Linda Perry Wonders Where the Hard-Rocking Women Are

Posted on Aug 25th 2010 2:00PM by Steve Baltin
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When Courtney Love was working with Linda Perry on the album that would eventually become 'Nobody's Daughter' -- though not the version produced by Perry -- the Hole singer wanted to put an all-female band together. As someone who's worked with a who's who of female artists including Pink, Christina Aguilera and KT Tunstall, Perry is the first to support woman rockers, but she had to dash Love's dreams of an all-woman band.

"She did start finding all these people and I was going to rehearsals and they sucked," Perry tells Spinner. "It was this wimpy ass f---ing girls who didn't rock. But you know what they did? They had a good look. It's still hard to find a girl who straps on a f---ing guitar and rocks and isn't worried about her f---ing fingernails or what she looks like."

Perry wants women musicians to look at the past and know that if you want to get up and kick ass, you have to be willing to put in the work. "Getting up onstage is f---ing sweating and rocking it, like L7 or Babes in Toyland used to do," she says, noting there are still some women doing it today. "PJ Harvey, f---ing rock 'n' roll. I like Karen O -- I think she comes off as cool and rock 'n' roll. But there are not a lot of women who play instruments and can pull that off."

Rather than just lament the lack of women rockers, Perry has signed British garage rock duo Little Fish to her Custard Records label and in frontwoman Juju, she thinks she has the next great female rocker. "I believe that Juju can be the next Patti Smith, the next PJ Harvey, the next Chrissie Hynde, the future Courtney Love, just meaning the spokesperson for women in rock 'n' roll," she says.

As a label head, Perry looks for her bands to fill certain needs, like L.A. trio Crash Kings, of whom she says, "I love them. I want to pop in a record and turn it up and be stupid for 45 minutes. That's what Crash Kings do for me." She describes prog rockers Bigelf as "my rock star fantasy, like they're f---ing Queen meets the Beatles meets Black Sabbath meets ELO. They have everything I love about music all wrapped up in one."

As for Juju and Little Fish, Perry says, "They're gonna be big. I know they are and she will inspire thousands, if not millions, of girls to pick up a guitar and get up onstage and say, 'F--- you,'" Perry says. "Back in the '90s when we had the beginning of girl rock, it never really got where it needed to go because it maintained this indie thing. Then all of a sudden the Lilith Fair stuff started showing up and it was like this softer empowerment of women. I want hard f---ing edge woman out there right now, balls in their hand, rocking it and it's not happening. That's what I look for Little Fish to do: Show up and do that and represent that part."

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