The Roches Are Back (Kind of) With a New, Posthumous Solo Album From a Dearly Departed Sister
If you don’t know The Roches, you really need to stop what you’re doing and listen to, say, “Hammond Song.” The Roches were three sisters from what they described as “deepest New Jersey” who learned to sing harmony in the back of their parents’ car on the New Jersey Turnpike and then grew up to sing songs that were so clear and sure and so not like other songs in the early ’80s in New York City. The first Roches album was born of failure: Maggie and Terre Roche had gone to England to record as a duo. They’d gotten a record deal thanks to one of their mentors, Paul Simon, who they sang backup for on There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. Record companies wanted a certain kind of album from two women in the early ’80s—i.e., something with an equal amount of power chords and frizzed-out hair—and when the Roches did not appear to be delivering, they were called back from England. “I think the record company was trying to get them to wear certain clothes,” Suzzy Roche, the youngest of the Roches, recalled when I spoke to her the other day. “And at one point the company had one quote unquote coach come in and try to get one of them to get down on her knees during a song. You know, it was weird.”
Thus, the two sisters returned to New York, and their little sister joined up with them. “They said, ‘Screw the music business—we’re going to sing in the streets!’ ” The Roches were born. They started to busk. It was near Christmas. They busked singing holiday songs. Crowds gathered, big crowds. The holidays passed and they added to their repertoire, and, in 1979, the three of them made an album, a crazy beautiful album that was produced by Robert Fripp, who would work with Blondie and Bowie and would say of the Roches (in Suzzy’s recollection): “You will never be hugely successful, but you will influence many people coming after you.”
This went for what they sang but also for what they wore, an ’80s street style that translates effortlessly to seriously cool today. “People were amazed at the things we wore,” Suzzy says. “They weren’t high-fashion. They were just not what people wore. I think we thought we were looking like other people!” (Since it’s election week, you can see them in their busking days singing at a political fundraiser for soon-to-be Senator Bill Bradley, back in 1978.) Beautiful album followed beautiful album, and their live shows at The Bottom Line, the old Greenwich Village rock club, became legendary. In 1979, John Rockwell compared them with Bruce Springsteen in terms of in-the-room excitement: “One thing that makes the Roches so extraordinary,” he said, “is the way all three women project such sharply differing personalities, yet blended together in an indissoluble unity. Terre is the joyous, extroverted one . . . Suzzy is . . . alternatively droll and commanding. And Maggie’s quiet, almost mystical presence (and almost shockingly strong alto) ground the other two in some deeper reality.”
Last year, Maggie died of cancer, at the age of 65. The Roches ended. You could feel a hole open up in the city, and it seemed to signify the end of an era, an era that defined New York as a place that couldn’t necessarily be defined, much less marketed for mass appeal or branded. In the weeks before her death, Maggie asked Suzzy to take care of her music, and confessed to her sister that she regretted never having made a solo album. She was famously shy in public. “I think that Maggie’s songwriting and voice and point of view was really sort of the heart and soul of the Roches,” says Suzzy. “She was so sensitive. She didn’t have a thick enough skin to go out by herself. But she certainly had the artistic power to do that.”
After her death, Suzzy was surprised to find songs and tapes and fragments archived with tremendous care. She began too to take Maggie’s songs out of the group, to listen to her work alone. “I started to see that when you took Maggie’s songs off The Roches records, you really get a sense of Maggie’s life as an artist,” Suzzy told me. “And her voice—I mean, often she wrote in harmony, but the voice of the songs is amazing. When I finally listened, I went, ‘Wow.’ It’s just an amazing story.”
The album that Suzzy compiled—entitled, Where Do I Come From, a 32-track double CD—will be released by Story Sound Records on what would have been Maggie’s 67th birthday, October 26. It includes four never-released songs, including the title song, “Where Do I Come From,” recorded at her home in the weeks before she died. If at first that song sounds half-written, when you listen again it isn’t, and, especially given that it is likely the last piece she wrote, its mere existence gives you an idea of the joyful, searching power of song in general. A preview of it is here, set to a video created by filmmaker Janie Geiser.
The rest of the album includes not just some of the best-known Roches songs, like “Jill of All Trades,” from Seductive Reasoning, that first album that, even though the record companies weren’t impressed, is impressive: “Blowin’ in from Boulder/ with braids/ Jill of all trades.” From the same album, “West Virginia” is like a Language poets poem, technically gorgeous and resonant:
“Nineteen / Charleston / Mescaline / He said he was a genius/ B-plus average/ In civil engineering/ His rearing / Was Catholic/ Political leanings/ And a talent for stealing things”
There is an early demo tape included in the collection (“Stayin’ Home”), as well as a song Maggie recorded in England, the night she heard that the record company no longer supported them, and a Christmas song that the other sisters were waiting for but never arrived when they recorded their famous Christmas album, We Three Kings, in 1990. “We used to have a game that was called Waiting for Maggie!” jokes Suzzy.
Maggie Roche’s wit was sharp, as is evident in this lyric from “The Married Men” which, like “Hammond Song,” you ought to set aside time for now: “I am not their main concern/ They are lonely too/ I am just an arrow passing through . . .” But she touched people in a deep way, something fans talked about in the flood of letters that came in after her passing. If you were living in New York City after September 11, 2001, you might remember the album of prayers that she made with Suzzy, entitled Zero Church, first released in 2002, a song from which, “Prayer,” is included in Maggie’s new solo CD. The prayer project was Suzzy’s idea, completed with a grant from Harvard University.
“I was just looking out my window and thinking, What are people praying? Just what’s coming out of the top of their heads?” Suzzy recalls thinking. “I wanted to do a project where people just wrote their own prayers.” At one point, she asked a man she met in an elevator if he’d be interested in contributing a prayer. “I was desperate,” Suzzy said. “He said he would think about it. And then he started calling me and, well, I had no idea that he was a Vietnam vet, and he said, ‘I can’t do this.’ I said, ‘Well, don’t worry about it,’ but one day he called me and handed me this amazing prayer, or poem, and it was just so heartbreaking that I just immediately gave it to Maggie because I knew she would an amazing job with it. It turned out that he had never spoken about his experience before. It was really heartbreaking. And I think it’s one of Maggie’s favorite songs of hers. I think she felt very proud of that song.”
The song is called “Prayer.” When you listen to it, you can hear Maggie trying to live up to the responsibility she had taken on. It was a responsibility she had to a stranger really, another person passing through.
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