Hi I'm Alice Bag and I'm at Amoeba and this is What's in My Bag.
I'm gonna do my recommendations first.
This is a band that sadly broke up.
This is a record from last year, but it's such a good record.
I actually have the CD and I keep it in my car and I play it all the time.
It's Allison Wolfe's band with Mecca Vazie Andrews
and the whole band is just made up of
people who are really amazing performers and really...
They know how to groove, they know how to rock and they fit together like a perfect puzzle.
So, Sex Stains.
Mecca is an Amoeba alumni. She used to work here.
Oh I didn't know that. I think she's focusing more on dancing now
and that's one of the things that made their live performances so exciting was that
you had Mecca and just her beautiful body movements and
you know, just opposed with Allison and her sort of like
exuberance at being onstage and they just played off each other beautifully.
And you hear it on the record. You really hear how they trade off vocals.
I recommend it, especially 'Land of La-La.' That's my favorite song on here.
I brought a classic out and this is Javier Solís.
He is a Mexican singer who does boleros which are these beautiful ballads, I guess you would call them.
I just have always loved his voice
and I don't have this one so I'm gonna get it. I've heard a lot of these songs
and I look forward to hearing it.
And if you haven't heard Xavier Solis, take a listen. He's got a velvety voice. Very romantic.
And then I picked Shopping.
I was doing a book reading in New Orleans
and Shopping was... they're actually from England but they were playing in New Orleans
and I caught their set and it was really fun.
It's not like a lot of heavy chords, it's a lot of melodies on guitars
and they create an atmosphere.
Everybody in the audience was just jumping all over the place.
That's how the music sounds like, it makes you want to dance.
When I pick music, I usually think, what do I want to listen to when I'm making breakfast?
Y'know it's completely different from what I want to listen to when I'm getting dressed to go out.
So this is when you're on your way to a concert, you want to listen to this and this.
And when you're making cocktails for you and your honey, you want to listen to this.
Actually, the first thing that I found was a book.
I was born recovering.
I'm surprised my first spoken sentence wasn't, 'Hi my name is Patty and I'm already an alcoholic.'
I wasn't a fan of Hole, I didn't follow them.
I didn't really know very much about Patty Schemel.
I met her at Girls Rock Camp and she was just
really nice and such a welcoming person that I really wanted to know more about her.
So I bought the book, I read it, and I just want to recommend it.
My social life really opened up when I started playing music.
That was the common thread for all my relationships.
If you like the Ramones, you could come over to my house
and I could play you all the songs on the first record.
That's how my first band The Milkbones came to be.
I love this book also. It's Patti Smith's writing and it's just flawless.
It's prose, y'know, it's beautiful to read.
I just feel like women don't tell their stories often enough.
I worked long hours at Brentano's and skipped lunches.
I befriended another employee named Francis Finley.
Discerning my plate, she would leave me Tupperware containers of homemade soup
on the table of the employees cloakroom.
This small gesture fortified me and sealed a lasting friendship.
I was trying to find another book to give you three
and I was looking for Michelle Gonzales' 'The Spitboy Rule' but you are all sold out.
So please get more, because that one is also very good, and it's also...
She's a Chicana, you know, I feel like we need to hear her voice too
to be more... to get a more rounded view.
But also, I deliberately go out of my way to find
the woman's narrative, especially in rock, because it tends to be left out.
So those are two strong recommendations.
You're gonna hate me, but I I do a lot of like Spotify and Pandora
and just have playlists because it's easy.
But I found that I listen to a lot of Soviettes
and I don't have a single one of their CDs or records. So I got some Soviettes.
I feel like they have real punk-pop energy. I like the way they do it.
I got Garbage.
I'm having a girl crush on Shirley right now, because I met her at a party
and I was really nervous to talk to her.
So consequently I said hello and then I went to the other corner of the room.
I didn't want to bother her.
And as I was leaving, she came up and she was super nice
and said what a pleasure it was to meet me
and she was familiar with my work and I was like...
y'know, of course, starstruck.
The person that invited us to the party also
is a video producer, so he was making a video for me.
It's a music video for a song called '77'
and I was lucky enough to have Allison Wolfe and Kathleen Hanna
sing some of the verses of the song.
It's a song about how women make 77 cents on the dollar compared to men.
So it's about changing that and fighting for equal pay.
We did a little spoof of '9 to 5'
and it was the day before we were gonna shoot. I think it was like 9:00 at night
and I wrote to the director/producer
and I said, do you think Shirley would do a guest spot as the nosy kiss-ass that
looks over the women's work and just reports back to the boss?
Y'know, I knew it was a total shot in the dark, right
and he wrote back that night and he said 'she said yes' and she showed up the next day.
We didn't even have wardrobe for her. She came dressed
and she might have accented from the rack
but she was ready to go and she was flawless.
She was so perfect. She was scary, walking around, looking over people
Yeah, it was so good.
I got Chicano Batman. I haven't heard this record.
Recently I put together a benefit for the victims of the earthquake in Mexico City
and the survivors of the hurricane in Puerto Rico.
And I asked Chicano Batman to play. I asked a bunch of my friends to play. It was a really wonderful show.
But Chicano Batman was on tour and they couldn't make it
but they were super supportive and they made a huge donation
and they were like just tell us how else we can help
So even though they were, you know, somewhere else, I just felt the love.
I felt like there was solidarity there even though they couldn't perform.
So I'm looking forward to hearing this.
And then another person that really came through at the last minute for that show was Teri Suárez
Teri Gender Bender from Le Butcherettes.
I didn't find any of Le Butcherettes. Dang.
But she also does a little cameo on one of my songs
that's coming out my next record so I'm excited.
And then I got The Gossip.
A lot of my CDs are... the CD is naked over here and then the CD box is
wandering around somewhere in my garage or in my car.
So I just thought I'd get this to supplement my collection.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
I'm so happy you were able to come down and talk with us.
Oh, thank you.