Jenny Toomey

Everyone knows what happened to independent music in 1991—“The Year Punk Broke,” as some wryly put it—when Nirvana struck a chord with the mainstream: Major labels scrambled to sign every underground band with above-ground album sales. Jenny Toomey calls these the “chump days,” referring to all the major label interest in independent bands. “If no one was interested in you, you felt like a chump,” she says. “It was a really sad period for the indies, because their most valuable bands were all being picked up by the majors. It was a gross time. And I saw it as a time when everyone began to think about themselves less as musicians and more as commodities,” Toomey continues.
Even Jenny Toomey had a major label run-in during the “chump days,” while she and Kristin Thomson were running their independent record label, Simple Machines. “I didn’t really shop (my music),” she recalls. “I just sort of fell in with a manager and a lawyer.” Through a series of circumstances, she met with the manager’s industry-connected “partner, who did rock stuff. I met with the rock partner about three times before I knew the whole thing wouldn’t work out. Rock Dude was a dork who tried to make me feel scared because of my age. He was really into Jewel and the industry. I quickly decided that he didn’t understand me or my goals or my music, so it ended.” The lawyer simply stopped returning Toomey’s calls, and the experience reinforced the conclusion that her goals were incompatible with the goals of the music industry.
She doesn’t regret the experience, however. “I’m glad I got to see how the process worked without having to be burned by it. I learned a lot. I learned that if an industry looks corrupt from the outside, it’s a good guess that it’s corrupt throughout. I learned more about the decadence and idiocy of labels from one dinner with an A&R guy than I did from Steve Albini’s Baffler piece [in which he summarily debunks the myth of bands becoming wealthy, or being treated well, via major labels]. I also understood how seductive it is. It takes a lot of courage to choose to do music in the face of the odds.”
Around the same time as her experience with A&R people, Jenny Toomey started her own set of tremors, possibly with farther-reaching tentacles into the underground than those created by Nirvana’s sudden popularity. The end result has been the influx of independent labels and bands- slow in coming, but at least one of its indisputable origins are based on a pamphlet compiled by Toomey and Thomson in 1991. Included in a book distributed by Dischord, the pamphlet was called “An Introductory Mechanic’s Guide to Putting Out Records”—a DIY handbook detailing step-by-step information about pressing and selling vinyl, cassettes, and CDs. It decoded much of the mystery surrounding indie labels and made having a record label seem like an accessible, attainable ideal. The pamphlet came years before CD burners and home recording studios, but it set the precedent for today’s endless roster of independent record labels, even more so than set-by-example labels like Dischord and Touch and Go, because it literally spelled it out. (You can read the Sixth Edition of the “Mechanic’s Guide” online at www.insound.com/machine.).
But the handbook is only one aspect of how Jenny Toomey constantly inspires by example. One of the most productive musicians in the history of independent music, Toomey’s dedication to music and activism has already culminated in a book’s worth of achievements.
“ I was an activist long before I was ever a musician,” explains Toomey. It seems unbelievable, upon hearing the imperativeness of her singing voice, that there was ever a time when she wasn’t a musician. Her alto voice is commanding, and when she calls on it, her raw wail can propel a whole song. Toomey is one of those rare people whose voices are strong enough to act as the primary instrument in all music. But first, she had to learn punk, in part due to her involvement with famous D.C. activist collective, Positive Force. “When you’re a punk rocker,” she says, “you learn to do a lot with a little. I think the idealism I learned being a punk rocker has been invaluable—that you can really have integrity, if you’re consistent and hardworking.” It was the heart of this idealism that motivated her to start Simple Machines, founded in 1990 with Thomson.
In the beginning, the label released a cache of cassettes, including some of Toomey’s early projects: Geek, Slack (with Dan Littleton- then from The Hated, now from Ida), and My New Boyfriend (with Christina Calle, Seaweed’s Aaron Stauffer and Bikini Kill’s Tobi Vail). The first Simple Machines 7” record, SMR .05 (split release in 1990 with Vermin Scum), featured an acoustic band called Choke, including Toomey, Littleton, and Geek’s Derek Denckla. It was, perhaps, the first time the full impact of Toomey’s wail was committed to record- she sings with such a frank voracity that, over ten years later, the sound of it is still chilling.
