I have had many opportunities to interview artists and musicians since starting the Lemming but this is my favorite. In our talk she never backed away from any subject, always has something to say about it, and was unafraid to share her feelings.
NL: This isn't your first time coming up to Fairbanks?
Pamela: No, it's my second.
NL: What brought you up here the first time?
Pamela: I have a friend that's living up here. So I came for a visit and I thought I would get some gigs too, and I did. I played in Fairbanks four times, on my last visit and twice in Anchorage. Everybody was really nice here, they said "Come back any time!" So here I am.
NL: I read that you have opened up for the Violent Femmes, how did that come about?
Pamela: Brian Richie, the bass player, played on my very first tape. They're from Milwaukee, two of them still live there. They have a new drummer Guy Hoffman, after Victor DiAngelo left. Guy has done several, several gigs with me in Milwaukee and Brian has done a few. I grew up in Milwaukee and began doing music there. At that time Brian would go out and see who the new people were and he saw me playing in a club one night and he asked me to come over to his house to play.
NL: He helped you get your start then?
Pamela: He did in the sense that he was really supportive. When I was over at his house, he has a portable DAT player and I had a drummer friend and they were friends, Greg Slovic. We spent the recording at Brian's and that became my first tape.
NL: What made you decide you wanted to be a musician?
Pamela: I don't ever remember deciding. I just knew. It was always what I wanted to do. Every since I was a little kid I would play rock star in my room. I had toy instruments. I thought about other things very briefly but I always came back to wanting to do music.
NL: When did you learn how to play guitar?
Pamela: I didn't learn officially till I was Fourteen. I took some lessons at the Y, learned some basic cords. I taught myself until I was Eighteen then I studied classical guitar and a year and half of jazz at the conservatory. Then I started performing as a solo act in coffee houses and stuff.
NL: Did you find it hard to get your start?
Pamela: No, everything was layed out in front of me, it was a special time. I remember I had been taking classical lessons and doing recitals and at the same time Tracy Chapman and Suzanne Vega were getting big. I realized I could do this by myself. I didn't have to play guitar in a band. I was coming to those realizations and I found a listing for a coffee house that had an open mike. I checked it out and it was exactly what I wanted to do. It had a nice atmosphere and an opening for a manager and I applied. I had a dream that I applied for the job and then the next night I had a dream that I was playing in a coffee house. In the next couple of days I went to the board meeting and I got the job, that's where I started playing.
NL: What do you like to write about?
Pamela: I like to write from my own personal perspective on the world. Anything from emotional things, relationship things, political things like racism and sexism.
NL: Are racism and sexism issues your strongly concerned about?
Pamela: Yeah! I'm bi-racial. I grew up in different societies. I grew in white society and black society, separately. I encountered racism from all fronts growing up. So did a lot of people. And any women encounters sexism, everyday. I started reading a lot of feminist literature a couple of years ago. It really has been profound. When I was first reading these books it put words to feeling I grew up having. Audry Lord, she's I think a phenomenal writer, she's a black lesbian poet activist. Everything she writes is so up front in your face and articulate. She can site specific examples of institutionalized racism in the whole structure of our society. That's something I've been thinking a lot about and that comes out in what I right.
NL: What would you consider some of the biggest problems with racism or sexism?
Pamela: It's peoples attitudes. The way we're taught as children, to hate. To think that because someone's different that they're inferior. Just to have to pay attention to anybody's differences. That that's a mark of something bad.
Peoples attitudes will have to change. We have to think of each other as coming from the same family. I think that we are. There's always stuff men grew up learning, that they have to be a specific way because of their gender, and women the same way. That's started to change a little bit with civil rights and the feminist movement in the early seventies. But, I think it's got to be a spiritual thing. If we thought of each other as brothers and sisters, as cheesy as that sounds. I think it's something we have to transcend, and not be petty about skin color or sexual preference or gender.
NL: Have you run into prejudice a lot then?
Pamela: I did, I moved out of Wisconsin. It's everywhere, but I encountered it a great deal in Wisconsin. Milwaukee is one of the most segregated cities in the country. I spent my adolescence in a little town outside of Milwaukee, a little white community. I went to a little parochial school, I was the closest thing to a black person there. I don't' know where it came from, it had to have come from their parents, but I was called nigger a lot. I was only in fourth grade, I didn't even know what it was. It continues to this day, every time I go back there. I was there last year and there was car full of teenage boys, there was an adult in the car too. They were totally laughing at me, it took me all the way back to when I was a kid when I had lots of instances like that just because I looked different. It's really infuriating.
NL: Do find problems with sexism in the music world?
