By Tom Harrison
The Province (Vancouver, WA) | November 18, 1994
Snow is falling in the mountains.
Road managers are frantic.
Faced with driving the potentially treacherous highway that separates Salt Lake City from their next gig, the respective road managers for Lisa Germano and Pale Saints resign themselves to arriving in Seattle later than scheduled and attempting to rearrange such things as interviews in the hope of making up the travel time.
Lisa Germano beats Pale Saints’ to the phone by two minutes.
Thus, having finished a salad at some diner along the way, Lisa has but a few minutes to talk about an album that deserves more time and space, Geek The Girl.
In her own words, it is the story of a girl “who is confused about how to be sexual and cool in the world.” It’s not a concept album as such but a collection of sometimes poignant and haunting, sometimes angry and unsettling songs. These are linked by an ironically spritely Sicilian folk tune, Frascalita, and made cohesive by Germano’s anarchic approach to song arrangement and sonic ambience.
“It just came out that way,” says Germano, better known here as John Mellencamp’s fiddle player than for her own recordings—On The Way Down From The Moon Palace, Happiness and Geek.
“I wrote other songs, too – but, when I wrote Geek The Girl, the song, I realized, wow, I have these songs that are dealing with the same things.”
To what extent Germano is Geek or simply identifies with her character is open to question.
Autobiography mixes with intensive social studies in Cry Wolf (prompted by the Mike Tyson rape trial) and A Psychopath (for which Germano drew from personal experience with a stalker) but the fiddle player also laughs easily.
The names she’s given her song-publishing companies—Inconsiderate Bitch and Emotional Wench—indicate her self-deprecating humor and outline a self-portrait of a woman whose fiery nature and wilful individuality are tempered by emotional vulnerability.
“In the end,” she says, getting to Stars, the optimistic conclusion to Geek The Girl, “you have to hold on to your dreams.”
With that, the considerate Lisa Germano hands off the phone to Colleen Browne of Pale Saints.
For Browne, the co-billing of Lisa Germano and Pale Saints tonight at the Town Pump marks a return to Vancouver after 4½ years of living in England
When the last band for whom she played bass, Martin Fields and The Academy, broke up, Browne headed to the U.K. and eventually was asked to join Pale Saints.
“I really didn’t know much about them at all,” she says. “I’d heard the first record but I wasn’t a huge fan. I just came in and played the way I play and it fitted in.
Her arrival not only changed the sexual balance in the band (with singer Meriel Barham there are now two women and two men—Chris Cooper and Graeme Naysmith) but gave Pale Saints a rhythmic underpinning its previous records lacked.
“I’m the only ‘official musician in the band,” Browne says.
“lan (Masters, her predecessor) was a guitarist who was forced to play bass. Chris says that, if anything started to groove, lan immediately would change it.”
If Pale Saints’ earlier albums were characterized by Velvet Underground-inspired washes of quasi-psychedelic color, the current Slow Buildings reveals a developing attention to song structure and instrumental discipline at no cost to the often-dreamy moods created by Naysmith’s range of guitar sounds.
It is a development that Pale Saints had to make after 1992’s In Ribbons, which culminated in Masters’ departure.
“The band couldn’t have lasted with the same lineup,” Browne believes. “lan wanted to go one way and the others wanted to go another. It’s definitely healthier now.”
And, with that, Colleen Browne puts down the phone and saves another road manager from an anxiety attack.
