Emily and Amy in the Green Room
I met the Indigo Girls at the best concert I never went to.
As we all trembled at the prospect of our digital world going haywire at the dawn of the new century (the Y2K panic), two friends and I decided to write a book about women in rock music.
Susan, Tisa, and I wanted to make a movie, but quickly learned that academics rarely lay their hands on the kind of money needed to make movies. What a bitter lesson! But we knew how to write.
So we wrote.
And the writing thrillingly involved interviews. We went to a couple of Seattle conferences featuring women musicians — thanks to Carla Black, then editor of ROCKRGRL Magazine (1995–2005), which cast a unique and vitally important spotlight on female rockers. We traveled to homespun Ladyfest cons in Chicago and New York (that one ended two days before 9/11), and to a celebration of ‘girl groups’ at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. We interviewed over fifty musicians at those meetings and on the telephone, using hilariously old-fashioned but effective technology (take out one wire, plug in another one, press ‘record’ — all with permission, of course. This was years before the iPhone).
