The prospect of interviewing Lois Maffeo had me excited for days before her scheduled appearance at the Starfish Room on. Being the rather silly girl that I am I had missed her show at the Yoyo Studios Music Festival a few weeks before - quite a faux pas, considering Lois is one of the oldest scenesters in the K Records/Olympia scene. Her music is acoustic, her voice soothing, and her lyrics subtle yet still very pro-girl. Crafty as a coyote, Lois is part of the quiet punk revolution. Krista and I waited for Lois outside the Starfish Room for a total of about one and a half hours. Half way through this wait we were told by a rather grumpy club owner that she had gone for dinner with the cub girls, but we did manage to track her down eventually. Here's what she had to say for herself. Krista: One of the things we wanted to talk about was doing radio, because both Trish and I have girl radio shows at CiTR and I heard that you did an all-girl radio show too. Lois: Yeah, I did an all-girl radio show called You Dream Girl. I started doing that in 1983 and I did it for about three years. When I first started doing it I really didn't have anything to go on; I didn't know anyone who had done a women's radio show, except there was a women's radio show at KAOS, the station I worked at, which was at my college, Evergreen State College. They played stuff like Farren, Hooly Near - stuff like that. I always thought, well, that music is fine, but it isn't really what I was thinking I wanted to play. I started out just doing a little talk show and it kind of evolved into doing a rock show, which evolved into doing an all-girl radio show. It is always kind of easier for me, instead of putting up a big fight with people, to be crafty. So I got a rock show first, and then I just played all girls, and then everyone was saying ‘wow, great show. I just looked for every girl musical performer that I could find in punk, reggae, rockabilly, anything. I played all sorts of stuff. It was really fun and it inspired me to play music myself. I really think that being a fan is equally as important in our scene as being a performer;somebody has to listen to the records. Krista: Did you ever do band interviews on your show? Yes, I did. I wrote to bands, and sometimes when bands would come through Olympia, I would talk to them. Sometimes I wouldn't be able to get interviews with people; I remember standing in the rain trying to interview Kim Gordon and she just never came outside. I was really bummed. I scrawled a little note and left it on the van. It's just a little embarrassing fan story from my past. Everybody has them.; everybody has written one sappy letter to a pop performer during their lives. I don't know that it was such a sappy note, 'cause I was kind of mad. Krista: I thought that this interview was going to turn into one of your Kim Gordon experiences. I'm sorry, its just that I'm delinquent in all things. Trish: We were going to blame it on the cub girls because they knew we were doing this interview and they abducted you. Krista: You mentioned that you went to Evergreen. What was it like for you? Evergreen is a weird school in that they don't have grades, but they give degrees. They don't give them specifically in anything. You get a BA or BS, but you don't get them in English or anything. It's kind of a holistic approach to educating people by giving them inter-disciplinary studies. I went to Evergreen because I had gone to this strict Catholic all girls school and I had heard about Evergreen from a friend. I heard that there was this place where they didn't give grades and you could get a degree in skate boarding. I went to my guidance councillor, Sister Katrine, and I said I wanted to go to this school because it sounded really rad. And she said that if I went to Evergreen I'd ruin my life. That was the moment I knew that I had to go there. I went there in 1981. It really is a great place to go to school. You can do a lot of work, especially if you have any self-discipline whatsoever. There are a lot of really gifted professors. Krista: After Evergreen you started doing bands... My first band was called Lumihoops. I was working at this job and we had a talent show. Two of my co-workers and I were wondering what we could do in the talent show and I had had this guitar lying around for like two years and never adequately learned how to play. One of the girls, Sharon, was a very accomplished musician. She played in a medieval recorder quartet. In fact, now she is an ethno-musicologist so she could really play stuff. She said, "Let's have a band. Lois, you play guitar." My friend Jan played drums. At this point the interview was interrupted by a Valet boy trying to run us over. Krista: So we were talking about what Trish calls "old school" Lois. We had our little talent show - Jan played drums, I played guitar, and Sharon played hurdy-gurdy and mandolin. Our influences were medieval music, punk rock and not being able to play, so our sound was very eclectic. We only played live once, [we] did a radio show once and we recorded five songs. One of them turned up on one of Pat Maley's [Yoyo studios] compilations called Throw. That was the most poppy song we did. Then I was in a band with Pat Maley called Courtney Love. And that lasted for a couple years. We put out three singles. I moved to Washington DC in 1989 and we actually stayed together a little after that. We did one tour and a show at the International Pop Underground Festival was our last show. Trish: Do you consider yourself to be punk? Your music is pretty poppy. You don't say Oi! in any of your songs. But the second and third letters of my name spell oi! When I first heard about punk when I was in high school I thought it was going to be really weird. I had this