Ultimately we did fail. The band lasted three years and broke up in an agony of hatred and hidden agendas. This fact is not unusual; it even happened to the Beatles. But the way our band broke up reflected all the conflicts that were at the same time devastating the radical women's movement, and hence it is worth exploring in some depth. In a sense the band was a microcosm of what was happening all over the country: we were losing our women's movement and we didn't have much guidance on how to stop the dissolution.There are many reasons for the band's failure. Some were external. With the radical feminist and radical movements of the preceding decade fast receding, our solidarity broke up as a result. But many of the reasons for our failure were internal: conflicts that once seemed easy to resolve, such as those of lesbians versus straights, now seemed almost insurmountable, and we began arguing too much and rehearsing too little. But there were two conflicts in particular which finished us. These conflicts lay at the millenarian heart of the prefigurative politics of the women's liberation movement.The movement's utopianism included the ideas that: 1) any woman should be able to do anything as well as any other woman; and 2) there should be no leaders. We soon learned these ideas were untenable, but we persisted in thinking that if we were good enough feminists, we could abolish inequality of skills, and we could function without leaders; the contradictions between what we knew to be true, versus what we pretended was true, destroyed us. In our band, the first conflict expressed itself as a tension between expertise on the one hand and, on the other, enthusiasm-in-place-of-expertise (or "militant amateurism"). Our early women's movement said that any woman could do anything, if given the right social context and sufficient social support. (I said something like this myself in the early days).I think this principle worked at the beginning, while our rock band was the first of its kind and women even appreciated its amateur qualities. After all, the band's amateurism conveyed the message that the audience itself could do things formerly considered taboo for women. But we owed it to our audience to be the best musicians we could. Some members of the band were willing to take up this challenge, but others were not. Feeling that the band needed a sharper beat, one day I suggested to one of our drummers that she take some lessons. She replied somewhat contemptuously, "I'm good enough for this band." The telling thing about this exchange was that nobody followed up. The myth about equality in skills was so strong that not one of us had the temerity to say, "You're not good enough for this band. Get better, or quit."The second, and related conflict that did us in involved the question of leadership. This question was to rend the women's movement from coast to coast. Committed, as I have said, to what turned out to be a myth of equal skills, the movement applied the same kind of thinking to leadership, declaring that there should be none. For instance, in another area, after my reputation as a public speaker had increased and speaking invitations for me multiplied, the CWLU decided that I should refuse further invitations, lest I emerge as a "heavy." I willingly went along with this. (Instead, I organized intensive speaker training sessions, where I taught inexperienced women the skills that I had picked up.) But no matter what leaders did to abnegate and equalize, it was not enough. The utopian vision became cannibalism, and the movement ate its leaders: in city after city, they went down.Here is how the leadership conflict played out in the band. We built the group painstakingly, and through much interpersonal struggle, to be an egalitarian collective. Thus, for instance, every member wrote songs, and these were accepted by the band as a whole with few questions asked, although friendly adaptations and amendments were usually received enthusiastically. But, amidst the appearance of structurelessness and leaderlessness, I was nonetheless clearly the theatrical director, theoretician, healer of wounds, spiritual leader and, if only by dint of a slight chronological advantage, "mother" to the band. Totally committed as I was to a deeply utopian egalitarianism, I was the de facto leader of the band anyway.When the women's movement started trashing its leaders, the band turned on me for all the roles I had played. Its solidarity split open, and I came under attack. After I wrote (with Virginia Blaisdell) and published in Ms. a piece on the band's strengths and triumphs, I was attacked by the band for egotism: "Why did you sign your name to the article?" some members asked. Interestingly, nobody questioned the importance of the article, just that I should take credit for it.The band needed my experience and skills, but they did not want to admit this. A gig we played at Bucknell University in 1972 made this clear to me. The audience was ferociously hostile, riled by an earlier speaker and angered by the fact that only half the band showed up. (In pre-performance confusion, they had taken the wrong plane.) Huge fraternity boys were roaring and piloerecting in the middle of the floor. At one point, Sherry put an empty coke bottle on my piano and grabbed an empty microphone stand because she thought they were going to rush the stage.I sought to calm the audience with a stand-up comedy introduction. Concerned about my leadership role, the band refused to let me do this. Instead, another band member, inexperienced in such situations, made a stumbling presentation which further enraged the audience. At this point I came out, delivered the stand-up I had intended to present, and the hostile vibes from the audience turned to warmth and enthusiasm. The band was enraged at me for my success in turning the mood around.After we got back from Bucknell, one of the band members -- the lead trasher -- suggested