Jacqueline Van Bierk of Otto's Daughter

Driving on Holy Gasoline

"Noise, white noise, and a violent whining sound" -Sisters of Mercy

12/21/01 - 9:30 AM

My eyes are so dry that they're attracting lint, and my fingertips feel as though tiny lizards are feeding on them from the inside. The perils of sleazy rock journalism encroaching on my dream-time, you see, making the day job a little more challenging than I need it to be. It hardly matters, though, as a heavy sleet glazes the windshield, too intense in it's attack for the wipers to fight off, rendering the miracle of eyesight practically useless in this little adventure. Luckily, I've made the trip to Providence and back so many times that if you cut off my head, my twitching corpse would probably take Exit 13 off of 95 by pure nerve memory alone. Mac's riding shotgun, chain smoking and telling the kind of punch line- heavy stories that retired guys revel in. "So, I had to fix the fuckin' muffler", he growls. "It was rusted out, all full of holes. Old Chrysler I had. Anyway, I didn't have enough money to get it replaced, so I patched up the holes myself. You know what I used?" I'm too busy listening to the buzzing in my head to answer, but it was a rhetorical question anyway. "Beer cans. I just flattened them out, welded them on. Worked perfectly. Of course, the cars was always drunk after that..." 

As Mac rattles on, I drift into the inevitable end of the year introspection. This is, after all, the time to pause and reflect, to give thanks to who or whatever that you've made it through another 12 months without pissing your pants on the subway, without waking up with a steak knife in your back. For me, it's been the most successful and happy year of my life. That might not be saying much, compared to people with real jobs and cell phones, but I'm satisfied. I got married this year, to a stunning, brilliant woman, the love of my hard charging life. Girlfriends, after all, are for amateurs. I even managed to make some money here and there doing what I love best- scratching out jagged lines just like this, in the hopes that my overwrought literary forays into the heart of the Rock touches the people that read them, if only briefly. It's good to be alive. The rest of the planet, however, didn't have it so easy this year, thanks to the sad fuckers that blew a hole in the middle of New York City, and started World War 3 in the process. The news these days is never good, and there are heavy days ahead, I imagine. But we'll survive them, I'm sure, as long as we continue taking care of one another whenever we can. Meanwhile, the rock, thankfully, rolls on. 

I was hoping to use this column, my first in 2002, to share what I've learned from my last year on the road, some kind of highway wisdom to lay on my fellow road animals out there, but I haven't actually learned anything this year. Except that if you go 56 miles an hour in a 35 mph zone, it will cost you 205 dollars. Also, if you really must drive one of those Korean phony Jeeps at 85 miles an hour in a windstorm, make sure that there's no 18 wheeler cruising along in the lane you're about to blow into. Oh yeah, and the radio sucks. Avoid it all costs. Beyond that, all I can say is Happy New Year, brothers and sisters, and welcome to another installment of rock and fucking roll at high fucking speed.

