Rock 'n' Roll Rigor

There's a fashionable older woman heading uptown on the F train. Maybe she's in her late 50s, with a new-wavey hairstyle that she probably settled on back in '84. Stylish black outfit that would've once had shoulder pads. There's a guitar case at her feet.

"Excuse me," I say, "but does the name 'Genya Ravan' mean anything to you?"

A pleasant-enough look: "No, sorry."

Okay, so maybe it's her kid's guitar. Then I notice that she's pulled a package of Gretsch guitar strings from her bag. I try another question.

"How about 'Gina Raven'?"

A bright smile, this time: "Ten Wheel Drive"!

That's one example of what went wrong with Genya Ravan's career.

I'm sitting with Ravan a few hours later at the Cutting Room and telling her that story. She's heard variations before. "At one point," she recalls, "we put out so much money for this radio ad that said, 'That's not a raván! That's a raven!'"

It would be the fourth big corporate push to make Genya Ravan a household name. Instead, her old fans still don't know how to pronounce it. Ravan remains a legend, though—at least in the sense that you can ask about the chances for a CD reissue of Goldie & the Gingerbreads, and she muses about giving Ahmet Ertegun a phone call.

"I can do that," she says, explaining her access to the former CEO of Atlantic Records. "About four years ago, Goldie & the Gingerbreads were given some kind of award for being rock 'n' roll pioneers as the first all-girl rock band, and Ahmet did the presentation. I don't take advantage of my contacts. I don't like to ask favors, but Ahmet's the person to call."

That honor, incidentally, would date back to the early 60s, when Goldie & the Gingerbreads could arguably have been the first all-femme rock act. Ravan—then still known to her mother as Goldie Zelkowitz—had already been recording since 1962, but Goldie & the Gingerbreads was her first big hype. At the very least, they're one of the few early girl groups who are undeservedly forgotten.

Then she'd become "Genya Ravan"—reclaiming her true first name—while fronting the brass-driven Ten Wheel Drive, which recorded into the 70s while sounding like Chicago with bad hygiene. Her first stab at a solo career made for four unheralded albums in the early 70s—unheralded, in one example, because of a producer rejecting Ravan's idea to cover "You're No Good" long before Linda Ronstadt's version hit the charts.

By the end of the 70s, Genya was producing herself in what would become an impressive final bid for stardom. Sadly, 1978's Urban Desire died a particularly absurd death. Genya had kept her shag haircut, and she looked like Patti Smith sans commercial calculations. The album design prominently credited Lou Reed—freshly legit from Street Hassle—in his guest role. Everything reeked of true nihilism. The only problem was that Ravan wasn't a punk rocker, or even a new-waver.

Any spiky-haired kid who bought Urban Desire was baffled to hear a great heartland rock album full of R&B influences. The record sounded like a mistake at the mastering plant. To be fair, though, the general quality would've been equally traumatic to fans of Head East and REO Speedwagon.

There was also a slight problem with the advertising campaign, but don't tell Ravan: "Did you ever see the ad campaign with the guy jerking off? That was all my idea, because the guy groups always featured tits and ass. I wanted to have that in my ad. I wanted to do what the male rockers were doing."

That's how Ravan remembers it. In truth, Genya's androgynous smoldering glare and a bathroom-sex motif made for the gayest art direction since Rod McKuen used a fist in lubricant for the cover of his disco album. Ravan can also credit reliable sexism for some of her problems. Urban Desire was released when some idiot from New York magazine could still write that Ravan—coming up on her second decade in music—"performs rock 'n' roll like we would expect from the best male rockers."

At least, that's how Ravan fondly remembers the line. "To me, that was a compliment. There were no hard women rockers at the time. It's always been a man's world—but I don't want to be bitter. Even with Goldie & the Gingerbreads, we got paid more because we were females."

Urban Desire was followed by 1979's …And I Mean It!, which replaced Lou with Ian Hunter and bathroom sex with Warholesque graphics. Token song titles that she really meant: "Roto Root Her" and "I Won't Sleep on the Wet Spot No More."

"Right when we were going onto the charts," Ravan recalls, "20th Century decided they didn't want a record division. My label was gone. It was such a bringdown. I just couldn't do it anymore. Maybe I could've gone to England and looked around, but a female hard-rock R&B act wasn't happening anywhere."

Instead, Ravan would continue as one of the few female producers in the recording industry. She was also still a Jew from 1940s Poland, which became an issue while manning the board for the Dead Boys' Young, Loud, and Snotty. Having already endured Swinging London's love for Nazi imagery in the 60s—including a stay in Eric Burdon's swastika-bedecked bedroom—Ravan encountered punk idiocy in the form of Dead Boys' drummer Johnny Blitz. "I told Blitz that if he didn't take the swastikas off his drum set, he wasn't going to have a producer. You know what he said to me? 'I don't even know what they mean!'"

(Belated thanks to that unknown New Yorker who almost killed Blitz in a knife fight.)

You can read about all this in Ravan's forthcoming memoir, Lollipop Lounge: Memoirs of a Rock & Roll Refugee. It's part of this year's GenyaMania. Urban Desire and …And I Mean It! are being reissued in August through Hip-OSelect.com. The glory of live Genya can even be heard with a monthly residency at the aforementioned Cutting Room, with her next show on August 31st.

Everyone's just now catching up, but that's partly because Genya dropped out of the music scene in 1991—sadly, just when she could've cashed in as a producer of pristine punk.

"I was really bottoming from '84 to '91," she notes. "I lived the life of rock 'n' roll, what can I tell you? I did some of my best production work high. In 1990, I found out I had cancer. I left New York. I ran away. I thought, 'Gee, maybe I need to get married and have a home,' and I did it. That's how I knew I was a drunk and needed help. If I was in my right mind, I'd have never gotten married."

All those good times interfered with the book, too: "Oh, honey, I started the book in 1971 and put it down in 1971-and-a-half. I started to drink, I started to do drugs. I've got 14 years sober now. You know what I did? Real estate, buying and selling. I wasn't going to reinvent myself again."

But she did. Genya still sounds great, and she's got an aging-rocker look that's still kind of sexy onstage. Ask for details on how that sex appeal served her offstage, and it's the closest that Ravan gets to being coy: "Let's just say that gay women think I'm gay, and straight men think I'm straight."

That's a pretty cool line that I'll start using myself. Sounding like a true entrepreneur, Ravan adds, "The rest you'll have to read in my book." o