It's almost time for the show, and Dalle laughs when it's pointed out that one name that hasn't come up during the interview is Courtney Love, a name that seems destined to appear in anything written about the Distillers.ĭalle, who played on two songs for Love's coming solo album, admires her elder's fortitude. The showroom of the rock club is packed with an audience of Mohawked and mascara'd punk-rock kids, waiting for the concert that will be the first step in the Distillers' new era. I bit through the chain-link fence and let myself out."ĭalle is standing backstage at the Glass House in Pomona, Calif. Actually it was I who broke the cage open. "Just feeling like a caged animal for most of my life, and someone breaking the cage open. "Total liberation," she says of the writing and the themes. Dalle wrote most of the songs in February during a visit to Australia, and she packed them with images of ominous violence and trembling anticipation. The textures of Coral Fang might be cleaner and the musical range wider, but there's still an urgency - and that headlong pace. This record is what I've been hearing in my head for a long time." "I think there's a lot of bands out there who are quite happy making the same record 10 times in a row," she said. Sing Sing Death House might have its engaging rawness, but they shudder when they recall trying to record 14 songs in one week. Now stabilized with the lineup of bassist Ryan Sinn, drummer Andy Granelli and guitarist Tony Bradley behind Dalle, the Distillers are trying to keep the old spirit alive amid the growing attention and inevitable complaints that they've gone too slick on Coral Fang. She followed him back to Los Angeles and formed the Distillers, going through personnel shuffles, releasing two Hellcat albums and spreading the word on the Warped Tour and an arena-rocking bill with No Doubt and Garbage. She began playing in bands and was 17 when she met Tim Armstrong at a music festival in Sydney where both their groups were playing. She developed a social conscience working and living at an activist commune, but it was an aimless life until music took hold. She also dabbled in drugs, and although she excelled at art and literature, she got kicked out of schools, roaming around Melbourne as she lived on the dole and worked menial jobs. "I was promiscuous, I didn't want to go to school, I didn't assimilate with my peers, I hung out with older people." Things began to stabilize when her mother remarried, but when she hit her teens, it all went haywire. Her mother kicked out her unfaithful husband when she was 2.
"My greatest satisfaction in life," she says, "is to be greatly underestimated and then rise above, and beat the odds into a bloody pulp."Īs a girl, she says, she was always collecting strays, perhaps to compensate for the turmoil at home. For her, it's just one more challenge in a life that's been packed with them. "Other people's opinions hold no relevance in my life," she says, between sips from a beer bottle. Sitting on a sofa in a bare room at the rehearsal complex, she takes a drag off a cigarette and intensifies her gaze. She didn't earn any sympathy by posing recently for photos in Rolling Stone playing tongue tag with her new boyfriend, Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme.Īnd signing with a corporate record company isn't the kind of thing that sits well with purist punk fans. Dalle has been branded a climber who used the well-known musician as a steppingstone to stardom.
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