Beth Ditto, basketball fan. Who knew?
"I really love the NBA," the 36-year-old singer said last month from her home in Portland, Ore., as the playoffs raged, never mind that her home team the Trailblazers had been eliminated by the Golden State Warriors in the first round.
"I never thought I would love sports," she says, "but living in a town with a major team is so much fun. What other area of life can you walk into a place -- no matter your weight, your class, your ethnicity, your politics, your sexuality -- and you're all dressed alike? When you go to a ballgame, before you know it, you might be high-fiving a Trump voter."
It's hard to believe that Ditto, an outspoken lesbian from Judsonia who fronted the dancey-punk trio Gossip for 17 years and shot to fame with the fierce, righteous and highly danceable gay rights anthem "Standing in the Way of Control," would ever have much in common with a Trump fan, but such is the power of sports, and the sweet charm of Ditto.
She was calling from Portland to talk about her fantastic debut solo album, Fake Sugar, which will be released by Virgin on Friday, and the dissolution of the long-running Gossip, a band of outcasts who fled White County in the late '90s for the greener punk rock pastures of the Pacific Northwest.
The album was recorded in Los Angeles and produced by Jennifer Decilveo, who also co-wrote many of the songs with Ditto.
"She was the Rollerblades to my roller skates," Ditto says.
"Anytime you hear Beth Ditto singing you know it's her," says Decilveo from New York. "She has a sweet spot in her voice and, once she gets there, I'm like 'Yes!' She has this strained-vibrato thing that is so unique and
so cool."
That may be most evident on Fake Sugar's fifth track, the expansive, pop ode to escapism "We Could Run," an early contender for song of the summer and a tune Ditto has said is about her Searcy friend and former band mate, Nathan Howdeshell.
"Dude, that was so good," Decilveo says quickly when the track is mentioned. Hearing the finished version, she says, "was like angels singing in my ear. I freaked out."
MORE GUITAR
There's a dance feel to the album, but it is much more organic than Gossip's 2012 swan song, A Joyful Noise and Ditto's eponymous 2011 solo EP, leaning more toward soulful pop takes on relationships, family and maturity.
"I don't know how it is in Arkansas, but it seems like everyone became DJs and stopped being in bands," says Ditto, who married girlfriend Kristin Ogata in 2015. "That's great. Dance music is incredible music, but I found myself missing bands. I missed organic sounds and hearing beautiful guitar."
One of her favorite groups, she says, is Alabama Shakes. "They are the best rock band right now, hands down, and thank God, because they've brought back rock 'n' roll."
On "Go Baby Go," Ditto pays homage to Alan Vega, co-founder of influential no-wave duo Suicide, who died last year at 78; she also pulled inspiration from Paul Simon's 1986 album Graceland and a visit to Elvis' Graceland home in Memphis for Fake Sugar's title cut, a pensive but optimistic track that would sound perfect on a lazy Sunday morning.
It's also on this track that she nods most obviously to her Southern upbringing, referencing the schoolyard knee-slapping "hambone" chant and the colloquial "Yankee dime."
"I had to ask her what a Yankee dime was," New Jersey-raised Decilveo says with a laugh. "It's a kiss."
On the fierce, booty-shaking "Ooh, La La," Ditto sends a shout-out to her beloved family, singing "Two sisters/four brothers/hard worker/like my mother ..." and, later, "Smooth talker/I'm a lover/firecracker/I get it from my mother's mother."
The album's first single, the slow-burning, dance-blues romp "Fire" has already racked up more than 1 million plays on Spotify. The video finds Ditto decked out in a shiny outfit adorned with flames and a switchblade and singing away as a bar fight evolves into a hunky cowboy line dance.
At one point, she uses a whip to snatch a corn dog for herself just before a bar patron is about to take a bite and eagle-eyed viewers will catch a fleeting glimpse of the Arkansas flag in the background. The whole affair is classic Ditto -- sassy, good-humored and proud of her roots.
JUDSONIA
Her biological father was a Patterson, but she has always been a Ditto.
"If you go to Jud, I'm a Ditto. Nobody would know me as a Patterson. I didn't know my real dad until I was older. My sister was a Ditto. My two brothers are Dittos," she says. "People think it's a made-up punk thing because it's such a cool last name. I remember watching Ghost and saying 'Mama, they just said our name,' and she was like, 'Yeah, it's a word.' I had no idea. So I was raised a Ditto, but never legally adopted. It's very Arkansan. My people!"
She is the fourth of her mother Myra's six children, plus one adopted brother, and she spent much of her childhood shuffling between relatives' homes in the small town near Searcy in White County. She also lived with the man she considers her father, Homer Ditto, in Georgetown and was surrounded not only by her siblings but cousins and adults who came and went.
It was a childhood of instability, poverty and abuse, which Ditto detailed in her riveting and sometimes harrowing 2012 memoir Coal to Diamonds with writer Michelle Tea. The book is dedicated to Homer Ditto, who died in 2011.