Pamela: I think that I have, but I don't think it's been as overt in my face. But perhaps not, because I know that in Milwaukee there are very few acoustical musicians, when I was growing up there and even fewer female musicians. From that perspective if there was ever a position that needed to be filled, like some guy said he wanted a female acoustic opening act, there weren't too many choices. That partially how I got all those great opening acts slots. I think that women are still a minority in the industry especially in folk music. It's pretty all much white guys, with few exceptions. I think that's the way the industry is set up.
NL: What would be an example of this?
Pamela: I think there are sexist attitudes with how women should be portrayed and what their images should be like. Women are still objectified and idealized. The blonde anorexic fashion model is still the ideal and if your not like that then your nobody. Every female artist, she is has some tremendous talent in one area or another or she's incredibly gorgeous. Men in the music industry can look like shit and sing for shit and be superstars. It's not even.
NL: Getting back to your music, what's the biggest audience you've ever played in front of?
Pamela: Well, the biggest contained audience would probably have been when I opened for Neil Young. It was two sold out nights in a 24 hundred seat hall.
NL: Was it like playing for that many people?
Pamela: You play the same songs you always play. Then there's the applause you're used to hearing but it's multiplied by a hundred. You look up and it's dark and there's the exit's lights up in the balcony far away. It's pretty phenomenal. I've played some big music festivals where there's lots of people going by, but you can't tell how many people.
NL: Do you have a big following within folk music?
Pamela: I don't know. I think it's growing. Especially since I moved to Boston.
NL: Is that a happening place for folk music?
Pamela: It's definitely the center of folk music. With the number of coffee houses and folk musicians concentrated in that area, it's defiantly. That's why I moved there.
NL: Has it always been like that?
Pamela: Since the sixties. It's probably multiplied since then. It really was a big deal then. There's a coffee house or two in Cambridge where Bob Dylan got started and Joan Baez. It's got some history attached to it which is why so everybody goes there. So anything you do there would probably have a stronger ripple effect then, Milwaukee. I've been touring a lot more since I moved there.
NL: By yourself and not with another band?
Pamela: I've never gone on an official 36 city tour opening for some band, that would be cool. No, I've been going back and forth between Boston and the midwest and each time adding a few more towns along the way. Now I've come all the way to Alaska and I'm going to start to stretch it to the west coast and keep drawing lines and connecting the dots all the way across. I've gone down to Atlanta for the first time and I'm going to continue to do that.
NL: So you mostly do a lot of touring?
Pamela: More and more now. It's really starting to pick up.
NL: You like the traveling?
Pamela: I love it!
NL: Is it tiresome living in hotels each night?
Pamela: It's like a big adventure. I might get tired of it years from now. Right now I dig it a lot. It kind of sucks to drive for fourteen hours but if I have cruise control and some good tapes then, not a problem.
NL: Do you have an agent?
Pamela: No.
NL: You book your shows yourself?
Pamela: I have one agent that books me exclusively in Wisconsin colleges, but that's it. Just a few days in Wisconsin, but the rest I do myself.
NL: Is that a lot of work?
Pamela: It's a lot of work, I have to do everything. There's no way to be on top of everything as much as you could be. I have to do all booking, all the promotions, all the mailing, any kind of radio, trying to get press. Then practicing, writing the songs, doing the gigs, then driving to the next one. I like it. I'm doing what I always wanted to do.
NL: If you ever got an offer to be signed on to a big label, would you take it?
Pamela: I don't know anymore. That sounds crazy. I'm twenty seven now and I first started to perform when I was twenty one. Twenty two, without a doubt, I wouldn't even finish reading the contract. Now, I've started to grow up a little bit and my politics have changed. I've become aware of what my personal politics are and I'm still learning about them. We've been talking about sexism in the industry, so for me to buy into that industry that I've been complaining about, that would be hypocritical and self-destructive, I think, personally. I like being independent. I'm not on the cover of Rolling Stone but I'm doing everything that I want to do and people respond and it's growing. Annie DiFranco has set such a remarkable example of what someone can do independently. She's huge. She has nine albums out, she's probably sold a million records or close to it. Completely independent. She's got some pretty stiff guarantees, now, if you want to book her. She started out doing the same thing. Packing some CD's in the trunk and going to play Java Joe's for twenty five buck, staying in a hotel and going to the next place. I think that has inspired me a great deal to be independent. I started my own label out of necessity a few years ago, but I was still thinking that if I ever got signed I could just sell them the label. Now, I don't think about getting signed. If someone did I would probably think about but I've got a lot more on my mind to bring to that discussion.
NL: You enjoy the freedom?
Pamela: There's no compromise, I do whatever I want. Just, not feeding that corporate machine that's got way too much power and money already. If even half the artists out there did it on their own, just think how empowering that would be to the independent artist. To think that they don't need that big break, just take a few steps on their own.