Antietam's Tara Key on a mission to 'claim rock for my generation'
In a recent tribute she wrote about Patti Smith, Antietam guitarist-singer Tara Key recalls her childhood growing up in Louisville. She was a self-professed tomboy, always in motion, playing softball, tennis, tumbling and running. Then, just before she turned 15, she was diagnosed with scoliosis and confined to a body cast for nearly two years.
“It pissed me off, but it made me sit in my room for three years with my guitar and learn how to play it,” she says. She also discovered Smith’s “Horses.”
"That was important that she was a woman, that her voice was like my voice, after growing up singing along with (the Monkees’) Mickey Dolenz and (Paul Revere and the Raiders’) Mark Lindsay. I felt bad about my voice until I heard her. I had gotten enough flak growing up in a working-class neighborhood and then we were dropped-kicked into a more affluent part of town through assisted living. The people were really different from me, the girls all dressed up. So Patti Smith validated me for being different -- the way she sounded, the way she looked. That tie and shirt she wore on the album cover became my uniform for years.”
Empowered, Key played in the Louisville group Babylon Dance Band from 1978 to 1983, then moved to New York where she formed Antietam with bassist (and now husband) Tim Harris (current drummer Josh Madell joined a few years later). Since then, the trio has recorded eight studio albums and forged a reputation for galvanizing live shows, with Key hurling her body around the stage and rubbing her fingers bloody on the guitar fretboard while surfing the waves of sound thrown up by the rhythm section.
The band’s latest album, “10th Life” (Carrot Top), is among its most direct, 10 fat-free songs gorged on melody, with typically thoughtful lyrics that consider midlife as both a challenge and an opportunity.
“It’s hard to separate what I write and play from what I’m living,” says Key, 53. “Tim and I are dealing with our moms approaching 90. We’re trying to learn from them how to go down that road. We’re dealing with all these adult things that anyone my age can relate to. I want to take this thing called rock music and claim it for my generation. Not as this nostalgic thing and going back to what it was like being 22 and listening to Husker Du, but relating it to how you live your life today. For us, my peers, rock should be an ongoing thing.”
Seeing Key play is enough to make a believer out of anyone. She was a pioneering punk-era guitarist who also dared to play extended solos that reached for the heavens. Now she’s pleased to see countless young female guitar shredders such as Screaming Females’ Marissa Paternoster, Carrie Brownstein and Marnie Stern who, whether they know it or not, owe Key a huge debt.
“I was hoping by now we would take it out of the dialectic of girl guitar players vs. guy guitar players, but there are things thematically and feel wise that are distinctive about girl guitar players,” Key says. “There are some awesome players that are just about touch and feel, and some shredders. What’s happening now is what I’d always hoped for. For generations younger than mine, Marissa’s generation, there is more of a gender equality vibe anyway, not just about music. Girls now have more girls to listen to. And just the idea of choosing to be in a band, it’s now something you can choose as a career when going to see your high school guidance counselor. For us, it was more cataclysmic to choose being in a band as your life. It’s much more accepted now, and that’s great.”
Key is still demonstrating how it’s done. In its third decade, Antietam has just made one of its best albums. And Key as a musician is still finding new ways to express herself. She was recently among several guitarists invited to interpret Jimi Hendrix’s version of “The Star Spangled Banner” for a New York public-radio station, and Key turned it into a moving meditation on America in the 21st Century. (The performance can be viewed HERE.)
“I had an electric guitar in my possession for a year or so when I first heard Hendrix, and he showed me ways that the guitar could sound like something other than a guitar,” Key says. “He was one of the first to use it as a sonic paintbrush. I can’t separate what I play from cultural content: the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ being played by an African-American gentleman during the height of the (Army) draft and Vietnam. So when I was playing it, I was definitely thinking about the America of today, how the schisms of today are so many more and so deep. I was trying to think what a union would be, that people want unity, but we’re so entrenched in dogma that we can’t get out of our little niches. With Hendrix, he’d cover a song and be literal, and then it would be like he took a hit of acid on the spot and wandered down this other road. That elasticity of time and content -- I wanted to be true to that spirit.”
greg@gregkot.com
Tara Key: Her photography and painting exhibit opens 12-8 p.m. Friday at Saki, 3716 W. Fullerton, 773-486-3997.
Antietam: 9 p.m. Saturday with Rick Rizzo/Tara Key at 1354 W. Wabansia, $10; ticketfly.com.
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