Interview with Musician Courtney Robbins

From high school jazz musician and self-effacing garage band guitarist to opening for folk rock icons Dar Williams, Melissa Ferrick and Lucy Kaplansky, Courtney Robbins’ muscular rhythms and melodic grace are impossible not to tap along to. Infused with raw nostalgia and emotional urgency, Robbins’ music artfully blends the taut intimacy of an acoustic affair with galloping riffs and a fragile, folk sensibility. Courtney took some time out of her Sunday afternoon to talk with Queerky about her upcoming album, creating poetry out of politics and the repercussions of throwing a pie in Ann Coulter’s face.

So how would you describe your sound?

CR: I’d say its folk rock, with more rock than folk, more energetic. A little bit of country has been creeping in too. It just sometimes happens like that. I listen to a fair amount of blue grass and alt-country stuff like Dolly Parton and Gillian Welch, but I would have a hard time saying I play country music.

Who are some of your influences?

CR: Well, I grew up listening to primarily the oldies station, like The Mamas and the Papas and the Beach Boys. Then I started listening to more classic rock like Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin. Then my sister tried to get me into the Indigo Girls in high school, but I didn’t like them at first. Patty Griffin, Joni Mitchell and Stevie Ray Vaughan are also up there. I know it’s kind of cheesy, but in a way I think we’re influenced by everything we hear - even stuff from high school jazz band, you know?

Oh, I agree. Speaking of high school, I have to ask about your garage band name “Some Idiots Afloat.” How did that come about?

CR: Some Idiots Afloat…how did we decide on that? We practiced in our drummer’s basement and his parents had a bunch of old magazines strewn about. I’m pretty sure it was the title of a Life magazine article from the 60s.

And you went to college in New York?

CR: Yep, Hamilton College. I was a creative writing major.

What kind of themes do you explore in your writing?

CR: Usually I tend to draw from personal experiences. Some of my songs are generated from stories I hear and think are relevant. I think actually my degree in creative writing has given me an ear for stories I might want to turn into songs, but I don’t sit down and think, “I’m gonna write this kind of song” unless it’s something that really caught my attention. I don’t write overtly political songs usually but I do think that the personal and political turn up some in my songwriting.

It’s certainly difficult to make poetry out of politics. That’s why I’m always amazed that songwriters like Ani DiFranco do it time and again.

CR: I know! She manages to do it in original, interesting ways each time too.

I read on your website that you recorded an album, but haven’t released it quite yet. What was that process like?

CR: Well, it’s called “Red Sky in Morning” and should be done hopefully within the month. The title references a line from one of the songs. I was working with Dave McGraw, who’s also a singer/songwriter and an awesome drummer, Thomas Lord, who I met a couple times in Tucson. I went up to Vermillion Cliffs in northern Arizona last February and we ended up recording eighteen songs in three days. There are going to be twelve tracks on the CD, plus a hidden track. The whole process was totally laid back. We recorded right outside of the Grand Canyon, in a tiny community of about forty people. It was beautiful and relaxed and just quiet out there.

Speaking of relaxing, what celebrity would you most like to punch in the face?

CR: That’s a funny question because I immediately think, who am I to punch someone in the face? But…that said…I could probably punch Ann Coulter in the face, if I had to.

Do you remember those University of Arizona students who tried to throw a pie at her when she came to lecture in Tucson?

CR: Yeah, someone told me the other day that there’s still a legal battle going on with whoever threw the pie.

They didn’t even hit her. She ducked.

CR: Really? An attempted pie throwing! That shouldn’t count. I don’t see how they can still be in trouble.

Yeah, a waste of a good pie too. So how long have you lived in Tucson? Any notable differences between East/West music scenes?

CR: I’ve been in Tucson for two and a half years. I had mostly college-related music experiences in the Northeast, so it’s kind of hard to say. But there is the Northeast Singer/Songwriter Circuit which fosters more of a music community that the Southwest doesn’t really seem to have as much of, in my experience. But maybe it’s because of location- many of the large cities and colleges are close together in the Northeast which makes it a little easier. Everything’s spread out here and I’m still taking time to see to see how things work, getting my foot in the door. I haven’t played outside of Tucson much because I have a job and not a lot of time to run off to shows. But I did play a show in Seattle recently and some in Tempe too.

Do you think sites like MySpace have helped make the marketing process easier for independent musicians who are trying to get their stuff out there?

