SARAH DOUGHER
A Shark Bait / Babes in Boyland interview @ the Crocodile Café, Seattle (10.26.2000).


It's the evening and only the second interview that we have together. As good students, we have read all the interviews, reviews and articles we could possibly find to have a more complete idea of who she is (besides a musician-composer-PhD student-teacher-music editor for Plazm) and learnt as much as we could about Sarah. We are very impressed by her music, her achievement, her wit, everything that makes us feel as big as smashed peas as we walk up to her to ask for an interview. She accepts with warm smile and we seat at a booth in the bar section of the Crocodile Café. The next minutes are incredibly intense (we have so many things to ask her, so few words and so little time) and the following words are the trace of the discussion we had with this Ms Lady of Rock….or at least what we could remember of them because the Mini disc we were using was brand new and yes, we did screw up the interview at one point (still possible to use for the radio show though, thanks for asking) but please don't come up with the usual 'girl and technology' comment rolling your eyes or we might get pissed off, which would result in your ass being initiated to the not so soft contact of a toe-cap DM. Sorry Sarah, though, especially since it was a great part of the interview that got erased. The rest is the almost exact transcription of the Lady's word (yes, you do have to adapt the oral message to the written form. No we didn't change the content). Seattle, Day One at night, enjoy !

BiB/Sb : You play in two different bands beside your solo career and you work as a teacher at the same time, do you ever sleep ?
Sarah Dougher : Yes, I do. I mean I haven't been sleeping very much recently because I am also now applying for other teaching jobs (that's a lot of work!) and I have my job, but my other bands right now are sort of sleeping. It's just me. Cadallaca is taking a little break. We were writing songs and practicing but we are not playing shows right now. The Crabs were on a sort of hiatus. I don't really know what's happening. I mean with Cadallaca, we maybe practice once a week or once every two weeks, sometimes more, but it doesn't really take that much time. I mean for me what takes a lot of time is writing music. Because for me it often involves a very long uninterrupted period of solitude and it's hard to find that chunk of time. You know when I was in school it was really easy because I would just like study for an hour, then practice for two hours, then study for two hours, practice for one… I could do it, I could organize my time a little bit more according to my will.

BiB/Sb : How do you write the songs with the other bands, then? Do you write them all together ?
S.D. : Yeah, we write them altogether. Well, for Cadallaca usually Corin and I get together and just sketch out parts of the song or we come up with an idea for a song or something and then in our next practice we play it and see what it sounds like, because usually when we write songs we're just sort of quiet and we see what it sounds like loud and with the drums. We would go like yeah, it needs something, it needs like a really good intro and we compose it together.

BiB/Sb : Is that when you come in with all the different kinds of instrument ?
S.D. : well, you know we just use three different instruments. It's a just a keyboard, guitar and drums. I mean we may use more instruments in the future, but for now that's it.

Bib/Sb : How did you decide on these instruments to start with ?
S.D. : Well, the keyboard sort of generated the band because I got this organ and I was like 'I wanna have a band with an organ! Will you guys be in my band?' And so we just decided to have the band.

Bib/Sb : Have you known them forever, I mean that's really what it sounds like when you talk about them.
S.D. : Yes, well I met Shana in 1995, when she moved from Chico, CA to Portland, and I met Corin a little bit before that, probably like two years before that, just through music and we had mutual friends. We were housemates for a while. We're just really good friends and we met mostly through music.

Bib/Sb : Is there going to be a full length Cadallaca album soon ?
S.D. : Yes, I don't know when but it will come, I promise.

Bib/Sb : How do you explain the fact that the community is so supportive in Portland ? I don't see it to be that supportive in Seattle, for example.
S.D. : Well, it's hard for me to say anything about this right mow, I guess because I don't really know what the scene in Portland is actually like, I only know about my friends and myself, you know what I mean, and I know even less about Seattle. However, what I do know is that the environment that I insist on playing music in is one that is not competitive, not contentious and that insists on the viability of new musicians and experimental music and different configurations of people. It doesn't matter if you've been in a band for ten years and then you start a band with someone who doesn't even know how to play their instrument yet, that's a band! I am really interested in the idea of being able to play music throughout my whole life with people. Having that be a value that I support in myself throughout my whole life because I really love it.

Bib/Sb : Have you found yourself limited by sexism, especially in the so-called cock-rock world ?
S.D. : I spend a lot of time trying to encounter or change the minds of sexist people, because I don't really encounter them in my day to day life because I don't arrange my life around them or to please them or whatever. I think because rock is in a lot of ways a laissez-faire social environment, I think that it's only when I've encountered people who think of themselves as part of institutions that I encounter sexism.

Bib/Sb : Do you think that there can be more sexism in rock than in punk for example (if these categories are of any relevance, that is) ? I mean punk was more or less a reaction against an institutionalizing rock…
S.D. : It totally depends on the scene, I think it's a very hard thing to generalize. I know for example like the genre hard-rock right now is really, really sexist, but it exists alongside the genre hip-hop, which actually also is really sexist in a lot of ways but there are punk scenes that also are really sexists. When I go on tour, I go to smaller places like I don't know Kansas City, or St Louis and the women there who are trying to forge their place in the punk scene have a lot of resistance. It's always really shocking to me because I would play with THE girls band of Kansas City, or wherever, and there's not like a whole bunch of them. Whereas in Portland, you have girl punk bands, and girl pop bands, and girls hardcore bands, and girl singers, you know it's like all these different styles of music that women are totally excelling in. When I see that on tour, I think to myself 'oh my god, the punk scene is so sexist' because young girls arescared to even try. I think that Riot Grrrl still must live because of that, and I will still have to go on tour because of that very thing, you know. Then I start feeling all that righteous and excited, but in my owncommunity because I get used to how wonderfully supportive it is, I forget sometimes.

Bib/Sb : How did you pick up the guitar ? Was it empowering for you ? I remember reading this interview of Donna Dresch saying she had chosen to play the bass because it was the least 'woman' instrument she could find. it was everything she was not supposed to be, you know, loud and heavy.
S.D. : It's funny she says that though, because the bass is often the girl's instrument. But I think what she does with it, her way of subverting the background bass line, its supporting role.


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