*Historical
Note : Only one member of the band is sporting a haircut that
could be called a "Mullet'.
The rest of us are wearing fashionable coiffures of the 1980's.
If you weren't born until the 70's or 80's.....A "Mullet"
has a notable "lack of symmetry' and no transition between
the front & the back, like 2 haircuts on the same head...
I.e. a bad haircut. Not every layered haircut is a Mullet... Our
hair is beautiful! (Don't I stick out amongst those güeras?)
Also note: The only New Wave female band in Los Angeles fronted
by a Mexican-American in 1983.
What
you are seeing here is 5 young women who went for it. Or rather,
I went for it and convinced 4 other girls to take that joyride
with me. We were rank amateurs, but at least it wasn't put together
by a man! At first, I would go audition for punk bands around
L.A. and just freeze up and not be able to play! Tiger Lily
became an all girl band when I thought I would be more comfortable
around my friends so in 1981, I convinced one of my closest childhood
friends, Gail to take up the bass guitar. (Friends no longer,
we've only spoken once since 1984, and that was when my solo version
of Black Cats was on KROQ in 1987.) A "Musicians Wanted"
ad in L.A.'s famous "Recycler", was answered by drummer
Becky Atkins and the female band with no name played trio in the
garage while I searched for another female guitar player. We started
as a rockabilly trio, and went through a succession of names including
"The Tomboys" and "The Cat Women". Late one
night I was watching a old movie in which Lucille Ball played
a burlesque dancer whose stage name was "Tiger Lily".
I liked it because the name is some strong next to something beautiful
and people might guess the band was female. Our ad stayed in the
Recycler and a parade of talentless freaks and very insecure girls
auditioned. Out of frustration I started phoning every guitar
teacher in the San Gabriel Valley and asking if they "had
any female students learning the electric guitar". I finally
discovered Jill Sharpe working in a Covina music store. She joined
up and we had a real band at last, a second guitar player/singer
allowing us to move into a more pop sound. We started writing
songs, playing live and recorded a demo tape. We debuted at the
Cafe Theater at The Inner-City Cultural Center in Summer, 1982
with keyboard player Nancy Morris who promptly left the band and
headed back to Arizona. She was the only player we had who was
not a native of Southern California. We did not meet Desha until
late 1983, making it once again, an all instrumentalist quintet.
No one in the band had really played in a rock band before. Jill
had been in a punk band that never had left the garage and Desha
had briefly played in a top 40 band. I'd been playing the guitar
since I was 12 but until the D.I.Y. Punk movement of the late
'70's it never occurred to me that I could play the electric
guitar. I simply had no example to go by other than Suzi
Quatro and in the 1970's she was considered a novelty and
something of a freak. A local band called The Heaters had a big
influence on me personally. They had 3 female players, Mercy Bermudez
and Melissa and Maggie
Connell and they played Pop.
Madame
Wong's, one of the birthplaces of L.A.'s punk scene, gave us a
Saturday night once a month for a year and we always went on first
because our audience was mostly girls,12-20 years old. Tiger Lily's
favorite bands included The Police, The Cars, Fear, The Dead Kennedys,
The Stray Cats and Roxy Music. Our sound started to evolved into
a Punk/Pop/Ska sound a little bit like No Doubt has today. Watch
the "Heaven '67' video for comparisons. |
