The Pacific Northwest had a thriving punk rock scene in the 90s with bands like The Wipers, Dead Moon and Bikini Kill. One of the pioneering bands of that time is Team Dresch, which had its roots in the queercore movement. This year the band has been on a 30 year anniversary tour. Band members Donna Dresch, Kaia Wilson, Jody Bleyle, Melissa York and Marcéo Martinez join us to play some songs and talk about their legacy.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From Bunk Bar in Southeast Portland, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. I’m joined now by Team Dresch. The Northwest Band is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the release of its first album this year. They’ve been called queercore, punk rock, riot grrrl, but for the band and for their fans, those labels probably are less important than the personal connections they developed with each other.
Team Dresch showed young queer people and especially women that they were not alone. The feeling was mutual. When the band reissued their catalog in 2019, they did it with this statement: “Just when you thought life couldn’t possibly get any gayer, Team Dresch is back. Why? Because we are alive and we want to be with our people.”
Team Dresch is Donna Dresch on guitar and bass; Kaia Wilson on guitars and vocals; Jody Bleyle on guitars, bass and vocals; and Marcéo Martinez and Melissa York on drums. It’s a real pleasure to have all five of you on the show.
Various speakers: Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Miller: Could we start with a song? Could we start with “Freewheel” from your first album?
Jody Bleyle: Indeed.
Kaia Wilson: Let’s do it!
[Team Dresch playing “Freewheel” live]
Whole lot of things to say but I can’t seem to hold on
Moved away it pulls me back to what I miss
Like talking, talking, talking with the mad queen
About emotional evolution
Well, I do what I do and I don’t need you
To tell me what’s in
And tell me who is cool
I’ve got no money left and the mean world around me
And I don’t, I don’t need that girl
To watch TV with, she’s just the same girl
Over and over and over and
You can go back to your boyfriend
Half of this is me and I’m not sure who the other is
She maybe came from all of you
This house is warm
I think I’ll take a nap
Just like Freewheel ...
Freewheel!
Well, I do what I do and I don’t need you
To tell me what’s in
And tell me who is cool
I’ve got no money left and the mean world around me
And I don’t, I don’t need that girl
To watch TV with, she’s just the same girl
Over and over and over and
You can go back to your boyfriend
[Song ends]
Miller: [Audience applause] Under two minutes of music. So much music in less than two minutes! It’s “Freewheel’ from your first album “Personal Best,” which came out 30 years ago this year.
You’d been in other bands. All of you had been in other bands in the Northwest in Olympia, in Portland, in Eugene. How did you actually meet?
Donna Dresch: My coworker in Olympia at the Smithfield Cafe was Brady from Hazel – which Jody was in – and he told me, you have to meet our drummer.
Bleyle: Yeah, and he said the same thing to me. So Hazel was playing backstage at the Capitol Theater. I met Donna in the alley, the famous alley behind the Capitol Theater. I think I immediately was like, we have to start a band and blibliblehblibleh … I just went motor mouth at Donna …
Miller: Because you knew their music?
Bleyle: Donna had been in a band called Danger Mouse, and they had a seven inch out with a really cool bass line that went like … Do it, Donna.
Dresch: [Singing] Do do do do. Do do do do do. Do do do do do do do do do.
Bleyle: And I had learned the bass line, so I immediately started singing it to Donna, and just started fanning all over her and telling her that we needed to be in a band.
Dresch: But Brady also wanted us to meet because there were only a handful of queer girl musicians at the time.
Bleyle: That part’s true, too.
Dresch: And then, Kaia.
Wilson: I was in high school in rural Oregon, Pleasant Hill, and I somehow got my hands on what’s called Homocore zine. Those who know, know. I saw an …
Miller: But what about those who don’t? What was Homocore zine?
Wilson: Oh, Homocore was kind of a movement, right? Like it was more than just a zine, but the zine was kind of the big rep … I mean zines, oh zines were so important.
Dresch: It was a queercore zine in San Francisco that lasted for a good four years maybe.
Wilson: It was just punk. It was just punk and queer, and I was letting my freak flag fly at that age, at 16.
Miller: In Springfield?
Wilson: Uh-huh. And I saw an ad for Donna’s zine “Chainsaw”, and it was like, “Are you a misfit dork dyke?” Can I say dyke on the radio? X that out. And basically, I was like, “Yes, I am!” It also said punk and I was actually a hippie, but I was like, “I’m not that, but I am really kind of punk.”
