You're Pretty Good For A Girl
Book Excerpt: Lynn Perko-Truell
This is the second installment in a five part series about drummers and drumming.
This essay was originally published in the essay collection Forbidden Beat: Perspectives On Punk Drumming that I curated and edited for Rare Bird Books.
You’re Pretty Good For A Girl
By Lynn Perko-Truell
I grew up in Miami, Florida, where I was a classically trained pianist who did public and private recitals into my middle school years.
At age twelve I moved to Reno, Nevada. Once into my teens, I quit the piano lessons and found more joy listening to rock music. My most memorable listening experiences happened with Led Zeppelin, along with The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Police, David Bowie, Neil Young, and Cream. Even though I had no idea I would soon become a drummer, my favorite musicians were John Bonham, Charlie Watts, Stewart Copeland, and Ginger Baker.
My friend, Helen Pardy-Johnson, worked in a record store. One day I went in to browse and she told me she was going to sing for a band. They needed a drummer and she suggested that I do it; I agreed. Shortly after I went to my first punk rock show and saw 7 Seconds, The Wrecks had their first practice in the family room of Bessie Oakley’s house. She played bass and Jone Stebbins played guitar. Since I didn’t have any drums, we pulled in a couple of big plastic garbage cans from Bessie’s garage, turned them upside down, and used them.
“We were our own inspiration in the beginning. We were bonded by our lyrics and the fact that we were all girls in a band, which was relatively unprecedented in our own experience of rock bands.”
The raw and rudimentary sounds of guitars, Helen yelling/singing, and me banging plastic sounded pretty cool. I realized playing punk music meant expressing yourself however you wanted to; playing even if you didn’t know how. I just played beats that I could pull off or that I could play fast enough. It was amazing that it was so easy to suddenly be in a band and have a “sound.” After a couple of months, I got a real drum set, a Ludwig Club Kit in oyster black and blue—our decided band colors, because we got bruised from thrashing.
We were our own inspiration in the beginning. We were bonded by our lyrics and the fact that we were all girls in a band, which was relatively unprecedented in our own experience of rock bands. The geographical isolation and small size of Reno allowed for an insular and inclusive scene for me to blossom in. It allowed for self-discovery and felt nonjudgmental compared to what we heard about in bigger city scenes. We wrote songs that expressed our disinterest in mainstream society. Our snarl of vocals and instruments gave us power.
Proving ourselves as girls that could rock was not our primary purpose—we just were girls intrigued by the possibilities of punk rock’s music and ideas. Even before my first punk rock show, I knew I wasn’t ready for college. I wanted something different and punk became my direction. It was powerful and gave me a purpose and path at sixteen. I had a new identity as Lynn Lust (we all had punk rock names). I began writing songs and lyrics, doing photo shoots, and practicing a couple times a week.
The Wrecks’ first show was in October of 1980 at Reno’s Rad House—a soundproofed garage equipped with a stage and PA in the back of a rented house that was also a party and crash pad.
Because Reno was between the Bay Area and Salt Lake City, many touring American and Canadian punk and hardcore bands passed through and I watched a lot of their drummers trying to figure out how I should play the drums. On a Wrecks sneak-away trip (from our parents) to see Redd Kross at San Francisco’s On Broadway, I saw my first true inspiration in their drummer Janet Housden. She was the first girl I had ever seen play drums live, and I fought my way through the crowd to the front of the stage to intensely study her playing.
Over the eighteen months we were together, we played with D.O.A., Black Flag, T.S.O.L., 7 Seconds, and more. In 1982, we recorded, packaged, and sent out our own nine-song cassette demo called Teenage Jive—the artwork black and blue. Our song “Punk is an Attitude” is on the double album Not So Quiet on the Eastern Front, a punk rock and hardcore album put together by the subculture zine Maximumrocknroll and released by Alternative Tentacles.
