Laurie Lindeen

There are a number of elements that move Petal Pusher beyond the mundane, first off, Lindeen’s a plenty snappy writer, her quick wit and self-deprecating tone (at one point writing: “I’m not a victim of anything except unrealistic dreams and believing in musicals”), set her up from the first page as a distinctive-but-accessible literary voice. The other reason is that Petal Pusher is only partially concerned with the rise and fall of Lindeen’s band, Zuzu’s Petals, a three piece all-girl pop/rock group that managed to make waves overseas and in the States despite never really being of a piece with the grunge boom that dominated during its time. The band dissolved quietly in 1995 after failing to secure major label backing just as Lindeen moved towards a more domestic life with future-husband and Minneapolis music legend Paul Westerberg with whom she now has a 9-year-old son

While Petal Pusher does regal the reader with the expected stories of drinking far too much at Liquor Lyle’s and nervous first gig jitters at the 400 Bar, Lindeen reaches far beyond her musical career for source material, purposefully juxtaposing her late 20s rock ‘n’ roll adventures with stories from her wayward adolescence in Madison, Wisc, semi-troubled family life and struggles with multiple sclerosis. At first it feels like an odd choice, why does Lindeen follow a series of paragraphs about being detained on drug possession charges for a miniscule amount of marijuana while on tour with an affecting reflection on the shared musical connection with her father in childhood? But ultimately the gambit works, giving the reader a compelling explanation as to the formative experiences that led Lindeen to pursue the exceedingly unorthodox “career” of aspirant indie-rocker.

Petal Pusher

Reveille: I sort of assumed from reading the memoir that you must have been a die-hard journaler and kept a really extensive diary. Was that the case or were you mostly working from memory when writing Petal Pusher?

Lindeen: It’s mostly from the best of my memory. Paul had saved all of my letters, starting with the postcards I had sent him when Zuzu’s was touring England, so I had a bunch of those and that helped a lot. I had a lot of pictures from the time, but there were also plenty of things I don’t remember in detail and that was usually when I would write about a parallel experience from earlier in my life.

Reveille: I’m glad you brought that up because I think that’s one of the things that really stands out about the book. Initially I felt like the juxtaposition of your adolescent and childhood experiences in Madison with your later band life felt a little jarring, but the further I read I ultimately thought it was the key literary device that made the book work. At what point in the process did you realize that was how the book needed to be structured?

Lindeen: My first impulse was to just write about the band, but I quickly realized that only takes you so far. I had to give myself permission to write about whatever came up. I was in grad school at the time so I had all of these two page assignments that were writing about different personal subjects. I put these pieces together with what I was writing about the band and tried to make a quilt out of it, my mom’s reaction was “You jump around a lot.” It’s the only way I could fill in the holes in my memory.

Reveille: I think one of the most powerful segments in the book was when you juxtaposed the experience of Zuzu’s Petals receiving a really negative review of their second album in City Pages with having an abortion. It’s a very moving part of the book but I’m also curious as to why you felt the need to include it as it’s obviously deeply personal information that could have been excluded without the public being any the wiser.

Lindeen: One of the things you’ll notice about that segment of the book is that it’s written in the second person, that’s one of the things that makes it less personal. I did debate a little over whether to include it in the book, but the reason I did put in there in the end was because it happened right around the time that I got that pretty bad review. At the time I was more upset about the review, we tend to focus on things that don’t really matter and blow off the really important things because they’re too intense. I thought it was important to include it in there because I knew so many women who had been through a similar experience. It was also a response to that Ben Folds song [the 1997 hit “Brick”], which is all about feeling sorry for the guy in the waiting room. It was like, well if you think the waiting room is bad …

Zuzu's Petals back in the day.

Reveille: One of the aspects of the book I find really appealing is that even though there is some turbulent and dark subject matter in it you also manage to see the humor in many of the situations the band encounters. Was it hard while writing to strike that balance between treating the band as a serious endeavor and being able to poke fun at it where appropriate?

Lindeen: I had the luxury of the most recent thing that’s in the book happening 12 years ago, my life is completely different now. By choosing to write it in the present tense I could be in my head from those times and know how I felt but still write about the experiences without being completely judgmental the whole time. It would have been a very different book if I had written it in the past tense. If I would have written it a year or two after I broke up the band I would still be licking my wounds, but it’s sort of this is what my young adulthood was like and now I’m far enough away from it I can laugh at parts of it.

Reveille: How does the experience of doing live readings compare with playing a rock ‘n’ roll show and turning the amps up to eleven? There’s still a stage and an audience involved but I imagine that’s where most of the similarities end.

Lindeen: I’ve certainly mellowed with age and also because my life doesn’t depend on it anymore. My stage fright isn’t as intense as it used to be but I still get keyed up before performing in front of people. It’s just a different thing though, I’ve been reading to my son at night for ten years and I know the material that I’m reading so well it’s not really something I have to worry about. Also I don’t have to worry about playing guitar which was always a great source of anxiety. To just have the luxury of getting up there to sing when I feel like it is a pretty nice perk.

Reveille: So what can people expect if they make it on out to the 7^th St. Entry tomorrow night? The bill describes it as a night of reading and covers. Will you be performing some music as well?

Lindeen: The guys I’m playing with from Retrofit are like walking jukeboxes. The way we’ve set it up is that I’m going to read for 10-15 minutes from a different section of the book and then the band and I will be playing covers that are related to that section of the book. Either songs we already knew from that time period or songs that are directly mentioned in the book. We’ll do a childhood set, a teen years set.

Reveille: Sounds like an interesting night. I wasn’t familiar with your music at all before reading the memoir but subsequently went to your MySpace and heard some of Zuzu’s music and songs from your solo EP (1998’s Pregnant Pause) and really enjoyed it. Do you still have that music making urge or is that consumed entirely by writing now? Could there be another album from you sometime in the future?

Lindeen: Maybe someday, I love to sing but I’m not writing songs. I got a huge amount of satisfaction putting together the book and that was easily the coolest thing I’ve ever done. I’m still moving in that direction and working on two others right now. As you can tell from reading the book though I change around a lot, so who knows? I do feel like writing’s a much more graceful way to grow old than on stage

Reveille: In an earlier interview I read you mentioned that you were working on a follow-up to Petal Pusher that would be sort of the second installment documenting your start in family life. Is that still in the works?

Lindeen: I’ve thrown away the concept of memoir and am making it more of a novel, but it’s still in the works. The scrutiny just gets to be so crazy because of Paul and who he is. Even in Petal Pusher I think he appears in something like 11 of the 370 pages but it seems like those sections are what people want to focus on.

Reveille: Even though Zuzu’s Petals didn’t achieve their goals of worldwide rock stardom it’s clear from the way you write about the experience in the book that you don’t really have any regrets. Ultimately the reader gets the feeling that Zuzu’s Petals was the vehicle you needed to help figure out who you were going to be as a person and it did fulfill that purpose. Is that a fair assessment?

Lindeen: I found writing through the band. It’s pretty clear to me that I wouldn’t have had the attention span at that age to sit down and compile a manuscript, but I did have the attention to write songs where I was allowed to repeat myself a lot. I’m glad I did it. The whole experience was a really freeing time. People who know me as a mom and stuff all these years later still have a hard time believing me when I tell them what I did before having a family, the reaction is typically, “You’re kidding me, oh my god.”

Reveille: Well at least now you can show them the book to explain!

Lindeen: And the interesting thing of course is that we all ended up in the same place.

Watch Laurie Lindeen read from Petal Pusher as part of the Riot Act Reading Series at the Turf Club