Changing up the tune

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This article was published 29/03/2018 (2960 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the trailer for the new local rock doc Girls With Guitars: I’m in the Band, Kalyn Hanuschuk recalls arriving at a gig with an armful of gear. The bouncer said to her male drummer, “Getting the girlfriend to carry the gear — nice.”

Instead of getting angry at the gendered assumption, she got loud —shutting him up with her rock ’n’ roll, as she says. But this was far from the first, or last, incident of the kind she faced in her more than 10 years as a guitarist and bassist in bands such as Quagmire and Blackhound.

And it’s those experiences — and the similar experiences of her female peers in rock and punk bands — that inform the content of Girls With Guitars. Anecdotes about first guitars and first gigs, history and comments on the Winnipeg music scene and stories of the struggles that often come along with being a female musician all pepper the 64-minute film.

“What really inspired me to move forward into the documentary was several years ago, I was standing in a magazine aisle and this magazine, Girls With Guitars, was on the rack. I was like, ‘Oh cool, maybe there’s an influential woman in here that I haven’t heard of,’” she recalls.

“So I started flipping through it and it was all just sort of women wearing lingerie, holding guitars. I was furious, like, ‘Are you kidding me? There isn’t a single woman who plays guitar who you could put in this magazine?’”

So Hanuschuk went out and found some influential women to talk to; women whom she had watched perform for years and admired, including Joanne Rodriguez (Chica Boom Boom), Julia Ryckman (Slattern), Jenna Priestner (Mobina Galore), Alana Mercer (the Gunness, Chica Boom Boom), Pam McKenzie (Teenage Knockups), and Amanda Sousa and Jennifer Norris Wuckert (the Pinkslips), among others.

“I was looking for women that kinda didn’t fit what people typically would think of like a female guitarist,” says Hanuschuk, who also has engineered and produced local punk albums. “Most people think of a girl onstage with an acoustic guitar, singing pretty songs, so I wanted to find women that were kind of the opposite.

“If someone was going to help me get my message across, these were the women that were going to help me do it.”

Hanuschuk wants to be clear that Girls With Guitars does not have an anti-man narrative — which, given the content of the trailer and the inspiration for the film, might be a natural assumption.

There are no stories of sexual assault, nor finger-pointing at specific people, just a consensus of frustration among women about the dismissive comments they regularly face (”you’re pretty good… for a girl”) and the trepidation many young girls feel about getting involved in harder music.

At its crux, the documentary is simply meant to be inspiring.

“I see a lot more women in music and film just stepping forward and getting involved with it and that’s kind of the message we wanted to drive home in the film, too — people are gonna have these preconceived notions and these stigmas, but the only way to combat it is to go out and showcase what you can do,” says Hanuschuk.

“You can talk about it and voice your opinion but that will only go so far. You have to show people and educate people — and I think women are starting to realize that, that all you have to do is get out there and show people you’re capable of doing these things and that will change the public perception.”

Girls with Guitars — a film made as part of the Bell MTS Stories from Home series — screens Saturday night, March 31, at the Park Theatre with an after-party to follow, featuring performances by Slattern, Katie & the Wolves, Guilt-Trip and Silence Kit.

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @NireRabel