Maybe it's just the wheel falling off

Magnified Eye www.magnifiedeye.com My guess is that they named themselves after that giant flying eyeball that Godzilla once fought. He grabbed the silly monster by his trailing optic nerve endings, swung his unblinking ass around like a cowboy with a very ugly lasso, and shot him into outer space. This was during Toho Studios' acid eating period. It all makes crystal amphetamine clear sense when you dig into the meaty groove stew of Magnified Eye, especially since the tracks on this self released, self titled demo are Gojira city- majestic, sun drenched, fire lizard doom rawk. Perfect for when you're driving so fast that everything around you slows down. It all synchs up perfectly, like Japanese actors and American mouths. Slushpuppy - "Unleashed" (www.slushpuppyrocks.com ) Slushpuppy are almost like contraband, a sort of inverse pornography, in the house of Sleazegrinder. I mean, can you imagine me trying to convince the wolf fanged, pill eating Satanic biker tyrants that darken my doorway of the sublime pleasures of this soaring, arena ready pop- grunge band? Wouldn't work, so let's just keep it to ourselves. Slushpuppy sound a little like a hard rock No Doubt, and a lot like a whole new sensation. In the murk of green smoke and clear liquor, you could squint and see a resurgence of the fist pumping 80's power pop of Patty Smythe's Scandal in Slushpuppy, and that's practically fuckin' revolutionary to anybody who's ears have been battered by the awful wave of nu metal and mall punk that's been eating up the radio space once reserved for bands just like this. Dawn Botti has a deep, throaty wail, and she attacks the songs with sex, swagger, and spirituality- a howling Earth mother with tear or two in her eyes, but ball lightning in her fists, a rock starress in the making. At times, the band even lurches straight into towering Cult-ish anthems before re-grouping into the calmer waters of alterna-pop. Either way, Slushpuppy are a great rock and roll band. Even if they don't ride motorcycles and worship the devil. 6 AM Eternal (www.mp3.com/6ameternal ) play neo-futuristic cyber creep electro-shock, the perfect soundtrack for watching robot insects tunnel into your skin and hatch egg bombs in your brain. On "Each One In His Own World", 6AME start tearing wires out of everywhere- there's Batcave-era death rock clanging away here as often as the microchipped churn of nu-industrial bubbles to the surface- and then they patch it all into one throbbing infernal machine, set it on self-destruct, and watch it melt. It's almost like some organic Wax Trax specimen running rampant, although I suspect that even the humanly flesh that stretches across 6AM's blue steel skeleton was created in a petri dish in some surreptitious chem-lab somewhere. Nude 101 "Cosmic Purgatory" (www.nude101.com) Every time I put this record on, usually as an antidote to some over-amped fuck metal record played too loud or too early for my fragile nervous system, I'm reminded of what a uniformly fine band these Toronto based rockers are. It's neo-grunge, this Nude 101, and bares a sort of second cousin resemblance to the pharmacy emptying era Screaming Trees- big, hooky rock that prefers to languish under storm clouds, sullen but determined. Nude 101 are part of a growing contingency of Seattle leaning rockers that are standing at the gates, waiting for the current reign of product placement rock to burn itself out, when some semblance of 'real' rock and roll has another chance of reaching the ears of the great unwashed. Keep those flannels in good shape, boys, because a cleansing gray rain is coming. Nasty Kixx - "The Pirates of Rock and Roll" (http://listen.to/nastykixx ) I might be as alone in this now as I was in 9th grade, but the title of this disc brings to mind mid -80's wonders of mad science and rubber record contracts Slave Raider. They, like Nasty Kixx, played heavy metal rock and roll, prayers to the Priest, lips pressed to Kiss, riffs like rolling Trans-Ams; only Slave Raider managed to briefly score a lot of flashy booty- a major label album, opening slot on a Lita Ford tour - dressed in kabuki make-up, eye patches, and plastic peg legs. A simpler time, perhaps? Maybe it was the cocaine. Swedish fireballs Nasty Kixx have no silly outfits to display, and I imagine that the title reflects their pilfering into a couple of decades worth of headbanger classics to forge their fiery sounds, but they don't end up sounding like anyone but their own Nasty selves. Pretense free, head's down, no frills rivet -head rock. 

Do Androids Dream of German Super Models?
Jacqueline Van Bierk is Otto's Daughter

Gentlemen, release the bats.

"I don't put the babydolls on stage anymore and people get so upset. They say, 'Where's the babydolls, and where's the blood?'

The Blood?

"In the song 'Miss You', I always had the blood, I'd put the blood on me."

So where do the babydolls come in?

"Well, the babydolls were there because I needed something to kick."

Female fronted industrial rock is, to me, a lot like lesbian porn- neither have got anything to do with me, really, but I like them anyway. And if you throw men into the mix of either, you've got an entirely different animal- passion gives way to selfish lust, the aesthetics of seduction become the politics of control, the process of discovery and experimentation dissolves into the gnashing, abrasive mechanics of release. Dancing, versus hurling into your collaborators with violent intent. Brothers and sisters, I choose to dance. Jersey industro-shock troopers Otto's Daughter and their enigmatic front woman Jacqueline Van Bierk, on the other hand, have chosen to straddle both worlds. In Jacqueline, predator and prey have found an equally inviting host. The band grinds away behind her, a serpentine thing snapping wildly with big metal fangs or brooding in the shadows, lying in wait in a deep swell of bubbling electro-hiss for it's next chance to strike; and then she appears, beauty enveloped in rage. She trills and screams, twirls and kicks, desperately ripping away at her own demonized psyche, just as she tears away at her layered skins, revealing more and less as the band drives her closer to the core of her dark visions of betrayal and her salacious desires for renewal of soul and flesh. Suggestive yet repelling, Otto's Daughter are titillating
and dangerous all at once. So, what of this woman of black obsession and bleeding light? Jacqueline is a former pop singer from Germany, a part time fashion model, a driven visual and performance artist. As such, I figured an interview to be a daunting task, filled with impatience and impudence. I mean, I've been around, baby. I've been dismissed by German models before. Turns out, however, that nothing could be further from the truth. Don't let the cyborg beats, mecha-destructo dive bombing guitars, and bloody babydolls fool you- Jacqueline Van Bierk is a sweetheart. Just watch out for the retractable claws.


