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The Donnas have every right to be bitter — and the general nonexistence of delectable male groupies is just one item on a laundry list of spoilers. "Seriously, if there were hot guys throwing themselves at me, I would take advantage of them!" complains vocalist Brett Anderson, lounging on the patio outside engineer Jay Rustin’s Sherman Oaks recording studio, where the Donnas are recording their next album.
What’s the issue on this mild winter day in an intensely girly garden paradise cluttered with poodle-haired pups, dive-bombing hummingbirds, and wildly whistling songbirds? The unequal treatment undergone by one of the most celebrated and derided groups of female rock musicians to hit the country’s pop radar since the Go-Go’s. Essentially, "it’s not the same!" Anderson and guitarist Allison Robertson yelp simultaneously.
"It’s much harder for a girl to get a blow job," adds Robertson, ever the analytical Donna, even in matters of quickies. "A lot of guys on the road in rock bands don’t always bang every girl — they just get blow jobs really fast. Guys can do that. It takes 10 minutes or five minutes. But with girls, it’s just not the same. We all know — it’s a little more involved. You need a little more privacy usually, I dunno."
Their tour bus just has tiny bunks shielded by curtains. "Literally, a Porta Potty is more private than a bunk," says Anderson, still the wisecracking, immaculately turned-out amazon in a sweater, skinny jeans, flats, and Springsteen T.
Once Palo Alto’s misfit all-girl rockers from Jordan Middle School, San Francisco’s punk-metal-pop sweethearts on Lookout!, then Atlantic’s up-and-comers splashed all over MTV, the Donnas are now, 13 years along, veterans at the ripe ages of 27 and 28 who can say they’ve been and done that and seduced, if not 40 boys in 40 nights, then thousands of listeners. Today labelless, off their well-worked and beloved touring circuit, and working through a Saturday on a disc with nary a flunky pushing a pop agenda, the Donnas are free, though their trajectory has been tough — littered with put-downs (some said they were the products of a Svengali in the form of Radio Trash–Super*Teem label owner Darrin Raffaelli, who initially collaborated with the teen band once called Ragady Anne then the Electrocutes), innuendo (who could ignore the unsettling amounts of older stalker dudes at their shows?), and rumor. "A lot of people think we’ve gotten dropped and we owe [Atlantic] thousands of dollars and we can’t pay them back!" Robertson explains. "Also that we’re broke and we’ve broken up."
"Also that we’re lazy," Anderson jumps in, imitating an imaginary slurring, boozy Donna. " ‘Oh yeah, we’re working on our record. Gimme another beer!’ "
Contrary to conjecture, it turns out that the Donnas weren’t dropped from Atlantic but left amicably, deciding not to renew in the face of pressure to go more pop after 2002’s Spend the Night failed to take off on rock radio despite much MTV play for their video "Take It Off" and 2004’s Gold Medal failed to remedy matters. "Our big joke was that we were making Gold Medal so Spend the Night would go gold," Anderson quips. Fortunately, the women who once aced their high school courses and recorded their first 7-inches after hours at a local Mailboxes Etc. are used to driving themselves — even when they couldn’t operate a motor vehicle.
"They started when they were in seventh grade," Anderson’s mother, Bonnie, says over the phone from Palo Alto. She’s one of a contingent of Donnas parents including Robertson’s musician dad, Baxter, and bassist Maya Ford’s English instructor father, John, who founded Poetry Flash. "We had to drive. We were the roadies. Mostly we drove them to different shows, unloaded them, watched them, and went, ‘Omigod,’ and loaded ’em up again. We lived vicariously through them."
But then, the Donnas’ career has been marked by such disjunctions: they were the good students who got into UC Santa Cruz (Robertson and Ford), UC Berkeley (Anderson), and NYU (drummer Torry Castellano) as well as sexy, nice girls-gone-bad who foregrounded female desire, fast tempos, and crunchy metal-fleck glam rock licks, fashioning a sound that might have emerged from Rikki Rockett and Vince Neil if they took the rock train to the next gender. All appetite and attitude, riding the tension between the needs to please and be pleased, the Donnas projected the carefree party-hard image that presaged Andrew W.K. while undergoing their share of trauma and drama, starting with a car accident on the cusp of 2001’s Turn 21 (Lookout!) and continuing through the trouble-plagued Gold Medal sessions, which saw Castellano’s painful case of tendonitis, Anderson’s ravaged vocal chords, Robertson’s divorce, and ordinarily prolific lyric writer Ford’s dry spell. "I kind of ran out of ideas and just got depressed," Ford says on the phone in Los Angeles. "I think I felt, like, a lot of pressure, and it’s never a good situation to be under the gun."
But the Bay Area–bred band stuck together, even when they always felt like outsiders amid Lookout!’s East Bay punk scene. "The thing that’s the most impressive about the Donnas is that through all of this, being teenagers, being best friends, having dreams of school and different careers, parental pressure to pursue those, highs and lows in terms of record sales and attention, they’ve stuck together," says manager Molly Neuman, once the drummer of riot grrrl groundbreakers Bratmobile and a force behind the now-catalog-driven Lookout! alongside her ex-husband, Christopher Appelgren.
The frustrating thing — even on this Grammy weekend, as the Dixie Chicks were getting ready to receive their dust collectors across town — was hitting the wall on rock radio as so many other female bands have. All the while they were dancing backward, away from the on-air jokes about synchronized periods and D-cups and being told repeatedly, " ‘We don’t play female rock on our rock station,’ " unless it’s Evanescence or No Doubt, Robertson says.
After trying Atlantic’s pop strategy and working with songwriters such as Dave Stewart ("You write songs with a guy who’s had these number one hits, and you see he still has to sit and go, ‘Dog, no. Frog, no’ — that’s nice," Anderson says. "You feel like, ‘Oh shit, he has to do that too’ "), they’re hoping to strike a balance with the new record, cooking up hard rock ear candy that satisfies a craving for sweet riffs and hard-to-shake hooks without falling prey to the monochromatic hardness of, say, Spend the Night. The songs they’ve tracked so far focus on Donna favorites — partying and dancing — with glances at the equalizing effects of nightfall and the loneliness of the road. And perhaps the gumption that gave these women the courage to face prove-it punks and surly sods every night on tour, the same sassiness that some mistake for brattiness, has been tempered with time.
"We were listening to old records and thinking, ‘Shit! Like, we’re scary!’ " Anderson says, laughing.
"This album," Robertson says softly, "is more like ‘Come party with us.’ " *
DONNAS
With Boyskout, Bellavista, and Push to Talk
March 2, 9 p.m., $20
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
(415) 621-4455
Sonic Reducer will return next week.