It’s a punk rock dream come true: the legendary Nineties rebels in Team Dresch are back with new music, for a world that needs them more than ever. The Pacific Northwest queercore band made noise in the Nineties, with two classic albums, Personal Best
in 1994 and Captain My Captain in 1996. The former just made Rolling Stone’s list of the greatest punk albums of all time, with its candid tales of queer youth finding their voices in bangers like “Fagetarian vs. Dyke” and “Screwing Yer Courage.”
Olympia, Washington rocker Donna Dresch started this DIY lesbian all-star crew when she was already one of the most respected musicians in the Northwest scene, playing guitar in Dinosaur Jr., Screaming Trees, and Fifth Column, also publishing her influential feminist punk zine Chainsaw. Team Dresch have kept regrouping for killer live shows, but now they’re back with their first album in 30 years, the brutal and inspirational Furthermore. It’s full of anthems about hanging tough through the decades. “Growing Underground” has them chanting the vow, “You can’t erase us! We’re stars” — definitely a queer rallying cry for our times.
Today guitarist Jody Bleyle, bassist Kaia Wilson, and drummer Melissa York are all Zooming from their home bases, scattered around the country. They’ve remained dedicated to keeping the band together, playing to crowds who are conspicuously, almost shockingly young. It’s a fact that hasn’t escaped their attention. “Seeing young people at the show is the best feeling,” Bleyle says. “It’s kind of mind-blowing. But it always surprises me and feels really good.” As Wilson puts it, “The youth need a hug.”
But they’re returning at a grim time for the state of the union, especially for queer fans. As Bleyle quips, “Should we just thank religious extremists for the fact that we can just keep on doing what we do?”
Team Dresch blew up in a golden age for feminist punk rock, with all four members already established in their own bands. But they cheekily chose to name themselves after Dresch, a very Seventies-rock thing to do—Dresch wasn’t the singer, but she was older, and they all idolized her. “That is why the band is named after Donna,” Wilson says. “She was an inspiration to me. At age 16, I got my hands on a zine called Homocore, and in that Homocore was an ad for Donna’s Chainsaw zine. I started writing her letters. I was in high school. I was so tormented, gay in high school, and I’m just going to have to say that Donna saved my life.
“But we all have a different experience with finding each other in the music scene. I remember the first time seeing Jodi being like, ‘Oh, my God. That’s a real badass dyke, and I am a wuss.’”
“I didn’t know that,” Bleyle marvels with a hearty laugh.
“I was so scared to meet you!” Wilson says. “I was a poseur trying to be tough in the scene, but I was such a little baby. Very shy — I pretended I wasn’t, but I definitely was.” Bleyle, like Wilson, was totally starstruck by Dresch. “My bandmates in Hazel introduced us, because they used to work together at the Smithfield in Olympia. But the first time I met Donna, I didn’t even say anything. I just sang the bassline from her seven-inch. It was like animals butt-sniffing.”
It didn’t take long for them to start playing music. “The three of us initially started the band together, me and Donna and Jodi,” Wilson says. “We found Marceo [Martinez], and then we found Melissa later, and now we’re a five-piece for life. But that experience of seeing the other dyke in the room who was really good at music—that was, for me, just the most mind-blowing moment of my life as a teenager.”
There’s always been rage in Team Dresch’s music, but the main emotion that comes across is communal joy — that’s part of the kick of their excellent new album Furthermore. “I do it for you,” they declare in the excellent new anthem “One Song.” “The lonely young one that was me/Who’s in me/And who may be in you.” Countless lonely young ones over the years have heard themselves in Team Dresch’s music, which is why their music has never faded away.
The early Nineties was a turning point in rock history, where bands like Nirvana brought mass appeal to guitar rock, while the riot grrrl movement exploded as women punks started their own bands, zines, labels, scenes, on a level that had never happened before. Punk rockers began refusing to hide the queer sensibility that had always been in the music. “We wanted to meet other people like us,” Bleyle says. “We all were ‘music first, music first,’ but then I think each of us got to a place where it was like, ‘We’ve got to fuse these two parts of ourselves or it’s not enough.’ The band was a way for us to expand that space and meet people, basically, and the way to do that was to be really explicit about saying what we needed to hear. So it was very just instinctual — like survival instincts.”