CR: I think it’s great. I didn’t know a whole lot about MySpace until recently. My friends were trying to get me to sign up but I was like, “Nah, I’m on Friendster. I don’t need another internet meeting place.” Once I started looking into it though, it was actually kind of cool. The music sites are very do-it-yourself and this whole world is at your fingertips-you can network, find other musicians, download songs, etc. I’ve gotten a couple shows through MySpace and when I was trying to find a place in Seattle to play I looked up this bar, the Conor Byrne Pub, that does women’s music on Tuesdays, which took me, of course, back to MySpace.

So what new projects are you working on?

CR: Well, let’s see. I’m going to try to cover my costs from the CD and to get more shows around Tucson lined up. Once I have the CD, I can tell people something besides “Well, here’s a crappy demo, but I don’t really sound like that anymore.” I’m going to try to get more shows outside of Tucson as well, once I have the CD in hand.

Check out Courtney Robbins’ music on her website www.courtneyrobbins.com or on MySpace www.myspace.com/courtneyrobbins

Written by Anna Pulley

Anna is a post-Creative Writing major and validation junky. In addition to Queerky, she also writes for dykediva.com, does film reviews for theaspectratio.net and writes profiles for singles on e-cyrano.com. She uses quotation marks unnecessarily and spends entirely too much time justifying the artistic merit of limericks. You can contact her at banannarama01@yahoo.com

Watching Out for Alison Bechdel

Since 1983, cartoonist Alison Bechdel has been a political activist, social commentator and humorist, all wrapped up in the form of her well-respected and widely published cartoon, Dykes To Watch Out For. It goes without saying that every artist will show a little bit about themselves in their work; following that theory, after writing hundreds of columns about the lives and loves of dykes, trans-folk and occasional het character, one would assume that the celebrated queer cartoonist’s essence would shine through. Not entirely; but that is about to change.

With the release of her candid new book, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Bechdel has opened up a lifetime of her secrets for all to see. Not only is it written beautifully, the Vermont-based cartoonist has illustrated her story with gorgeously emotive visuals that frequently resemble intricate paintings more than they do cartoons.

Fun Home is short for ‘funeral home’, the family business that her father, Bruce Bechdel inherited. As the book’s full title implies, the work is both bitter and sweet, a journey that oscillates between Alison’s analytical perspective and her deep honesty. The novel primarily focuses on her dissection of two prominent elements in her life so far: firstly, her love of fine literature and secondly, Bechdel’s own coming out process. Tying those two threads together is Alison’s father, and much attention is placed on how such a complicated man played his own part in both her art and her queer journey. “I realized at some point in my process of writing this book,” recalls Bechdel, “that it was really about becoming an artist, and my apprenticeship as an artist under my father. It was a tough apprenticeship and he was very judgmental and extremely overbearing. He wanted me to be an artist…to do things he hadn’t done.”

While away at university, the young Bechdel bloomed emotionally and creatively, eventually coming out to herself and her family. After outing herself to her parents, Alison’s mother reacted with her own family’s hidden truths. Mother Bechdel outed her husband, explaining to Alison that her own father - a local grade school English teacher — had a long history of sexual relations with men and teenaged boys. In telling these stories, Bechdel’s novel is no upbeat, dumbed-down cartoon…in fact, just the opposite. Fun Home is an in-depth analysis of a family - and their breaking points — from the inside. “To boil it down to its crudest level, I think I wanted to show the anecdotal effects of homophobia in one family’s life. It is much more than that, I hope, but I guess that was sort of my mission.”

One day while at school, Bechdel received a phone call telling her that her father had been killed after being hit by a truck, an accident that to this day Bechdel believes was a suicide. Following years of counseling and consideration, Alison made the decision to write and draw her very private family’s story. She didn’t tell her mother that she was writing it until the project was a full year into its seven-year gestation. “I was very nervous about it; she’s a private person and her friends don’t know this stuff. Over the years, I had gotten a lot of information from her and I guess she felt kind of betrayed by me going public with it. I felt bad about that but I felt that it was something that I needed to do. At the same time,” recalls Bechdel, “she gave me a box of letters from my father, and I got a lot of insight into my father from those. One of the strangest moments ever was reading my father’s love letters to my mother.”

