Full transparency, Nancy Vogl sent me two vinyl records with expedited shipping. The first is Tryin’ to Survive, the second album produced by the Berkeley Women’s Music Collective, or BWMC, back in 1978, of which she was a founding member. The second is her 1984 solo album Something To Go On, which features fellow collective member Suzanne Shanbaum. Full transparency, she plans on sending me one more record. A CD this time.
“Polkanomics!” she exclaimed when she, Shanbaum and I convened for a zoom interview. “I should have sent that, damn it.” Polkanomics was one of Vogl and Shanbaum’s more recent bands, emerging from the pursuit of happiness in 2004. “We thought, ‘What is the goofiest, most ridiculous thing we could possibly do for a New Year’s Eve party?’ And someone said, ‘Oh, let’s play polka.’” Then they, along with Marie Merideth and Elizabeth Cabraser, played together for another 10 years.
The Berkeley Women’s Music Collective, founded in 1973, was not born out of the same irreverence. In a 2012 interview with archivist JD Doyle of Queer Music Heritage, Vogl didn’t argue with Doyle’s assertion that they — Vogl, Shanbaum, Debbie Lempke and Nancy Henderson, the original main group — were “the most out early lesbian band.” Instead, she clarified, “We were the maddest, I think.” Anger was their catalyst, maybe most succinctly summed up by their roving blues ballad “Fury”: “There is a peace in my heart/ When I start, don’t you know when I start/ But then the fury/ You know the fury/ It comes over me.”
Generally, journalists are supposed to refuse gifts from sources. And, generally, I mean no disrespect. In the case of the Berkeley Women’s Music Collective, however, going straight to the source is one of the few remaining ways to access its discography — none of its songs have braved the music streaming space. A quick search on Apple Music offers Andy William’s stunningly heterosexual “Music to Watch Girls By” as a substitute.
The preservation of its story, too, has been largely relegated to the hobby-archivist. Websites such as Doyle’s are a time capsule of the band’s moment, filled with clips from newspaper and magazine scans. Spare YouTube uploads are one of the only ways to hear the collective’s songs without a record player. I first heard about the collective as a volunteer at KALX, UC Berkeley’s student and community radio station. While I was being trained on the locations of highly specific genres in the physical media library, the library department head used its album as the marker for women’s music, a genre I was previously unfamiliar with.
Not only the subject of a BWMC song, a sense of fury lies at the heart of the women’s music genre on the whole. Maxine Feldman, a self-proclaimed “big loud Jewish butch lesbian,” is oft credited as the genre’s originator with her 1969 song “Angry Atthis,” written in response to the moments overbearing anti-gay institutions. Feldman explored her gender identity later in life and grew comfortable with any pronouns. From then on, women’s music was known as music — of any sound, style or form — written for and by women, often lesbian, in pursuit of feminist consciousness.
Five years before she passed in 2007, Doyle interviewed Feldman, too, and he also uploaded one of the only publicly available recordings of her song to Youtube. Like the BWMC’s “Fury,” Feldman’s vocals are undoubtedly angry, though her tone is wounded: “I hate not being able/ To hold my lovers hand/ ‘cept for under some dimly lit table/ Afraid of being who I am/ No longer afraid of being who I am.”
The song was first performed just a month before the Stonewall Riots, timing Feldman credited to a feeling in the air. “It was bound to happen,” she said. “We were all getting very tired of being invisible.”
Artists were tired and angry — but also curious. When discussing the band’s origin, Vogl and Shanbaum both pointed to a sense of skepticism, or maybe disquiet, that started in childhood. This sense that “something was up” — that Vogl had after a love affair with her best friend — or the urge to figure out “what’s going on” pushed Shanbaum to study existential philosophy at CalState Northridge and later at UC Berkeley. It was while she was attending the school that Shanbaum started to find the answers, though it wasn’t in the classroom.
Shanbaum, disappointed by the classism she felt on campus, dropped out of UC Berkeley before her first year was done but had no interest in leaving the town. “I wanted to get to a point of understanding in my life, and that had nothing to do with the philosophy department at Cal at all,” she said. “But I did meet a lesbian.”
The Bay Area has an obvious LGBTQ history, which it wears proudly — visitors are often first welcomed to San Francisco in the Harvey Milk Terminal at SFO. But history is often more subtle than murals and plaques and more often grown over. The history of the Berkeley Women’s Music Collective begins on Derby Street, not too far from campus, at a co-op once known as the Derby Dyke House.
“It was the old governor’s mansion from 1890,” Vogl said. “It had two floors and eleven bedrooms. I think 13 of us lived there — 13 dykes and a ghost.”
Vogl didn’t have much to say in the ilk of ghost stories, but that was probably for the best. The real intrigue of the property came from the living. Before moving to Berkeley, Vogl and Shanbaum rarely met others like them — bright, radical lesbian feminists. Then in a flash, it was overwhelming.
“[I was like] ‘Oh my god, and then here’s this one, here’s that one, here’s the other one,’” Shanbaum said.” Though she didn’t live in the Derby Dyke House specifically, she met her future wife in the co-op, along with lifelong friends and eventual band members.