Jody Bleyle was already the drummer for Hazel, while Kaia Wilson played in Adickdid (and later the Butchies) and her label Mr. Lady Records. Martinez was the drummer in Calamity Jane. Bleyle did the legendary Candy Ass label, which put out the original Team Dresch records, along with Dresch’s label Chainsaw. Candy Ass also put out the influential 1995 compilation Free to Fight, featuring crucial artists like Heavens to Betsy, Excuse 17, the Spinanes’ Rebecca Gates, and the Third Sex. It was dedicated to instruction in self-defense for women, in the face of misogynistic and homophobic violence. (“Target Practice” had the memorable chorus, “If you choose to fight / Remember these are the places to hit / Eyes, knees, groin, throat.”) These punks were not playing around.
When Martinez left after the first album, York took over the kit, but on Martinez’s return, the band just kept going with both drummers. (Martinez came out as transmasculine in 2019.) They’ve continually played killer live shows over the years — for all their individual projects, something has always kept calling them back to this core mission. Kaia Wilson once summed it up perfectly with the wise words of Stevie Nicks. “You can never get away from the sound of a woman who loves you,” Wilson said. “That’s our band. Our band is the woman who loves us.”
But in recent years, they felt the urge to write new material. “We had been talking about making a new record for so long and never did it,” Wilson says. “Fast-forward to a couple years ago, at a Buddhist restaurant, having a nice lunch on a tour in Oakland, California. Jodi freaked out and said, ‘I can’t keep playing these same 22 songs over and over—it’s like Groundhog Day.”
When they started working on these new songs on Furthermore, it was long-distance, via Zoom. But for them, that wasn’t so far from the spirit of the early days, when kids in different towns connected via zines and became long-distance pen pals. “We figured it out,” York says. “Because I was the only one who was on the totally other, opposite coast, I had to get scrappy with being involved in this process. I consider myself scrappy, and I’m in a band with four other scrappy people. We’ve always been scrappy.” As if to illustrate the point, York’s cat keeps forcefully clawing her way on camera. “Talk about dykes in the pit,” York says. “That’s what we call her. She’s very aggressive, but with a soft side.”
It’s definitely rare for bands to return sounding this recharged. “I just found out the other day from listening to our local radio station that Haircut 100 also just released their third record,” Bleyle says. “And it’s their first in 42 years. I was like, ‘We are soulmates! But I’m an uber-fan. I would air drum to Haircut 100 when I was wee little because I grew up in a one-bedroom apartment with me and my mom. There was no room for drums. But it was all about the freaking Haircut 100 and Donna Summer, I might add.”
One of Team Dresch’s most beloved songs is “Uncle Phranc,” about their experience as young punks meeting the legendary L.A artist Phranc, who used to play in hardcore bands like Catholic Discipline before her makeover as the self-proclaimed “all American Jewish lesbian folksinger.” She served as a mentor to Team Dresch’s generation. (As they sing, “She told me not to fuck with straight girls / She told me not to take pills.”) But by now, this band has hung in there long enough to become that same sort of mentor figure, communicating with younger listeners who weren’t born the first time around.
“Yeah, it’s the gender euphoria, the queer joy,” Bleyle says. “It’s just giving yourself permission to just be as happy as you can fucking be. When we ask, ‘What do we want to experience for three minutes when we’re at the show?,’ it’s ‘I want this — I want to see all the beautiful faces just jumping up and down and knowing that they’re the fucking best.”
“It doesn’t feel like it’s us, even,” Wilson adds. “It feels like we’re part of this thing with all these other people. So the live show just feels like that moment where we all get to be just exuberantly ourselves.”A major theme of the songs on Furthermore is their empathy for how tough it is for queer kids in the 2020s. When they were growing up, they didn’t see anyone like them in the music world, and they know how that feels. “You have this self-hatred, growing up in a world and not seeing yourself there,” Bleyle says. “It’s just so hard to really believe that you are worthwhile and that you don’t have some poison seed in you. So I feel like it probably feels good for them just to know that we’re just here, doing our thing. ‘Yep, we’re still here. You go out there in the world, where it’s scary and everything’s new for you. Don’t worry — Team Dresch is still going to be in the basement practicing, and if you guys make it over here, we’ll buy you food and there’s always some soda in the fridge.”
One of the album’s most powerful mission statements is “One Song,” with the opening proverb, “Some people say you only write one song / And that feels true.” So for Team Dresch, what’s the song they keep writing? “There’s your personal experience,” Kaia says. “You’re bringing that into a song, the one that you’re writing for yourself, but it becomes this whole other thing when it’s all of us together. Again, that’s coming back to this importance of being in a band with other queers. There’s something that happens when we get together, and that’s the one song.” It’s a song that has kept them going, individually and collectively, even in dark times. “I think the song is trying to say what we need to hear,” Jody says. “To keep ourselves alive and joyous and fighting.”
Click here to read the full article.
