Past Music Columns

Jessica Hopper

Dan Monick

The Keys to the Clubhouse

Jessica Hopper’s new book demystifies the music biz for girls (and boys too).

By Miles Raymer

June 25, 2009

Jessica Hopper and I became friends right after I moved to Chicago in 2001, and since then we’ve collaborated on lots of projects: a 2008 year-end wrap-up for the Reader, a couple issues of her old zine Hit It or Quit It, even a band called A Billion Dollars, which lasted one show. Last year she enlisted my help for her first book, The Girls’ Guide to Rocking: How to Start a Band, Book Gigs, and Get Rolling to Rock Stardom (Workman Publishing), which came out early this month. A compendium of rock ’n’ roll knowledge for girls ages 10 to 16, it covers more topics than any one person could reasonably be expected to master, so when Hopper thought I might have some special insight about something, she asked me a question. For instance: what song would be good for demonstrating what a flanger does? (Easy: “Freak Scene” by Dinosaur Jr.)

Hopper locates the book’s genesis in the mid-80s, when she was a ten-year-old in Minneapolis. “The first band I ever, ever tried to start was with my neighbor,” she says. “We found a keyboard in the trash, and because I found it in the trash I wanted to charge her a quarter a week to use it and she thought that was ludicrous. And after the second week when she refused to pay me, our band broke up.”

Hopper’s now 32 and knows a bit more about music, not to mention intraband dynamics. She’s played in more durable bands, most notably Milemarker spin-off Challenger, and she’s worked as a tour manager, including a stint with LA art-pop outfit the Sads last fall. She was a publicist for years, starting as an intern for Amphetamine Reptile in 1992 and running her own firm from ’95 to 2004; these days she’s a music consultant for This American Life and writes about music for Spin, LA Weekly, the Trib, and of course the Reader. So by the time she decided to put together The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, she had a network of industry friends to pump for information. She didn't bug just me; she talked to her old bandmate Al Burian, Girl Talk tour manager David Scheid, and Vice Records honcho Adam Shore, among others. Sometimes she’d post questions to her blog, soliciting info from anybody who happened by. Basically, she followed the advice that ended up in her section on tour booking: “Making Your Connections Work for You.”

Rock ’n’ roll has historically been a fake-it-till-you-make-it endeavor. You learn to book good tours by booking shitty tours. You catch yourself tossing around the word “tone” before you’re even sure what “midrange” means. That’s why, even though I’m not a girl, I wish the Girls’ Guide had been around when I started playing. It starts with the assumption that the reader has never picked up a guitar or sat behind a drum kit, but it doesn’t stop there—sure, it offers tips on coming up with a band name, but you’ll also find info about the arcane world of publishing, which even musicians with publishing deals rarely fully understand.

“I don’t want girls to be afraid of the technical stuff,” Hopper says. “I want a young girl who might be reading this book at 14 years old to grow up with both the knowledge and the technical tools to feel like this is something she can master. Granted, a 14-year-old girl doesn’t need to know off the bat the different ways you can license your song or the definition of ‘recoupable.’ But she will.”

The “technical stuff” is part of why Hopper targeted girls with her book instead of writing for a general youth audience. Girls’ rock camps exclude boys for much the same reason: boys are expected to be comfortable with nuts-and-bolts stuff like gear and girls still aren’t. “When I was younger,” says Hopper, “you never wanted to ask questions or make it look like you didn’t know what you were doing, because people already assumed you were the dumb girl in the band.” Rock is friendlier to female musicians these days than it was even a decade ago, but the chauvinism isn’t gone; within the past couple years I’ve seen a sound guy, unbidden, plug in a woman’s guitar for her.

The Girls’ Guide arrives as part of what may turn out to be a sea change. Hopper helped both the Portland girls’ rock camp, in operation since 2001, and the New York camp, which started in 2005, get rolling—she did PR and lent a hand with fund-raising and gear drives—and now similar programs are proliferating around the country, inciting young women to pick up guitars or drumsticks and crank out Garageband demos. Girls Rock! Chicago is in its fourth year, and reps from 20 camps attended this spring’s national conference in Austin.

Hopper and I both came up during the 90s alt-rock boom, when a generation of female musicians—Juliana Hatfield, PJ Harvey, Mary Timony—attracted lots of fans and media attention but still ended up the subjects of condescending articles about “Women in Rock.” These days, though, there are too many women in rock for an article like that to make sense. “‘Women in rock’ is way less of a ghetto,” Hopper says. “It’s actually happening.”

On the underground-rock front, former Be Your Own Pet front woman Jemina Pearl—who was 17 when the band’s debut came out on XL in 2005—and 13-year-old Ada from Tiny Masters of Today have both earned the blessing of indie royalty like Sonic Youth, giving girls who aren’t into Disneyfied pop somebody to look up to. But Hopper counts Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, and Aly & AJ as role models too, in that they’re relatable—they at least seem to be normal teenage girls who just happen to make music.

“Right now culturally is a really exciting time for young women to get involved with music,” Hopper says. “There are literally dozens of rock camps getting off the ground. There are people like Taylor Swift selling out stadiums with songs they wrote about their own lives, and there are 40,000 girls singing along who are her age and younger. The idea that rock also belongs to girls and young women is finally starting to trickle down.”   

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