coming around

2019 | Rock

— track 5 “break me”

Kerensa Grace Karinen: I just love music. I’m from Spearfish, started playing piano as a kid, then my friend bought me a guitar and I started writing right away. I would play open mics all the time, that’s how I met Kahle, the drummer on this album. And his sister painted the skull album cover. Everything just came together perfectly on this album and I can’t wait to record the next one. I love harmonies. NaTasha is so good at it, and Brittany was really good at it too, that makes the album. I just love Sleater-Kinney, St. Vincent, Tegan and Sara, stuff like that. I love what they stand for, they’re not afraid to speak their minds. Speaking up about it when most people shy away from it. Like our song “break me,” people try and break people down, and I’m like, “Go ahead. Whatever. Go ahead and break me, it doesn’t matter, because you’re going to build yourself back up. So go ahead and do it, because you can’t break me.” A lot of songs though, I’m not even conscious when I write, you know what I mean? It’s not even really me, so I can’t really take credit for them. It’s weird. The stars? I don’t know.

Desiree Shaffer: I’m the newest in the band, I’m the baby. I joined, what, in like April or something. It was right when people were starting to get vaccinated. So we had, like, two or three band practices before we played our first show together. And I had just learned how to play bass, really, over quarantine, so I’m really new to playing the bass. I didn’t get started until NaTasha was like, “Hey do you want to be our bass player?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I don’t really know how to play bass, but I can learn.” So I’m still trying to learn the songs. I’m from South Carolina and I just moved here in 2019, and NaTasha was the first person that I spoke to before I moved here because she throws all the shows and stuff. So I was like, “Hey, my husband and I play music, how do you do?” We play bluegrass stuff together, acoustic stuff, I play upright bass with him. It’s called Slug’s Revenge. So this is my first time playing electric and first time playing with a pick, so that was all really new.

Cassie Applegate: I play the drums, pretty new to drums as well, been playing for the past three years maybe. And yeah, really enjoy it, this is my second band that I’ve been in. Having a lot of fun. I’m really enjoying all the amazing songs that Kerensa is writing. We have a lot of fun together. The last band was called Nosy Neighbors, but I was the only girl in that band, so it’s fun to be in an all-girl band. It has a completely different feel to it, that’s for sure. I feel like we all take it seriously, but we all also kind of respect each other in how we feel like we want to play music, which is cool, instead of one person controlling the whole thing, it seems a lot more collaborative, and we have a lot more say in it. Kerensa’s really good because she’ll write these beautiful songs and then let us play around with them, so that’s cool. Instead of having someone who is set in their vision for the song, we have a little bit more freedom in what we do with it.

NaTasha Carman: So I guess I was just a choir nerd forever, and then I was in this band called the Darning Hearts with Dylan Lewis who was my husband at the time, and then we decided to be poly and he met his new bandmate and lover, and that’s now Humbletown. And so we tried to have a three-piece band for a while, but it was a little awkward. Then I just put a shout-out on the internet, I was like, “I need a new band! I can... harmonize?” So, I had booked Purple Honey a few times before, they were kind of my favorite local band, but it was just Kerensa and Kahle and whatever bassists they found. So I went to band practice and she was like, “Do you have any instruments?” And I was like, “I have this synthesizer that I found, that I bought at a garage sale.” Then I had to figure out how to make sound come out of it because I didn’t have an amp or anything, so I went and bought an amp that day, went to band practice, been in Purple Honey ever since. We lost one of our bandmates, Brittany, that was March of 2020, like, right when Covid hit. Yeah, that really sucked because I couldn’t go see her in the hospital. After that we didn’t even practice until after vaccinations. And now I play in three bands, it’s kind of a problem. I have to write a song tonight for practice tomorrow to play on Saturday. You probably know Lee Michael Strubinger from NPR, it’s his baby, but I’m in his band now. We have a psychedelic band, I think we’re called The Neon Eyes, but I’m not totally sold on it, it’s really hard naming things.

Cassie: You’re playing a show as The Neon Eyes, right? So you kind of have to commit at that point.

NaTasha: Ugh, I guess so. What if we only play one show and then we break up?

Cassie: Yeah, and start a whole new band with a different name.

NaTasha: I’m also in Plague Pitted Moon, which is a droney metal band.

Cassie: But we’re also starting another metal band, so then you’ll be in four bands.

Desiree: We’ve been really busy in July, we’ve had a lot of shows. We played in Deadwood at the What Women Want Festival, we played at Iron Phoenix, we played at Pride Fest at Memorial Park in Rapid City, we played at Main Street Square in Rapid City for their Summer Nights thing they do. That’s all been just in the past couple weeks. We have a show at The Cave coming up.

NaTasha: We’re headlining.

Cassie: Oh shit, okay.

