By: Miranda
10.04.07

In the summer of 2005, my best friend and I packed up in my decrepit black Chevy Lumina to undertake the approximately 105 mile journey to Winston-Salem, NC. Much like the Blues Brothers before us, we had a mission. We were off to see Sleater-Kinney at Ziggy’s in Winston-Salem. I had only recently discovered the band myself, and was really lucky to have convinced my best friend to take this one-night trip with me. Armed with a tank of gas and a boombox loaded with Sleater-Kinney’s new cd The Woods (because of course, my car stereo is jacked) we drove off to North Carolina.

There we were, in a tiny roadhouse just down from the Coliseum, in a night that was so hot and humid it is practically another character in this story. The lights were bright and the music was loud, so in other words, perfect. When Sleater-Kinney took the stage, and the first chords of “The Fox” thundered in the air, it was if everything had stopped and nothing was more important than the beat that Janet Weiss was banging out on her drum. It didn’t seem physically possible that someone could drum as fast and loud as she could without growing a few extra limbs. The music was urgent and all-compassing, and felt as much a part of me as the beating of my heart.

That’s the night I fell in love with Sleater-Kinney.

Fast forward a little less than a year later, to June 27, 2006. I was laying on my then-boyfriend’s futon with my mouth stuffed full of cotton balls, high on Vicodin. I had just gotten my wisdom teeth pulled that morning, and still woozy, I pulled open my laptop to check my email. I found no less than three emails from my friends, passing along a news story with the news of Sleater-Kinney’s indefinite hiatus. I couldn’t believe it. I was too stunned and drugged to even cry. Why? Why did my favorite band just call it quits when I was just getting to know them? One of my emails read, “Isn’t that the band you’ve been talking so much about lately?” Another email consoled me that, “The Woods is probably the peak of what they could have done and it would have gone downhill from there.” None of the emails that fell so kindly into my inbox really understood what it was that I had just lost.

For me, and for so many other people, Sleater-Kinney weren’t just an amazingly talented band from Portland, Oregon. In a world that is so severely lacking in positive female role models, in this band there were three individual, beautiful women who could rock just as hard and unapologetically as the guys, without losing any of their feminine qualities. As Corin Tucker was once quoted saying in concert, when they were accidentally confused for groupies, “We just want to say that we're not here to fuck the band. We are the band.”

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