Goodbye to Romance

Otto's Daughter have been slugging it out in the murky vampire lairs of New York City's goth clubs for half a decade. Recently, they emigrated to New Jersey, home to headbanger cover bands and feathered roach clips. Not exactly a breeding ground for cutting edge post-apocalyptic noise technicians. As she washes the Manic Panic out of her ever evolving hair across the line, I ask Jacqueline if she's been gleaning any musical inspiration out of her new environment. "New Jersey doesn't inspire me at all, to be honest", she laughs, obviously finding my question absurd. "I mean, it looks beautiful when I'm driving through it, but we're city people, so I've never actually seen most of New Jersey." She says that the move out of Gotham City was strictly a financial decision. "New York City's great, but the rents are so steep that living there is impossible", she sighs, "but we still play in the city a lot." And before the biggest city, there was the homeland. Jacqueline left Germany 7 years ago because, she says, "I just got really bored. It's funny, I always had the idea that I would go somewhere else when I was growing up, I just didn't know where. But I was in Hanover, and I met this girl, and she was a real America freak. She said, 'Let's go to New York', so I went, and when we got there I said, "Wow, I have to come back, and stay." 

In Germany, she had grown up in a musical family, following in her father's footsteps, performing first in dance troupes and children's choirs. It seemed a logical progression, as a teenager, to become a pop singer. "Yeah, I tried that, but it was nothing really serious. I was just listening to some old songs, and I was like, wow!" she says, with amusement. At the tender age of 14, her industrial leanings had yet to surface. "Industrial? Oh, no. I was listening to pop music, Depeche Mode. I was a real pop queen. My voice back then wasn't the best. I didn't do any training, you know, so I just said, 'Ok, I'll sing pop!' I just needed time to grow, to find out what I really wanted to do." Although she does possess tapes capturing her early forays into teenage pop, you probably won't find them surfacing any time soon. "It's not bad, really, it's just really corny", she says of the recordings. "Cheesy pop music. And I couldn't really speak English that well back then, either, so it's pretty funny."

