Jill Cunniff and Gabby Glaser first met as feral teens roaming New York City’s East Village in the early ’80s. The girls were music-obsessed—equally enamored of both punk and early hip-hop—and even though they were basically fresh-faced babies at the time, they’d try to sneak into nightclubs and, if that didn’t work out, then they’d just hang around outside and try to catch the music that way. “We met on the corner of St. Mark’s Place in 1980,” Cunniff recalled to The Face. “Two 13-year-old girls all punked up. I looked like a dreadlocked bag lady and Gabby looked like Chrissie Hynde.”
They were rabid fans of female punk pioneers The Slits as well as bands like Bad Brains, and they’d hit up spots like Tier 3, the Mudd Club, and Danceteria. Then, as they got a little bit older, they hatched up a rather ingenious plan: creating fake hand stamps for the clubs they were dying to get into. In fact, in on this hand-stamp racket were Mike Diamond, Adam Horovitz, and Adam Yauch, future members of the Beastie Boys but, back then, just your average young hooligans pining for the nightlife. Eventually, the teens began wandering the city together in a pack, causing harmless trouble.
Soon, Cunniff and Glaser’s friend Kate Schellenbach, another underage club kid, joined the boys as the drummer in their first teenage incarnation of the Beasties Boys. “It took seeing the Slits onstage for me to realize that being a musician was something I could do,” Schellenbach remembered. “But when I joined the Beastie Boys, we never talked about the fact that I was a girl. Music wasn’t as segregated in those days. Everything was mixed up.” Meanwhile, Glaser and Cunniff both took up guitar as teens, writing songs in their respective bedrooms.
Later in their twenties, when Cunniff, Glaser, and Schellenbach formed their own punk and groove-laden band Luscious Jackson along with their friend Vivian Trimble, they would wrestle with their status as an all-women group, particularly against the backdrop of Riot Grrrl and the ’90s music media’s obsession with “Women In Rock.” What’s more, their continued friendship and alliance with the Beastie Boys would be both a blessing and a curse, garnering frequent comparisons as well as a nickname: “The Beastie Girls.”
It was in my own feral pack-traveling teenage years that I’d see Luscious Jackson open for the Beastie Boys on their Ill Communication European tour in 1995. That cold February in Germany, Frankie, Leah, Hillary, and I crammed into our friend Daniel’s tiny VW Jetta and drove hours to the concert stadium in Aschaffenburg, bopping to our own carefully curated mix of punk and hip-hop all along the way.
But let’s rewind the tape back just a bit. After years of club-hopping as high-school kids, Cunniff, Glaser, and Schellenbach went their separate ways for university. Glaser went to film school and then studied in France for a bit, while Cunniff and Schellenbach both studied fine arts in San Francisco. After they graduated, they moved back to New York and landed entry-level jobs, which they now refer to as “the pantyhose years.” “The pantyhose years,” Trimble recalled to i-D. “You can’t afford any nice clothes, so you go to a thrift store and you end up looking really weird.”
It was at one of these gigs—a “hell job” teaching English at an adult education center—that Cunniff met Trimble, who was born in New York but had been raised in Paris, and who had only recently moved back to her birth city. Cunniff and Glaser had recently formed a band, and so they needed a keyboardist to play samples at their inaugural gig. Trimble gladly accepted. Meanwhile, Schellenbach, who had been drumming for the Lunachicks, allowed herself to be lured away and recruited into her old friends’ band.
The women stumbled upon their band name one night while watching ESPN’s SportsCenter and hearing a sportscaster mispronounce old-school basketball player Lucious Jackson’s name as “Luscious.” To them, “Luscious Jackson” sounded undeniably badass.
The band then wrapped up an EP titled In Search of Manny (1992), which featured an epic cover photo of one of Glaser’s mom’s old boyfriends, a ’70s-looking dude manspreading with his shirt unbuttoned to his navel and a beer can at his crotch. For the most part, Manny was comprised of demos Cunniff and Glaser recorded with a sampler in their friend Tony’s basement, with Trimble and Schellenbach contributing to a couple of last-minute tracks. The EP would be a precursor to their signature sound, combining elements of punk, funk, hip-hop, disco and pure pop.
By that point in 1992, the Beastie Boys had clearly reached an explosive level of fame, and so Luscious Jackson approached Mike D with Manny and asked him if he knew of a label that might be interested. He came back to them with the suggestion of putting it out himself, and thus Manny became Grand Royal’s first release. The band’s full-length debut Natural Ingredients would follow, along with a spot on the Lollapalooza tour, then Europe with the Beastie Boys, and an eventual arena tour opening for R.E.M.
Meanwhile, throughout their budding success, it became commonplace for everyone to ask Luscious Jackson what it was like to be women in a band. In a 1994 MTV spotlight, Cunniff emphasized the band’s shared womanhood as a songwriting asset. “We all recognize the importance of arrangement—and that’s something that I’ve noticed is really good about women players,” she mused. “They can listen to the whole of the song and say, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t play on this part. Let me just drop out here and listen to the whole.’ And a lot of male players, they want a solo. We have, like, this thing against soloing—it’s not good for the whole of the song.” From: https://albumism.com/features/luscious-jackson-debut-album-natural-ingredients-album-anniversary
