The Catalyst interview: Laura Jane Grace

Powerful and raw, the songs written and recorded by the Florida punk band Against Me! are honest without fail, whether they’re political, personal or something else altogether.

From the earliest indie albums, Reinventing Axl Rose (2002) and Searching For a Former Clarity, the band carved its own unique niche in punk – lead singer and songwriter Laura Jane Grace played acoustic guitar, which gave even the most aggressive songs an organic nature, along with the more traditional electric. Against Me! briefly signed with major label Sire and cut the moderately successful, Butch Vig-produced New Wave. Major tours of the U.S.A., and the planet, followed.

The 2014 Transgender Dysphoria Blues changed the landscape for Against Me!, as the band’s frontperson, who’d previously been known as Tom Gabel, preceded it with the announcement that she was now identifying as a woman, Laura Jane Grace. The world’s first transgender rock star.

Your tells are so obvious

Shoulders too broad for a girl

Keeps you reminded

Helps you to remember where you come from

You want them to notice

The ragged ends of your summer dress

You want them to see you

Like they see every other girl

They just see a faggot

They hold their breath not to catch the sick

  – Against Me!, “Transgender Dysphoria Blues”

Laura Jane Grace performs Sunday, in a solo concert, at the Floridian Social Club. Tickets are here.

While Against Me! is on an indefinite hiatus, Grace’s solo career is flourishing. She has published a memoir (Tranny: Confessions Of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout), and her AOL web series True Trans was nominated for an Emmy Award.

In this revealing conversation with the Catalyst, Grace discusses the band’s earliest days, their claw-up to fame, and the rising tide of gender dysphoria that fueled and ignited her pre-coming out music.

St. Pete Catalyst: Gainesville has always been a hothouse environment for growing new bands. I think Against Me! got started there right around the time I left the city after 20 years.

Laura Jane Grace: Technically, Against Me! started in Naples, Florida. And there weren’t many places to play in Naples. Specifically, there was zero places to play. Initially, Against Me! was just myself, then it evolved into a two-piece, me and a drummer named Kevin, and then James (Bowman, lead guitarist) eventually joined. At the time, unfortunately,  South Florida was like a mecca for Christian hardcore, it seemed like. There was a church that put on some quote-unquote punk shows.

My one friend who I grew up with, his parents had a basement – which is unheard of in Florida – and they would let us throw shows there every once in a while. But really, we had to leave Naples to play shows. And that meant going north, right?

To start off with, we’d go to St. Pete and play at the Refuge, and there was a record store in Tampa, 403 Chaos. We played in St. Pete, Tampa and then Orlando, and then we started catching more wind of what was happening in Gainesville.

I moved to Gainesville in 1998. I was 18 years old, and so not being able to play in bars, or go to the bars, meant we weren’t a band that really played in the bar scene. So we were like totally oddballs in that way.

Joe Courter at the Civic Media Center offered us a place to play. So initially, when I moved to Gainesville, the CMC was my world. I volunteered there, eventually Joe gave me the responsibility of booking shows there, so I would book other bands to play there.

In my opinion, what was happening in Gainesville then was, at that moment, really reaching a pinnacle, blowing up. And specifically, that all revolved around No Idea Records.

[Ed. note – Founded in Gainesville in the mid 1980s, the indie label No Idea provided a springboard for numerous Florida-based punk acts.]

If you weren’t playing in the clubs, how did you get No Idea’s attention?

We were outcasts because we weren’t of age. And we had the weird setup – I played an acoustic guitar, Kevin was on the pickle buckets – but another thing that made Gainesville unique and amazing was a recording engineer who had a studio in his home named Rob McGregor. And Rob made good-sounding recordings. We eventually went in and recorded a four-song EP with Rob, that we then put out as a 7-inch. And that, I think, was what really caught people’s ears in the local scene. They could hear the song and go ‘Oh, this is actually pretty good.’ And we started getting shows with other bands.

I somehow conned my way into getting a job as the door person at the Top Restaurant, even though I was underage. And that was my in. I was checking IDs at the door. And I was able to go to that bar, because they thought I was 21. That’s where everyone hung out, and it just went from there.

After the second EP with Rob McGregor, we knew we were ready for a full-length. The band had evolved into a four-piece. And our de facto manager – we didn’t even know what that meant, he was just our bud – went to No Idea and asked if they would put out our record. And they said yes.

They put out the first record, which was Re-Inventing Axl Rose, and it just kind of blew up.