Once she permanently settled in New York, she began searching for musical co-conspirators. Enter West Coast mystery man and future Otto's Daughter drummer and evil twin, Ace Velcro. "He and I got together back in '95, '96", she explains. "Neither of us could get a band together. I don't think either of us wanted to work together, because I didn't think we'd get along musically. I didn't really like his stuff, and I was much more into hard rock. But finally I said, 'All right, give me a drum machine!' and we started collaborating. I really like what came out of it, it was a good combination." Jacqueline and Velcro have been together ever since, forming the core of the band. Finding co-pirates to complete the vision, however, has become an endless struggle. "Yeah, well, that's a whole story there", she sighs. "Ten thousand guitar players later." Currently the band is filled out by vet rockers Dan and Jim, bringing with them a legacy of band experience that includes subterfuge punks Spy Society 99 and sadly defunct glamdustrial kingpins Chemlab. "The two we have now, I feel really blessed. They're just filling in, basically they're in the band for however long they want to be, but they've been great, and they just came out of nowhere." But what of the OD killing fields, littered with the corpses of used-up guitar players? "Most of them just didn't have the drive", she says. " I hate to say it, but most of them didn't have the talent, either. Or they wouldn't play it the way I wanted it, the vision that I had for things. I don't like having to tell people what to do all the time, either we click or we don't, you know?" Thinking back, she recalls a memorable experience with a former OD axe slinger. "Then there was this one guy, the total extremist", she remembers. "He started out really cool, but he turned into this alcoholic, psychotic guy who would cut himself on stage. He'd get so fucked up that he couldn't even play the songs, so we had to fire him, on stage. Which was the most difficult and embarrassing situation ever." Ah, yes. Even in the icy confines of industrial music, the perils of rock and roll decadence shows it's snarly teeth. "He was just playing random noise, he wasn't playing anything that even belonged to the song. I was just like, if this goes on, it's going to become really embarrassing, so I called the bouncer over, and I was like, 'Hey, can you just get this guy off the stage?' and they dragged him off and out of the club. He was so fucked up that he didn't even know what happened. He called us later, like 3 times, going 'What the fuck happened? Somebody threw me out of the club!' He was arguing with us, saying I wasn't really that drunk!' but I was just like, 'Oh, go away!' It turns out, the band had been scheming his departure anyway, they just hadn't thought of doing it in such a public forum. "Well, we knew we had to get rid of him. He was only in the band for a couple of months. But when we got him, he had all this experience in bands and on the road. Of course, that might not have even been true. So we knew we wanted him out of the band, but he was psycho, sick. He was schizophrenic, actually. But he booked that show, you know, so we said, 'Ok, we'll play this one show, and then we'll fire him.' He got fired, all right", she laughs. And of course, even in such moments of high weirdness, the show must go on. "Yeah, well, everybody knew what was going on. It was one of those nights where a lot of people had shown up, like 150 people. But everybody was cool, we kept playing. I just said, 'Ok, he's gone. Just pretend you're hearing guitar."


I Want You to Want Me

"When I was young my dad was in a band, and I was always known, in my little town, as Otto's daughter. His band was really well known in our town, and I was active in little girly dances and things, so whenever I was out doing something, people would say, 'Oh, it's Otto's Daughter!' So when we were looking for a band name, every one I liked was already taken, so I thought, all right then, what about Otto's daughter? Because who the Hell else would have that name?" And all this time I thought it was an homage to the perpetual street metal dirtbag bus driver on the Simpsons. A meditation, perhaps, on what sort of progeny might sprout from his rock-fertile loins. Jacqueline chuckles at my assertion. "That's a stretch", she says. "I never heard that one before." Regardless of its origin, it's fitting that the band's name suggests a lineage, the process of growing up, and into, a new and independent creation. It's a theme of great interest to Jacqueline. "When we started out, we didn't know who we were, or who we would attract", she explains, "so we were playing around, having make-up on, and people said, 'Hey, you should play in those goth/industrial clubs', and we said, 'Well, ok. I guess we are kind of goth/industrial." Finding a place in the musical world was the first step in forging the band's identity. "Later on, we started doing the whole stage show. And people came and left, and I always wanted to have that one band, something really magical, but it never happened, so I gave that idea up, and now it's just whoever is here, they're here until they go away, and it's cool." As time went on, and it became clearer that the band's vision would rely solely on Jacqueline and Velcro, the sound began to evolve. I ask her if the band on stage and on tape is the same as the one boiling away in her brain. "I have a sound in my head, yes", she says, "but it never turns out that way. I wanted it to be heavier, you know, heavier guitars, way more industrial, but once you start writing, you kind of have to let it go where it wants to go, without forcing it to be something it's not. When we write, I try not to listen to any music at all, because with out even trying, you end up writing something that sounds like someone else, because you've been listening to them so much. Of course, most of the bands that I listen to, I couldn't do what they do, anyway." Jacqueline likes her rock and roll hard and vicious, you see. "Well, one of my favorite bands is Pantera, and that's definitely not me. I learned the hard way that I can't sing Pantera songs", she laughs. " I was trying to be really heavy, and I hurt my voice badly. And I like Slipknot, and I like Rammstein a lot. They really rock." With visions of Germanic fire power in their heads, the band has just completed recording their second album, 'Renew'. She says that the new record reflects a harder, more developed sound than the largely pop -industrial debut, 'Void of Course'. "The new album is lot heavier, more guitar oriented. It's more mature, and it's definitely more rock." Jacqueline explains the thematic progression between the first album and 'Renew'. "Well, 'Void of Course' was a lot about things I was going through, you know, 'Who am I? Where am I going? Is life going to be shit forever?' and 'Renew' is more like 'Something has to happen', it's more looking forward to things, and it's also about 'Give me what I want', you know? Like in the song 'Renew', there's the line, 'Tell me what I have to do, I want you to want me, how could it be that you don't want me? I'm everybody's dream.' So there's a little bit of attitude", she says. "I'm a little bit stronger as a person than I was on 'Void of Course', so it's a little bit more mature." I point out that her lyrics seem to have a thread of psycho-social-sexual obsession to them, and I wonder if they're auto-biographical. "Yes", she quietly admits. "That's kind of been the story of my life, going for something that you don't have. But that's a good thing, I guess. You don't want to stand still, you should want to go for something bigger and better." Speaking of which, with a bigger sound and a bigger stage show in the works, it won't be long before Otto's Daughter break out from the confines of their velvet lined coffin in the dark-sider clubs. Jacqueline agrees. "The goth/industrial crowd really dress up, and they're cool people, but there's a part of those people that are really snobby", she tells me. "And they don't want to move for whatever reason. And it's not just with us, I've seen some great, awesome bands like Ogre and Hate Dept, and I was just like, 'Wow, Move it!' Like who the fuck has to be on stage for them to move? So, it's nice to play for them, but I think it's time for us to open up and play for a different crowd." In order to do that, she sees the need for Otto's Daughter to begin touring other parts of the country. "There's no other bands like us around here. Even the ones that are female fronted play much different kinds of music. That's good in a way, because bands in New York can be very competitive. I've never been that way, myself. I mean, I think you should be as wild as you want on stage, you should do whatever you want, just be yourself. But I really want to take the band to other cities, other parts of the country. We went to New Orleans to play recently. We were there for a week, it was great. I didn't want to leave." I ask her where she'd like to bring the band next. "Everywhere would be nice", she says.