NaTasha: And then this high school girl that always hangs out at The Cave, she’s opening. So, I have been booking underground shows just because nobody was doing it for a hot while, kind of like 2007 until — I feel like it all the sudden picked up the last couple years, where there’s other venues doing stuff, but — like, I booked at the VFW and wherever else would let us have shows just because I wanted to have all-ages shows and weird bands that, like, the bars wouldn’t let them play there. And then all the other venues in town charge like $700 a night to have a show there, so I was like, “Fuck this.” And then doing shows at my house, which was the Nameless Cave, that’s kind of where it all started really picking up. We just had a show here at my house last Thursday and I didn’t tell anybody about it until, like, noon that day and still about 60 people showed up. But I kept getting threatened to get arrested for having shows out here, because they wanted money, and taxes, and all that shit. So then we decided to open The Cave Collective downtown. A bunch of our stuff was down there anyways because it was the Racing Magpie before that, and we were doing a bunch of stuff with them, and they were like, “Our lease is up and we’re going to move out.” And we’re like, “Mind if we move in?” That was awesome. Just the community that was built from it, and all these new people that I met, like Desiree. And then Covid killed that. Closed, and did all the livestreams, and all the Zoom stuff for like a year and a half. But also, like, just having that show here at the house on Thursday I’m like, “Oh my god, this is so much easier.” It’s so much easier to just pass around a hat and not have to worry about the taxes and stuff, versus having to run a whole business and a non-profit, and be there every day of the week. So yeah, now we have a sweet new spot with a big old grain tower above it. I still book all the shows and make most of the flyers. Any flyer that’s hand drawn, that’s me. I don’t know how to use a computer, so.

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Desiree: Riot Grrrl just basically means that we have a voice and we want to be heard. We have just as much of a right to be up at the front, and playing music and shows as everyone else.

Cassie: I like that whole DIY aspect too, where we don’t need anyone telling us how to do it, where to do it, what way to do it. And just like NaTasha said, how she makes all of her own flyers still and books her own shows, it’s still very much that punk rock mentality of, “We’ll just figure it out.” We’ll just figure out how to play music the way we want to play it, and make songs the way we want to sound, and we don’t really care about how about how anyone will perceive it, but we hope that it goes out there and people enjoy it, and maybe some people will be motivated to start their own bands by it. Especially young people who are not quite sure if they should start a band or not. It’s so cool to see new, young, bands start up all over the place, and sometimes they are inspired by seeing us.

NaTasha: I love that our mosh pits are always, like 90% female at our shows. I feel like the ladies go hard here.

Desiree: Yeah they do.

NaTasha: Before I started The Cave Collective downtown, I had this group called Sisters Watching Sisters. It was just a group of us ladies that pretty much started a girl gang just so that when we went to shows we were watching out for all the girls. And we gave each other phone numbers so if you ever had to walk you had somebody to talk to. So mainly The Cave started with these feminist ideals of nobody getting hurt anymore at any shows. The masculine toxicity that you see at these shows, getting groped, I’ve tackled dudes for being inappropriate.

Desiree: The only two people that I’ve ever punched in my life were dudes after they grabbed my ass at shows.

NaTasha: I just want to be a role model for all these young girls to just — and maybe it’s like the role models I needed. Cassie, I don’t know if you remember Amethyst from back in the day, she used to book the shows too. So she moved away and then I started booking shows, and I would message her and be like, “What do I say?! What’s a rider?!” I feel like the Rapid City scene has pretty much been kept alive by ladies.

Cassie: That’s true. A lot of motivated ladies booking shows in the whole area, Spearfish and Rapid City.

NaTasha: Amethyst de Wolfe, she’s super awesome. She’s out in Seattle now. She booked all the shows when I was in high school, 2000-2004. Those were some really good times, and here I am, 35, still trying to hold on to it [laughs].

Cassie: It was a very male-dominated band scene, I would say. Wouldn’t you say, NaTasha?

NaTasha: Yeah, there were no girls in bands, except for Sarah Bowman.

Cassie: Like, even though Amethyst was booking all these shows, it was a very, very male-dominated, ego-driven type of band scene. So I think it’s cool to see a lot of feminine energy.

NaTasha: It was kind of like, “Hey, you’re 16, have this forty.”

Desiree: It was like that where I grew up too. I’m sure it’s probably like that in a lot music scenes for a woman growing up. Especially younger, underage girls, go to these shows and get wasted and end up where they shouldn’t be in bad situations. That’s why The Cave is so awesome, because it gives young people here a place to go where they’re not pressured to drink and do drugs, and you can just go and see music, and you don’t have all of that shit that goes with it that you’re expected to do.

NaTasha: That’s actually probably why I moved to town. I feel safer with them in town, not drinking. Most of our crowd is teenagers, up to mid-twenties, and then there’ll be the old punk kids like us, and parents, and then I notice there’s this whole revival of underground music and punk and stuff, and I just realized it’s because their parents are the old punk rockers now [laughs]. And I’m, like, in between these two generations. Now I just feel like I’m the mom of the scene.

Can’t wait to show you what we’ve been doing now, we have, like, a whole ‘nother album’s worth. Recording it this fall.

Desiree: We’re all moms too. Our babies need to get bigger so we can go on tour.

Cassie: We should just to bring them on tour, have a family bus.

Kerensa: Yeah, we need to record and then go on another tour.

NaTasha: Next summer, tour.