Screaming Females serve fierce rock and not necessarily with a smile

By Beverly Bryan
Published: April 14th, 2009 | 4:00am

Marissa Paternoster works as a waitress for the moment but she’s about to quit because she’s going on tour, even though the economy is sinking. “I’m really bad at working,” she explains. The 22-year-old Screaming Females’ frontwoman admits that she’s never had a job for more than two months before quitting for a tour. Touring, writing songs, playing guitar, singing, and doing all the artwork for the trio (long-time friend and bassist King Mike and drummer Jarrett Dougherty join her) doesn’t count as work, she explains, she enjoys that.

Dougherty agrees. They’d both like to see Screaming Females become their only job one day. It’s not an unreasonable goal considering that they’re only concerned with making enough money to pay for food and rent. “I’m not hoping to be on MTV Cribs,” Dougherty quips.

Their plan might not work out, but in the mean time, Paternoster is busy overcoming just the shock of being on stage. In the beginning, she says it took a lot for her to play live. She met Dougherty when they were in college in New Brunswick. It was there that they were exposed to the basement shows that are a staple of college student cultural life and Paternoster recalls that the first time she saw New Jersey punk-pop quartet the Ergs! play in a basement show she had an anxiety attack because she didn’t expect to find so many people there.

It’s a strange image if you’ve ever heard Paternoster screaming and bellowing over a guitar that’s only slightly more vocal than its owner. “It took some getting used to,” she says. “But I wanted to do it so bad I had to force myself.” She still claims to be somewhat reserved in conversation. Dougherty, however, is much more open, which may be a side effect of his other role in the band. He handles the booking, among other non-musical tasks.

Where a bit of her onstage persona comes across most is in her rejection of the canned descriptions she has heard to describe Screaming Females’ music; Paternoster is clear and even a little acerbic in rejecting categorization of her band. “We pretty much do whatever we want. I don’t care about sounding like a post-punk band. I don’t even know what that means,” she exclaims, spitting out the genre term like it tastes sour. The same goes for punk without hyphens. Paternoster finds the term meaningless when applied to music, while Dougherty contextualizes it as a part of the American-folk tradition.

These are not such surprising perspectives from a band that, while emerging from a notable punk scene, owes a lot to classic-rock’s bombast and untrammeled noodling. “You look at the Minutemen and they kept talking about how their biggest influence was Creedence Clearwater,” Dougherty observes.

A Minutemen comparison would not be misplaced. Like that other rambunctious trio, Screaming Females “jams econo” with low-cost, DIY production and touring. The band’s third album, Power Move, is out on New Brunswick punk label Don Giovanni April 14, and will be the first the band didn’t self-release.

In keeping with their DIY roots, they also self-recorded their first album, Baby Teeth, and struggled to book tours on their own until Joe Erg, bassist for the now disbanded Ergs!, opened a map and traced the invisible pathways of the punk-touring underground for Dougherty. This lesson has been crucial, because Screaming Females’ live show sparks word-of-mouth like wildfire, not the least of which is owed to Paternoster’s growing rep on guitar.

While their peers aren’t complaining about the jammy breakdowns or the odd guitar solo from Paternoster, one member of the axe-wielding old guard seems to have felt a might threatened by the young shredder. “I got challenged to a guitar battle by some old guy. I don’t know what his name was. He was so mean. He printed out his resume and challenged me to a guitar battle in Pittsburgh,” she says. According his documents the man had played with Neil Young and had a picture of himself with Lemmy from Motörhead.

If there was a compliment buried in all that posturing it was lost on Paternoster. She didn’t take him up on the challenge. “If we battled I would have just hit him over the head with my guitar,” she says. You could take that literally or figuratively, but the statement points to why Paternoster may be best suited for a life in rocknroll and why the world of customer service may be safe from any Screaming Females in the future.

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