Our last show was July 3, 1982, at the West End Community Center in Vancouver, BC, opening for Black Flag and Saccharine Trust. All the bands were using Black Flag’s amps and drums. We were nervous with the big crowd and expectations to see this all-girl band. Black Flag’s roadie, Mugger, offered to tune our guitars before stage time, but instead detuned them as a practical joke. Our first song sounded awful. Luckily most Wrecks songs were only one to two minutes long, so we got back in tune as quick as we could—but we were thrown off and already being verbally challenged by the audience. The show was a bit of a calamity. Mugger intentionally tried to make fools of us…I’m guessing he wouldn’t have done that to a band of teenage boys.
I moved to San Francisco at the end of 1982, and in 1983 I met Gary Floyd through a mutual friend.
His band, The Dicks, formed in Texas but he wanted to reform it in San Francisco. He asked me to try out. I heard there were three other guys trying out too, so I knew I had to come in strong, confident, and prepared. At some point, the challenge to be better than guys at playing drums crept in and greatly inspired me.
At the time I was practicing at the Vats, an infamous punk live/work/practice place in San Francisco that was once a brewery. There was a guy there, likely a speed freak, but he was also a drummer. He knew I was going to try out for The Dicks and asked if he could watch me practice some songs. This fellow ended up having a huge impact on my playing style. After watching a couple of songs, he said, “Don’t care about how you look or if your mascara is running.” (Or maybe he told me my mascara was running—I can’t exactly remember, but there was something about mascara.) “Sit in the music and play. Just do whatever you gotta do to get through it.” Those were powerful words from a stranger, and I credit him for my abandon while playing drums.
In 1984, I went on my first American tour with (SF) Dicks. We toured the Midwest and east coast with D.O.A. We played a few actual nightclubs, like the Metro in Chicago—and the legendary punk clubs the Satyricon in Portland, Oregon, and City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey—but mostly we played a lot of garage-type places with low-hanging ceilings (Gary called them “fire traps”), spending nights on living room floors of promoters and fans across the country. We traveled in a van with a “Tile Man” logo on it because we bought it cheap from a floor-tile installer. I drove in the smaller towns and over the US/Canadian borders because we always got pulled over. Being an eclectic bunch of misfits, we felt a female driver would create less problems with police and locals.
On tour, I realized how bouncers and other band roadies increased my determination to prove myself.
I was often regarded as a groupie and many times had to talk my way backstage or send the doorman off to find another band member to let me backstage. Stagehands and roadies sometimes ignored me or snickered at me, so most nights I could hardly wait for sound check or stage time to get my revenge upon them by dominating the drum set. All their doubting gazes gave me determination, strength, and power, mentally and physically.
After a while, I heard more and more “you’re pretty good for a girl.” A few years ago, I got a DM on social media from a man who told me that he was in the opening band for us in a basement in Brooklyn, New York, and he had said to me at the time, “You are the most exciting female drummer I’ve ever seen,” to which I responded, “I just want to be the best drummer you’ve ever seen.” He said my response never left him and “had an effect on the way (he) raised his daughters.”
“We as a band were peaceful people, using art to express our views, but our hardcore sound attracted an aggressive crowd.”
The members of The Dicks were not close, but I bonded deeply with Gary Floyd. He encouraged me to try out for The Dicks, chose me, and defended me out on the road from the occasionally aggressive and verbally abusive punk boys, and yeah, even a few girls. At a headlining show at the Berkeley Square, I was jumped in a bathroom by the DMR girls—a feminist punk gang in Berkeley— who thought I didn’t look punk enough to be at a Dicks show. I made it out of the bathroom, but not before they pushed me around and ripped the shirt off my back as I ran out the door.
The Dicks released a three-song single on R Radical Records, run by Dave Dictor of MDC. We had the infamous Spot from SST Records at the board as the final mixer/producer, recording live performances with no overdubs. It was a party event when a band went to record back then. Many MDC and Dicks friends were hanging at the studio and are included in the ending chorus of “No Fuckin’ War,” a serious and somber song that was one of the more popular anthems of the time. It was included as the soundtrack to a Thrasher Magazine skate video.
