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Thirty-five years ago, one of Portland’s most celebrated grunge-era bands dissolved after a terrible gig opening for Nirvana in Buenos Aires. The macho ’90s festival crowd didn’t want to see Calamity Jane. They didn’t want to see women playing punk music. They wanted Nirvana. Mud, coins, spit and profanities sent the proto–riot grrrl trio fleeing from the stage and effectively ended the band.
This Saturday’s Menopunkapalooza benefit concert is a fitting place for a reunion. The concert is part of a two-day festival spread across the Mission Theater and the Crystal Ballroom put on by filmmaker Alicia J. Rose (read more on the festival). She’s enlisted a who’s who of women in music—Neko Case, Corin Tucker of Sleater Kinney, and Pat Benatar are just a few of the marquee names—for interviews in her documentary-in-progress, Menopunks, which subverts tired and oppressive ideas about menopause. Many of the women playing at the Crystal Ballroom event also appear in the film, including Jody Bleyle of Team Dresch and Calamity Jane frontwoman Gilly Ann Hanner.
Hanner is Calamity Jane’s singer, songwriter, guitarist and only constant member. (Her younger sister Megan played bass in the early days.) Hanner was introduced to drummer Lisa Koenig by Slim Moon in 1988 while both women attended the Evergreen State College in Olympia. In that burgeoning scene, the two rubbed elbows with a fledgling Nirvana, who played a memorable house party for Hanner’s 21st.
“The first time I heard Nirvana—at my birthday party—it gave me goose bumps,” Hanner recalls. “My front window got broken out of my house. Somebody jumped through it. Just to watch that whole trajectory of this dark, dumpy scene in Olympia of depressed people trying to make their art so they [could] feel better—to have that taken up into this other realm was very strange.”
Back in the day, Hanner wrote the songs and Koenig booked the tours. “You literally had to use the telephone and call these places,” Koenig recalls, “and then you’d have to send them a tape or a single.”
The Calamity Jane tape was recorded at Olympia’s Yo Yo Studios, where Hanner completed her final independent project for college. Though the record is long out of print, it can be heard on YouTube. That collection of melancholy indie Americana only hints at the din the band would go on to make, but its charm is timeless.
Washington’s eccentric capitol was Calamity Jane’s spawning ground, but they moved to Portland after Hanner’s graduation. As the ’90s approached, the band found itself on bills with louder bands. A gig at Blue Gallery with Poison Idea and Babes in Toyland was an epiphany. “I want to sing like that,” Hanner remembers thinking. “I want to let it all out.”
The band began to issue a series of 7-inch singles with increasing layers of distortion and angst that culminated with a scorching full-length album in 1992, Martha Jane Canary, which included the song “Miss Hell.”
Calamity Jane was poised, except the rhythm section had just moved to separate states. By that time their friends in Nirvana were worldwide superstars. Hanner was not ready to throw in the towel, so she assembled a new lineup and carried on.
“Kurt called me and said, ‘Hey, you want to play for 30,000 people in Argentina on October 30?’ I remember the answering machine message: ‘You can ask for whatever you want. We’ll fly you down there.’”
Calamity Jane had shared the stage with Nirvana at the No on 9 benefit concert at Portland Meadows in September 1991, and anything seemed possible in those heady days. Sadly, this moment that could have been a stepping stone to fame became legendary for another reason.
After 35 years apart, the plan was to reunite the original trio. Due to Megan Hanner living in Southern Oregon, it was not to be. Thankfully, a more than able replacement bass player was found in Mandy Morgan, known best for her work in Nasalrod. Morgan’s recently reunited band Berzerk is also playing Menopunkapalooza. To make things even more incestuos, Hanner will also perform early in the evening with Party Witch. Koenig’s current band, Grizzly, is booked too. As is onetime Calamity Jane drummer Marcéo Martinez, who’s playing with their long-running band Team Dresch.
“I guess it’s good that it’s a legend,” Hanner says of the Nirvana fiasco. “It was pretty monumental for us. We just didn’t go on after that.”
The world and its ideas about gender—at least in some corners—looks much different a few decades later. You can bet that when Calamity Jane does finally go on at the Crystal, any booing misogynists will be dealt with swiftly by a thousand or so menopunks.
GO: Menopunkapalooza at McMenamins Mission Theater, 1624 NW Glisan St., and the Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St.; linktr.ee/menopunks. Mission: 5 pm Friday, June 26. Crystal: 7 pm Saturday, June 27. $59.75. All ages.
