could
weep that I'm gonna see Patti Smith," says Geraldine Fibbers's singer and
songwriter Carla Bozulich. Over the phone from New York, Bozulich speaks
with
reverence of the punk priestess, whom she'll soon see perform in Central
Park.
"The mid-to-late '70s were all about Black Sabbath and
Ted
Nugent and stuff like that for me," Bozulich says. "Then I saw Patti Smith
on
Don Kirshner's Rock Concert. That changed my life."
Smith's
influence on the Fibbers is obvious to those who have seen the Los
Angeles-based
band in concert or heard its debut album, Lost Between the Earth and My
Home. The Fibbers certainly don't sound like Smith - their music has a
more
rustic feel - but Bozulich shares Smith's intensity and artistic ambition.
Not far from where Smith will perform, there's another New York stage
that
means a lot to Bozulich: "My biggest aspiration in life is to go to the
Met and
see La Traviatta or something," Bozulich says, "That would be it
for me."
That might come as a surprise to some, but Bozulich's move toward the
Appalachian country music that influences the Fibbers probably shocked
fans of
her previous band - the brutal and industrial trio, Ethyl Meatplow.
"I don't know how to make this a clever quote," Bozulich says with the
shyness
that marks her speech but never her music, "but I think of life as a big
salad
bar - an amazing salad bar - so big that you can't imagine how many things
there
are. And I want to taste it all."
anting to be
the girl with the most salad, so to speak, is important to Bozulich's
music as
well as her musical taste. On Lost Between the Earth and My Home,
Bozulich
moves through a vast array of female characters, projecting down-and-out
despair
on "Lilybelle"
[282k .aiff] ("In the dark she
is rocking/Not to records but to voices in her head"); unhinged nihilism
on "Dragon Lady" [225k
.aiff] ("I'm stopping
everything/Making fun of myself/Drinking lipstick/Tipping
bookshelves/Ripping up
words that I thought were important"); and see-ya-later bravado on "Dusted" [287k .aiff]
("I'd like to curl you up with a
better book/But there's no finer fish to hook/And I'm gone gone gone
gone/I'm
dusted").
Bozulich says all these characters are her, though. "When I started
writing
really seriously for this band I really started writing the record that
kind of
summed up my life to date," she says. "This record is really me."
Bozulich has had a varied life. Born and raised in San Pedro -
the
same Los Angeles harbor community that spawned the Minutemen - Bozulich was
kicked out of her house at 16 by her mother and stepfather. She worked
minimum-wage retail jobs, eventually finding work as a live-in housekeeper
for
Ella Fitzgerald's pianist.
"I don't really want to get into the whole sob story thing with people,
so I
tend to shy away from being too specific with what the songs are about,"
she
says. "But it's safe to say I tend to draw from reality rather than
hypothetical
situations."
Many of the songs of Lost Between have an eerie desperation, but
things
are better now for Bozulich, who is close with Fibbers Daniel Keenan (lead
guitar), Kevin Fitzgerald (drums), and William Tutton (acoustic bass).
"Daniel's
my best friend, Kevin is a dear friend, and so is Bill. The only person
who is
just sort of joining the family is Jessy Green, the violin player, who we
found
by calling McCabe's [music store] and asking if they could recommend
someone."
Bozulich and her friends formed the Fibbers just as it seemed Ethyl
Meatplow
was on the verge of big things, and Keenan, Fitzgerald, and Tutton were
also
involved in other bands. "We were doing it just for fun," Bozulich says,
and at
first the band played covers of such country minidramas as George Jones's
"The
Grand Tour," Dolly Parton's "Jolene," and Bobbie Gentry's
white-trash-but-proud
anthem, "Fancy."
When Ethyl Meatplow's record company crumbled last year and the band
itself
did the same, Bozulich got serious about the Fibbers.
"I started to think of music as a career when Ethyl Meatplow started
touring
10 months out of the year," she says. "People would say, What do you want
to do
when you grow up? I would make something up to answer, but in my head I'd
think,
I'm not going to grow up. I'm gonna be dead first. But when I got honest
about
it, I knew I wanted to work with art ... I always had this voice saying,
You
don't have a chance at that. But at the same time I had this other voice
saying,
That's the only thing you could be doing. I feel very lucky, because it
worked
itself out."
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