No Shame In Flamboyance: An Interview With Gere Fennelly

Interviewed by Less Lee Moore

One of the coolest live performances I ever saw was in Dallas TX in 1993. Redd Kross was playing with a bunch of other bands (including pre-indie-cred Nick Heyward from Haircut 100) for the Live 105 Acoustic Christmas.

For their cover of PJ Harvey’s “Oh My Lover,” keyboard player and pianist extraordinaire Gere Fennelly performed the song on a baby grand, with singer Jeff McDonald dramatically sprawled on top of it.

Although she left Redd Kross soon after to concentrate on other pursuits, that amazing flair for theatricality and humor still infuses everything she does.

Popshifter: How did you get started playing music? I seem to remember that you were a piano prodigy.

Gere Fennelly: Yeah, I started playing piano when I was really young and we never had a piano at first. But we had neighbors that had pianos, and for some reason, I was bored with the ability to play by ear, so I would go over to people’s houses and play like, Henry Mancini songs when I was three and four years old. One of my neighbors finally said to my dad (cranky voice), “Why don’t you get her her own piano?” Because I just basically bugged everybody!

So I started lessons when I was about seven. And ever since then it’s all I ever wanted to do. I knew I was going to grow up and be a piano player.

Popshifter: That’s amazing. Did you have the Tori Amos thing where your parents thought you’d play classical music but you rebelled and played rock or punk?

Gere Fennelly: My parents really weren’t pushing me to play classical. They really never even pushed me to play piano. I was the one who wanted to play. But usually when you take piano lessons, they start you on classical anyway. So my teacher trained me in classical, but I would always listen to records like, I’d play along to records—it wasn’t really rock yet—and I’d listen to the stuff my dad was into, which was like Henry Mancini, Burt Bacharach, and all that kinda stuff.

But then when I was about 13 I started getting into Elton John. My teacher had an idea that I would be going into the concert world, but as soon as the rock thing started happening I was like, “No, I wanna be a rock musician!” So that was that. It was all over once I got into Elton John. (laughs)

Popshifter: How did you become a member of the band Rox? I knew you’d been in that band, but I just saw the video clip on your website.

Gere Fennelly: Oh, that video! (laughs)

Popshifter: Thank god for the Internet because otherwise I would never have seen that. It was amazing!

Gere Fennelly: Rox were a band before [I joined]. They weren’t just some put-together band, they were a real band, teenage girls playing around the East Bay of San Francisco. I had a boyfriend, who I was in a band with when I was 17. I remember him saying, “Oh, there’s this all-girl band and we should go see them.” So I went to see them one night and they were like a female Aerosmith, kind of. And I was like, “Oh my god, they’re great!”

So I just went up to them after the show, and I told them, “I’m a keyboard player and I should be in your band!” They were like (snooty voice), “Well, we’ll give you an audition,” you know, they were all kind of rock star-y about it.

So I got in the band and within a couple of months we had this deal to go to Japan. We got discovered just like in the old fashion: playing in a rock club and getting discovered. It was Toshiba Records, which is EMI is Japan. We got signed and we went over there to play and live over there. The deal was is that we would live over there indefinitely but after. . . we just started misbehaving. I don’t think the Japanese knew what they were getting into! (laughs)

We lasted almost a year over there but then we got sent home. We were bad.

Click to read more from Gere on. . .

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