Dottie’s Story

Dottie’s Story

I’m Dottie, one of the original Nogheads, a life-long Ethnog groupie and proud of it! I’m also a “second wave” feminist from way back when women’s liberation was a call for total revolution against the patriarchy. In 1966, I was still in high school in San Francisco but hanging out with a fantastic group of women from Berkeley, skipping school to go to all the sit-ins and protests over civil rights and the Vietnam War. We were reading Freidan and de Beauvoir and my friends were getting pretty sick of making coffee for the (male) student revolution. We had our own “women’s liberation cell,” it was really a consciousness-raising group but no one called it that at the time. Anyway, we were at a rally in Seattle and found ourselves at the Spanish Castle with a bunch of women from Seattle who later wrote the “Lillith Manifesto.” I was the only one who was really really listening to the band and they weren’t the greatest but they had this aura, you know, a real charisma and raw raw talent that was just unbelievably groovy! I remember them doing “Wild Thing” and I just knew that they were going to be Big. I didn’t meet the guys that night but I went to Seattle whenever I could after that to hear them. They really had a feminist vibe even though they were pretty much in to that whole “drugs, sex, and rock n roll” thing. I even wrote some feminist lyrics that I wanted them to play but they had their own stuff and that was cool. It would have been strange to hear them singing “Tear down the patriarchy, Spurn the male chauvinist pigs, Make love with the Mother Goddess.”

Anyway, by the beginning of 1967, I was living on and off with a couple of women’s lib sisters in Seattle and we were loving the Ethnogs (literally and figuratively) whenever and wherever they played. We were doing a women’s lib newspaper and helping out at a cooperative coffee house and doing daycare at a commune and sit-ins and rallies every weekend but we never missed the band’s gigs. Thanks to the Ethnogs, I traveled all over the country once their first album hit the charts, following their tour schedule and joining in war protests and meeting up with women’s lib feminists all along the way. My Seattle sisters were with me, we were Earth Mothers and fem politicos and loving each other and the Ethnogs and hating the war and the establishment and anyone over 30 and especially the male chauvinist oppressors. When the band put out “Oral Traditions,” we knew it was a tribute to our performances of women’s orality and I like to think that Gory got the idea for “Train to Purgatory” after the Fem-Nogs read Mary Daly’s The Church and the Second Sex (1968) out-loud (and naked; maybe that’s why it had such an impact).

We were delighted when the radio stations banned “Spit Me Out and Take It Back.” By that time, there was a whole camp of us moving around the country, grooving to the Ethnogs and doing whatever we could for the feminist cause. That’s how I came to do ethnography – thanks to the Ethnogs, we had all become interested in ethnographic traditions and perspectives and we were reading Bateson and Goffman and Mead (of course!), writing and doing fieldwork, documenting the oppressive patriarchal-capitalist lifestyle as we found it all around us and issuing reports from the ground on women’s creativity and resistance. I finally finished high school through correspondence courses and enrolled in university while the Ethnogs were touring overseas. I remember once when they brought back a Turkish kasik and we all thought it was a wooden speculum! Anyway, the graduate students in anthropology at Stanford were creating a feminist revolution against the masculinist traditions of fieldwork – Michelle Rosaldo, Louise Lamphere, Gayle Rubin – and we Nogheads were really excited by their energy and vision and fierceness.

At that point, Gory was in and out of the hospital and the band didn’t play as much so it wasn’t that hard to do college work and keep up with them. One of my fondest memories is from their 1976 America tour because after the Albuquerque show, all the guys signed my face at a night-long backstage party that no one would have remembered except that my face had the guys’ names on it. By that time, they were playing “The Taste of Ethnographic Things” and cuts from their “Fieldnotes from the Edges of the Earth” and we all thought we were the coolest Fem Nogheads ever! But I have to admit that the guys were pretty out of it most of the time and the whole party came to an end after Crisp died.

Through the late 80s and into the 90s, Gory would show up off and on and all of us would get late night collect calls from phone booths or bars; he would play a whole set by himself while we listened on the other end of the line. We got postcards from Australia from Dougie but didn’t hear at all from Dick, just saw him now and then on TV – but that’s Dick. My original Fem-Nog sisters are still together and we are a great bunch of hags and spinsters, still weaving our fieldnotes into feminist insights.
We loved the 2007 Reunion Tour – that was us, right up at the stage, sometimes on the stage, screaming our lungs out and selling Ethnog t-shirts and jewelry on the side (a labor of love not a capitalist venture – the proceeds go to Dougie’s nonprofit music camp for differently-abled kids of all ages). We can’t wait for the next Ethnog musical venture – after all, for us “It’s a Way of Life.”