Let’s face it: Female Rock musicians do not get a lot of credence in mainstream popular culture. Narrow that already sparsely populated field down to the realm of the female drummer and the list of easily referenced icons approaches single digits, and for many rock fans, zero. Despite this disparity, one of my favorite drummers of all time is the wildly underrated powerhouse Patty Schemel.
I was lucky enough to be present for a screening of the film celebrating her story at Lincoln Center in NYC this past Wednesday where Schemel herself was present. When she took questions from the audience along with other panel members like filmmakers P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes, as well as essential Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson, she was goofy, funny, lucid, honest and intelligent in her responses. Her easy manner would not belie the peaks and valleys Schemel has witnessed in her sometimes tragic, sometimes beautiful, always rock and roll story.
Patty Schemel, center, in Rolling Stone with HOLE, 1995
The documentary tells of Schemel’s story as a core member of the unforgettable, critcally acclaimed, and highly divisive rock act Hole. Premium clips from hours of backstage, stage, and home video footage shot by Patty herself make up the majority of the film, as well as footage from fellow Hole band member Eric Erlandson and their friend Kurt Cobain.
The result is a much-needed and well constructed picture of what the private side of rock and roll life was like in that tumultuous time. The film is an unwavering testament of life, love, passion, betrayal, tragedy and triumph that will either make you pick up your instrument and never let go in pursuit of ephemeral perfection, or throw it in an incinerator in an intelligent moment of self-preservation.
Kurt Cobain, Frances Bean Cobain and Patty at The Cobain’s Home, 1992
Schemel started out playing drums as a child at the age of 11 in the now iconic Pacific Northwest in Washington State. Her influences, like mine, are largely white and largely rock, and like her good friend Kurt Cobain, she started rocking out early on groups like AC/DC and Wire. As is the case with every talented musician, she spent hours intensely woodshedding in her room, copying the techniques of her favorite drummers like John Bonham of Led Zeppelin.
Fast forward a couple years and Patty starts hanging out with Kurt Cobain after seeing his band Nirvana play a few times in WA. “I went to an all-ages show in Tacoma …’Oh,’– it occurred to me these are the guys that do the Creedence {Clearwater} covers.” Since Kurt was AWESOME and not sexist or homophobic, the two struck up a fast friendship and Patty even lived at the house where Kurt wrote In Utero with him and his family. One of my favorite moments in the film is when she revisits how she would hear him painstakingly work out songs we all still hear on the radio today like Heart Shaped Box in that house in the middle of the woods.
A testament to Patty’s drumming, in addition to her being the 1st woman EVER on the cover of Modern Drummer Magazine, was the fact that she nearly was a member of Nirvana and was in contention with Dave Grohl in Cobain’s mind for a replacement for the band’s first drummer, Chad Channing. As the fates had it, she formally joined Hole instead in 1992, and wrote, recorded and toured in support of the seminal album, Live Through This.
Schemel and the album went on to win countless awards from rock critics far and wide, including Album Of TheYear and Best Drummer from Rolling Stone Magazine. Still, this was not enough to protect her from losing limbs in the vicious machine that is the corporate rock industry, with all it’s sexist, homophobic and greasy, unjust trappings. Her story is a candid and often shocking recounting of how easily something pure can be poisoned by the disgustingly exclusive Corporate Rock Empire.
Members of HOLE, Metallica and Veruca Salt at The Monsters Of Rock Festival in Canada, 1995
What’s compelling about Patty’s story is how humble and entirely ordinary she is. A woman with a pagan true heart, a fine sense of humor, an unwieldy history of drug use and a perfect rock sensibility got caught up in the eddying whorl of the marginalizing popular entertainment industry in pursuit of what she knew she loved, and her legacy and sheer commitment to survival and all things true make this a story that anyone who has ever claimed to love rock and roll needs to know about.
So throw aside your cliché assumptions about Women In Rock and get ready to be Hit So Hard: The Life And Near Death Story Of Patty Schemel.
