How Is This Possible? It Just Is.

I got to do something really cool last week. I produced a 2 hour long live online web show. We had six bands, live and semi-live. A host and two guests who co-hosted. 

I’ve worked at 5 VMAs in various positions (talent escort, running like a crazy person for performance approvals, red carpet interviews, once shadowing the show’s main talent exec) and 5 mtvU Woodie awards (again talent escort, identifying red carpet bands for the press, random running around, oh and I developed the concept for that whole show) so I’m not unfamiliar with the large scale live production with semi-live elements, but I’ve certainly never produced one entirely on my own. Making a rundown was more of a trip than I can tell you and it was pretty fun when the whole thing got thrown out the window and I started making it up as we went along.

But here’s what struck me the second I put my comms on: I had only met most of the crew that day and was having a hard time telling their voices apart. Because they were all men. No one had a problem recognizing my voice. I was the only woman on the headset. After the fact I realized all the bands on the show were all-male also. One of our guest hosts, who showed up unexpectedly and jumped right to work in front of the camera, was a woman. The demo for this show was by and large young females.

The production crew being all male is largely unremarkable, to be honest. You’ll get a female producer or director now and then, but by and large the crews most places I’ve worked have been all male. Except when I was in college and worked as a live camera operator for our local NBC affiliate on the local news. Of the 3 cameras, 2 were manned by women. Our director was often a woman, who let me also learn the chyron equipment. It is certainly avoidable if you put enough effort into it but that was the only experience I have had where production was even near to equal, when it came to gender. And it was in the summer of 1999.

At any rate, after last week’s event I got to talking with one of the guys on the production and we developed a show idea we want to pitch to VH1. Maybe I’ll insist they hire an all-female camera crew for that.

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  • I'll Be Hard to HandleElla Fitzgerald

Women you should know about, birthday edition: Ella Fitzgerald.

Yeah yeah, you already know all about Ella. In honor of her birthday, I spent all morning listening to my Ella catalog and I very much wanted to share this song. It’s both different from her typical fare and entirely fitting to her personality. And quite the single girl anthem. 

“I just want you to know I think you’re a punk.” 

This particular track was written by Jerome Kern, whose more popular works (“The Way You Look Tonight,” “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” the entire Showboat musical) you are undoubtedly familiar with. “I’ll Be Hard to Handle” was written for the musical Roberta, which became a 1935 movie starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. This song was what could be considered a b-side, but the sassiness Ella brings to it makes me absolutely love it.

Kern was one of the most important songwriters of the 20th century and Ella has put her mark on everything worth marking in the Great American Songbook — it’s clearly a match made in heaven.


Women you should know about: Françoise Hardy

Interesting tidbit I did not know about Ms. Hardy until mere moments ago: she suffered from debilitating stage fright so intensely that it caused her to stop performing live by the end of the ’60s. She has continued releasing albums, however, and you might recognize her best as the lovely female voice on Air’s “Jeanne.” Personally, I’m most fond of her folky ’60s work.

The video above is her very lovely interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” but I also highly recommend “La Rue des Coeurs Perdus,” which is the French translation of Ricky Nelson’s “Lonesome Town.” (“The Street of Lost Hearts” when translated literally, how lovely.)

Women you should know about: Emmylou Harris.

Last night I was reading my book, replying to emails and listening to Emmylou Harris’s new album on NPR music. It took less than one song, because the first song was that compelling, for me to stop everything I was doing and read what NPR had written about her. The first sentence is her saying how difficult songwriting is, still, for her. They manage to make it all the way to the second paragraph before they mention Gram Parsons, whose connection with Harris in the ’70s is often credited (even by Harris herself) as the reason any of us know who she is. And that’s fine, but we all know Grievous Angel would have been only half the album it is without Harris. And, frankly, she probably would have met the right people or caught the right ear at some point with a voice like hers. Hell, Parsons wasn’t even the first to discover her — his fellow/former Flying Burrito Brothers band member Chris Hillman actually has that honor and in turn recommended her to Parsons to help fill out his vocals.

At any rate, what reading this made me flash on was a throwaway line in Keith Richard’s book Life, where he expounds on his relationship with Parsons before and during the recording of Exile on Main Street. He says something along the lines of, “this was before Gram met Emmylou and well before there was anything going on between them, but there would be.” And something about the way he wrote it, the context it was in, makes it feel like Emmylou Harris owes her career to Gram Parsons wanting to have sex with her.

Here’s the problem I have with that: I couldn’t tell you the name of one person Neil Young has had sex with. And, critically speaking, that is who Harris is on par with, both in terms of the quality & quantity of her output and the level of respect she deserves. And yet all we do is talk about her relationship to Gram Parsons. No one feels the need to write about CSNY every time they do a think piece on Neil Young. I’m sure some of the romance comes from envoking the untimely and mysterious death of Parsons, but Harris has been recording since the late ’60s and has a rich backstory of her own. And she had enough gumption to make sure her career carried on when he was gone. So can’t we start talking about Emmylou Harris on her own yet?

The song above is Emmylou Harris’s “Together Again” performed on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1977.