She’s most famous for Tsunami, however, and their distorted, often minor key music that paired a desperate punk sloppiness with tightly wound, sometimes jazzy pop songs and, of course, Toomey’s accusing voice. The band broke up in 1998; in eight years, they would release three proper full-lengths, about fifteen 7” records, a compilation of b-sides and rarities, and songs on various comps and tributes. In addition, she would find time to record and tour with Liquorice (with Littleton and His Name is Alive’s Trey Many) and Grenadine (with Mark Robinson and Rob Christiansen).
After Tsunami’s demise, and the corresponding closure of Simple Machines, Jenny Toomey was uncharacteristically quiet, but in that time, her silence was only musical. She worked full-time as a journalist at the Washington Post, and began writing a detective novel with her mother. She also “started re-recording that musical that Franklin Bruno and I wrote years and years ago- but besides that and a couple of shows I didn’t do much music at all.” In addition, she began working for a musician’s rights organization called the Future of Music Coalition.
The Future of Music (www.futureofmusic.org) is a non-profit organization whose goal is to help protect musician’s copyrights, especially on the internet, and to work towards “a musician’s middle class.” Currently, Toomey is the organization’s full-time executive director, serving as a spokesperson, organizer, and lobbyist. In addition, she acts as a sort of artist’s sounding board and grant writer, so the organization may “do original research to try to understand the impact of media consolidation, lack of health insurance and lack of strong unions on the ability of artists to make a living.”
Toomey explains, “The closest description [of the Future of Music] we’ve been able to reach is that we’re a think tank. When copyright legislation is created in the US, it’s created as a result of interest groups, and the musician is taken out of the process. We try to document that and put everything into historical and economical context.” The Future of Music educates musicians through a variety of channels, including newsletters, speaking tours (one of which was combined with Toomey’s US tour in Fall 2001) and huge summits that have featured everyone from Chuck D to Orrin Hatch discussing copyright law and policies surrounding digital technology.
Working with the Future of Music is a logical step for Toomey, whose activism and musicianship have always been intertwined. Given Toomey’s experience with the mainstream music industry, she’s already tasted the disparity between the interests of most musicians and major labels. However, focusing a magnifying glass on the industry has merely “put the facts to the suspicions. I always understood it was tough to succeed through the major label system. Now I know that, statistically, 99.6 percent of artists don’t recoup. I had a general understanding that radio was tough for indie artists. Now I know that it costs as much as three million dollars in promo money to get a single added in all major markets. I always thought it was a tough industry; now I understand it’s tough by design... in other words, it’s broken.”
Five years ago, Toomey began recording Antidote, her debut solo record. In a sick twist of fate, Toomey was actually unsure who would release the album upon its completion, despite having run her own label for eight years. She says, “I just assumed it would be easy. But a lot of my friends who run record labels were suffering greatly, and all the independent structures I knew were gone. I had a really hard time finding a label.” Luckily, her Future of Music coworker, Michael Bracy, also co-partnered a little New York label called Misra, and he was willing to release Antidote. The double album was recorded during weekend trips to Chicago and Nashville; she afforded the airfare with money she saved from her job at a dot-com. Antidote exhibits the tendencies Toomey has always had towards Kiss Me, Kate- type musical pop, torch songs, jazz standards, and music that is more commonly heard in piano bars than in punk clubs. It’s majestic, full of cello, vibraphones, piano, trumpets, violin, viola, and pedal steel, yet the mini-orchestra works as a background worthy of her voice. As usual, Toomey’s voice is the most prominent instrument, and it’s smoother, more developed, and as buttery as ever. Despite the glimmer of jazz chords beneath so many Tsunami songs, Antidote is almost drastically different from most of Toomey’s other music, barring Grenadine. She says she’s unsure about whether turning her focus towards standards was a deliberate action, though it’s clear that Antidote reflects a sort of expansion. “It’s not for me to really say that I’ve grown. I hope I have; I wouldn’t presume. I think I listen more and sing with more depth. This record is more intimate; it’s more arranged; it’s more risky. I also enjoy it more. I’ve always liked singing and I’ve always enjoyed music, but it seems somehow more connected to a core these days than I’d felt (or admitted that I felt) in the past.”
