JDub Records

(Editors note: this is the FIRST installment of an on-going series of exploratory, imaginative and fantastical blogs from Girls in Trouble’s Alicia Jo Rabins.  Enjoy!)

I grew up thinking it was normal to play violin. My parents didn’t, but my mom had seen a TV special about the Suzuki method-where you start young-so when I was three I started on a Wheatena box and a paint stirrer, and soon graduated to my own tiny little violin.

That’s me and my friend Alicia Lin learning not to use our left hand to hold up the violin. The two Alicia’s-we grew up playing together.

I really liked playing, but it wasn’t until I started composing–I went to this amazing camp called the Walden School for Young Composers, where a bunch of young freaks were analyzing the Magic Flute at age 11, and learned to compose by throwing tennis balls at pianos–that music started to feel really creative to me.

I also grew up kind of pop-culture illiterate.  My family didn’t really watch TV or movies or listen to the radio, except for classical music.   It’s not like my parents were religious or anything, it just wasn’t really something we did.  So I read a lot.    In about seventh grade I started listening to the radio:  B104, which basically played late 80’s pop.   I fell in love with this song called “Waiting For A Star to Call,” by Boy Meets Girl.  I would just sit by the radio waiting for it to come on.  I used to call and request it over and over.  That sugary pop was a big influence on me.

So that was the beginning of my pop culture education.  I’m still continuing it,  but it’s hard to make up for all those lost years.  I still can’t really get into watching TV.  In fact, we don’t even have one in our apartment.

Eventually I grew out of B104 and started getting into local bands.   My favorite were the Piltdown Men.  I wore out my tape of their album Tipper Gore Shoots Smack.  I loved throwing myself into the mosh pit, and only later did I realize it was probably annoying, because though I didn’t mind getting beaten up, a lot of the guys felt like they had to watch out for me.   The guys in that scene were pretty cool, but the bands were mostly men, so there was a kind of unspoken feminism among the freaks.   I listened to a lot of Crass, Diamanda Galas, stuff with a lot of drama.    I also accidentally discovered Camper Van Beethoven, and there I was blown away by the idea of using violin in rock bands.

Then this boyfriend played me Leonard Cohen, and that got me into folk music.  I think that indirectly led to my getting really into playing traditional Appalachian music a few years later.  I loved how dark the ballads were-all about death and loss.  And that you could sit around in a circle and play tunes with people you’d never met.  People weren’t so precious about their instruments-I had always liked to play outside-and that world made sense to me.   So I started playing on the street, and I met a lot of people that way.  A few of us started a band called the Mammals, and we spent a year touring together playing traditional music, but adding original songs and tunes as well.

I was really into Jewish practice at that point, (I’ll tell you that story some other time) and I wasn’t playing on Friday nights, which became impossible to sustain with a serious touring band.   I decided I would just travel around the world playing on the street, something I’d wanted to do for a while.  Just as I was about to leave,  I got a call from Annette Ezekiel, who needed a fiddler for her klezmer-punk band, Golem, in New York.   Alicia Svigals, who I had taken a couple klezmer violin lessons with, had recommended me.  It is weird how many violin-playing Alicias there are!

I hadn’t planned on moving to New York, but I drove down to meet the band and I just fell in love.  So instead of playing on the street, I spent the next five years touring with Golem.  It’s like a family; such an amazing group of people.   We’re actually leaving for Europe next week.   Golem got me back into the rock side of things after so many years of playing in string bands.

When I started to write the songs that became Girls in Trouble, I drew on all these influences that have been a part of my musical life.   Some songs want to be more folk-influenced, some are more like classically composed pieces and some are just rock songs.  I love having this broad palette of styles to draw from.   I’ve never been much of a purist; to me, music is music, and the boundaries are all permeable anyway.