Anyway, I wrote Donna a letter when I was 16 and she wrote me back. I mean, I was like, “I’m gay, it’s hard to be gay out here! It’s so Christian and scary.” And then Donna said if I wasn’t born gay, I would definitely choose to be. [Laughter] And that was like a mind-blowing concept. I can’t tell you how … Because at the time I was like, “Oh, I was born gay. What a bummer.” But then I’m like, oh my God, it could not be a bummer. It could be the coolest, best thing ever. I could choose it, in fact. What a great idea that it could be a choice.
Anyway, that’s a long story, but then I met Donna later in person in my band Addicted, when our bass broke at a Capitol Theater show in Olympia. Donna was like, “I’ll go get a bass.” And then I was like, “Oh my God, you’re Donna! We haven’t met in person.” We just wrote letters.
Miller: Was there a point when you realized that not only did you vibe with each other, or you were excited about each other’s music, but that you worked musically, that actually this was gonna gel?
Dresch: Yeah, that we somehow liked the same kind of music or like playing the same kind of music. We all had different tastes, but it somehow worked.
Bleyle: Yeah, I mean, Marcéo was in Calamity Jane, a band that I loved in town. And I used to go see him play all the time. I just started playing drums, so I would just stand next to him and watch him play and then afterwards kind of force him to give me drum lessons before he broke down his drums. And with Donna, like I said, I loved her band also and then I heard Addicted playing at I think what was Pine Street then probably, it might have been La Luna already.
Dresch: We played together, didn’t we?
Bleyle: Yeah, but before that, I heard you singing and I thought to myself, “I could play with that person.”
Dresch: I love that.
Bleyle: Yeah. And then I knew that you were queer. So it was like we all knew that we had to do music, but we needed to we wanted to do it with our gays, too, because otherwise it was just … we were all doing music, but we needed that part of it to feel like we could really express ourselves more fully.
Miller: What do you all remember about your first gigs as a band, as this band?
Bleyle: Was the first one at the Curse?
Wilson: Probably. House show.
Dresch: Oh yeah, before Marcéo was in our band, we had Scott Plouff who was in the band Spinanes. He was our first drummer. And we played an all-girls house party, and he and Billy from Bikini Kill had to sit in the car until it was time to play.
[Laughter]
Wilson: The house was called The Curse. It’s an infamous punk house.
Miller: They were allowed on stage, but they couldn’t be a part of the party until they were performing.
Wilson: Like being under 21.
Dresch: 1993.
Wilson: Yeah, 1993.
Miller: What kind of community developed around the band?
Wilson: Certainly queer, but also just people who appreciated our musicality. We were very forward about making really dynamic and interesting music that was all one package. It’s not like we were like we are just here to be activists. We are here. It’s all together with the music.
Miller: Kaia, the Portland writer Sarah Jaffe had a lovely appreciation of the band when you all reissued your albums in 2019. Sarah wrote when she was 17 in 1995, she was growing up on the East Coast. She said, “Nobody talked about being queer and I had no idea how to find girls to kiss or other queer people to pal around with. My longing felt intensely singular.”
Then she said she wrote to you, and you wrote back to her. And this is either her recollection or maybe she still has the letters. She says, you wrote, “Being a dyke is rad, you’re awesome. I can’t tell you whether or not to come out. It depends where you’re at in your head.”
How common was it for people to write letters like that to you?
Wilson: That’s probably like literally what Donna wrote to me, and I just recycled it. I’m not kidding. [Laughter] Yeah, common for us. We wrote lots of letters back and forth to “fans,” but our fans are just our community.
Bleyle: Yeah, it was really common. I mean, Donna’s fanzine turned into a record label, Chainsaw, and I started a record label, too. And then Kaia eventually started a record label also. So I think some of that community that was happening in Portland at the time was about making records too and recording records. We had an old eight track that we got from someone that we barely knew how to use and then we recorded “Heavens to Betsy Seven Inch” on it.
But yeah, so making the records was a big part of it. There were tons of girl bands, there were queer bands, we were doing free to fight, there was a self-defense project where we did self-defense lessons before our shows – because violence was an issue at almost every show that we played. And also, bands like the Heavy Johnson Trio, Eli, who owns Atlas Pizza and Dots in the Heavy Johnson Trio. Candy Ass has put out his record. And Thirty Ought Six and Sunny Day Real Estate were like, you know, just simpatico musically people.
Miller: Well, Kaia, I’m curious, when you said fans, you put fans in quotes as if … so you didn’t really see a division between yourselves and the people who loved your music and went to your shows? Because the word you used was community, so there’s less of a division then between yourselves and your audience?
