Eight great women of San Diego music: roots to rap

By no means definitive, the following list of eight women from San Diego’s diverse and storied music scene run the gamut from cow-punk to gutbucket blues to gay-friendly rap. They’ve nearly all taken inspiration and style from the past-remolded it as their own-and never looked back.

1. Rosie Flores

Whether you call it rockabilly, cow-punk or the catch-all Americana, the music of Rosie Flores is undeniably grounded in American roots at their most influential and exciting. Born in San Antonio, raised up and nurtured artistically in the burgeoning punk underground of 1970s San Diego, Flores seems to have had a hand-or voice-in an inordinate number of watershed acts from that era onward.

Like her stylistic soul mate, Austin’s Alejandro Escovedo, Flores is credited with practically inventing (or re-inventing, if you will) the genre known as “Alternative country.” But such accolades are almost academic when listening to the vibrancy of her recordings-from any time in her career: the gutbucket joy of Rosie & the Screamers, the all-female tour de force of the Screaming Sirens, or the many acclaimed solo and collaborative projects she’s gone on to sire since.

Flores’ most telling pairing was arguably her duets and ensuring tour with mutual influence/admirer Wanda Jackson, eventually re-issued under the name “Honky Tonk Reprise.” She continues to tour and release solidly crafted and well-received records even today, as second and third generation tributes to the Queen of Alt-country come and go.

2. Barbara Mandrell

She may have built her eventual country music superstardom by playing on the stages of Nashville and Las Vegas and dozens of military bases around the Pacific Rim, but Barbara Mandrell never escaped her father Irby’s early training as the daughter of an Oceanside music shop owner in the 1960s.

A one-time traveling musician himself, Irby Mandrell ran the Oceanside Music Supply and taught his daughter Barbara to read and play music early. In fact, she was already gigging in Vegas on one of her several instruments, steel guitar, by the time she was 11 years old.

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By the time she was 14, Mandrell had already toured with Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline and George Jones. During her sophomore year of high school, she found the time to be crowned Miss Oceanside, before launching a tour of military bases and a career run for decades to come by her longtime manager: papa Irby. She would eventually score a string of smash hits, including her best-known duet with George Jones, “”I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool,” before starring in a television show with her two sisters in the 1980s.

Barbara’s solid musicianship and her father’s unwavering loyalty as her manager over the years would eventually place her among the most respected of country’s leading ladies, paving the way for such diversified crossover spirits as Reba McEntire and The Judds. The spring of 2009 was an especially meaningful one for the North County native: Irby Mandrell died in March, just one month after his daughter Barbara was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

3. Diamanda Galas

Avant-garde is almost too tame a phrase to begin describing the ridiculously experimental and sublimely unparalleled Diamanda Galas. Once again, San Diego’s sun-kissed stereotype is befuddled by a highly confrontational and un-commercial artist nurtured in the formative years of high school towards a largely cult following among music aficionados.

Except this one is not a guy named Frank Zappa, but rather, a statuesque femme fatale with shocking, four-octave vocal range, a unique take of the shrieking, German expressionist opera and more goth street cred than Siouxsie Sioux and Exene Cervenka put together. Even more unconventional, Galas enrolled in UCSD’s music and visual arts program; then began her performance career with, among other things, a role in Vinko Globokar’s modernist French opera, solo performance-art pieces with names like “Wild Women With Knives,” and eventually her studio debut, 1982’s “The Litanies of Satan.”

Once described by punk icon Henry Rollins as the most intimidating artistic force of his generation, Galas never did achieve more than an underground following in her career. But her wildly aggressive, post-feminist aesthetic-and penchant for channeling blues and gospel traditions alongside the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud-surely blazed trails that Sinead O’Connor,  P.J. Harvey and Tori Amos could follow later.

4. Candye Kane

Part neo-blues revivalist, part agit-prop activist, the multi-faceted musical career of San Diego’s most storied and prolific performer, Candye Kane, can not be overstated. The facts run the stranger than fiction gamut, yes, but her achievements are a study in postmodern pop culture writ large. A one-time, self-described “sex worker” and part-time porn star, the wildly popular blueswoman who has toured constantly for the better part of two decades now has never abandoned her truly “outsider” roots.

Due as much to her kinetic showmanship and unearthly pipes as her activism on behalf of the GLBT and sex worker communities, Kane has built a fan following as rabid and diverse as her unabashed persona (which she once described as a “fat black drag queen trapped in a white woman’s body”).

Born in East Los Angeles, Kane has called San Diego home for most of her career, and the local music scene has embraced her as a cultural and communal icon-as well as a musical heroine: she’s won an unprecedented nine San Diego Music Awards, including seven as “Best Blues” artist and 1998’s “Artist of the Year.”

