Boy Trouble: the 1980s New Wave Punk Lesbian Band

SAN FRANCISCO, 1983 — This is how you form a band in 1983: You go into a record store and pick up a copy of the San Francisco Music Weekly. In the back are a few pages of classifieds. You look under “musicians wanted” for someone who wants a singer. You call them on the phone. If they have an answering machine, you leave a message. Otherwise, you keep calling. Finally, you meet them somewhere for an audition. This is the first time you see them or hear what they sound like.

I’m living in a ground-floor flat in the Haight Ashbury, two blocks from Golden Gate Park and a block south of Haight Street. Although the Haight is burnt out by now, with a mix of dank hippy head shops and cheap fast-food joints, there are three music clubs that have punk and New Wave. Sonoma County was too suburban and second-rate. Here, I feel like I’m in the middle of it all.

I connect with three guys who play together once a week in a rehearsal studio they rent one night a week out at the edge of the city. Steve, the guitar player, is a serious guy with short dark hair and thick glasses. Neil the bass player is a surfer type, with baggy shorts and longish blond hair. Eddy Larkin, the drummer, is a wistful, slightly crazy guy who is evidently the heir to some fortune he’d rather not indulge in. They’re not very excellent musicians and neither am I. But I’m cute and blonde. That’s important.

They’ve got a few songs we work on. One of the first songs I write could be the theme song of my life. It’s called Boy Trouble, and it goes, “What am I gonna do? I wanna be in love with you. But I’m dreaming of another lover who’s tougher and somehow it just ain’t you.”
We decide to call the band Boy Trouble. It fits. These three guys and me.

I don’t mention that I’m a lesbian. My look is hyper-feminine with my hot pink jeans and short skirts so it would never occur to anyone unless they saw me with another woman. And I flirt and strut just like a sexy straight girl. In fact, I’m enjoying being out of lesbian country and in a scene with all these cute men with their spiky hair and leather jackets.
My stance as a singer and songwriter is nasty girl. I snarl and shout the words — since I can’t sing loud enough to be heard over the band. And I pose, wiggle and writhe around like the abused foster child of Marilyn Monroe and the Cobra Lady.

Steve gets us our first gig, a Tuesday night at the Sound of Music. This is where most bands start. It’s a raw dive in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, a former drag queen hangout that’s turned into a punk club. Celso, the owner, will book anyone. Celso is a sweet, middle-aged Filipino guy. I never wonder how or why he got into punk, and I never think to ask him. He has three bands a night, seven nights a week. Bands split the door, with the headliner taking the largest share. The door charge is $5, but usually the only people who show up are friends of the band — or sometimes only the people in the other bands.

We’ve got six weeks to get ready for the gig. We don’t even have enough songs. I’m not worried, but evidently the guys are. One night when I show up for practice, they have something to tell me. “We want you to take singing lessons.”

I don’t know why I get so angry. The nuns in fifth grade told me to just move my lips when we sang in church. If I ever broke into song when I was a kid, the other kids would moan and tell me to stop. In fact, I knew that, with my lousy voice, punk was my only chance to be a singer. I also know they’re stupid, because my vamping around will get us a lot further than their shitty musicianship.

Maybe I’m angry because they talked behind my back. I can just imagine them.

“She’s a really bad singer. What can we do?”

“Do you think she can get better before our gig?”

“She’s GOT to!”

In any case, I storm out. “Fuck all of you. I don’t need you!”

A plan coalesces instantly. Linda, Beanie and Lulu can do the gig with me. I know they’ll do it. I can offer them entre into the bigger pond of San Francisco — with me as a mole into the straight scene. What I totally miss is that, while this is true, they say yes because they believe in me.

We get Sarah to play bass. She’s a beautiful, slightly androgynous blonde, just 22 years old. She’s also Linda’s on-again, off-again lover — and she can honk a saxophone.

Songs flower in my brain. Once a week, I drive up to Cotati for band practice, and I often write a new song on the way up. Most of my lyrics are flip takes on pop culture or anti-romantic ballads. “I went to the shopping mall to buy a purple sweater. I didn’t go for mohair ‘cause polyester’s better. Let’s go shopping!” Or, “You think you’re so far out, you make Uranus look close. But your wise ass just comes off verbose. Why don’t you love me if you’re so smart?”

Linda and I could be the Lennon and McCartney of lesbian New Wave punk. Except there is one big problem with my being a lesbian. I can’t keep my hands off men. My band mates encourage my sexy act — they love it, too. But it’s strutting for the men that turns me on.
When I’m onstage, I bathe in men’s approval, and after our sets, I flirt with them relentlessly. In the punk clubs, I don’t want to be seen as a lesbian, I want to be the sexy straight girl.

I go so far as to tell a reporter who’s doing a story on girl bands, “One of us isn’t a lesbian. Can you guess which one?” And I leer at him to drive home my point.

The rest of the women in Boy Trouble never call me on this. I don’t know why. Maybe they’ve just already seen through me and realized that I am in fact just a tourist. Beanie and Lulu, especially, are older and tougher; they’re cynical about everyone. Even if they see my insecure rejection, they still love me.

We get gigs all over. Like the New Jersey go-go circuit, bands hunt out clubs and persuade owners of dive bars to turn them into punk clubs. We work our way up from opening band on a Tuesday night to playing on Thursday nights and, once in a while, on the weekend. Celso at the Sound of Music loves us. We can headline there on Saturday night once a month, although we quickly figure out it’s better to go on second. The shows are advertised as starting at 9 p.m., and they’re supposed to actually start at 10, with the second act going on at 11 and the headliner at midnight. But the opening bands stall as long as they can, hoping more people will show up. By the time the headliners get onstage, it’s often after 1 a.m., and the audience is burnt out and staggering out the door.

The other place that loves us is Heaven’s Gate, a dive bar at the top of Haight Street, where the fog rolls in from Golden Gate Park. It’s a deep, narrow bar that shouldn’t have bands at all — there’s not enough room. We set up on a stage at the back facing a row of tables along one wall and the bar running along the other. I put an extra-long cord on my mike and prowl on top of the bar as I sing. We even have fans at Heaven’s Gate who come to see us; or, maybe they’re always there, but they like us. One of them is a paraplegic guy named Frank who loves it when I climb onto his wheelchair with him and sing to him.

We egg each other on to be even tougher and nastier. Beanie in her black leather jacket snarls her way through guitar solos that head out into outer space and beam back in. Lulu wears a red spandex jumpsuit open to her navel. Her unfettered breasts move in time to her bashing the shit out of the drum kit.

Linda and Sarah and I affect New Wave style — lots of black eyeliner, leopard prints and hot pink. I make Sarah a dress out of pink spandex that’s just a tube held up by a piece of black elastic, so you can ogle her slim hips and high breasts. Linda finds a dress with epaulets in zebra stripes that is as femme as she can bear — and makes her look like a true punk diva. I pull out a new look for each gig, tight pants, short skirts, torn t-shirts. I develop a whole pseudointellectual theory about the cultural meaning of pink.

This is the first time I’ve been with people who admire and encourage me to be the way I want to. They are all for the band and willing to go anywhere with the music and the performance.

I toss off some lyrics to a song about child abuse that I mean to be shocking. One night when I arrive for band practice, they’ve already been working on it. They slowed it down and transformed it into a spooky ballad with a sobbing guitar solo that incites me to sing it with seething rage and then scream out the last word, “Daddy!” The band has transformed my simple song into a haunting tragedy.

To be continued here on Medium by all the people who were a part of those crazy times. Please comment and add your memories. Message me if you want to edit the story by adding more.

RIP Sarah McNair and Lulu