“Zuzu’s Petals”, a heartstring-tugging line from the classic film, “It’s A Wonderful Life”, transcends it’s initial message of realization and redemption and is reincarnated in three talented young women from Minneapolis who have adapted the phrase as a band name.

Entering their third year of existence, Zuzu’s Petals have thus far remained a local group, having only played in and around the Twin Cities area, along with a handful of out-of-town gigs.

A now out-of-print cassette release and a single were recorded during an earlier incarnation of the band – original drummer Vicki Barnes amicably left the band and was replaced by local radio DJ and record-store clerk Linda Pitmon, described in the band’s press kit as “a real pro”], and a full-length album [When No One’s Looking] has been recorded just this year with the new line-up.

The following conversation took place at a South Mpls karaoke bar, (of which I must admit I have forgotten the name) where I met with Linda, and founding members Coleen Elwood [bass/vocals] and Laurie Lindeen [guitar/vocals] as they were making their picks for the night’s karaoke event. Before dazzling the regulars with their own impersonations of classic rock stars, the talented trio happily shared with me some of their own personal perks, pitfalls and pragmatism; acquired through the process of balancing a rock ‘n roll career with their everyday lives; along with some of the wit and wisdom involved in the music biz.

Laurie: Basically, we’re getting steered in the direction of what we need to do in order to get picked up by a bigger indie label.

Coleen: We just got the single in, so we’re gonna do another push, if nothing else, just to generate interest for the new thing that we recorded.

Q What sort of things have people been telling you that you need to do?

A Coleen: We need to tour.

Linda: We need to schmooze.

[cheekily adding, after a moment’s pause] We’re considering both of them.

Coleen: At the same time, we’re working on our music.

Q What sort of changes are you making?

A Laurie: We’ve changed all of the arrangements on most of our old material. We’re just getting to the point where we know how to deal with different parts and concentrate on that.

Coleen: We finally learned how to play our instruments, so now we can kind of approach things a little bit more seriously [starts laughing].

Laurie: Sometimes.

Coleen: One thing we were told by Dave Pirner, [Soul Asylum celeb who’s lent production assists to the cassette release and the “Shipwrecked”/“Babblin’ Mules” 45] is “less is more” – something we’re trying to work on.

Laurie: To clean everything up.

Q In terms of the band’s style or production?

A Linda: Just the arrangement, to bring everything down to its basic structure. By doing that you figure out what parts are the most important, what parts of it are the meat of a song. Then you build it back up in a different way, just adding what you really need, and strip away all the garbage that we’d been putting on top of it.

Q Do you feel that your approach to the studio is much different than the way you handle a live performance?

A Coleen: It has been that way in the past.

Laurie: We’re just learning that. We don’t know that much about the studio, but now that we’re really investing big time in this next project, we’re learning you have to know everything before you go in there.

Coleen: It’s affecting our live stuff just in that we have to learn new arrangements. Still, when you’re live, you’re live, and when you’re in the studio, you’re in the studio. I think what its done for us is show us what we can do in the studio with songs, and what we want to achieve at a live show – to a point. I mean, it’s still a live show, and there’s something to that that’s really beautiful that you don’t want to lose; the spontaneity.

Q There’s a real danger in learning the studio so well that it can transform you into a completely different band than people see on stage.

A Coleen: We don’t want that.

Linda: There will be no keyboards on the album.

Q How much of the band’s activities are determined by your day to day lifestyles? If you need to tour, does that pose a problem or are you free to do what you need to?

A Coleen: That’s why we have the jobs we have.

Laurie: We’ve just gotten our lives to the point where we can do that.

Coleen: It’s a focus, so all three of us have jobs that are – thank God! – really flexible, and supportive of what we are doing.

Q Do you find it difficult to maintain the balance between a job where you punch in every day and the band?

A Coleen: It’s where your focus is, how much you want to make it work, how much you want to do it, and if you really want to do it.

Laurie: You’ve got one shot to do it, you might as well go for it.

Q What was the initial reason for any of you wanting to do this?

A Laurie: Touring…to put out a record and see the country.

Coleen: Well, I guess originally we just wanted to see if we could learn the instruments. Just to see if we could rock a little bit.

Laurie: When you’ve been a hardcore spectator for so long, you get to know the people involved and you realize that you don’t have to be special, you know. You get to know people and you go, “If they can do it, I think I’d like to give it a try too.”

Q Were there people who particularly inspired you or provided an incentive to pursue this?

A Coleen: Certain bands…

Laurie: Individuals too.

Linda: Best friends and people like that, you know. People that don’t know anything about the music.

Coleen: People that quit their careers.

Linda: It’s exactly the same as someone taking a risk with any other kind of career or lifestyle change. It takes a lot of guts to quit a half-assed job or go back to school. You’ve never got any guarantee of getting a better job when they come up, but you hope that you can better your life or whatever, and you can go back out and try it again. There’s really not much difference at all in a lot of ways, there’s the same kind of risk involved. I really respect people that do that.

[contemplating for a moment] It’s my full time job. I spend more time practicing than I do in the record shop. [Everyone agrees on this point]

Coleen: People can have full-time jobs and do this as a hobby, but for us it’s more than a hobby.

Linda: We haven’t been playing that long, we need those extra five years that they’ve been hanging out and playing.

Q Have you given much thought to how far you’d like to go with this? How much looking ahead does the band do at this point?

A Coleen: I think we take it one step at a time. We really wanted to tour and make one record – that was what we said a couple years ago. That’s looking like it’s gonna happen pretty fast… we’ll see.