Those letters and the couple’s earliest development - a courtship that included quotations of F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Shakespeare - was the formation of a bond that was intellectually stimulating, if not romantically so. Growing up under the tutelage of such literarily-fueled parents provided Bechdel with the opportunity to access great literature and language, yet she admits that her desire to rebel against her parents led her to the land of comic strips. “My parents had passionate, creative interests; I carefully chose my own mode of expression so that I could elude their radar. In a way I became a cartoonist by default. It was one mode of expression that they didn’t know anything about, didn’t care about, and I could work without their scrutiny. Consequently, you don’t get taken seriously. I didn’t mind…I liked that…it enabled me to be free.”

Ironically, one of the reasons that Bechdel’s Fun Home book stands out as unique is the juxtaposition of the perceived simplistic cartoon form against her own broad use of complex language. Throughout the novel, Alison uses heady comparisons of her life to classic literature, from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Homer’s Odyssey. Truth is, the autobiography is often so intellectually complex that it occasionally risks alienating its audience. At one point of our conversation, I quote a line from the book back to Bechdel: ‘My father’s life was a solipsistic circle of self, from autodidact to autocrat to autocide’ and then ask her if her frequent use of symbolism and elevated language is possibly the result of her trying to ‘raise the bar’ of cartoons — consciously or unconsciously — in hopes of gaining her late father’s approval, or perhaps her own. “That’s a very good question. I won’t deny that that is a possibility, but I really do passionately care about words…they are extremely important to me. The thing about cartoon is that you’re using language and images…that is a potent mixture. That is something that really interests me, that interplay between language and reality, and how language can’t - no matter how precise you are - quite capture reality in the same way that an image can. Besides,” she defends, “there’s no point in dumbing it down. I feel like everyone can go to the dictionary, and I think they should. We have richer lives when we have richer language.”

One of the reasons that Fun Home took so long to complete was Bechdel’s painstaking process of capturing as much literal and expressive detail as possible in every frame. Her secret technique? Photography. “I took tens of thousands of photographs,” explains Bechdel, “dressing up and reenacting each scene to come up with each image. One very intense part of my photographic research was going back to the spot where my father was killed, standing there on the side of the road and taking pictures of trucks as they whooshed past. Even though I was acting things out matter-of-factly, the experience entered into my body in some way. I was in a jacket and tie at one point impersonating my father in a casket. I could either emotionally explore that or shutdown…I feel like I did both of those things.”

As a result of her groundbreaking work, advance copies of the book have received rave reviews from a wide variety of respected writers and cartoonists. Oprah-heralded author Dorothy Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina) called this book ‘brave and forthright and insightful’, while American Splendor comic legend Harvey Pekar dubbed Bechdel as “one of the best” in the cartoon genre. “My work does span the comic world and literary world,” explains Bechdel. “I’ve been getting feedback from writers that is thrilling to me!”

Throughout the writing of the book, Bechdel kept one foot in the Dykes To Watch Out For world, both out of enjoyment and economic necessity. “I could have done the book in half the time, but I had to keep doing my comic strip; I’d have two weeks to do my book, two weeks to do my comic.” After years of working on the strip, she admits “I started to yearn for more recognition and I hope that this book will get me some of that. I love my comic strip and I don’t want to demean it…I just feel like this book has a different quality to it.” Bechdel’s future plans include touring and promoting Fun Home and hopefully - if the reception to the book is positive - continuing to work on further autobiographical work. She admits to still being fueled by Dykes, although the cartoonist admits that her dedication has a personal cost of its own. “It is really getting to be a ‘can I afford to keep doing this?’ situation; I get $30 - $60 a paper, sliding scale. I couldn’t possibly live on my comic book income.” In an effort to keep the characters in print, she is currently working towards a cyber-answer to aid her financial problems. “I have a plan of Dykes To Watch Out For premium,” she explains. “You could get the strips emailed to you right off the drawing board, right when they are most current and have a connection to the current news. And I would leave them uncensored, or I could have occasional frontal nudity…it could be like HBO!” she laughs. After 23 years of working on that project, when asked if moving on from Dykes is an option, the ever-activistic Bechdel explains where her fuel comes from. “The strip is still really exciting to me. Especially at this point in history, as it is dissolving into totalitarianism, it is just vital to me to have an outlet.”

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is available from Houghton Mifflin Books.

Written by Denise Sheppard

Denise Sheppard (scribeatshawdotca) is a self-employed journalist/editor who likes long walks, candlelit dinners and writing for U.S and Canadian national mags and websites. Her fave topics are human rights-related pieces and entertainment journalism.