The Early Years

Narrator: Elizabeth Clark Phair was born on April 17, 1967 in New Haven, Connecticut. She was given up for adoption and was adopted by John and Nancy Phair. Dr. John P Phair was a doctor in residency at the time at the Yale-New Haven Medical Center; Prior to his residency he graduated from the University of Cincinnati Medical School in 1960. Nancy Routt Phair was a graduate of Wellesley (Class of '55). Liz was the second child adopted by the Phairs. She has an older brother Philip. The early part of Liz's life was marked by occasional relocation due to Mr. Phair's medical career. At the age of seven (1974-1975), Liz spent a year in Britain while her father was on a microbiology fellowship at Sheffield University. While she acquired an English accent, "like the second day", and admits to a pre-pubescent crush on Prince Edward, she still suffered culture shock.

Liz: "The first thing that freaked me out was that the was that the playground was all cement. At gym class, they all started taking off their clothes and they all had these blue knickers on. And I had these little lacy panties." -(The Times-Britain, 1999)

The family moved to Cincinnati afterwards before finally settling in Winnetka, Illinois for the rest of Liz's adolescence. Life in Winnetka was a well-heeled existence. Winnetka is among the poshest of Chicago suburbs. The average house sold in Winnetka in 1999-2000 went for approx $1 million dollars. Dr Phair took a position with the Northwestern University Hospital and after several years became a world renowned AIDS researcher and head of infectious diseases at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Her mother, Nancy, teaches at the Art Institute.

LIZ: I spent a lot of time as a child fantasizing that I was part of a dynasty and I had to be raised in secret or I'd be killed. On my twenty-first birthday I sat down at the breakfast table thinking they were going to tell me, "You must take over the country, you're the heir." But it would limit me psychologically to find my natural parents. Whatever characteristic of the day is my most impressive I pick as my legacy. (Listen to a .wav clip of Liz discussing her being adopted here)

About five percent of my ambition is the idea that if I get visible enough my (biological) parents will come to me. And I won't have to go find them. I thought that was a really good idea. Connecticut doesn't release files. They might not want to be found, and if they did want to be found, what would that do to my sense of the possibilties in life? I've been given a free reign to create myself. I could be anything because, frankly, one doesn't know what I'm destined for.

It (being adopted) motivates my songwriting. It gives me that free space -- I've got this mental idea that I'm not really, deep-down, fully attached to anything, like that floatable world that artists create for themselves. I'm a member of that world, intrinsically. I don't have a biological mother to refute. Bad behavior in a child, you can frame it up against your parents -- you know, 'You're just like your father.' Since I don't have that model, it frees me up to pursue what I want to perceive as myself.

My parents are always shoving books in my face, they read constantly. My parents were Episcopalian and they would take me to church because they thought I should understand it. They would never take communion. They'd just sit there, and you could tell they were kinda bummed that they were in church on Sunday! They were honestly great. With my mother, swearing was strictly prohibited. But my father swore -- he'd be putting up the Christmas tree, saying 'Goddamn it!'

I grew up in dialogue. My family table always had discussions that ended up in verbal wars. Whenever the extended family came over, it was sort of a verbal power play. I remember being a young girl at these tables with my dad and my male cousins and my uncle, who was very loud. I didn't know anything, but I wanted to talk really loudly. They loved me to death. Maybe because I'm adopted, they didn't want to mold me. They encouraged me, they were interested in me. I always had a weird net of safety around me. They've got a little bit of WASP, appearance-oriented, academic prejudices, stuff like that. In a way, it's not a normal cross section of a family.

They let me get away with too many changes of mind. In return, I'm really comfortable trying a lot of things -- I don't feel like I can't do something well. I was prodded only and wholly in the direction to do something I liked. They have a big respect for loving what you do. You shouldn't do something your whole life if you don't love it. And that also means that you have to make what it is you do lovable.

Music was something that I did because I did a lot of activities as a child that were to enhance my experience, you know what I mean? Like tennis and archery and all that stuff, and music was always a part of it. We always had a piano and my mother liked to play. It was just part of life. I think I picked up quitar when I was in Eighth grade because my best friend Anne Murphy, we both took piano for five years before then, and she started playing guitar and I thought that was so much cooler. So i had to have a guitar then. I started with classical and then moved on to folk, and i would learn Joan Baez or James Taylor songs, but i got bored with learning other people's songs. I started writing my own stuff because I was always rebelling against reading music, and I had a good ear and I could just imitate my teachers stuff, and they caught on really early.

But I wouldn't listen to reason so I began to write my own songs, and she finally just said that was fine and if I came in with two songs every week that would be great. I've been writing songs ever since I could remember. And going to camp, and singing all those songs, and making up your own, and stuff like that. It was just a part of growing up for me. Any time any boy had an effect on me like that, a song had to be written at some point. The songs were the venue for things I never felt like I had a chance to say. If I was obsessed with somebody beyond me or that I didn't know, I'd write to them. It was like me secret fetishism. I'm not one to go running to my friends and tell them what happened that day. I wanted to run to the guitar and say it. A lot of girls weren't out playing sports. A lot of girls were in their rooms, in their little imaginary worlds. That was my songwriting world.

My parents loved music. My mom would sing me to sleep every night, and later I was in choir. The listened to a lot of classical music and Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Joan Baez. I also had little kids' records. I like anything that seems to stimulate me, anyone who seems different, someone who's working with an idea -- or sometimes even when they're not.