In addition to the lesbians and ghost, the Derby Dyke House was also home to a baby grand piano, so it was the perfect place for the nascent band to start practicing. It was Debbie Lempke who first posted a sign looking for interested parties, which attracted Vogl, Nancy Henderson and finally Shanbaum.
In the spirit of collective living, the members’ list was nebulous. Jake Lampert was an early member, and Bonnie Lockhart eventually took Henderson’s spot when she left the band. The vinyl sleeve for their second album is peppered with the photos of all the other women who contributed to its creation, squeezed in wherever the song lyrics aren’t printed. I am particularly interested in the photo at the bottom of the b-side highlighting the “Transisters,” an organization based in Santa Cruz that taught women electronics and acted as assistant engineers on the album. Seven women sit around a table outside, most wearing open smiles. The two at the forefront are a bit more stingy with their smile, the set of their eyes discerning. It all feels very precious, very stern.
That type of creation, learning as they went, was not just the method, but the very purpose of the band. In a 1979 article for “Paid My Dues,” an early feminist music journal, Shanbaum wrote that none of the members of the BWMC considered themselves musicians — they spent more time talking than playing.
“We went to the university of the collective,” she explained to me. “We struggled about everything. We discussed everything, every possible thing to try and understand class, understand who we were, understand how things worked.”
“Like our bodies,” piped in Vogl. “Remember when we all gave each other a pelvic exam to see what was going on? That was a pretty funny band practice.”
Having formed so early on in the history of women’s music, the Berkeley Women’s Music Collective was actively discovering the genre with every step. It was scruffy, and members spent early days playing in the basement of churches and at demonstrations at People’s Park. Since most of the members had no formal music training, song development was a game of trial and error — expression first, notation never. Their first tour was fittingly rough around the edges, as five people drove around the country in a borrowed four-seat van. “There were no seatbelt laws,” Shanbaum noted. There weren’t many guidelines in general.
“The world was not made for us,” said Shanbaum. “There was no manual for us. We spent our time in the band and music as a medium to explore why we felt alienated and isolated.”
“You know the theories that they study in women’s studies?” Shanbaum asked. “We had to figure them out!”
While the genre is known as “women’s music,” the feminism the group subscribed to was one of liberation for all from strict gender roles, not women alone. “People,” off the group’s second album, proudly states, “Everybody be somebody, let somebody share/ Sharing in the labor, in the will to carry on/ Working with each other brings the revolution.”
Vogl’s office wall is covered in photos of her family and past mentors, evidence of an archivist spirit she seems to share with people such as Doyle, the YouTube uploaders and my KALX trainer.
In recent years, this spirit has pushed her to fundraise for the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, founded in 2014 by photographer Lenn Keller. To parlay a phrase from the website, the archive was created with the goal of preserving “material about a community that contributed so much to the Bay Area and California.”
In its present state, the archive is a living thing. Its projects include an oral history, of which it is currently asking for interested interviewees and interviewers. Many of the photos in the gallery were donated from people’s personal collections. Still, the “Who We Are” page features childhood photos of the staff, often in black and white, sometimes with birth and death dates beside them. Keller passed in 2020.
“Right now, our whole culture could disappear with a click of a mouse, you know what I mean?” she said. And with recent moves by the federal government to scrape images and references of LGBTQ+ people from their websites, attempts to do just that are not relegated to the imagination. “We really want to preserve (our history),” Vogl said, “And to make sure that it stays in the consciousness of the world.”
Nancy Vogl and her partner of 31 years, Laurie, live in Sebastopol with at least one dog who was getting frustrated by the length of our interview. Vogl spent her post-BWMC life working in LGBTQ+ youth groups and as a coach for the California Department of Education. She and Laurie have worked to turn their home into a space for couch-surfing kids to sleep while they get back on their feet.
“It’s like an army buddy,” said Vogl. “Once you go through those years with someone … I mean, I just had a party here — a kickoff for the (Bay Area Lesbian Archives fundraising) campaign — so I invited almost my whole crew from back in the early 70s… they had not laid eyes on each other for 40 years… and there were 30, 34 women here. But it was just like yesterday.”
When I had first emailed Vogl last year to try to set up a discussion, she responded eagerly, unafraid to toss in an exclamation point or two. I was met with the same enthusiasm when I thanked her for her time, though with a touch less verve — “It really pleases both of us that somebody would care.”
Suzanne Shanbaum lives 30 minutes away from Vogl in Santa Rosa. She went on to study both computer science and yoga and eventually worked in the World Trade Center up until the 9/11 attacks. Having narrowly avoided going into work that day, she left New York and moved back to California where she reconnected with a woman from the co-op days named Jane, her now wife. “I just never forgot her,” she said. Jane whisked Shanbaum away when it was time for dinner, for which I hold no hard feelings. According to Shanbaum and Vogl, the collective never really ended.
The Bay Area Lesbian Archive is hosting a fundraising celebration with music from Vogl and friends Dec. 13 at La Peña in Berkeley.