Chick Singers Need Not Apply

By JAY COCKS

Four new women rockers take aim and take off

There is a sex problem here; a certain difficulty of gender, even regarding the slang. Standard record-biz patois for new talent on the rise is "breaking out." A quartet of plastic inflatable Teddy bears like the Knack, who came off the crackling short circuit of Los Angeles rock clubs and had a No. 1 album first time out this summer, are said to be breaking out in a big way. That message is clear, not just because of the size of their success but because they are all guys. Say that four women, Ellen Shipley, Carolyne Mas, Ellen Foley and Pat Benatar, are breaking out with their separate debut albums, and it just sounds as if they have bad complexions.

These four have produced, within the past few months, records that stand with the most promising work of the year from any gender, male, female or convertible. Their music, despite different shadings of style, shares a boldness of spirit, a feeling of fragility conducting a heavy flirtation with absolute abandon. It can strut tough, cry soft or laugh up a sleeve. The best of it can go big and make the long reach look easy. It is mainline, rock-bottom rock 'n' roll, and it puts a lot of the fellas to shame. Or should, anyhow; but there are these problems...

Rock is still a kind of music--and a life-style--in which women are frequently called "chicks" and are, as performers or presences, expected to behave accordingly. You cluck prettily. You smooth your feathers nicely. You don't try to take over the barnyard. When Carolyne Mas says, "I'm not a chick singer," she is not so much handing down a manifesto as setting up an aesthetic credo. Mas has no special interest in forcing some shotgun wedding of feminist politics and rock; neither do the others. They sing songs of personal reflection, not propaganda. But the rock business will not let you forget how you look.

Visiting a New York radio station on a promotional swing, Ellen Shipley discovered that "if you look like someone's old girlfriend they won't play you." She says, however, that the problem has as much to do with archetypes as stereotypes. "It goes much deeper than male chauvinist attitudes," Shipley observes. "In music, a white woman has traditionally been set up to play a role for teen-age male fantasies." Mas reflects simply, "Record company people wanted me to do a Stevie Nicks or Blondie. You get a lot of that stuff." One reason for this is that Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac and Deborah Harry of Blondie have done very well, thanks, by trading on their nifty looks as well as their considerable skills.

"For a woman," Shipley says, "it's vulnerability or strength. People want to push you one way or another." These four are not averse to a little push. All of them take great, if sometimes contrary, care with their album photos (Benatar's picture makes her look like a black widow Piaf) and, in hallowed Hollywood tradition, Shipley and Foley decline to give their ages. Still, these women give some indication that if they do not find a fresh new direction, they may at least open up a different route.

Ellen Shipley might not have written, never mind recorded, Heroes of Yesterday, one of the best tunes on anyone's album this year, if she had not been booted out of her theater class at Hunter College. "You ought to be out of here doing real things," her professor told her, so Shipley (born Shippelkopf) swapped her half-finished master's for a series of the prescribed real things, including marriage, playwriting and a job as an assistant to the music critic of Saturday Review. The marriage shattered, the play never got produced and the magazine got sold. Shipley tried singing in a folk-rock duo in 1976, took a job as a receptionist at a rehearsal studio to keep the apartment heated. She also kept writing, encouraged by a couple of musicians around the studio like Keyboard Player Ralph Schuckett, who helped her with musical structure, co-produced her first album and now shares a brownstone in Brooklyn with her. In Heroes of Yesterday, there are echoes of the mock-Wagnerian melodramas produced by Phil Spector for '60s girl groups such as the Crystals and the Ronettes, but Shipley's lyrics try to go deeper, attempt to capture the ebbing of a lost childhood ("Born too late, born too late . . ."). With a little luck, however, Shipley may have come along just in time.

Pat Benatar, 27, was born, like Shipley, in Brooklyn, and there is a lot of New York in their voices and their wise, wily, wounded attitudes. But if Shipley evokes various girl groups, Benatar sounds like all of them packed tight into one. She can put a lot of sass into a song like I Need a Lover ("Who won't drive me crazy"). Benatar's teen-age studies as a coloratura soprano have taught her, she says, "a lot of technique and stamina -- I can scream without hurting myself."

Ellen Foley can cut loose with the power, too, but her training was strictly Broadway, and her big break came on the Meat Loaf Bat out of Hell album, where she undercut Loafs buffalo bellows with some full-throated purring. The most overtly sexual of this quartet, Foley tries for what she calls "the woman-child look," but turns out more like an F.W. Woolworth vision of Lana Turner. "Rock 'n' roll is about rhythm and movement," she reminds us, then supplies a footnote on anatomy: "Your sex is very close to your heart. It's got to be a total piece." If the biology is inaccurate, one listen to a steam-heated Foley vocal performance like We Belong to the Night makes such a consideration seem irrelevant.

Carolyne Mas, 24, grew up a suburban New York kid but writes with a cosmopolitan air. She sang Gilbert and Sullivan with the Light Opera of Manhattan, can even find a kind word for Cole Porter among random enthusiasms that run from the Who to the Police. In collaboration with Guitarist David Landau, Mas cooked up a tune called Quote Goodbye Quote that bids fair to become a classic evocation of the romantic kiss-off. Mas sings it with a distinctive wit, while Landau and the rest of her band make sure the music stays in a state of perpetual overdrive. Mas' songs vary from reveries to roughhouse declamations without missing a beat, and if she keeps up this pace she may be dogging Randy Newman's tracks in a few years. No telling then if she will still have the time and the disposition, as she does now, to keep her friends trim by cutting their hair. Clippers and scissors, but no razor; one chair but no waiting. --Jay Cocks

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