E-Mail This Article to a Friend Still on fire Kristin Hersh punks it up, and Meghan Toohey gets a band BY BRETT MILANO

Not long ago, it would have seemed ridiculous to suggest that anyone over 40 had any business playing punk rock. But that was before British trailblazers Wire released their loudest music ever (the two Read & Burn EPs and last year’s Send album, all on Pink Flag), before Mission of Burma kicked and screamed their way through a reunion, and before Rocket from the Tombs (with David Thomas, Richard Lloyd and Cheetah Chrome) played a fierce show at T.T. the Bear’s Place during last December’s snowstorm. It’s one thing to recapture the sound of your heyday, as old-guarders like X and the Stooges have done recently. But Wire, Burma, and RFTT were the first who really upped the ante — proving that a band with enough creative fire, and enough of the right attitude, can sound more vital than they did two decades earlier.

Add to that list Kristin Hersh — still a few years shy of 40, but a full two decades removed from the first Throwing Muses EP. After juggling acoustic solo gigs with the occasional Muses reunion, she’s now gone full-tilt punk with her new band and mini-album, 50 Foot Wave (on her own Throwing Music label). On the surface, it’s no big change: two of the three 50 Foot Wave members were in Throwing Muses (Hersh and Bernard Georges, now joined by drummer Rob Ahlers), former Muses drummer David Narcizo did the cover art, and the project comes on the heels of last year’s Muses reunion. But Hersh insists that this is a whole new thing, and the music on the disc bears her out. The opening "Bug" charges out with a big guitar riff and Hersh’s voice already raw from screaming, and it doesn’t calm down from there. The familiar, subtler aspects of her style are kept out of the mix. It’s not pretty, it’s not elliptical, it’s not even dark or haunted. It’s just brash, snotty, and fun.

Reached by phone at her current home in Los Angeles, Hersh sounds noticeably more excited than she did when talking up the Muses tour last year. Although the new band haven’t hit the Northeast yet, they’ve played a string of club dates on the West Coast, doing a full set of new material. So what makes someone (re)discover punk rock after a 20-year career? "I wonder about that myself. I missed punk rock the first time around, and I haven’t heard a lot of what’s out now. But I know this is exactly the kind of music I wanted to hear, and I couldn’t find anyone else doing it, so I did it myself. I wanted something that was simple without being simplistic. Because there’s a meaning in that simplicity — it’s there for a reason.

"I love the idea of simplicity, and it’s taken me 20 years to get there. You have to grow through your complexity, and what finally comes out is like an elegant solution to a math problem. When we started this band, the ethic was, ‘If you can’t play it when you’re drunk, don’t play it at all.’ But it’s a pretty sweaty rock show — there’s a lot of counting, and a lot of muscles working their butts off."

True, a lot of Throwing Muses’ music pointed in this direction, especially last year’s reunion disc, on which Hersh took pleasure in plugging in again after a string of acoustic albums. But she had a few reasons for not retaining the old name. For one thing, the Muses aren’t necessarily over; they have a live DVD coming out later in the year. For another, the name carries some angst-ridden associations that she wanted to get away from. "There’s always going to be something tangled about Throwing Muses, and I mean that in the best possible sense. Maybe I’m more attuned to subtlety in what I do, so this band may sound more different to me than it does to other people. I’d say one difference is that 50 Foot Wave doesn’t take itself too seriously. It doesn’t hurt my throat to play a 50 Foot Wave show, or my hands — at the end of a Muses show, my hands would literally be covered with blood. This band doesn’t seem to have any physical repercussions yet."

As for the apparent contradiction of an experienced musician punking out: "I don’t envy ‘young’; to me, that’s not a good place to be. I like being a little smarter. I just feel that we’ve done our time, we’re experienced, and now we don’t give a shit. Which is what you learn over time. For some people, youth is what gives them that mind set. But I think it’s one that you grow into, or else the business takes its toll."

Having maintained a two-decade career without a commercial breakthrough, Hersh is a good example of what Robert Fripp used to call a "small, mobile, intelligent unit" — she’s survived by doing grassroots things like releasing official bootlegs, playing small solo shows, and maintaining an active presence on her Web site. 50 Foot Wave will likewise start at ground level: they won’t release any albums, only EPs, but they’ll put one out every nine months. "I think that’s more appropriate to today’s attention span. Even back in the day of side A and side B, it was a given that certain tracks on an album were filler; this way there isn’t any. Besides, I expect that a lot of the music will be downloaded, so the CD is redundant anyway." They also plan to tour constantly, and to shrug off Muses requests — though she says there haven’t been any so far. "So far it’s only the writers who’ve been bringing that up. So either the fans know the deal or else we’re getting different people entirely."

SINGER-SONGWRITER MEGHAN TOOHEY is one artist who knows how much a band name can mean. Two years ago, she was playing under her own name, headlining every show and selling out many local clubs. Although she’d started as a folkie, her fans didn’t mind that she’d taken on a band and shifted to a rock format. Then she decided to start billing herself under a band name, the So and So’s. Her audience minded that.

"You can either call it a ballsy move or say it was an incredibly stupid thing to do," she notes over a beer at the Abbey Lounge. "I went from selling out good-sized venues to a point where people didn’t have a clue. But I needed to have a new identity in this city, to be the artist I knew I could be. Here I was playing with distortion pedals, having great influences like the Strokes and PJ Harvey, and I was still getting categorized as part of the folk scene just because I play Passim once a year. But I definitely lost some of my audience for a while."

Sure enough, the official debut by the So and So’s — Give Me Drama (Supertiny) — is a considerable advance on the two discs that Toohey released under her own name (the full-band Romantic Blunder #4 and the acoustic Eight So Low) in late 2000. Instead of pushing her loud and lyrical sides to separate corners, she’s integrated them, making loud rock with lyrical depth. So the opening "Better" sports some enticing melodic bursts between its heavy guitar licks, and "Oceans in Between" — a torchy ballad that’s the disc’s highlight — throws some Radiohead-like twists into the arrangement. Although it was recorded over two years with four different sessions, it holds together well, thanks in part to the subject matter. "I tend to write about tumultuous relationships; that’s my MO. I try to write about my grandmother, or about the man I see playing in the street, but it never works. I guess I’ll have to find something else to write about when my relationships start getting boring. But you can always sell records with songs like these, because somebody is always getting dumped."

For Toohey, inaugurating the So and So’s wasn’t just a matter of changing the name; it also meant giving up some control to her bandmates (guitarist Jay Barclay, bassist Rodrigo Monterrey, and drummer Chris Hobbick). "I had to get over myself, which was the hard part. I still write the songs, but I had to step back and let Jay say something like, ‘Can we put the chorus here?’ Once I got over that, I’d realize he was right. He also got me to go out and start seeing other bands instead of being a hermit like I was." Another big influence was co-producer Victor Van Vugtat, who had engineered PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea — an album Toohey loves so much that she had to catch herself from sounding too much like it. "I was a little embarrassed by ‘Dark Day,’ because that was so obviously influenced by her. Here was a woman who was seen as a heavy-rock artist taking those dark melodies and complex lyrics and turning it into pop — that was pretty inspirational."

Although she’s just 27, Toohey has 10 years of performing under her belt (she played the Rat while still in high school) and a brother, guitarist Sean Toohey, who was in the major-label band the Red Telephone. So she’s dead serious about taking her own music to the next level. "It’s nice to be a Boston darling as long as I have been, but I’m looking to get some recognition and bring it back home. We’ve had a lot of near misses, and I’d love to be the person who puts the Boston scene back in the fore again. So I think it’s time for me to be successful — my mom told me that."