The following article is provided by Rolling Stone.
By JONAH WEINER
A decomposing skull hangs beside Janet Weiss’ doorbell: one bulging eyeball, jagged teeth, strips of flesh. Halloween was a few weeks ago, and Weiss hasn’t gotten around to taking it down yet – perhaps because other, realer ghosts have been haunting her. Like, for instance, the Ford cargo van in her driveway. “That was Sleater-Kinney’s gear van,” she says. “ ’The Silver Bullet’ – we put more than 200,000 miles on that thing, and it’s still going.” Or take the brand-new vinyl box set perched magisterially in her study, collecting all seven albums by the epochal punk trio that Weiss joined in 1996, that Time called America’s best rock band in 2001, and that announced its “indefinite hiatus” in 2006. Sleater-Kinney – Weiss on drums, Carrie Brownstein on windmilling lead guitar, Corin Tucker providing the klaxon-force lead vocals – had sealed their place in the indie pantheon by that point, with their fans ranging from the midcareer Eddie Vedder, who brought them out on a 2003 arena tour with Pearl Jam, to the pre-career Lena Dunham, who saw them live when she was an adolescent and thrilled, she says, to their “amazing mix of chutzpah and pure skill.”
But the band was tired. Sleater-Kinney’s seventh album, “The Woods,” pushed them farther from their creative comfort zone than they’d ever gone, and the arduous experience of making it, in wintry upstate New York, left them spent and raw: “It’s freezing; there’s 10 feet of snow every night,” Weiss says. “You’re really isolated. And when you’re working creatively like that, 12 hours a day, sleeping in the same place as each other? It’s an intense experience.” By the end of the tour, she says, “Carrie didn’t like being on the road. Corin wanted to have another kid. We were exhausted.”
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We find a table at the bookstore cafe, where Tucker gets a tea. She grew up in Eugene, Oregon, arriving at Evergreen in 1990 and writing songs that regarded the patriarchy and her own white privilege with equal acidity. On “No Cities to Love,” she again turned her gaze outward – “Price Tag” is about the “downward spiral of the working poor,” as she puts it, in the big-box-chain era – and inward, too. On “Gimme Love,” Tucker confronts what she describes as her own “monstrous” need for an audience’s approval: “That song started with me asking, ‘Why are we doing this band again? Why are we here? There’s no guarantee we’re gonna make a reasonable amount of money!’ ”
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When Tucker’s done with her tea, she hustles home for dinner with her kids, then over to a newly opened pingpong hall on Southeast Belmont to meet Weiss and Brownstein. Sleater-Kinney played a lot of ping-pong on the Pearl Jam tour; a few years back, Weiss and Brownstein crushed the Willamette Week in a Portland charity tournament. The Belmont hall is new, with sleek tables and nouveau-mod decor. One of the owners, spotting Brownstein, rushes over. “This place is the culmination of a lifelong dream of ping-pong!” he says. “My brother and I started it as a pop-up party, to see if people were as crazy about the game as we are!” The band nods politely. Weiss tells me later that the place would make a wonderful Portlandia location.
We play a doubles game, with me and Weiss against Brownstein and Tucker. “How does this go again?” Tucker asks. “I serve to that side?” Brownstein’s style of play is cool, with one hand tucked nonchalantly into a pocket. Weiss plays the way she drums – precise and clobbering. In just a few minutes, thanks to her, we’re up 10-0. Weiss sends a blazing serve fast and low across the table. Brownstein and Tucker both go for it, and both whiff: 11-0. “That telepathy between them that I told you about?” Weiss cracks. “It doesn’t extend to ping-pong.”
