with the preceding “Oh My Lover” in that we have the narrator now worshipping a female figure, and because of the casual way in which she addresses her, this worship seems healthy, maybe even feminist.
Shana’s mom had us all call her Karen, even her own kids, because that was her name. For a while I worshipped her, even wished she were my own mom, because she was just so heartbreakingly cool. Shana told us that Karen was an outlaw in their home state of Arizona (for what, I never found out), and that only added to her mystique. She didn’t even care if we cussed or smoked around her. Karen was married to Skip, a tattooed soldier at least 10 years younger than she was, Shana’s second or third stepdad.
Joe, ain’t you my buddy thee / Stay with me when I fall and die / always thought you’d come rushing in / to clear the shit out of my eyes. “Joe,” a song at the center of Dry, is manic and madcap and driving—there’s no quiet-loud this time, just loud and utterly bombastic. “Joe ain’t you my buddy thee / lay my enemies out in lines / come in close I’ll wash your feet / With my hair I’ll mop them dry.” And who the hell is Joe? He could be anyone from the average Joe, to Jesus, to G.I. Joe, impossible to know. But there’s a definite war theme here.
We see it again on “Hair,” a quasi-epic about Samson and Delilah. There’s the push-pull of their mythological romance, with Delilah at first thrilled to be Samson’s “stunning bride,” only for her to eventually do the deceitful deed of cutting off her groom’s hair. “Delilah my babe! / You lied in my face! / You cut off my hair / You lied in my bed!” Samson screams.
Karen and Skip had a tumultuous relationship, one with lots of drinking and fighting, and it started to spill over into our ability to stay over at Shana’s house on the weekends. Shana began missing school to take care of her young siblings, and because she was determined to be the first in her family to go to college (she’d end up attending Harvard), she couldn’t go out as much as she started nearing her senior year. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the end of an era.
Still, Shana took a nerdy, brainy approach to music like me, and we’d trade tapes and CDs, even after I stopped going over to her house as much. I think she was the only person I shared PJ Harvey with at the time. In his review of Dry in NME, Andrew Collins refers to the album as “low-slung guitar poems,” and that’s likely why I thought Harvey might pique Shana’s interest. Shana was a Sylvia Plath devotee—she told me with relish how Sylvia had bitten her husband Ted Hughes on the cheek the first time she met him, making him bleed. Shana devoured literature in general, often—ironically in the case of Plath—to escape her family’s dysfunction, much like I did in my own home. As I’m sure PJ Harvey read prolifically to escape the drudgery of a sheep farm.
Though there are plenty of sexy punk-and-blues infused bangers on Dry, there are several slower, more poetic offerings. “Happy And Bleeding” celebrates the simple fact of being a young woman coming into her own, symbolized by menstruation. And the final three songs, “Plants And Rags,” “Fountain” and “Water” are reminiscent of poets like Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, or Edna St. Vincent Millay with their lush imagery and fleetingly morbid, somewhat gothic subject matter (“Plants and rags / Ease myself into a body bag”).
Some critics suggest that Harvey-as-narrator drowns herself at the end of Dry, in the final song “Water,” like a modern-day Virginia Woolf—“Now the water to my ankles / Now the water to my knees.” But I mostly read it as a cleansing—washing herself of the lover-imposed shame from the album’s beginning. We know for sure that she comes back, ferocious and throwing fists, on the next album: “Tie yourself to me / No one else / No, you’re not rid of me.” Still, Dry remains one of my favorite releases from that era, if only because PJ’s documenting of her coming of age became the soundtrack of my own.
LISTEN: