Home girl

Boston's Thalia Zedek is one of the most respected women in rock. Oh yeah, she's a lesbian.

by Christopher Muther

For a performer whose raw, painfully honest songs can quickly hush a rowdy audience, Thalia Zedek is surprisingly demure. In conversation over French fries and beer in Harvard Square, Zedek's blue eyes glance down to the ashtray -- where a pile of cigarette butts is building -- whenever the talk strays from music to more personal topics. In concert and on disc, the lead singer and guitarist of the Boston-based band Come conveys her inner thoughts and feelings easily. But in conversation, she pauses frequently and forms her sentences cautiously.

"I don't really use music as therapy," Zedek finally offers. "I like to write songs that elicit emotions in people. So when I perform them, I try to put everything I have into singing. Passion is important in our music."

Zedek, 36, who fronts Come along with musical partner Chris Brokaw, holds the distinction of being one of the most respected but underappreciated women in rock, both in Boston and nationwide. For nearly two decades, the openly lesbian singer has played with a succession of groundbreaking bands, such as Uzi and Live Skull, culminating with the formation of Come eight years ago.

"I think she's really a remarkable talent," says Urvashi Vaid, a long-time pal of Zedek's who is best known for her work as a lesbian and gay civil rights activist. "I just wish she and the band had more recognition and success."

Vaid, an unlikely punk aficionado who befriended Zedek amid Boston's thriving punk scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, recalls being impressed with the young musician from the first time she saw her play.

"She must have been 16 or 17, but even then you could see she had enormous talent and energy on stage," Vaid says. "I love her. I think she's a rock and roll genius. She's not of that wussy-girl folk genre. She's more in the tradition of Patti Smith. . . . She has the same quality of being able to go out there and hold a stage."

Vaid isn't the only one who loves Come. The late Kurt Cobain was a vocal fan of the band. In Britain, where Come briefly enjoyed next-big-thing status, the country's largest music paper, New Music Express, recently raved that Zedek has the "undeniable cultural resonance of a woman axe-slinger with broken glass for tonsils and no desire to be Courtney Love." Rolling Stone critic Jon Wiederhorn wrote that Come's songs "shiver with hopelessness and glimmer with raw beauty."

This month, the band releases its fourth disc, Gently, Down the Stream (Matador), a solidly enthralling double album that continues Come's sonic journey into hard-edged, blues-flavored rock. A morose instrumental dominated by piano and clarinet, called "The Former Model," and a muddy foot-stomper called "A Jam Blues" mark new territory for the quartet.

Zedek says that with the release of each new disc, she hopes more people will discover Come's music. She admits, though, that she doesn't really expect the band to break out beyond its core indie audience.

"I've never felt like we'd be huge, because the kind of music we're playing is totally wrong for that. The songs are too long," she says, between quick puffs on her cigarette. "The kind of music I've been interested in all along has never really been mainstream, except for that brief period when Nirvana was on the radio all the time."

The kind of music that Zedek is interested in -- Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and Gun Club -- has influenced the dark styles of her many bands during the past 18 years.

Her first break came shortly after she moved to Boston from Washington, D.C., in 1979, after she graduated from high school. A roommate auditioned for the band White Women and dragged Zedek along for moral support. Her friend landed a job as the band's guitarist, and by the end of the audition, Zedek had been picked as the new drummer. Her friend soon quit the band, and Zedek moved from drums to guitar. Eventually, singing was added to her responsibilities.

"I was kind of nervous about it," she recalls. "I had always really liked singing, but I never had a good voice. I got more into playing guitar, because I never thought I'd get a chance to sing. But I always liked it."

From White Women, Zedek moved to another all-female band, the pop-oriented Dangerous Birds, a group of friends who met through the local music scene. Before the band got into the studio, however, she jumped ship and joined Uzi, a fondly remembered group whose songs were about a decade ahead of their time. The band's music, heard on the EP Sleep Asylum (which was released after the group broke up), straddled punk and grunge, with hints of early techno thanks to inventive sampling.

Uzi enjoyed local success in the mid-1980s, but Zedek and drummer Danny Lee eventually developed creative differences. Lee was looking to take Uzi in a more techno-oriented direction, with tighter rhythms. Zedek, on the other hand, wanted to loosen up. The personality conflicts marked the end of the band.

After Uzi's breakup, Zedek hooked up with noisemakers Live Skull and eventually moved to New York. It was then, on a trip back to Boston, that she met Brokaw.

"Thalia and I were introduced, and then we played for three hours," Brokaw says of his first meeting/jam session with Zedek. "It immediately struck me that she was this great guitar player and that the two of us played together really well. We were playing in a way that was more interactive than with any other guitar player I'd ever played with. There was an immediate musical dialogue. It was incredible."

When Zedek left Live Skull, she and Brokaw, along with rhythm section Sean O'Brien and Arthur Johnson, formed the first incarnation of Come. Both Brokaw and Zedek credit their similar outlook and mutually respectful relationship with maintaining the band's long life span.

"I think we've always conducted business with the band in terms of what we've wanted to do in the short term," Brokaw says. "It's always been `Well, what do we want to do now?' Neither of us has approached it in terms of `What is this doing to my career?' "

The same attitude extends to Come's low-key image. Unlike many bands fronted by women singers, Come focuses entirely on the music. Zedek wears shirts that look as if they were rummaged out of her father's closet. The selling point is her raspy, nicotine-hardened wail, not "me dancing around in front of the band. I don't think we've ever had an angle," she says. "We've just played."

Similarly, Zedek's sexuality has never been a distraction from the band's music. She has been out for years, and says she hasn't encountered any problems with bandmates or record companies.

"It was weird," she says. "I felt like people would never ask me about it, but whenever they did, I would tell them. I thought it was weird that people would go out of their way not to make an issue about it. I wanted people to know."

By the time Come's Don't Ask, Don't Tell album was released on Matador in 1994, most people knew. Between interviews in the press and tortured love songs peppered with feminine pronouns, Zedek was out with a vengeance.

Her songs, however, are not pointedly political. Instead, they deal with more-abstract concepts, such as love and pain. In "Mercury Falls," from Don't Ask, Don't Tell, she writes: "Mercury falls like skin off a bone/Mercury falls, since you've been gone/Ugly this time of year/When people disappear/Don't you get sick alone?"

With its subtle, introspective lyrics, Come does not have the vehemently queer following of politically outspoken bands like Team Dresch and Tribe 8. Nevertheless, Zedek says, the band has its share of gay fans.

"I think there is an audience," she says. "There are lesbians and gay men who are into music that's not quiet acoustic stuff or dance stuff. You can still celebrate your sexuality and listen to rock music."

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Christopher Muther interviewed RuPaul for the December issue; he can be reached at cmuther@aol.com.

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