In 1984, the Dicks played a Rock Against Reagan show in the parking lot of what was then the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco where the Democratic National Convention was being held.
During “No Fuckin’ War” the stage became overcrowded with people grabbing mics to sing the chorus, roaming, and stagediving. It was an exciting time, but the memory of a strong skinhead presence still makes me cringe. We as a band were peaceful people, using art to express our views, but our hardcore sound attracted an aggressive crowd.
In 1985, we recorded the album These People with Klaus Flouride from Dead Kennedy’s as producer. We did some touring but mostly stuck to shows in SF and LA, including two at the Olympic Auditorium. The first Olympic show was with MDC, Social Distortion, and the headliners Discharge. Gary was concerned about the rumored intense audience, so he gave himself a mohawk the day we left for LA hoping to fit in and lessen the degree of spit and verbal abuse. Inexplicably, we ran out of gas on the way down to LA and missed our spot in the lineup. The promoter said we could play after Discharge, which we did, probably suffering even more animosity from the crowd because of it.
In watching videos of that show, I note two things: how fast I could play, and the number of punks from the audience pacing and jumping from the stage. The second time at the Olympic was with Fishbone and Dead Kennedys, which, unbeknownst to us, would be our last show. Due to the aggressive and sometimes violent factions of the scene—skinheads, Nazi-punks, and drunks—our fun and passion was replaced with fear and discomfort. There was no point for The Dicks to carry on.
That was the end of me playing hardcore punk.
Gary and I immediately began talking about starting a band where we didn’t need to be bound to the rules of any music genre. In 1986, we found a kindred spirit in Ben Cohen and began writing songs for our newly formed band, Sister Double Happiness. Mikey Donaldson, from The Offenders, rounded out our sound, which I describe as heavy blues-rock with a splash of grunge.
I flourished as a drummer with SDH because I now had the space for fills, dramatic pauses, and a heavy emotional attack. We released records on SST, Sub Pop USA (Singles Club) and Europe, Reprise, and Innerstate Records. We toured Europe and the US multiple times, both as a headliner and as the opener for Nirvana, Soundgarden, The Replacements, Dinosaur Jr., 4 Non-Blondes, and others. During this time, I worked on a movie project with Paul Westerberg, and via J Mascis, played UK’s TV show The Word with Dinosaur Jr. (their drummer was injured). With no official break-up, SDH stopped performing in 1996.
“Punk rock and hardcore helped me discover a fierce passion, a part of me that I may never have known.”
I met Roddy Bottum in 1984 when The Dicks played a Squatters’ Rights concert at City Hall in San Francisco. Roddy was playing keyboards with the band Trial. Over the years we became close friends and in 1995 we started chatting about starting a new band. He and I were interested in pushing our musical abilities by trying new instruments and writing and singing pop songs. He knew Will Schwartz from LA and Jone (Wrecks) was now my roommate after her move to SF. We made a demo-tape in 1995 and signed to Slash Records and released our first record as Imperial Teen in 1996.
We’ve released six records, and over many years toured the states numerous times—as a headliner or opening for The White Stripes, The Breeders, Lush, The Lemonheads, Hole, Pink, and others. We also played a few European festivals including Isle of Wight Festival, and have had several music placements in movie soundtracks, TV shows, and TV ads. Although I play several instruments in Imperial Teen, my main one is still the drums. With our more poppy sound, my drumming approach and style did change—becoming crisper and more succinct yet retaining space for powerful tom fills and crescendos.
Punk rock and hardcore helped me discover a fierce passion, a part of me that I may never have known. The experiences I had in my early years behind the kit helped create my identity, drum style, and a true expression of self and power that I could carry into any genre of music, ultimately giving me courage, confidence, and contentment. The bond of both music as a movement and the family of musicians and friends I met along the way remain constant and precious.
Awesome! Lynn, you’re such a badass