Wilson: Yeah, we like to hug our audience, especially pre-COVID. But yeah, I don’t know, it just was, why should there be a division ever anyway? I mean, other than for safety, if you got stalkers, but we didn’t get stalkers. Lucky us.
Bleyle: We started the band to meet people. When we’d advertise the shows, we were just desperate to get other people that were queer, women who were playing music to just come to the shows. We’d say on stage, “If anybody is in a band, let us know.” I mean, we were desperate to meet people, make community and just make friends. So when people wrote to us, we wanted to know them. We would say, “Come to Portland,” and some people would show up at our house.
Wilson: Yes, at our house. [Laughter]
Bleyle: And say, “I came to Portland. Hi, I’m 17.” When I think about it now, I’m like we were adults. So we really shouldn’t have been letting a 17-year-old that just showed up in Portland live in our attic, but when you’re like 23, are you an adult? You don’t realize that.
Wilson: Your brain’s not fully developed yet.
Bleyle: Yeah. And I think that goes back to the Homocore zine. And Donna lived in this warehouse in San Francisco called Shred of Dignity where Homocore was based out of. Well, just because … Didn’t Tom put in the Homocore zine like, hey, come to San Francisco, like leave home, get to someplace where you can be excited to be who you are?
Dresch: Yeah, a lot of people came to the Homocore warehouse to meet Tom. He’s incredible.
Miller: Can we hear another song? Can we hear “The Council?” This is from your second full-length album, “Captain My Captain.” And Jody as you switch, because I guess now you’re taking the bass as Donna takes guitar, anything we should know about the song before we hear it?
Bleyle: No. [Laughter]
Miller: OK, let’s just hear it.
Bleyle: It’s just the kind of lyric that’s like, you know, interpret it as you will.
Miller: OK, let’s hear it, then I’m gonna try to interpret it.
Bleyle: Oh yeah, that’d be fun. Let’s see what you think you can hear any of the lyrics, my parents always like …
Miller: I printed them out.
Bleyle: Oh, that’s smart.
Miller: Oh, this is public radio. [Laughs]
[Team Dresch playing “The Council” live]
The council
Less rated
Clean intent
I’ll trade you
The first one called
The last one picked
You’ll suave fast but you’ll miss
Whose traction trains slipping
Your tractions aims slipping
The first one called
The last one picked
A hunger for continuity
A hunger for continuity
The last
Am I next
Let’s meet there
Between the core and the mantle
The last
Is it fine? It’s OK
It’s inaudible, it gets through sometimes
Is it fine? It’s OK
Am I butch or femme, can I register
I hear all the things they say about me
I hear all the things and I wonder how they know all these things I don’t know about me
If you know so much would you mind sharing it
Please
[Song ends]
Bleyle: [Audience applause] Thank you, Bunk Bar.
Miller: That is “The Council” by Team Dresch, which is Melissa York, Marcéo Martinez, Jody Bleyle, Kaia Wilson and Donna Dresch. They’re celebrating the 30th anniversary of the release of their first album this year. So Kaia, to me, when I look at the lyrics, some of them are, “I’ll trade you,” “the first one called, the last one picked”, “am I butch or femme, can I register,” “I hear all the things and I wonder how they know all these things I don’t know about me. If you know so much, would you mind sharing it, please.”
So, to me, it’s about belonging or wanting to belong, not being sure if you belong, not even totally knowing who you are. There may be themes that are especially resonant for young people, but they’re also sort of universal. Do you still feel some of those things now, 30 years later?
Wilson: Oh, so this is why I love not saying what my song is about, in my head, what I think it’s about. I mean, who knows? I was 20 years old when I wrote it, but because my thoughts around the song are just kind of a little different about feeling and being judged in whether it’s on a wider scale or even within a community,
Miller: Yeah.
Wilson: And that’s kind of where I was at writing that song.
Miller: That’s what it really comes out. This is just a feeling within the community, right?
Wilson: Yeah, sometimes within the community, there’s sometimes a little friction. I don’t know if you know about that, but yeah.
Miller: There can be friction within bands, too.
Wilson: No, not this one.
Dresch: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Miller: Well, can we talk about that? So what has it been like to make music on and off, but for the last 20 years with some regularity, with this same group of people?
Wilson: I think it’s [beep] amazing, sorry – bleep that. Because we’re family and so we got to, like, know each other through so many different developmental periods. And yeah, there’s been friction, but we’ve come out to like being the kind of family you just want to stay in forever and that you know you can count on no matter what. In the revolution, we’re gonna definitely be holed up in a hollow tree together.