One of my happiest childhood memories is swinging on my grandmother's hammock, the Fourth of July. My grandmother lived on many acres of woods with streams - and it even had a farm where they stabled horses for a while. I just remember swinging back and forth, your family was around, you could smell the barbecue going, and pretty soon it was going to get dark and they were gonna start the fireworks, and it was the best feeling.

She went to summer camp with Julia Roberts (cited in Whip-Smart's "Chopsticks") when she was 13.

Liz Phair: She was tall and bossy and fun. I always had tall, bossy friends. We stopped speaking because she was always calling me collect, and it pissed me off. I'm like 'What are you fucking calling me collect for? Your parents are rich enough.' She only did it a few times, but she was enough of a power player. Tall, bossy friends get you in the best kind of trouble, though.

The High School Years

I was a really excellent student 'til the end of junior year. At which point I had one of those epiphanies where I could not for the life of me remember why I was achieving. I remember being sort of attacked by my class in geometry, because I was doing well on the quizzes and it was a curve. I had a crush on this guy, and he was turning around and giving me these evil glances. He really, truly, didn't like me. I honestly hadn't been trying that hard, and I felt like, "what the fuck?" So I just 180'd and started ditching class all the time. I barely passed my second semester. Then I started getting into it again. High school was fun in a lot of ways though.

In freshman year, I had to French-kiss, and it was totally disgusting. It took me a weekend to get over it. He was popular, and all my friends were really happy because I had glasses and braces, and somehow my hair managed to be hideous at that point, too. I'd been, like, a pretty girl my whole life. So when everyone was like, "He's really popular and he likes you," I was forced into it. But then I remember that the next make-out session hooked me for life, because I finally realized it was who you did it with.

For me, summers in Winnetka, Illinois, were about all these long-haired high school girls riding around in Rabbit convertibles. There were bonfires and new swimsuits to wear, escapades into the city with fake IDs and big, bombastic Midwestern thunderstorms. And, of course, there was the annual Dead-show event. We'd go up to Alpine Valley [Wisconsin] to get away from our parents. That was where I first tried drugs. There was this bunch of girls, and we'd get into scraps and try to keep each other out of trouble. My girlfriends all had brothers that were about two years older, and the summer before senior year, everyone in their circle dated one of us. I remember that I felt pretty that summer.

My high school(New Trier High School) was very Ferris Bueller, The Breakfast Club. John Hughes went there(editor's note: Hughes actually graduated from Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook, but it is hard to Chicago's North Shore suburbs apart), so at one point the national perception of the teen experience was somewhat based on our high school. We were so giddy and power-bad, but that attitude changed. One night my friend and I were driving her Rabbit home from a party, and we'd both had too much to drink. I was leaning my head out of the passenger side, resting it there because the metal felt cool and nice. Then I noticed the parkway trees whizzing past my hair. I was like, 'Shit! We're driving up on the grass!' That pretty much sobered us up. I guess the whole summer euphoria sort of ended.

New Trier High School (had) a high percentage of people with access to expensive grooming products. There wasn't rock 'n' roll at New Trier. There were 4,000 `Buffy' people, and three punk rock kids, and we'd stare at them in the bathroom. Nobody looked like that. Toward the end of high school, I didn't care about grades anymore. I came up with an existential crisis a bit too young and nearly flunked out. I lost my ability to go to Williams. I kept saying that I didn't want to be guided down a path - I wanted to be my own tugboat captain.

Narrator: In doing research about Liz's high school it is safe to generalize a few things about the time Liz spent at new trier. New trier has a long standing reputation as one of the best public schoools in the nation. More than half of the student body rank in the 90th percentile nationally on standardized math and reading tests. Put another way, an above-average student is below average at New Trier. Much has been given to the residents of the wealthy suburb and therefore much is expected of the next generation. There is a high level of expectation of academic success of those that go to New Trier. Competition is embedded in the New Trier culture. Going to high school at New trier is a pressure cooker type situation. Just being an average or slightly above average student is seemingly unacceptable. Kids that go to New trier are held to a higher standard and this is often a stressful situation for the child.

Another item i learned about new trier is some what related to the first. In the mid nineties, New trier was the subject of a story in time Magazine because it had the highest level of student experimentation with marijauna in the nation. Nearly seventy percent of the student population had experminted with pot. It seems pretty clear that students at new trier react to this high level of stress with recreational drug use. the students are using pot as a coping mechanism to relieve the pressure that is placed upon them by their school and family situations.

The Phair family wasn't immune to these pressures. Add to this the inherent problems of being a teenager coming to terms with being adopted and it is obvious that the teen years were probably quite a temptestous time for Liz and her brother Phillip. Liz has been fairly open about her pot usuage, being a fairly regular toker up until the birth of her son nicholas. For the most part, though, Liz was able to use her songwriting as a coping mechanism against these pressures.

Liz :"I loved music, but I was never a music buff. I wrote for different reasons. I didn't write to be on stage, I didn't write to have a career in music, I wrote as therapy or because I like to create things."

Her brother Phillip didn't seem to come out of the situation with such luck. Phillip battled alcoholism as a teenager, which Liz chronicled in her song Table for One.

Click here for a really good article on New Trier,