—Bertolt Brecht
In November 1996, the only mosh pit going on at the Battery Acid show was in Gretchen’s eighth-month belly. The child kicked in time with the bass drum, thumping up under her ribs, and Gretchen was screaming the lyrics over the chatter, wishing that the lights at the Garage would block out the emptiness. There was the thin rattle of applause after each song, there were the dead-dream faces of her band, and nothing about any of it provided an incentive for an encore. She unplugged her mike, retracted the cord and walked away.
In the year after Mary’s Danish broke up, Gretchen and Louis wrote 60 songs for their new band, Battery Acid, and got a record deal with Geffen on the heels of only their second show. But a month before the release of their record, their A&R lady, Debra Shallman, was fired. For nine years she had been a secretary to the Geffen bigwig John Kalodner, and he had finally given her signing power. But soon after he left the label, she was fired. And all her bands, Battery Acid included, were considered the (after)taste of a gal who had the mark of a coffee pourer. Label politics, only second in band dangers to label finances, had slung a noose once again around Gretchen’s dream.
"You know, I talk to other musicians and so many feel cursed," she says flatly. "We went through so many bumps. You think, I’m not going to do the indie thing again, what happened with Morgan Creek. It’s major or broke. And then to have the Geffen thing so harsh with Battery Acid — a month before your record comes out, the artwork’s done, you’re just waiting all hopeful, and then your A&R person is fired and you’re dropped out of nowhere. It was the final straw."
Well, almost. Gretchen and Louis scrambled, diving back in the studio to write a more radio-accessible song for the new A&R team. But as Gretchen explains, the Geffen monster couldn’t be sated: "It was a hard[-edged] record, but we thought, let’s just give them their one pop song. But when we gave it to them, suddenly they wanted the whole record to be like that song. I’ll tell you what," she says, "what made me feel slutty was having written that one pop song. It felt then like we weren’t doing it for the art but just to survive. And we were booted anyway! It’s at that point that you realize there is nothing you can do but walk away. You feel robbed, broken."
Tonight, Gretchen looks at home in a quaint South Pasadena restaurant with trophy gold records framed on the walls. She has swapped Chili tours, backstage bashes and a road-hungry tour bus for a cottage in Pasadena, a real estate license and a Volvo. Baby bottles have replaced microphones, and she shuffles through escrow papers instead of set lists. She and Louis — married now, he’s a stockbroker — have stored their combined 23 years in music together in scrapbooks, somewhere, she says, deep in storage. They have made a decision they’re proud of — to be responsible parents — but she has in her voice the discomfort of having come to the masquerade in the wrong costume.
Gretchen doesn’t want to sound bitter — she feels blessed, she says, to have traveled further than most in music. She got to see much of the world, spend eight years of her life in the company of creative folk and flirt freely with the endless seduction of rock glory. And while Gretchen laughs at how conservative her outward life has become, she holds on to the notion that one is not only what one does. The other members of Mary’s Danish are still pursuing music — Julie, Wag and David doing music for TV, James Bradley last seen on tour with Slash; all but Julie have kids, and they are still great friends. Gretchen still writes poetry, is still the fragile, lyrical soul who could lift you from a dull place. But music is now a private act.
"The whole Geffen thing seemed so unreal," she says. "Geffen, I thought, was one of the best — they had Beck, Sonic Youth — but I remember the day our manager called. I just went in my room, laid on the bed and cried. I couldn’t believe it. Mary’s Danish had just gone through the full nightmare, and I thought this was finally going to be it. I just cried and cried. I totally lost the desire to make music again."
Natalie Cole’s "Unforgettable" is playing loudly now over the diner’s speakers. Gretchen nods to a gold record on the wall, cups her pregnant belly and attempts a smile: "It feels good to be anonymous now. Even if that isn’t what we wished for." A second baby will soon make its debut, and Gretchen’s private joys will continue to fill her public void. And perhaps a softened version of "Don’t Crash the Car Tonight" will be just the right memory to send her child into a brighter, more permanent dream.
Roughly 340,000 Mary’s Danish records were sold; not one member has to date received a penny of royalties.
