How Ferron got her groove back:

by getting Boulder with Bitch

It's not the most obvious partnership: Ferron, gravel-voiced old-school folkie and living legend of women's music, teaming up with the category-defying rocker Bitch, who produced Ferron's new album Boulder. And yet, why shouldn't musicians of different generations be friends, collaborate, and learn from each other? Is it because the man wants to keep them down? Well, yeah it is, but forget the stereotypes about overly earnest lesbians with guitars. In an interview with Bay Windows about their work together in the studio and on the road, Bitch and Ferron overflowed with good spirits and gentle humor. In fact, they were so funny and charming that we're running the interview verbatim.

BW: To start with an obvious question, when did you two first meet?
Ferron: I saw her and Animal [of Bitch's former band Bitch and Animal]. I think it was even before their first CD came out. I was told, "You've got to meet these people." So I was taken to their hotel room where they were holding court, and I thought, "What a bunch of wingnuts!"
Bitch: And now here I am at your house.
Ferron: I guess I'm a wingnut too. It was the new world crashing in on me, I guess. I came from a folk and rock world that wasn't so theatrical. Those two are very theatrical so put them together and it's pretty wacky. I like it, but I'm not that extroverted. They forgot to give me confidence.

BW: If being called "the lesbian Bob Dylan" doesn't give you confidence ...
Ferron: Depends on how you feel about Bob Dylan. I'm not quite as sexist as he is.
Bitch: You need to work on that.
Ferron: You have to be born into it.

BW: You could work at it. Try to objectify three people every day.
Bitch: There's a good goal.

BW: And Bitch, what about your first impression of Ferron? I assume you were already familiar with her work?
Bitch: That day we met, I was not familiar with Ferron's work. Animal and I didn't really come from the music world. We had more of a theater background. It was Ani who told me about Ferron's music and was shocked I had never heard her songs. It wasn't until later, after meeting her, that I finally heard her play. And she just ripped my heart out.
Ferron: That's what I want to do. Kill people. The first time I heard B and Animal sing, I got it. I saw that it was politics, just a different way of doing it; very powerful and full of integrity. I remember we did one show in Berkley, and B came out and the audience was horrified. It was all older women and if you don't have a crease in your pants, then what the hell? But by the end of it, she had them like butter in her hands.
Bitch: I feel like I've come to understand the lack of communication between our generations, just from the simple fact that I hadn't had this information passed on to me about the women's music scene. So I started really understanding that when I started going to these women's music festivals and saw all the work that has been done to create women's spaces and try to empower people. And I had to acknowledge my own ... feeling that these women's spaces were a nerdy thing. I had this idea about a bunch of old ladies wearing purple and beating drums. That's a stereotype that's been force fed to me, because we live in a society that doesn't want us to learn from our elders. Watching my peers see Ferron sing has been so exciting for me.
Ferron: I think the whole thing around you thinking it was going to be some nerdy thing is all part of the disillusionment with feminism. And the ones younger than you, they don't even think feminism is an issue.
Bitch: They say, "Don't be so uptight."
Ferron: Right. Exactly.

BW: So you got turned on to each other's work and you started playing together, but how did this evolve into making an album together?
Ferron: I needed a push in the butt, and I certainly got that from B. Because I felt like I had said what I had to say, and I meant it, but now I had to go do something else. I was drifting off.
Bitch: I basically tied her down and made her record this album.

BW: Bitch, was it your idea to begin with?
Bitch: Yes. I'd been wanting to do this for years. Actually Animal thinks it was her idea.
Ferron: No, her idea was to get other people to do a tribute. Which would have been sweet, but instead, no, Bitch wants me to sing the songs myself. And then she took the music away and did whatever she wanted.

BW: It's like having to cook for your own birthday party.
Ferron: Yeah!
Bitch: Well, barely. You had to sing about four days, and I worked on it for a year.

BW: So Ferron, you were reluctant?
Ferron: Yeah.
Bitch: More on a subconscious level. She kept finding reasons to put it off. She kept sabotaging it, basically. Finally last spring I just booked it into my tour. I said, you can run but you can't hide! And I just showed up at her house. And even then, she somehow cut her finger and said she couldn't play guitar. But we recorded some stuff, and then I came back in the summer and parked my RV outside her house and we recorded the rest, and I worked on it in my RV while Ferron went on with her life.
Ferron: You know what it was? Many years ago I saw a guitar player who was old and bald and not hip any more. And he was still talking about the record he was going to make. I turned to a friend of mine and said, if you ever hear me sounding like that, I want you to shoot me. At a certain age I don't need to, you know, fight for a stage space at 10 p.m. when I'd rather be asleep anyway.
Bitch: But why shouldn't that guy make a record?
Ferron: Oh, he should. But to think it was going to be number one on the charts ...
Bitch: Oh, well, that's a whole other thing. But Bob Dylan just had a big album. But he's Bob Dylan.

