"I was very sheltered and always felt very safe and taken care of. I realized (in college) that I could be unpredictable, chaotic, and let a night happen, and it would take meaning in the chain of events. There was a whole social element to it. A whole new way of having fun. Now I was bad-still a virgin, but I was bad. It was the world of the imagination, and boy, did I have an imagination. The first inklings of freedom of choice, everybody goes through that. I just happened to take it up with a fervor." During breaks from college, Phair and her old New Trier pals would congregate at the Heartland Cafe in Evanston to chatter, flirt and dream. Phair would drink whiskey on the rocks, smoke cigarettes and act like she belonged, even though she wasn't even 21. The goal was to "bag the hottest guy who walked in." Did you find him? A smile, somwhere between embarrassed and bemused, alights. "He doesn't exist. Every evening, there'd be two hours of fabulousness and then ... crash."
"I'm resilient, very resilient. I will work with whatever context you give me. I will adapt to whatever -- I will figure it out. It was like in high school, I went to a super-conservative preppy high school that was enormous, and by default of not going to class senior year I ended up going to Oberlin, which was a super-tiny, socially inverted college, where lesbians were the top of the food chain. And I just looked around and I'm like, 'My acid-washed jeans and Lady Di hair is not gonna work.' You adapt."
Oberlin (Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio) is a total P.C. training ground. Everything was so heavy and serious (there), it sort of destroyed laughter for me for a while. Oberlin takes people who are creative and in crisis, or look like they're going to be.
I do write politically. I went to Oberlin, which is a very politically correct campus, where you spend a lot of time having to explain yourself, what your motives are. Oberlin College (projects) a really moral institution, with a lot of stress on virtue and social ethics largely full of shit because a lot of it was self-indulgent. It had a completely weird inverted social status structure.
At Oberlin, she walked into a thriving band scene. Bands from there that went on to greatness (and near greatness) include Codeine, Bitch Magnet, Seam and Come.
Liz Phair: "Everyone had a band. It was exactly like Chicago -- in fact, a lot of them moved there. There was a lot of rock & roll spirit, but it was an intense place. Neurotic overachievers who want to be hip.
Did I ever perform at Oberlin? Never. Oh god, no. I hung out. I was like a band wife. I went out with all the rock musicicans, sat quietly in the rooms while they argued about re-issues and what not, and got drunk, and had my fun."
Liz as an Undergrad at Oberlin
Liz studied art while at Oberlin. Phair worked as an intern in New York for artists Nancy Spero and Leon Golub during her time at Oberlin. While she wanted an art career she would find out in college how tough it is to make it in the art world as a woman.
Liz Phair: "I decided to make a name for myself and become a fine artist. I had a modern art book assigned to me by a female professor. I started counting and there were, I think, 15 female artists before 1960. That was pretty frightening, but I figured that after 1960 there were sure to be more. And there were 15 females artists after 1960. So in a book of 1,200 pages, there were 30 female artists. I just freaked out, I walked around for days telling everyone I could, and they'd say, 'That's nice, Liz.' It was really frightening to me. That's what I wanted immortality for -- to get my name in the history books and to make sure I could pursue my interests."
Liz graduated from Oberlin in 1990 with a degree in Art History/Studio in Art.
Liz Phair: I slacked off for three years out of college
I lived in Chicago for a summer doing nothing. Then I went to San Francisco and did largely nothing. I was with all these intellectuals who were all doing nothing. Like we would get up in the morning, get high, drink coffee, get dressed, go cafe-ing. Sit and have really deep, intricate conversations about ideas and theory. I mean, my day was very verbally stimulating, and I really was having the best time of my life, and doing absolutely nothing. You know, we were plotting a million thousand theater productions, we were considering film. We were training to be an actor; we were really just whiling away the hours -- exactly like that book [Generation X], only a different set of people. But it was in a way horrifying and satisfying all at once
I just chewed up all my savings. I did nothing of any value whatsoever.
My God, it was a blast! We had, like, a 7,000-square-foot loft. It was beautiful. I had so much fun. There were a thousand Oberlin students out there.
It was a little community of people; very few of them had jobs. They were all intelligent, attractive, like, interesting people. We all had a ton of free time, and a lot of clothes to wear. It was a quintessential slacker experience, but from a different point of view. In fact, all of my friends who were out there have now gone on and are doing amazing things. Like my friend Nora, who was my roommate there and my chief partner in crime, is now directing films. She just shot one for $100,000 and she's moving on into the millions now. So these people do get right back on their feet and start doing something. I think it's largely a pride thing. But we all slacked off.
We fucked around. In San Francisco it was all kernels of ideas, but nothing ever happened. It's funny, because I look back at that time as such a fun time, so social. Now everyone's doing what they set out to do. I also recorded my first songs in San Francisco. I was such a grifter. Not a grifter, what do you call it? I mean parasite, but it had more panache, it did. I always enjoy trying to get away with stuff. IT's a big thrill for me. And in San Francisco my friend Nora and I would go out in the morning with no money and just go to cafés until we pounced on someone. We got lunch, or they bought us lunch. And we'd move from there through their social world until we found dinner or a party. That's something that I love to do. It is sort of a job. I don't know what you call it -- social whoring maybe.
(Film maker) Nora Maccoby and I were really close friends, living in a loft in SOMA, San Francisco, right after we graduated Oberlin. (By the way, one of our other loftmates was Charles Wurmfeld, director of Kissing Jessica Stein). Oh my god. The stories from that time could go on for days, and if I wrote them all down it would make an excellent movie. Nora .......wrote the film Buffalo Soldiers......Nora was the reason, way back when, that Chris Brokaw came to SF to visit us at our loft and subsequently charmed me into playing all my secret songs for him while Nora went AWOL during his stay. I guess something went wrong with their love connection. Anyway, good thing because that's when Chris Brokaw dared me to put my songs on tape and send it to him. So you see, without Nora, there would be no Chris. And without Chris, there would be no girlysound. And without Chris and Tae Won Yu making dubs, and me, a reputation, you would not be reading this exhaustive rumination at all. Funny. (-Liz Phair, The Ken Lee Interviews)
I just recalled myself to Chicago 'cause I realized if I didn't move back home and sort of suck off the structure of my parents, I could've done that indefinitely. And so I did and then I got my shit together. And I'm quite happy that I made that choice. I mean, I loved doing nothing. (Click here to read the entire Terry McManus Interview