Industrial Spice?

The issue of gender stereotypes, the myth of women as the weaker sex, looms large in the music of Otto's Daughter. I ask Jacqueline if she thinks it's easier or harder for the female rocker to find a place in the music industry. "Harder, definitely", she plainly states. "Because girls always fall in love with the lead singers, and girls are great consumers, so they buy the records. Guys are different, because if they like something, they'll stick with it for a long time, but girls change. And when you're a girl in a band, I mean, how many bands do you hear on K-Rock that have a girl singer? It's much harder to break through, especially since I'm not trying to be this sexy girl, or the girl next door kind of thing, I'm just trying to be myself and do what I want to do, and I like to be aggressive on stage, to be violent." She has tried in the past to lay down her arms and attempt the more accepted sex kitten role, but the results left her cold. "One time, I told the guys I was going to try to be really cute on stage, so I put on the silver pants, you know, and the little top, and I felt awful. So I said, ok, I tried it, it's not me." Jacqueline hopes that other women rockers will take a similar stand, and she'd like to see a greater sense of solidarity amongst female musicians. "I think it's time that women got together and said 'fuck all this sexism', and booked their own tours", she says. " That Lilith tour was a good idea, but all the bands were girly-girly bands. Every time I would try to contact people like that, they would shut us off from it. I don't know if it was me, or the girls, or that we were too heavy for it, but I'd really like to see something like that happen with harder rocking bands." Her sense of independence and gender-free aggression has not been lost on her fans, and she has a loyal contingency of young women, several of whom have even gone so far as to create fan-sites dedicated to her. "It's cool, I love to see girls in the crowd, it's like that whole 'Girl Power' thing- stand up for yourself, and do things for yourself. Every girl can do it. I'm not against guys, but I'm about things being equal. A girl can rock as much as a guy, and be as hard as a guy if she wants." Ultimately, that identification is what drives her. "That's the whole point, really", she tells me, " to connect with someone and have them feel something through your music." Whether it's fear, elation, inspiration, or just rocked the fuck out, you're sure to walk away with some wild new feeling after spending some time with Otto's Daughter. Just remember to stay out of kicking range when the serial killer chase scene synths and backwards wailing of "Miss You" cranks up. For more information on 'Renew', video footage, and a frankly disturbing gallery of photographs, visit the band on-line at www.ottosdaughter.com 

Next time: Your new rock starress crush, Fluffy Starr.

- Still rocking in the Dead End Zone, Sleazegrinder