In 1974, the Amazon Music Project (AMP) held a festival in the Santa Cruz mountains. The Collective was in attendance and shared their music with an almost all-female audience.
The AMP was covered with a long piece by Natalie Reuss in the pages of Off Our Backs, a radical feminist magazine. Reuss offered that she felt “particularly inspired by the four women in the Berkeley Women’s Music Collective,” noting in particular the moment when the Collective poignantly finished their performance with their song “Fury“.
The piece illustrates the energy and atmosphere of the women’s music community in the seventies. The photographs show nude women dancing, bathing, and playing in the forest sunlight.
At the same time, the piece also describes the challenges of finding a venue to host the event, and relates an incident, with a biker gang, that marred the festival’s idyllic mood. After an AWP organizer had asked the bikers to leave the festival, they drew out knives and threatened to rape her. When she shouted “Fuck you!,” one of the bikers struck her in the face. After the bikers left, the AWP organizer spoke to the owner of the property, who defended the bikers as the site’s “normal clientele”.
After the incident with the bikers, a band called the Gang Band played and polarized the audience. There was a man in the band and many women in the audience felt his presence and the band’s lyrics unsettling, especially after the encounter with the bikers.
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In a recent interview Suzanne Shanbaum, speaking about the Collective’s political lyrics and passion for activism, recalls how she reacted strongly, and with decisive action, to the Gang Band at the AMP festival: “We played this Santa Cruz festival one time where the Gang Band was playing. They were a Sonoma County band with a man in it and we found their material to be offensive. So I climbed up on the stage and turned off the power and then they threw me off the stage and then some people caught me. We just couldn’t take the way it was.”