5. Jennifer Batten

Jennifer Batten makes any list of San Diego’s great female musicians on pure technique. That she’s achieved her rightfully earned rep as tops in her field is even more impressive when you consider her trade: guitar goddess. In the embarrassingly über-male landscape of rock’s guitar hero pantheon, Batten not only excelled in proficiency and form during her career, she did at a time when the craft was easily at its most competitive and (some would argue) absurdist peak: the late 1980s.

Batten took up rock guitar at age 8, and eventually inspired by the likes of Jeff Beck and Eddie Van Halen, she would attend and later teach at the G.I.T. (Guitar Institute of Technology). Having perfected the “two handed tapping” or “hammer on” technique pushing guitar rock to its penultimate virtuosity at the time, Batten would land her breakthrough gig in 1987-as lead guitarist for Michael Jackson’s “Bad” tour.

Since then, Batten has written a book on her guitar stylings, toured with several Jackson world tours and recently signed on to play in Jeff Beck’s backing band. When pop music can count on one hand its’ “famous” female guitarists, Batten’s contributions can hardly be overestimated.

6. Eve Selis

Few artists, male or female, can boast the longevity, peer accolades or fan following that San Diego’s Eve Selis has compiled over the years. With the exception of her 8 Great list-mate and aesthetic counterpoint, Candye Kane, Selis boasts probably the longest and most “unsung” body of work in local pop music.

Selis crafted elegant, rootsy blues and pop balladry to ever-increasing effect and appeal in the five records following her 1998 debut, “Out On A Wire,” and it’s easy to get the feeling that if she had just come into her own a few years earlier-and maybe added a ticking metronome acoustic guitar style-she could have mined the mainstream success of one Jewel Kilcher.

As it happens, at least so far, Selis has remained one of San Diego’s most prolific-and intimately engaging-touring treasures. And the local scene has noticed, surely: awarding her an impressive five statues at the annual San Diego Music Awards (three for the highly competitive “Best Americana” category).

7. Sara Watkins (Nickel Creek)

It’s hard to believe fiddler and singer-songwriter Sara Watkins helped co-found a band that came to be known as Nickel Creek two decades ago. Despite Watkins’ obvious virtuosity and lengthy resume of collaborations with pop and country music legends over the years, her fresh-faced appearance and down-home authenticity still pass her off in many minds as some sort of rookie ingénue in the music industry. Hardly.

Not only has Watkins sold a ton of records with her childhood music-classmates from North San Diego County, Sean Watkins and Chris Thile, in Nickel Creek (whose self-titled debut was produced by Alison Krauss); but she’s also recorded with the likes of Hank Williams, Jr., Bela Fleck, Jonny Lang, Ben Lee, Mandy Moore and fellow San Diegans Switchfoot, among others.

Her latest noteworthy collaboration, April 2009’s self-titled solo release, featuring the playing and producing skills of Led Zeppelin’s legendary John Paul Jones, shouldn’t come as all that much of a surprise. Watkins’ versatility as a multi-instrumentalist and her still-developing gifts for simple, yet multi-faceted songwriting and singing continue to shine through whatever project she’s endeavoring. Her mix of youthful purity and traditional chops continue to produce more than interesting results-even as her original band lingers in the sort of hiatus that would worry most major label acts. Nickel Creek’s last release was 2002’s “This Side,” which peaked at number two on Billboard’s country charts.

8. MC Flow

Compared to the rest of her 8 Great list-mates, San Diego hip-hop artist MC Flow is still a rookie-but in terms of audience, critical and scenester hyperbole, the zeitgeist-riding transplant from New York (whose real name is Abby Schwartz) is nearly impossible to ignore.

And while her sexual orientation is certainly crucial to her anomalous, groundbreaking role as a lesbian rapper playing hip-hop in a city infamous for its lack of indigenous rap acts-none of that would matter if she didn’t deliver on the mic. Her rhyme schemes and neo-boogaloo turntablism mix as well as any fan of “Paul’s Boutique” would require, while the white-girl irony and gender-bending novelty is certainly eased by the success of other like-minded artists, such as Peaches.

At the risk of rewarding gender-identity politics over the purely sonic-minded standards of hardcore hip-hop heads, MC Flow’s infectious work on singles like “Incredible” and even the anti-Prop. 8 manifesto “Created Equal” point the way past merely courageous and timely. As first efforts, their messages may bear the promise of true party-people power, as well. Think Beastie Boys meet Luscious Jackson in the basement-after the revolution.

Will K. Shilling is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He’s written about San Diego music for 15 years at SLAMM magazine and SD CityBeat; and served as program editor for the San Diego Music Awards several times.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 4:58 pm and is filed under 8 great, Arts & Entertainment, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.