Your mother bought you a four-track recorder, back in Naples, so you could put your songs on tape. How did your songwriting change from those earliest years?

I still mess around with a four-track! I think I was 13 years old; I’d already been playing guitar for a while. I started Against Me! as a bedroom project. I didn’t have an electric guitar, so I just played acoustic. I think it was over a Christmas break – I want to challenge myself to write 10 songs, and then I’ll dub some cassette copies and give ‘em out to friends. Just as a personal test.

I did it. And the songs were terrible, objectively terrible, but I accomplished the goal. Then it went from there. Then it was well, I just want to play one show, and play these songs. Then it was “Well now I want to play with a drummer, because it’s more fun playing with people.”

I think with most people, with writing songs, you just gotta do it. The trick is giving yourself permission to write bad songs. And eventually, every once in a while, you might stumble onto something good. But you’ve got to learn how to do it somehow, you know?

Once, in talking about your transition, you said “You’re either going to kill yourself or be yourself.” I wondered how that life change affected your writing? Did another channel of expression open up for you?

I think I would almost adapt that quote from “kill myself or be myself” to “kill myself or find myself.” Specifically with songwriting, what’s amazing, and what happens with that “give yourself permission to write bad songs” thing, is that your subconscious comes into play. There’s times when I write and it’s very “with purpose” and I think I know what I’m trying to get across, an idea or something like that.

But there’s other times where I don’t really know what I’m trying to say. And especially back then, I had all these feelings of rage, and of knowing there was something different about me, and feelings of shame associated with that because of any representation I’d ever seen of trans people. It was always negative.

At the same time, I had never heard of the word transgender, even. Until I was like 18, 19 years old. So trying to find yourself – “this is not me,” “this is not me,” “who am I?” – that’s a process of being a teenager in a lot of ways, right?

Right, and that’s why your story is inspirational to a lot of people.

I appreciate that. And I see that everywhere, with kids today still. But that would happen to me a lot with songwriting – when I hit on something that was resonating, with myself at least, it would be expressing those feelings that I didn’t feel I could express in any other way. Or that I had any other safe place to express them.

But within a song, because sometimes you could change around the words a little bit to mask it, you can work in metaphor. I was able to work through that. And through the process of, even then, traveling the world, and playing shows, as the band got bigger and bigger and bigger, it just kind of forced everything to a culmination.

Any producer I ever worked with, who’s worth their salt, was always pushing me to “go deeper.” Like “Dig deeper within yourself.” That, I really think, was a part of it for me.

What was the band’s reaction? And the fans?

With the band I think it was more of a “light goes on” moment. Of like “Oh, OK – now so much more makes sense.” I used to bristle at small things. Like before going onstage, if one of the band members was like “All right, boys, let’s do it!” That would make my fucking skin crawl. And they didn’t know that. They weren’t doing that to be mean. They just didn’t get it. I had never told them that part of myself. But nonetheless certain things like that, where they couldn’t understand.

When it comes to fans, or the general music public or whatever, I saw it kind of reaching this point of like I was feeling so stifled, an inability to express anything I was feeling, unless I came out. Where it was going to be more detrimental if I didn’t come out, and I started to explore that side of myself – whether that was like growing my hair longer, and people telling me to cut my hair, or like if I would have put on any kind of makeup, people would have made some kind of derogatory comment, “guyliner” or something like that.

It was more important to just be fuckin’ honest with people about what I was going through, and who I am. So it kind of felt like it had reached a head.

In interviews, this will of course always come up. But I wondered if you get weary of your transition being the topic, instead of your songs. “Here’s a woman who used to be a guy,” not “Here’s a great songwriter,” that kind of thing?

Yeah, totally. I mean, to be completely honest, especially if it’s completely stuck in the coming out story. That was 2012 that I came out. At this point, I’ve written a book, I’ve been nominated for an Emmy, I’ve fuckin’ traveled the world like 20 times over. There’s so many things that I’ve done since then that, in my mind at least, eclipse that. I don’t know, I wish people would kinda update the bio a little bit and maybe ask questions about stuff like that. Unfortunately, it’s predictable.

On this tour, you’re road-testing new songs. Tell me what the new stuff sounds like?

I’m road-testing these songs, but I play everything. I play the early stuff, I play the middle stuff, I play it all. But I did just finish recording a record in February, and I’m in the mixing process right now. I’m excited to always play what’s new, and I’m always excited to play what people want  to hear. I’m a working class musician, you know – I gotta tour to eat, right?