idea in my head that punk was going to be so radical, that it was going to hurt my ears. It was going to sound like needles going in my ears. I think that the first punk record I ever heard was the Sex Pistols and then I was like, "Wait a minute, this is just rock and roll!" In Phoenix, where I grew up, there wasn't really a big punk scene. Punk was the music I listened to as a youth, but then I heard about people doing things like their own label, and their own tours. When I started to understand how it worked on an independent level it became an even more dramatic inspiration in my life because I realized that you could start your own business, or start your own band. You could do all these things with kids, or people that were your own age. That's when I started to think that I wanted to actively be punk rock. I have never owned a leather jacket, I've never dyed my hair, I don't have any tattoos. I am really pretty lame when it comes to the badges of punk rockdom. Krista: Do people ever try to discredit you because you don't wear those badges? Not very often. I mean, sometimes I'll get a review in something like Maximum Rock'n'Roll that will be very slighting. Although, MRR doesn't review records anymore, except for the ones they define as punk rock records; so I wouldn't even be reviewed in MRR anymore. Really infrequently do people take issue with that. I've played shows before, like in East Bay, where the kids are so crusty - totally dyed hair,they're dirty and totally punk, and a friend has set something up at one of their warehouse parties. It is always just an intimidation factor: are you afraid to go play in front of a crowd? I have played with Unsane and Fugazi and a rap band called H2O - Hard to Obtain - and it doesn't matter what the crowd is like, it's just a matter of having confidence in yourself. Krista: There seems to be another side to punk, other than being crusty, that as more to do with attitude. For example, Kicking Giant and Jad Fair are challenging people's ideas of what music is. If you have something good, people will be open to it. Anyway, we were wondering, what is a strumpet? A strumpet was at one time used to describe a woman of ill repute. I've always liked that word, and plus strumming is something I do, so I'm a strumpet that strums. Part of the Riot Grrrl thing is about appropriating language. I kind of felt that if people can appropriate slut and bitch to words that don't harm them, I can do that too. Krista: In the song "Strumpet," your lyrics are very in your face. You seem to be saying, "I'm going to do this and if you want to call me a strumpet, that's okay, but I'm just doing my own thing." But there is also part of that song that is about telling other girls not to let that whole attitude make them scared to do what they want. There is nothing wrong with shaving your legs, but if you don't want to shave your legs there shouldn't be any problem. If you want to sing on a stage, great. But if you don't want to there is no problem. If you want to do it, confidence is so important. Every time I go to the music shop I'm just waiting for a guy with a poodle perm to say ‘Is your boyfriend in a band?" I get so frustrated because I'm not a performer so that I can educate all the sound men and idiotic boys at the music store. The same way that I talked about getting my own way at the radio station, I think you have to educate people that way too. Instead of just calling someone a dick, it is better to encourage his girlfriend to form a band. I think that is how to get back at the culture that oppresses you - sneakily take away their badges of power. Krista: Your t-shirts say "I'll steal your girlfriend," right? Lois: "I'm gonna steal your girlfriend." It is what I was just saying about encouraging women to play music and do the things they want to do. I chose an image of Sophia Loren, just because it was cool and sexy. Krista: Who are your idols? 'Cause Trish says that you are not allowed to have idols. Trish: Let me say what I said! I said that considering you are down with the whole Olympia/Kill Rock Stars thing, is it okay to have idols? My theory is that if you idolize people, you have to accept that others may idolize you. And then you are a rock star. I think your point is a very valid one, and I used to go back and forth on that one. But last summer I went to New York to see Patti Smith read in Central Park and she read a really moving - what might have been a journal entry about idolizing people. And she was famous for idolizing people. She said that art exists as much for the artist to create it as for the people to enfold it. Elevating some of those ideas, she thought, was really right because it gave you a connection to what she considers a higher form. It is really funny because I was really thinking about it yesterday because I met one of my idols. I was in line at the car rental place. There is this dancer named Mark Morris and he does this thing called the White Oak Dance Project with Mikail Barishnikov. I was looking in front of me at this guy and I was like, oh my god, that is Mark Morris. And I thought, it's now or never, so I said, "Excuse me Mr. Morris, but you are a hero to me." And he said "Oh, gee, thanks!" He was so normal, a goth kid. He could be my neighbour boy! So it is something to aspire to, and in another way there is this falseness. A lot of people fight it; they have misconceptions of what it is. Probably Slim from Kill Rock Stars and Calvin at K. I think people believe things about them that are entirely not true. And Ian MacKay from Fugazi. If people don't want to drink because Ian doesn't there isn't any real harm in that - but as long as they aren't being assholes because Henry Rollins is an asshole. That would kind of be a drag. .