Miller: What’s the secret? How do you stay together?
Dresch: We kind of grew up together.
Wilson: We did grow up together.
Miller: A lot of literal families grew up together and don’t make it.
Wilson: But we needed each other back then. We came together because we needed each other, so I think …
Bleyle: We’ve all been to a lot of therapy. And that, for real though, that makes a big difference. Hasn’t everyone? Everyone in the band has been in an enormous amount of therapy, enormous. But there’s a lot of skills. I mean, you gain a lot of skills. I think that we have so many more skills than we had back then.
But I think, also, there is certain amount of choice. We’re just dedicated to each other and and going through whatever we need to go through to come back together, but I think some of it is about how amazing it is to get to play shows with this bigger community that’s amorphous, growing and changing, and to be able to really stay connected to that is so special. We could still be a part of it without being in this band, but it would just be different. Like getting to be here tonight, we wouldn’t be getting to do this.
Miller: Jody, how have the some of these songs that you’ve now played for 30 years evolved for you, as a songwriter and as a performer?
Bleyle: Well, there’s one song, for example, called “Uncle Phranc” that is about a relationship with my mom from many years ago, and it has changed so much. I mean, my parents, they never rejected me, but it was definitely like an acceptance. They would have preferred that I not be gay. I’m quite sure, right? And you just get to a point where you kind of realize that that’s not good enough and if that’s gonna be as good as it is, you don’t want a relationship like that in your life.
But my parents ended up starting a PFLAG group – Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays – in rural New Hampshire. They worked security patrol for the first ordained gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. They really worked hard and changed more than I probably have been asked to change yet by my own children, right? They were pushed, and they changed and they evolved.
So when I sing that song now, it’s emotional. Sometimes I say something about my mom, but then I’m also aware that a lot of people still have a really strange relationship with their parents, too, and I want to honor that too. It’s not just like, hey, I used to have this sort of relationship with my mom, but now everything’s cool. That pain is still there because those years of pain were there and it’s still painful for many, many people.
Miller: Let’s hear another song, if you don’t mind. It’s called “Don’t Try Suicide.”
[Team Dresch playing “Don’t Try Suicide” live]
I’m scared to leave the house
I’m scared to go to sleep
And when I do
I wake up feeling scared
My girlfriend cuddles me
And holds me when I cry
I tell her that I’m scared
Ask if she thinks I’ll die
She tells me I’m okay
I don’t believe her, but it makes me feel better anyway
Can’t get myself to eat
Trick myself and watch TV
Even when it works
I end up puking scared
My girlfriend cuddles me
And holds me when I cry
I tell her that I’m scared
She says that I won’t die
She tells me I’m okay
I don’t believe her, but it makes me feel better anyway
[Song ends]
Miller: [Audience applause] What have you heard from fans about that song in particular over the years?
Bleyle: Don’t make me cry, Dave.
Dresch: It’s a tearjerker.
Bleyle: Yeah, it just does the same thing that it does for me, which is just kind of get you through, get you through something, that when you’re just feeling really, really, really low. Just that feeling of … I mean, it’s just hard when you feel like you’re in a world and you’ve grown up in a world that’s, for me at this age, keeping coming back to how intense it is that you grow up in a world where you don’t even see any representation of yourself, basically is the easiest way to put it. You don’t even know that you can’t exist, that any of the feelings that you have are real things, you spend your entire childhood trying to be this thing that just, that doesn’t feel right.
So you’re basically teaching yourself how not to trust yourself. I mean, it’s awful, it’s just [beep] sad. And the fact that all these kids today, especially trans kids, are just being used as political pawns and they just are real people who just have to feel like they hate themselves, like the world just hates them – they don’t even know them – just for being. It’s just [beep] makes me [beep] mad, Dave.
Miller: One of the ways that you built community, found people, was on the internet – a very, very different internet than we have now. This was AOL message boards. Am I right that was one of the ways that you told the world about your first tour?
Dresch: It was the AOL message board.
Bleyle It was!
Miller: Yeah. At that time ...
Dresch: I still have my AOL address. [Laughs]
Miller: Did it feel like a force for good at that time, the online world as you knew it?
Dresch: I’m always fascinated by whatever the new thing is, so I couldn’t get enough of it. But Jody had the first email address that I knew of. You had to read email address.
