Tribe Spit Deep -- Photos

Lynn Breedlove, chief singer and songwriter for infamous dyke-punk band Tribe 8, has been performing throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe for over a decade. She currently teaches at the Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco, where she lives. Breedlove is releasing her first novel, Godspeed, on St. Martin’s Press in April 2002, available in stores and through Insight/Out book club.

Childhood
Born in Oaktown California, raised in the burbs of Sam Clam’s Disco, Lynnee
Breedlove insisted her name was Johnny but her mom was a big femme and so the
little tomboy was forced to wear dresses. She tried to conform. Although she
was in love with her kindegarten teacher, she developed an instant crush on a
little boy in kindegarten who lipsynched to a Jackie Gleason record in a suit
an pork pie hat. The little boy soon got a pair of durmstix and played every
garbage can like the star dancer in Stomp.She soon figured out she just
wanted to be him. Her parents wouldn't buy little Lynnee a drumset, but she
receive a Beatles album from a German auntie in '63, before they hit the Ed
Sullivan Show, and thus began her career as a rock n roll broom playing
lipsyncher, practicing in the mirror. The little boy turned out to be Tracy
Chapman's drummer, Dennis Fongheiser. But that's ok, because Lynnee grew up
to get way more blowjobs onstage than he ever did.
She wrote her first poem, published in the local paper, titled “Kitty,” in
the third grade.
She travelled Europe extensively and repeatedly with her Berliner mom who was
more like Auntie Mame, teaching her about fashion, shopping, partying, and
culture, darling. This meant she never fit in in with American kids, but boy
could she speak German and French like a bat outta hell.

Adolescence
She played Bobbysox softball and fell in love with her teammates at thirteen.
They were best friends however, and after comparing hundreds of love poems
Lynnee had given both of them, they figured out she was more than a friend,
and turned their backs on the little pervert. At fourteen she found the way
to be loved rather than shunned was to audition for school plays, take the
smallest parts that got the most laughs, and cut up in class a lot. She
managed to do this while still staying teacher’s pet. She came out at
sixteen, got laid At Seventeen, and received her only high school award at
eighteen, the official title of Class Clown, complete with funny face year
book picture. She continued to write love poems for her best friends. She
wrote everywhere. Once, caught on a hill watching the sunrise without paper,
she wrote a poem on a rock with a felt tip pen. The only TV she ever watched
in the seventies was Saturday Night Live, drinking beer she stole from her
dad, hiding out in her room. She knew Janis Ian was a dyke when she wore a
white three-piece suit on SNL, 20 years before Ian figured it out herself.

Adulthhood
When she turned eighteen, Lynnee cried because she didn’t want to grow up.
Instead she joined the army. She wanted to avoid college, and she heard she'd
get three free pair of fatigues with her name on them, as well as two pair of
combat boots. This was upsetting to her parents who wanted her to at least be
an officer. But she loved the institutionalized perversion of boot camp. She
still likes to yell "yessir i’m proud to be a maggot sir!" in the middle of
a romantic dinner. Also shooting all the guns was really fun. When the drill
sargeant sent each grunt out to fire the machine gun, he warned them to shoot
one burst straight ahead, not to be John Wayne and spray the whole area.
Always the opportunist, she thought, "when's the next time I'm ever gonna
get my hands on one of these," and promptly sprayed the whole area.
Throughout the 80’s she made a thorough attempt to destroy her liver.One day
in ‘83 she went to a punk show in Mendocino and gazed in awe at beer bongs
and moshpits. After that she never the same. She started listening to Black
Flag and impersonating Henry Rollins at home alone in the mirror with a beer
can for a microphone.She managed to get a degree in English Lit from Cal
State Hayward, graduating cum laude, with a nomination for a scholarship to
law school. But she moved across the bay to San Francisco and started
partying in earnest.
Still alive when the earth quake hit in'89, Breedlove decided to give up her
decade-long suicide attempt and hang out with her Grandma, back in San Leandro. Haggard and permatweak, she could get hired only as a bike messenger,
with a brief stint on a motor scooter. She had her last drink and her last
hit of crack at four AM New Year's Day on Castro Street, as she slid down a
wet street sideways on a moped, yelling "yippee no brakes."

Life begins at 31
She called Silas 'Flipper' Howard who was already clean, and said "I'm ready."
Together they drank a lot of espresso, smoked cigarettes, and started a band
called Venus Envy. Fortunately some lesbians sent a threatening letter from
their lawyer warning them the name was taken. So they changed it to Tribe 8
after two gigs. It was 1990, and Valencia street was full of leather jacketed
mohawk dykes wearing cutoff jams and combat boots. There were no dyke bars
cuz all the dykes had got clean and sober and there were few places where
dykes could rock out, except a couple of cool clubs once a week like Faster
Pussycat where Stone Fox played, and Female Trouble where Linda Perry was
caught in a large Dr. Seuss pre rave hat with dreads down to her ass playing
an acoustic guitar.
So starving rocker dykes tore the clothes off Tribe 8, and stars where born.
Emboldened, and having decided there was no justice to be found in the field
of law, she instead started an all girl bike messenger company called Lickety
Split All Girl Courier on May 1, 1991, with a rolodex a phone and a pager.
One bike and one motorcycle covered the entire San Francisco Bay Area. Ten
years later there were three computers, radios, dispatchers, three trucks and
six bikes. But successful is stressful, and Breedlove bailed to focus all her
attention, finally, on her art.

Godspeed
She finished the novel she had started writing seven years earlier. When she
graduated from school she tried to get a volunteer spot writing for Mercury
Rising, the local messenger paper, but she was turned down, because, they
were too polite to say, her style sucked. Her writing was pretentious and
without substance. But then the fabulous Anna Joy, of Blatz and then Cypher
in the Snow fame, with whom she was madly in love, took her to some of Kathy
Acker’s secret open classes at a pub called Edinburgh Castle. Acker was paid
by SF Art Institute, but felt the classes needed to be more accessible to
poor punx, Breedlove was able to attend and hear what real writing genius was
from Acker as well as other young brilliant minds, including a barely legal
Antonia of later Dirtbox fame.
So Breedlove wrote the first chapter what was to become a novel called
Godspeed. Acker encouraged her, and as she was a hot femme on a Harley,
Breedlove listened.
Flipper opened a cafe for all the little lost dykes with no bars at which to
congregate, and started having spoken word performances there. She invited
Breedlove to read, who then had to write another chapter. And another . And
another.
Breedlove wrote in her spare time between Tribe 8's gnarly touring and
recording schedule and running Lickety Split ten hours a day.Then in '98,
Sister Spit invited her on tour. In the van affectionately known as Sheila,
she wrote a new chapter every night, based on some fabulous tour adventure,
and read it to crowds across America.
Before she died, Kathy Acker told Breedlove to call her agent, Ally Sheedy's
mom. So she did, and before long St. Martin's Press agreed to publish the
little punkrocker's book about a bike messenger in love with a stripper and
her road to enlightenment. Breedlove harassed Flipper, whose movie By Hook or
By Crook was winning praise all over the world, including Sundance, until she
agreed to work with her on turning it into a screenplay.
And she lived happily ever after.