Mesmerizing
Liz Phair Biography
The Childhood Years
Elizabeth Clark Phair was born on April 17, 1967, of mostly German (and lesser English-Scottish-Irish-French) ancestry. She was adopted as an infant in New Haven, Connecticut. Her family later moved to Cincinatti, Ohio, and she grew up along with her older brother Philip (who was also adopted) in the affluent Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Illinois. Liz has compared Winnetka, and the school she went to (New Trier High School) as a cross between Ferris Beuler's Day Off and The Breakfast Club. Her father, John Phair, is an AIDS researcher and Chief of Infectious Diseases at Northwestern Hospital. Her mother, Nancy Phair, is an Art Instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago. At the age of seven, she spent a year in Britain when her father took a sabbatical at Sheffield University. She acquired an English accent and crush on Prince Edward, but she also suffered culture shock. Liz: "There was really no way for me to rebel against my parents. My father provided me with my very own subscription to the Evergreen Reader by the time I turned ten."
After considerable indecision, Liz went on to Oberlin College in Ohio, where she majored in Art History/Studio in Art. She worked in New York as an intern for the politically-focused artists Nancy Spero and Leon Golub. She graduated from Oberlin in 1989.
After college, Liz moved to San Francisco with three classmates, and lived in a SOMA (South of Market) flat. Liz bounced to Boston and then back to Chicago. For a time, she supported herself by making charcoal drawings.
Right before she left San Francisco, a friend of Liz, Chris Brokaw, the guitarist for the band Come, became impressed when he heard her play and persuaded her (on a dare) to make a demo. When she returned to Chicago in 1991, she began to record. What came out was the Girlysound tapes, a series of three cassettes containing 32 songs Liz recorded in her bedroom on a 4-track machine. Liz originally gave out only two copies of the Girlysound tapes: one to Chris Brokaw and one to Tae Won Yu. The two in turn began dubbing copies for friends, who did the same. John Henderson, who runs the Chicago indie record label Feel Good All Over, heard the tapes and offered to re-record some of the Girlysound tapes with Brad Wood. With the exception of two recordings with Ashtray Boy in July 1992 ("Shirley Maclaine" and "Infidel" on Ashtray Boy's the Honeymoon Suite album), nothing ever materialized from their ollaboration, as Henderson and Liz had a falling out during the sessions over the direction of the recordings: Henderson wanted a stripped-down but precise sound, while Phair wanted to rock on her own terms.
Liz continued to work with Brad Wood. In the summer of 1992, Liz sent a six-song tape (consisting of Girly Sound material) to Gerard Cosloy of Matador Records. Cosloy was impressed and signed her to a contract (for two albums and an EP). Given an advance of $3,000, Liz began working on a single which turned into a collection of 18 songs entitled Exile In Guyville. The term "Guyville" originated from a Hyde Park musician named Chris Holmes (from Sabalon Glitz), and the term was adopted by local band Urge Overkill in the song "Goodbye To Guyville". "Guyville" refers to the male-dominated band scene in artsy, multi-ethnic Wicker Park (located north and east of the Chicago Loop).
Fresh off the success of Exile In Guyville, Atlantic Records... [to be continued...]
Sometime in 1995, Liz married Jim Staskausas, a film editor who worked on Liz's first video "Stratford-on-guy." Staskausas has a 15/16yr. old son named Aidan. They all still live in Illinois.
In early 1996, Liz got pregnant. She had her child on December 21st, 1996, and named him James Nicholas Staskauskas (he'll be called "Nick"). He weighed 8.5 pounds.
[To be continued...]
CREDITS
I'd like to thank Aaron
Walker for much of the information in this biography. I'd also like to
thank Jason Long
for some of the information as well. I'll attempt to complete this
biography at a later date, but let me know what you think. And, of course,
I'd like to thank Liz Phair...