"Moving back and forth among so many houses, I didn't feel like I belonged anywhere. If anyone asked me where I lived I didn't know what to say. Here and there, I guess," she wrote. The girl who would grow up to start her own fashion line for plus-size women kept what few clothes she had in a bag under the kitchen sink of her aunt's house.
A RIOT GRRRL
By the time she was 12 she was identifying as a feminist and soon discovered the Riot Grrrl movement from the Pacific Northwest. Through bands like Sleater-Kinney, Huggy Bear and Bikini Kill and writings in handmade 'zines, Riot Grrrl emphasized the political and social power of women, embraced the do-it-yourself aesthetic of punk rock and welcomed lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Ditto was entranced.
In high school she sang in the choir and reveled in her outsider status. She became adept at dyeing her hair with a mixture of Kool-Aid powder and Noxzema, started singing in a band called Little Miss Muffett and was beginning to realize she was a lesbian.
At 14, she befriended fellow nonconformists Kathy Mendonca, Jeri Beard and guitarist Howdeshell, who were a little older and from nearby Searcy. Those friendships changed her life.
When Mendonca left Searcy for Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. -- practically Ground Zero of Riot Grrrl -- Beard and Howdeshell followed. Ditto graduated from Riverview High School and, with a one-way ticket to Olympia sent from Mendonca, she left Judsonia for Washington.
"I needed to be with them," she says. "My brother, Benny, and my sister, Akasha, dropped me off at the airport and were like, 'Bye. Get out of here.' They didn't want me to stay there. They knew I had to get out."
In Olympia, she formed Gossip with guitarist Howdeshell and first Beard, then Mendonca, on drums.
The trio of Arkansas misfits would soon tour with their heroes in Sleater-Kinney and their amateurish, rough-hewn sound on early efforts like 2002's Arkansas Heat would give way to the more confident crunch of 2003's Movement and on to the polish of Standing in the Way of Control (with Hannah Blilie replacing Mendonca) and the Rick Rubin-produced Music for Men from 2009.
The band gained a loyal following, especially in Europe, playing highly charged sets at festivals like Glastonbury and touring constantly. Ditto turned heads with her fashion line and posed naked on the cover of Love magazine. She also wrote a column, "What Would Beth Do" for The Guardian and keeps a home in the Hackney borough of London.
After 17 years, though, Gossip is done, prompted mostly by songwriting partner Howdeshell's return to White County to care for his ailing father.
LET THAT BABY FLY
"He moved back and just stayed," Ditto says, which put a strain on writing new Gossip music.
Ditto frequently returns to Arkansas to visit with family -- she was in Cabot for a niece's graduation a few days after this interview -- but has no desire to spend much time here.
"As much as I love it down there, and as much as I love my family, I don't live there anymore and there's a reason I don't live there. I don't feel safe."
The pair did work briefly with producer Jason Weinheimer in Little Rock on some Gossip material, she says.
"He was excellent. Boy, we loved him and had a good time." But otherwise things weren't working out.
"I just texted [Howdeshell] and I said, 'Hey, I've been trying to write the Gossip record for two years. I've been beating myself up because it doesn't sound like Gossip and I feel really bad.'"
She told him that maybe it was time for her to just do her own thing.
He replied, "Let that baby fly," says Ditto, a spin on "Y'all let that baby eat," which is what Homer Ditto would tell anyone who tried to stop Beth from getting seconds at the dinner table as a child.
"That's how Nathan and I work," she says, laughing. "That was his response, which was really funny."
Howdeshell has a small label, Fast Weapons, and has released music by fellow Searcian Bonnie Montgomery, with whom he has also played guitar, and Little Rock native John Pugh's Vision Control project. Through a mutual friend, Howdeshell declined to comment for this story.
"When you leave somewhere and create this thing together, to see him return was really hard for me," she says. "But Nathan and I aren't bitter. We have nothing bad to say about each other at all."
And she still has her other Arkansas buddies.
"Jeri, literally, lives right across the street from me. I can look into his window. We're still really close. Kathy lives across town and I'm going to baby-sit her little girl on Sunday. We call ourselves the Searcy Babies."
For the foreseeable future, Ditto will be on the road. A tour kicked off Saturday in Columbus, Ohio, and will have her performing across much of the United States and Europe through October (sorry, there are no Natural State stops as of now).
"Nothing made me think I wanted to do this," she says when asked about her career, which has found her not only seeing the world as the frontwoman of Gossip with her high school friends, but recording with Blondie, appearing in the Tom Ford film Nocturnal Animals, runway modeling and posing in fashion magazines, becoming a role model for plus-size women and speaking out on gay and lesbian issues. "When I was little, people would ask me what I wanted to be and I would say 'A nurse, or a singer' or 'A hairdresser, or a singer.' But I didn't know.
"I had an aunt who died when I was 15. I always felt she had some kind of -- and I know this is really out there -- but I always felt like she had some sort of real sweet plan for me. I just didn't know what it was. Then I met Nathan and Jeri and Kathy and I just had no idea. They were so cool."
Style on 06/11/2017