that we cut the band's repertoire to exclude the songs I had written: "I've been hearing that the sisters don't like your stuff, Naomi." I said that I agreed with the general principle that we should play what women want to hear. "So why don't we take a poll at our next gig?" My songs came out very popular and so she dropped that line of attack.To paraphrase Tolstoy, these unhappy disputes all have their unique quirks and kinks, and it is beyond the scope of this paper to dwell on them. I should point out, however, that by talking about "the band" I don't mean to imply a monolithic consensus about trashing me. As these dynamics go, one person started the attack -- as it turned out, when I left the band she attacked the leader who took my place. The rest of the band, in varying degrees was reluctant to join the confrontation she had set up, but their silence gave the trashing the appearance of unanimity.The reluctance of some of the other band members to stand up for me stem from the ideology and culture that had so recently infected the women's movement. Band members were just plain scared to oppose the new dogmatism. They didn't want to appear politically stupid. After all, hadn't the CWLU decreed that I should stay silent? Maybe, reasoned some of the band members, I shouldn't be performing at all.How much the band actually relied on me was to be sadly revealed when I left Chicago. Struggling against the male power structure in science, I leapt at the chance when Bell Labs in New Jersey made me a scientific offer I couldn't refuse. In January of 1973 I took a six-month leave of absence from the band, in part because the group's attacks on me as leader had become intolerable.Three months later, I read in my copy of the CWLU newsletter that the band had dissolved. The group described its dissolution as the outcome of natural, organic processes: "women's music lives and grows." But the reality was that the band had died. Women's music doesn't necessarily live and grow (although from the 'seventies to the 'nineties, many wonderful kinds of women's music did, but not the kind played by the CWLRB: bust-out bad-ass visionary political poetry.)The band dissolved not because of spiritual, organic processes, but because we were not honest about the skills we needed to develop. The good musicians in the band resented the tenured-for-life members who refused to learn their instruments, and the inept members of the band -- to my surprise -- resented the good musicians even more fiercely. And, perhaps more important, the band collapsed because trashing had replaced compromise and negotiation as the dominant political modus operandi of the radical women's movement.Recently, I heard the audio portion of a video tape of a CWLRB performance that took place shortly after I left Chicago. It's labeled "last concert," and I hear Susie on the tape announcing this to the audience. Jesse, who has seen the tape, tells me that it is grainy, fragmentary, black-and-white. It makes me nostalgic, bringing back both the conflicts and the euphoria of the period. For the rest of my life, I'll always be obsessed with the conflict between the band's ecstatic side and its amateurish side.Through the poor tape, we nonetheless see Susie (a natural performer) working like mad to keep a lively tempo for the band. Sherry's deadpan voice shouts out, "Keep on truckin, everybody... there's plenty of space back there to truck." And Pat Miller's slide whistles and banjo-rhythmed guitar makes an old-time honky tonk festival out of the song. The audience is delirious, cheering like crazy.Why is the audience cheering so hard? Many of the other songs are done quite poorly, revealing -- at least to someone familiar with the band's previous performances -- the extent to which the band has disintegrated. In another step in the de-skilling of the band, one of the drummers is now singing, "Ain't Gonna Marry," tunelessly and without rhythm. Sherry has omitted her lovely modal solos in "Mountain Moving Day." Even precise Susie loses the bass line in "Don't Fuck Around with Love," the key to which cannot be discerned. And the drumming has shifted from a rock beat to a polka. The demoralization that the band members are feeling as the drummer looses the beat and the singers can't stay in tune is palpable.And yet, in the grainy shadows of that last tape, the audience is ecstatic. Why?Beyond the CWLRB's flaws, beyond the disintegration of the last performance, the band nonetheless conveys movingly celebration and resistance. Its performance deliberately sets up a pre-figurative politics of strong, defiant women, absolute democracy, and an intense desire for audience participation. Through the intensity of the medium, through our bad-ass revolutionary poetry, it shouts the news: we can have a new world, a just and generous world, a world without female suffering or degradation. It is an irony that the utopianism that had destroyed us was the same ingredient that made our performance so powerful.After the death of the CWLRB, I played with the more durable and musically more proficient New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Band, whose dominant forces were Virginia Blaisdell and Jennifer Abod. (Blaisdell was a professional musician who could play trumpet, french horn, drums, piano and even electric bass, and directed the beginner musicians into a tight ensemble sound. Jennifer Abod -- Susan's sister -- had the family's stunning dramatic presence, and a deep blue voice she could have taken to Hollywood.)Later, when I became Professor of Psychology at SUNY, Buffalo, I sat in with a South Buffalo lesbian band. But it was never the same. I mourned the band, and the radical women's movement that fell apart in that same period; for years, I mourned it. The Women's Liberation Rock Band was, in Chelsea Dreher's words, "Like a lover who abruptly walked out on you and never did tell you why."
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