BW: Was the plan always to work with Ferron's existing songs? Why?
Ferron: Yes. She chose them.
Bitch: Just from hearing her, I would get attached to certain songs that I loved.

BW: Ferron, what was it like hearing your music through Bitch's ears?
Ferron: Well at the time it was just me and my guitar. We agreed that I wouldn't hear the CD until it was done. Because if I had collaborated ... it's like building a boat with your dad, you know? You just end up running for the tools. Part of the deal of passing the torch is that I have to step out of the way.

BW: That sounds scary but freeing.
Ferron: It's all part of what I'm trying to teach B.
Bitch: What do you mean?
Ferron: If I was going to hold on to that project then I wasn't really ready to let go, was I? I kept telling you that I want a garden, I have other things to do in life besides keep reminding people we're one big thing that has broken apart. I said it as many ways as I can. But my voice is there, so whatever you do B, I'm endorsing it. I'm there. It's a very interesting process.

BW: And what did you think when you heard the finished songs?
Ferron: I thought it was very accessible. Very homey in some ways, kind of raw. Well, it was made on a little Mac with one mike. It made me wonder why I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars making CDs that were deep and evocative. What I mean by deep is saturated. I don't think that matters any more.
Bitch: Well, technology has changed too. You couldn't have done this twenty years ago. You had to spend all that money.
Ferron: That's true. But the sound has changed too.
Bitch: Like what people want from a recording?
Ferron: Right. For a CD I probably rented two separate reverbs, one for my vocal and one for the band, and it sounded so deep. When I listen to sound now it doesn't go front and back too much.
Bitch: It's all to the front. I know what you mean. I remember I got a message from you - I still have it on my cell phone - when I e-mailed you the first track, "Already Gone."
Ferron: It wasn't done yet.
Bitch: It wasn't totally done, but I sent it to you. And you just said: "B. Ferron. I don't know what you did to that song, but the hair on my neck is standing up. It's so intimate."
Ferron: Yeah, very intimate. That was great. I like the humanness. Part of making CDs is eradicating humanness and going for perfection. That's the old fashioned way. This CD is alive, which is more what I believe in.

BW: Bitch, how did you approach the arrangements? It sounds like you wanted to be true the spirit but take it new places.
Ferron: With some of the songs she's gone pretty far from the originals, because of different drum rhythms or whatever. But if you heard me live on stage, that's what I sound like.
Bitch: It was overwhelming, because I've never produced a record on my own. So I've got to be Bitch and have eggs of steel while producing one of my idols! So much of it is about trusting yourself. So I just bit off a chunk at a time and let the songs tell me what they wanted. I just knew I needed Julie Wolf to play piano on "Already Gone." And I always heard "The Cart" as "a Bitch song," as Ferron would say, with 70 tracks of violins. I did keep calling my friends and saying, "You'll tell me if I'm ruining Ferron's songs, right?"
Ferron: There's so much about what B is talking about that I really respect. I'm not going to sit down with somebody, after 35 years of singing these songs, and baby them. It had to be somebody who would have the courage to do their thing. I have time to talk philosophy, but I can't spend all that time on the songs again. None of my band, for instance, has ever rehearsed with me. I don't like to rehearse. That sounds nuts probably, and it's kind of arrogant. But I assume they know music. And B ended up in the same kind of dynamic.
Bitch: It was perfect. I didn't want her to be around, and she didn't want to be around!
Ferron: I gotta tell you though, I no longer have nails. While she was making the CD I learned to bite my nails.
Bitch: Really? I thought you forgot the whole thing was happening! But really, I never wanted to play them for Ferron, because we do have a different aesthetic and I didn't want to get off my path.
Ferron: Like when we play together and you say, "It's so cute how you care about tuning your guitar." I'm like, horror show!

BW: I bet you two have a blast performing together.
Ferron: We really do.
Bitch: Passim is going to be the perfect spot.

Ferron and Bitch play Club Passim, 47 Palmer St., Cambridge, at 8 p.m. on June 25 and 26. Tickets $25. Info: www.clubpassim.org or 617.492.7679.