dambuilders: JOAN WASSER

Trained as a violinist, she began displaying her knack for casual reinvention while playing the violin with a punk-like abandon in the 1990s college-radio rock staple the Dambuilders.

 -the sun

At the age of eight she took up the violin and, a decade later, took a place to study music at Boston University before realizing that the classical world was not for her. 

"I didn't want to make classical music my life. The Beethoven symphonies have already been played a million times and I am not going to do it any better."

"I just always loved music. I was the girl with a mohawk playing the violin in high school. Everybody thought I was a freak. And guess what? I am."

- alterdudes

Instead Wasser, sporting dreadlocks and vinyl mini-dresses, started to play violin in punk bands. 

"It's hard to make a classical instrument fit into that world, but I wanted to bridge the gap between the guitar and the bass and play the violin really loud." 

In the grunge era, her band the Dambuilders were signed to a major label and toured the world. - telegraph

She was in her first band, the Dambuilders from 1990 until 1997

 

Joan dated Jeff from 1994-1997 when he died.

"It was incredibly difficult to grieve privately for those close to him - everybody wanted a piece of him - we were a very private couple. It took a while to get through that period, honestly. I never would want it to happen any other way because the fact that I survived it has made me such a strong person. It has actually really made me more compassionate."

living an ordinary life

Yeah, I don't know, there's a tremendous amount of energy that goes in to living an ordinary life,...from which all other things about your life come. Just, relationships with people you care about, or your enemies, or, you know, strangers, or people who claim to be your friends and lie, or people who... you know, all kinds of things. So, that's enough.

August, 1995, by RRR Radio

it's not the bomb that has to go man, it's the museums

Great paintings shouldn’t be in museums. Have you ever been in a museum? Museums are cemetaries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men’s rooms. Great paintings should be where people hang out. The only thing where it’s happening is on radio and records, that’s where people hang out. You can’t see great paintings. You pay half a million and hang one in your house and one guest sees it. That’s not art. That’s a shame, a crime. Music is the only thing that’s in tune with what’s happening. It’s not in book form, it’s not on the stage. All this art they’ve been talking about is nonexistent. It just remains on the shelf. It doesn’t make anyone happier. Just think how many people would really feel great if they could see a Picasso in their daily diner. It’s not the bomb that has to go, man, it’s the museums.

Bob Dylan Interview, by Nora Ephron & Susan Edmiston. 1965

jeff: music needs time to live in

it could be a sound that you've never had, and you know sound carries emotion with it obviously.  and you sort of brighten by it somehow or, it, and definitely music needs time you know in space, meaning when you play it you obviously music needs time to live in and sometimes that time is  a memory, a childhood memory or a really dramatic memory of  a fight, a loss, a death, a birth, a movie, something totally ordinary and  just if  a song captures it those are the things that keeps time in your life but some times change. like  revolutionize your life? very few songs.

(talking about songs that have changed his life) on triple j radio in 95.