This article appeared in the women’s music magazine, Paid My Dues, and includes interviews with several artists who performed at the 1974 San Francisco Women’s Music Festival. Nancy Henderson and Suzanne Shanbaum from the Berkeley Women’s Music Collective were interviewed.
The author poignantly notes the struggle of women wanting to be equal but knowing that everything they have to learn about music they are going to end up learning from men.
Women’s music festivals offered a place for female musicians to play music without the judgement over technical proficiency that often came when playing with men. In the article, Nancy Henderson appreciates the “space to be bad” and compares it to the former competition she felt with her brother growing up.
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In a recent interview, Suzanne Shanbaum recalled that the band’s original drummer, Jake Lampert, had a similar experience to Henderson, in which she relied on her brother for musical opportunities: “Jake was a killer drummer, guitar player, singer, everything. Cause she had a brother who was a musician, so she always got to be in bands. Her brother would bring her bands.”
Shanbaum later talks about her experience as one of the few women attending the Berklee College of Music in Boston:
“So we (Debbie Lempke and herself) auditioned and were accepted to Berklee College of Music in Boston, which was a small college that had a primarily all-male student body. They had 1200 guitar players and all of them were men, except for me and Emily Remler at one point.”
“The practice rooms had pictures of women bending over and it was really gross. It was such a gross, sexist environment there.”
“It was like one big locker room with seventeen-year-old hot shot guitar players from everywhere in the world, testosterone-ing all over the whole place. So it wasn’t the best place for women musicians, but I really did learn.”