Before there was a Lilith Fair, there was Cris Williamson

by Michelle Tomko

As the queer music scene gears up to see modern music stars perform in the Equality Rocks concert in Washington, D.C., legendary women's music performer Cris Williamson is gearing up for her first solo tour in fifteen years.

She is also entering an empty house for the first time in over two decades, as her breakup with partner Tret Fure goes into perhaps the most agonizing stage of lesbian relationships: the stuff removal.

In route to her bachelor pad from a vision quest in Montana, the performer took time to do an interview on a Denver airport pay phone with the Gay People's Chronicleproving that true artists don't have cell phones.

Williamson will be performing in Dayton on Sunday, May 14 at 8:00 p.m. at the Canal Street Tavern, in what she is calling her "Good Grief" tour. She will be playing old standards as well as unrecorded new tunes that Williamson refers to as "spells for grief."

"My friends are all saying, Why don't you listen to your own songs?" joked the singer.

"Montana was good for me," said Williamson. She is trying to stay as loving and positive about the breakup as possible, even though she describes hearing Fure's news as "like getting hit in the face with a Coke bottle."

"My people on both sides of the family are from Ohio. Well, all over the place. But in Columbus and Cleveland, and Cincinnati and Toledo. A lot of them still live in Toledo. My grandparents did live in Columbus for a while," Williamson added.

Michelle Tomko: If you had to sum it up, how has women's music evolved in the past twenty years?

Cris Williamson: We're still talking about women's music after 20 years.

Just the fact that you can ask the question indicates it's a living thing. It's no longer just in the minds of just a few people. That's probably the best answer to it. It's really alive, and has lots of faces now, lots of different styles.

I'm still not really sure I know what it is. I do know that it's women who have responded most strongly to my music. I think men would if they heard it more. I wish more of them would come to the show. They somehow seem to think that whatever it's going to be, it wouldn't be for them, and that's so not the case.

What do you make of the fact that female artists have difficulty getting men to come to their shows?

It's sort of just one of my points of irritation within the gay community is that on Pride Pay we all hold hands and say "We are family," and then everybody promptly forgets. I think especially the men seem to forget that family means you're connected. You work on those connections and you do show up for the family get-togethers.

It's just like any dysfunctional family. We don't need to be deeply dysfunctional within our own culture. I think that's where we need to be really functional. And the way we do that is showing respect and concern for each other by attending and seeing what the culture is. We tend to get too insular. I think there are still women who don't want men there. There are men who don't want women where they are. And that's the polarity of it. Has that always been the case? Don't you think so? There's that genuine sort of suspicion of each other on the polarized ends. But up the middle are people who want to get to know one another. And if we can't get to know each other in our own culture, I think we can be divided so easily. How will we ever come to one mind? Unless some massive disease hits us like AIDS, then we pull around that. It takes a tragedy, sometimes, to unify people.

You sound like you follow queer arts. I do the best I can. It isn't always what interests me. I'm interested in art. Capital A, R, T in the world, however it's made, by whomever.

Do you hold queer artistic endeavors to a higher standard?

What may be a measure of its value is: Does it last? Does it speak, not just to gay

people, but does it speak to the human condition? Because I'm a writer, and it matters to me that you move from the personal to the universal. I think there's a danger to being ghettoized, because it may be too limiting.

Let's say we're writing poetry and we decided to write a haiku, which is very structured and very formal. Within that formal structure, which often is forced upon us as gay people, "you people stay over here and do what you want, but please don't mingle with the rest." I myself have found great freedom in that. Because I want freedom wherever I am I'm going to stretch the boundaries.

I think that what we need to keep doing is not mainstream. Because I think we are in the mainstream anyway, we're just often invisible.

What came first, your musicality or your sexuality?

Music first, last, and always. Sexuality is the least part of it. Sensuality is a big part of music for me, not sexuality. That's really the mundane and there are lots of people who will deal with that. So for me it's more about what will carry my philosophy of life.

And when you get labeled “mother of women's music"?

It's really about my place in time. That phrase. I was there. When you mother something you nurture it. I helped nurture it. But I would really say that if any body is, it's Meg Christian, it's Ronnie Gilbert, and it's Alix Dobkin. It took a lot of mothers to give birth to this culture. Fathers, too.

Did you feel pigeonholed at all?

Oh sure. When I hit 45-I'm 53 now-I had a real crisis, especially as Lilith Fair and women in music started rising way up to the top and being bankable.

I went, "Well, here we are, still ghettoized." It doesn't touch us. We get no beautiful fallout from it. We get no goodies. We're ignored completely, except by the gay press-and often by the gay press too. I said, "Why not?" If women love this, then that's who I'll sing to. Because nobody else was knockin' down the door for my art. It had passed over the desks of every major label. And they all went, "Well, we have a woman already."

Now, that's not the same. It's women who are bankable. It's Sarah McLachlan's idea, and she's Canadian, so she may not really have known about the women's festivals that happened down here. But for her, it's the same as it is for everybody. When you discover something yourself, it's as though it's brand new and you made it up.

On the other hand, the history of that is for more than twenty years, women's festivals have gone on with women doing everything. Only women onstage, women doing sound, that's a real women's festival. It's like Columbus discovering America; it actually was there. He didn't invent it.

What would you like to say to Generation X feminists whose first dose of women's music might be the Indigo Girls or Melissa Etheridge and whose Woodstock experience is going to Lilith Fair?

Every generation is going to have one of those watermarks. It doesn't mean that's all that ever happened. That's why history is really important to me. I am a historian, and I really think that it is important to constantly remember we're part of an enormously long, long, and often unsung process. Now we sing about it more. It's much more visible.

Does the music lose something for the people of your generation because it's easier now?

What are they supposed to do? Suffer? What is history for, if not to make it easier for the next generation?

I think what would even that out would be a nod. Hello? Just a nod for the women who came before. I was raised in the '70s where it was really important that you remembered you're standing on the shoulders of giants and you didn't make it up. How do you think

April 28, 2000 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

you got there? How do you think the road got made? For those people to never get a nod. It's okay now. I sort of came to grips with that myself and stopped moaning about being left

out.

Would you participate in Lilith Fair if you were invited?

Of course. Sure. But they don't think about us. I mean Bonnie Raitt, who's a good friend of mine, said she herself felt like a grandmother there.

But this is such a huge culture. Where young girls spend their money is what drives the market. If lesbians become fashionable, which they did for about a minute, so what drives that is fashion. A lot of younger people don't have that grip, that the money that they put down is going into somebody's pockets.

You've had to make an adjustment. This is your first time out solo in a while.

Yeah but it's what I know how to do. This is the least of it. The hardest part is a daily life without Tret. It's twenty years and then in a matter of months, and she just left yesterday, and I'm coming home to that empty house. Well it won't be completely empty because I'm there.

Literally yesterday?

Literally yesterday, the truck left. How to say goodbye to somebody when you're still in love with him or her is really, really hard. How to say goodbye when it's not really in my vocabulary.

Cris Williamson

IRENE YOUNG