Back in June, a cut-and-paste photocopied flyer began appearing on telegraph poles around Portland, Oregon, promoting a DIY show by an apparently defunct band at an intimate community space. The band hadn’t mentioned it online, but hopeful fans bought every ticket anyway. Their bet paid off: the gig really was the first in 32 years for Heavens to Betsy, the pioneering feminist punk duo of drummer Tracy Sawyer and singer-guitarist Corin Tucker – the latter’s band before Sleater-Kinney unleashed her visceral vibrato unto the world.
Tucker proudly made the flyer herself. Heavens to Betsy were barely out of high school when they played their very first show, 35 years ago this week, in Olympia, Washington, a two-song set as part of a now-mythical indie fest dubbed the International Pop Underground Convention. The festival also featured the likes of Fugazi, Bikini Kill and Melvins; meanwhile Heavens to Betsy had practised only a couple times.
Before an audience of about 100, Sawyer was so terrified that all she could think was, “This has to be over soon.” This summer’s gig was less frightening, looking out on kids the same age that Tucker and Sawyer were when they started the band. That inventive eight-song demo was recorded by Molly Neuman of Bratmobile with a four-track she checked out of the media library from Evergreen State College in Olympia, and only circulated on around 100 cassettes dubbed by the band. Active from 1991 to 1994, Heavens to Betsy released one album, Calculated, and rounded out riot grrrl’s OG trifecta alongside Bikini Kill and Bratmobile (who have both reunited in recent years to rapturous crowds).
Turning their spare setup into an extreme sound, Heavens to Betsy made songs that were emotional, fearsome and dead serious. Riot grrrl records and zines – which, in Tucker’s words, put academic feminist ideas into a teen-girl vernacular – have struck a chord with every subsequent generation, echoing through the DIY underground on to the 2010s defined by Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie magazine. Olivia Rodrigo claims it as an influence; Bikini Kill will play her women-led Daisy Chain Fields festival in California this month.
But the enduring power of this incendiary music has always been how its rawness leaves the door open, telling fans that they could do this, too. Heavens to Betsy were originally signed to Kill Rock Stars. Last autumn, the label approached Tucker and Sawyer about a long-overdue wide release for the demo.
The duo had only kept in touch “a little bit”, Sawyer says, in the decades since their breakup; both are mothers of two. A whole lifetime has passed. But the more we talked, and the more I started listening to the songs again, it absolutely made sense.” Tucker hadn’t listened to some of those spartan demo recordings since the tape came out.
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