Bleyle: I did. It was a force for good because we couldn’t have gone on that tour. We really did book the whole tour in 1993 on the internet, which most people didn’t know what the thing was. So when we get to a show and we’d say, “Hey …” I don’t know, what’s an example of a name … like, “Hey, CokePepsi36,” or whatever. And everyone else in the room would go, “What are you guys talking about?” And you try to explain to them what it was, and you couldn’t even explain it because it was too abstract and bizarre.
Dresch: I just put it together. That’s why we played so many colleges on that tour because those were the only people who had email addresses.
Marcéo Martinez: I didn’t even know that.
Miller: Wait, say it again. Can you up the mic, otherwise we can’t hear you.
Martinez: I didn’t know the internet existed back then. So I didn’t know that you guys booked the tour through email. So I just learned that today.
Wilson: Let’s just make it clear that Donna and Jody are the ones who understand computers. Then well, Melissa, too, but Marcéo and I are going ahead and say it …
Melissa York: But Donna knew them before all of us. And you were talking before about community and that’s how we all found each other. You know, Kaia, because I was in a band at the time in New York.
Wilson: I did call ya.
York: And Kaia called me on the landline because she sent me a cassette tape of personal best and was like, “Hey, I heard you’re booking some shows. Can you book some shows for my band?” And I was like, “Awesome, sounds great.”
So Homocore was like the big movement at that time. It was like riot grrrl but for queers, so we were really at the moment it started, and it was just so very powerful.
Wilson: It’s like a microfungal connection. What are those called? Microfilaments.
Miller: Mycorrhizal. Yeah.
Wilson: That’s what it felt like to be like. We were probably like that. I wonder if the mushrooms feel so cool. [Laughter]
Dresch: But at the same time, we were friends with other bands who had gone on tour before us. And they came back and said here’s the number for the place in Fargo, North Dakota, so then we called on the landline.
Bleyle: Yeah, but Donna’s brother did build one of the first message boards on the internet, so it was the Chainsaw message board. It was just a homemade message board on Donna’s label website. Lots and lots of people found their community there who are still friends decades later, so that was a really, really special, formative place on the internet that definitely was a place of good.
Miller: Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons that I brought it up is that I don’t even need to point out that the internet is no longer an unalloyed good. It’s a place that is probably more likely a place for disconnection, radicalization and deep unhappiness than deep connection. And yet, the roots were in a lot of ways really different.
Bleyle: Yeah, I mean, but we were transferring files up to our web servers using Fetch and they were hosted on independent ISPs, so it was like punk rockers owning the connections to the main vein. That made a big difference.
Miller: When I was prepping for this conversation, I was looking at older performances you all had done. I clicked on one of them on YouTube and very quickly realized, wait, this is not Team Dresch. It was maybe 12-, 13-, 14-year-olds at a School of Rock performance in Chicago, playing some of your songs. They were great, by the way, you should check it out. But I realized – and this was probably seven years ago or something – these are teenagers. At the time, they were teenagers. And I imagine that for them, your songs were their anthems. They were really rocking out.
What does it mean to you now that a whole new generation is playing your music?
Bleyle: Cool. Very cool,
Dresch: Again, I’m a very emotional person, so I think I’m gonna start crying. But it’s like when you’re asking Jody before about “Don’t Try Suicide,” it’s just … it’s everything. It really is. It’s just like that we could be there for kids and we’re learning from them, too, because the youth today are just amazing and they’re very, very like powerful and strong – so we’re learning from them. So it’s kind of like this two-way street, if that’s even the right saying. But it’s just incredible that we just have this connection and that they love us and we love them, too.
Miller: Do your … I was gonna say fans. Does your community bring their kids to your shows now?
Wilson: Yes. Is there more to say about that? It’s just kind of just, yes, they do, which is again, cool … that’s all I got. It’s just like I can’t believe it. We’re so lucky.
Miller: Yeah. How much do you think about the band’s legacy?
Wilson: Well, no, yeah.
Miller: You don’t.
Wilson: I mean, not really. I mean we’ve never been like that. We’re not very forward thinking about what we’re doing. We’re just like, here, we’re doing it. We’re doing what we’re doing right now. It’s awesome. We love it.
Miller: Maybe the legacy is too big. What do you want people to take away from the band, to remember about you or to feel after they’ve been around you, to feel after they’ve listened to you?
Bleyle: I mean, I think we want people to feel included. We want people to feel like they are happy to be who they are, that they’ve had an experience in a room of people together, of just being alive and being joyful, and being [beep] awesome.
Miller: And we’re done. Kaia Wilson, Donna Dresch, Marcéo Martinez, Melissa York and Jody Bleyle, thank you very much.
Various speakers: Thank you, Dave.
[Audience applause]
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