Denise Sullivan

From her time on the LA scene during the first wave of punk, and through a 25-year solo singer-songwriter career that’s served as inspiration to a new generation of queercore and riot grrrl artists, Phranc is embedded in California’s rich musical landscape. Temporarily sidelined from performing in recent years, Phranc is officially back to art and music and fuels her creativity by pursuing her favorite activities offshore, from swimming and sailing, to surfing.

“Going surfing is a big part of my creative process,” she says. “I’ve surfed since I was nine years old. Leaving land is my favorite part of it. I like being in a separate reality.”

Phranc’s day-to-day reality includes making cardboard art (she shows in galleries and museums on both coasts) and writing songs. Some of her work is topical like “Bloodbath” (which took on apartheid in South Africa) and “Condoleezza”; other creations are more whimsical (“Rodeo Parakeet” comes to mind). But whether whimsical or topical, Phranc’s art and music always has a story to tell.

“It’s still my favorite thing, to listen to a story through a song. It’s like nothing else. A song can preserve time and memory and history in a way that words or a picture alone can’t. A song can capture it all,” she says. In recent years, Phranc wrote about her beloved hometown of LA; like souvenir postcards, she hopes to incorporate the songs in a package that merges her audio and visual media.

Growing up in the beach community of Mar Vista near Venice, California, Phranc took a ’70s pilgrimage to San Francisco, figuring she’d fall in with its world class gay community; instead, she discovered a world of artists, actors, and ne’er-do-wells who introduced her to punk rock. “It was a great time and a life-changing time for me. I felt like I had a peer group. Not only did I identify as far as politics and music, but also age-wise. I had been with people because they were lesbian and women and we had a lot in common but they were all a lot older. So for once, I fit in. Where could a freak fit in? In punk rock!”

Morrissey and Phranc strike a pose

Unable to secure a day job outside of a stint as a nude model at the Art Institute, Phranc returned to LA. “So I came back from San Francisco and the only people I knew here were lesbians, and no way man, I wanted punk rock! I started going out to punk shows. I would put on a little suit and tie and I would go there and try to look so cool though I didn’t know a soul.” Hanging out on the street by herself at a SoCal Avengers show, she was spotted by Edward Stapleton. “He walks up to me and says, ‘Hey, want to be in a band?’ Not, ‘Can you play anything?’ And I’m like ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Good. The band’s Nervous Gender, you’d be perfect.'” From keyboards in that band she moved on to guitar in Catholic Discipline, and eventually landed in Castration Squad. You can catch a glimpse of Phranc in Catholic Discipline, alongside bandmates Claude Bessey/Kickboy Face from Slash magazine and Robert Lopez, aka El Vez, in the Penelope Spheeris film, The Decline of Western Civilization.

By this time, it was about 1979, and punk was already changing. “The fashions changed and the politics changed and people were wearing the swastika, which they hadn’t been up to that time. Because I’m Jewish I would notice and it pissed me off. So I wrote a song called ‘Take Off Your Swastika.’ It was right around the same time the Dead Kennedys wrote ‘Nazi Punks F**k Off.’ I wrote the song as a direct personal reaction to the swastikas and I decided to play it on my acoustic guitar. Up ’til then, I’d been playing electric guitar and synthesizer. Nobody in punk was really playing acoustic guitar at that time, and the reason I did it was because I really wanted the words to be heard. Because, as far as I’m concerned, punk rock is the folk music of today… though I didn’t play it at some folk club, I played it at punk rock clubs.”

Phranc was as amazed as anyone when people’s response was overwhelmingly positive. “People would yell and I’d get heckled and stuff, but on the whole it was pretty great. I remember playing at the Whisky and seeing a couple of guys taking off their swastikas.”
In 1985, her solo debut, Folksinger, was released on Rhino Records; she’d recorded the album with money she saved from teaching swimming lessons. It wasn’t long after that she became the designated support act for artists like Morrissey, Hüsker Dü, and the Pogues. “My audience has always been very diverse. People assume because I’ve been out as a dyke that my audience is lesbians and that’s not true. The audience that really supported me and continually has is a mixed bag of men and women, gay and straight. Still to this day, people come up to me because they heard me at college. My songs are for everybody. I like to reach as many different kind of people as I possibly can at one time.”

Read more about Phranc in Keep on Pushing

Filed under: Arts and Culture, Folk, video, Women in Rock, acoustic punk rock, Gay Pride, groundbreakers, Jewish folk singers, Jewish lesbian folksingers, lesbian folksingers, LGBT singers, musician/visual artist, Phranc, Pride 2014