Carla Bozulich

Carla Bozulich is best known as the powerful singer for the L.A.­based band, The Geraldine Fibbers. Before that, she was the gamine howler in the confrontational sex assault outfit, Ethyl Meatplow. She has one of the most unique voices in any genre (she was, I believe, nominated for “Best Female Vocalist," and "Best Male Vocalist" one year in BAM Magazine!). She's also a painter, writer, and has directed a video for the Fibbers. Her work is at once brutally raw and weirdly visionary.Born in New York City in the last week of 1965, Carla spent her first couple of years in Greenwich Village. Mom and Dad were into the downtown jazz and books scene. Maybe this, combined with the late 60's atmosphere of tumult, crushed idealism, and death could account for what inspired Carla's penchant for the defiant truth and exquisite pain in her work. Drama led to upheaval. Upheaval led to Los Angeles' harbor town, San Pedro. Longshoremen. Lowriders. Betty Crocker with a knife. Pedro's the best! If only there were time to show you the whole town right now!Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Mose Allison, Parliament, Roberta Flack—Thanks, Mom and Dad. Black Sabbath, Elton John, Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Who, Alice Cooper — not to mention Styx and Heart — thanks, Sis. She can also still sing you every word of Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life." At twelve she discovered Patti Smith (Oh, shit!) on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert. Neil Young, Joni Mitchell. Heard the Minutemen play for the first time. T-Rex and Bowie and Sabbath and Styx. Then it all started breaking open. The Damned, Sex Pistols, Devo, The Pretenders, the Dead Kennedys, UXA, The Germs, Pere Ubu. Then Lydia Lunch, Iggy, ESG, Descendants, Leaving Trains, The Bags. By way of meeting Gary Kail, (guitarist in Carla's first band, The Neon Veins), she heard stuff like Neu, The Fall, Can, Alan Watts on KPFK, John Cage, The Shaggs, The Slits, etc. Carla's first appearance on record is from Gary's 1982 album, "Zurich 1916," "You know — telephone and vacuum cleaner stuff". She sang in a couple of groups: The Neon Veins, and then The Invisible Chains, who recorded an album for The Minutemen's New Alliance label when Carla was 18 years old, Mike Watt shelling out $500 for two funny days at Radio Tokyo.Carla disappeared from daylight for a few years, which she blames entirely on Motörhead and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. At 21, she re-emerged to co-create Ethyl Meatplow, a band that one can say without exaggeration was ahead of its time. No shame and no guitars. "We were there to shake things up. At that time, without guitars or hetero machismo a band just plain sucked. That was fun and it kept the cool people away.” Their sequenced insanity inspired folks all over the US to dance, disrobe, beat-off, or beat them up. Several releases and five years later, the Industrial Dance Diva had written a few good country songs in her downtime on the road.She formed The Geraldine Fibbers in 1993, during the last gasp of Ethyl Meatplow. Audiences didn't skip a beat and just started showing up in cowboy boots instead of whipped cream and unwound cassette tape. The band was well-loved by fans and the press alike. Having released some stuff through Sympathy For The Record Industry, they found themselves being flown around by huge record companies who couldn't live without them. They chose Virgin. "God, it sure seemed right .... oh well." says Carla. They released two albums. With the addition of the intensely creative Nels Cline on guitar, the second album, "Butch," was even more dynamic. The single from the album, "California Tuffy," generated a video directed by Carla ­ one unedited shot of manic instrument assault, fire, and rambunctious hijinx, including a miming rubber cat. Showered with good press, both albums were acclaimed to be in the top albums of the decade by some respected journalists. The band toured 10 months a year. The fans were thrilled. Who knows what happened. Actually, we just don't have time to go into it. Anyway, neither album sold (by major label standards) and the band was dropped in 1998. Many had pegged The Geraldine Fibbers as a shoe-in for some kind of success — blunders, bad luck, lack of ambition and plain weirdness made it unattainable, sending them into hibernation.Carla and Nels Cline then created Scarnella. "I felt like I needed a project that couldn't be touched by the gross pigshit that is the music business". Scarnella is decidedly open, experimental, often instrumental, an art-for-art's-sake sorta thing. For Carla it's a "super-great way to clean out the muck and get down to what it means to spontaneously create." First they did James Brown's "Hot Pants" for a Zero Hour tribute album and then released an album on Smells Like Records. The duo continues to perform, sometimes doing songs, sometimes entirely improvising their sets.Carla scored an independent feature film called “By Hook Or By Crook.” An official Sundance selection for 2002, it garnered awards at festivals in the U.S. and abroad. On a Tom Waits tribute album, she recorded a haunting rendition of his tune, "On The Nickel." She created a song called "Blue Boys" for a Kill Rock Stars comp, played on the Destroy All Nels Cline album and sang on ex-Devo drummer Dave Kendrick's newest “Empire Of Fun” CD. She did a duet with Victor Krummenacher of Camper Van Beethoven on his latest project and sang some tracks with Lydia Lunch that'll rear their lovely heads soon, we hope. Carla also collaborates with avant-garde singer Bonnie Barnett and is hoping to record something soon. She has also created a special score for a production of Jean Genet's play, “The Maids.”Carla recently threw her first "Fake Party," which she describes as "New Music dressed up as a party meets a social event disguised as art." A Fake Party is a performance based on the architecture of the "party" space. Carla selected the Schindler House in Los Angeles — a combination of hyper-modernism and a sort of primitive simplicity — for her first Fake Party. Rudolph Schindler and his friends were artists and eccentrics who threw decadent parties involving every kind of imaginable no-no. Carla spent weeks scripting and choreographing a guide for the evening's accidents, experiments, and blatant, loving insincerity. Twenty fellow artists/musicians were recruited to make the experience as fake as possible. The music was improvised with a tight structure, except when Carla was lip-synching to her own voice along with jazz hits of yesteryear stolen from dusty LP's. The evening's sounds resonated into the Hollywood sky like question marks shot from a loaded gun. Heck, there's a lot more to tell, but we don't have time.After the “Red Headed Stranger,” what's next? Who knows? There are several possible directions ... She intends to make a solo album, finish her book of horses and, of course, she wants to make a little film to accompany her recent re-working of the “Red Headed Stranger” album. All that can be said for sure is that she'll certainly be off somewhere working like an obsessive silkworm .... at whatever she wants.

• http://www.carlabozulich.com/