Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 25-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Smith: In the 1990s we played some shows with Fugazi: Seattle, Olympia, New York. At the Vancouver show, someone threw his shoe at David while he was playing. Some of those young guys were really bugged to see and hear a woman onstage who is powerful (and the songs are weird and arty) and she’s angry looking and yelling—yelling at guys. Hmm, this isn’t what they want at all. Some of those guys, many years later, wrote to us on MySpace saying they hadn’t seen anything like what we were doing and, at the time, they didn’t like it, but it changed something for them. They became more open to women’s perspectives in music and more interested in different music, different than four guys onstage, and they felt it began with seeing Mecca Normal at a Fugazi show. For us, that sort of thing has been very helpful in allowing us to see how individuals can make an impact, how things change.