In a way, Antidote is a residual of Toomey’s entanglement with the chump time. “I recorded a lot of those songs several times during the ‘chump’ period,” she says. “I recorded some of those as [unreleased] demos for 4AD. But none of those versions of the songs were proper- those sessions were never finished.” In addition to her demos, the song “Word Traffic” originally appeared on the 1991 Slack cassette as the sort of raucous, urgent love song that was characteristic of Toomey’s music at that time. But on Antidote, trumpet, vibes, and harmonies transform it into a sultry tune with a bossa nova- like fluidity. Toomey wanted to re-record the song so long after she wrote it “just because I think it’s a great song. I was listening to a lot of Gail Costa, and I love the arrangements on her records- she has beautiful jazz chords that are mixed with odd, psychedelic guitars, and with Kevin’s trumpet, it seemed logical to do it that way.” (Another song on Antidote, “Breezewood, PA,” also appeared on a 7” under the moniker So Low, with Karate’s Geoff Farina.).
Antidote consists of love songs almost entirely; the lyrics are as personal, sweet, and cynical as Toomey’s ever been. She explains, “The songs are about more than one relationship. They are actually written over eleven years, about as many as five different relationships (some songs deal with more than one person). Even stranger, the period when I recorded the album involved an ending that I hadn’t written about in the songs, but the introspection that came with that loss really was an engine behind the emotion in the performances. I think the album has far more to do with a feminist or smart woman’s investigation of the epiphanies and disappointments that come with romantic love.”
She offers a baring list of the emotions and situations behind the songs: “Breezewood” critiques a fashion magazine’s advice to not let the fella you like know that you like him. It’s an arrogant defiance of romantic decorum. “Fall on Me” tries to distill that indescribable moment of absolute commitment that is expressed in certain failing relationships- the unspoken ‘why’ of why one stays. “Patsy Cline” is a laundry list of complaints that tries to get at the ways we change for those we love and the difficulty there is in getting two separate egos to align. “Unclaimed” is maybe my favorite song—it talks about the power imbalance in romantic love; the ways women are vulnerable to gossip. “Charm City” is a romanticized nostalgic look at an end trying to hold on to the boldness and brightness that led to the choice even in the cold light of failure. “He Don’t Wanna Know” is just mourning. It’s a blues- a resigned and defiant ache. It’s the most traditional one. The one where the woman loses as much from the actual loss as she does from the commitment to being available to that loss.”
She seems like she’s constantly working for something, or several things at once, and Jenny Toomey’s future is as prolific and ambitious as her past. She’s currently working on a Franklin Bruno-penned record with Calexico; there’s also the issue of her musical with Bruno and her own novel she’s been promising her fans for so long. “I’m very involved with the Future of Music right now- it takes up most of my time. But my plans are to finish the record, finish the musical- we’re three-quarters of the way through, working on the chorus vocals that Ida are singing on- the group, show-stopping numbers, you know- and then the novel.”
Ultimately, that the first solo release by a woman whose career has spanned over ten years, was funded by money she made at a dot-com seems a little ironic; it appears to validate the work Toomey does with the Future of Music for the “musician’s middle class.” But she’s not one to rest on her laurels, and she’s not bitter about having to struggle for resources like every other independent musician. “I was lucky to be offered a job where I could use my writing skills and my knowledge of music in order to raise enough money to record the record I wanted to hear,” she says. “People have always done this. Steve Albini used to work in a graphics lab to raise money to record his records. Mark Robinson does freelance design. It’s just a question of what moves you. Folks who worked with me at the Washington Post would take out hundred thousand dollar loans to renovate their houses because that made them happy. For me... it’s making records.”