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.”
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