Linda: When I started playing, all I said was I wanted to play one time in the Entry [everyone laughs], so you can kind of see it’s kind of gone on…

Coleen: [laughing] She’s realized her dream.

It’s just like, “follow your heart”, basically, [laughs] and realize that you’re gonna be broke for awhile. You know, if you want that new car, then maybe you should stay at your job…

Linda: Then you shouldn’t be in a band.

Coleen: But, if you want to have a blast, and kind of live out your dream or whatever, go for it.

Q Is it coincidence that the three of you are female, or did that have anything to do with the beginning of this band?

A Laurie: We just happened to be. The core started because I wanted to play with her [Coleen]. I moved up here and she followed a month or two after, and we just started thinking about it.

It was god awful for so long… I mean, when we first started playing we had no business at all being up there.

Coleen: We’ve been playing for two and-a-half years out, live.

Laurie: We learned on stage! It’s the best way to learn. You can practice all you want, but that live thing is so different, and so many different things can happen.

Coleen: We had a lot of really supportive friends – or just people that saw the energy and the fun we were having, and made allowances. There were those that thought we stunk, too – and I heard it from the beginning. Now we’re hearing, “You guys were so bad, but now you’re so much better.” We had enough people around us who said – my parents, for example – “This is great! You’re doing it!” – instead of talking about doing it.

Linda: I saw some of the early ones (shows]… I was really drawn to ’em. It’s kind of cool, ’cause I have a different perspective on the whole thing.

Laurie: We didn’t think we would get her as a drummer. We were like, “Call Linda!” She came over and we were like, “Would you be interested?” She was like, “You want me?”

Linda: I really liked ’em from the beginning. I went and saw ’em and I thought to myself, “I really want to play with these guys, but they already have a drummer – that creates a big problem.” I had worked with all three of them over at the Global Cafe, when they were just starting. They were like, “You can come play congas with us sometime”, and I thought that would be really cool, but no one ever called me.

Laurie: We lost your number!

Linda: Every time I’d go see them, I’d be like, “Yeah, / still wanna do that, if you’re interested’, and I thought they were just totally blowing me off; I was like, “Yeah, alright, okay, fine”, but it all worked out for the best in the end.

Q With the limited number of alternative type venues for bands to play in, are you getting enough exposure, or finding it difficult to get your foot in the door?

A Laurie: We’ve branched out, as far as to non-club venues – art openings; a different kind of place where there’s gonna be a different kind of crowd.

Q How would you rate the kind of reception you get at alternative venues – better or worse than the clubs?

A Laurie: Really good.

Linda: Different.

Laurie: Different, because people are there to see you, or to support the gallery, or whatever.

Linda: They’re not there just to pick up a drink and then happen to see you.

Coleen: What I noticed about the No Name Gallery was that the people are more intellectual about their critique of you, which is kind of refreshing… they view you as an artist. We didn’t start out thinking that we’re going to be artists, but in a way, what we try to do has at least a bit of intellectual and artistic thought involved in it.

Linda: Sometimes it’s great to play in a bar where there’s just a bunch of drunken revelry goin’ on, but it was also really cool to be playing in a different space. It was just a totally different feeling playing at an art opening, and it did give us an opportunity to play to people who wouldn’t normally go to bars to see a band. It was really great to get their feedback on it.

Coleen: People really wanted to talk to us about it, too. They weren’t there to be seen or to see somebody, or have a drink or pick somebody up. They were there for the art – all the art – and it was a really great group of people. They wanted to talk bout it, and give you their opinions, which is really helpful.

Q What sort of attention do you get from others within the musical circles?

A Laurie: Either we’re vicious dykes or we’re sleeping with everyone we work with to get shows.

Q Apparently some people focus a lot of attention on your gender roles; it’s generally believed that you don’t succeed by being nice.

A Coleen: Wouldn’t you rather deal with somebody who is nice, up front, on time, got back to you, and didn’t have a big ego or a chip on their shoulder?

Linda: [wryly] Or just had Lycra on?

Coleen: I’ve been getting a lot of flak lately from other bands, that are guys that sit back with a jaded attitude and don’t do a single thing to push their band forward in any sense.

Linda: Some of them have very good bands, but they’re not doing anything. They expect people to come to them, and that’s not the way it works in any kind of business.

Coleen: It’s also a question of why they’re doing it. They’re doing it for the wrong reasons – they’re doing it to be cool.

Q Traditionally, the big reason given has been to pick up girls, but how well does that attitude work in reverse? Your typical male ego would lose a few notches letting himself be picked up by a female rocker – not to mention that not too many women cite that as a reason for being in a band.

A Linda: I think some of ’em probably do.

Coleen: I’m sure more women will have that attitude, because there’s gonna be more and more of a variety of different types of women. Judge me on our music, and not our gender. You’ve gotta work twice as hard in anything, let alone this.

Linda: That’s a major reason to be in a band. That’s the way it’s been since day one – that’s why rock ‘n roll started. Rock ‘n roll is sex, basically; that’s why it started. That may be the underlying reason, that doesn’t have to be the overriding factor, that doesn’t have to be pushed in everyone’s face – but that’s the way most bands operate.

Q Who does the majority of the songwriting in the band?

A Laurie: Coleen and I do.

Q What are you consciously trying to get across to your audience when you’re writing a song? On what level are you trying to reach people?

A Laurie: We write in two completely different ways. I usually write personal songs, but not always.

Coleen: I try to write songs that try to be a little more far-reaching. I don’t try to be political; most of the songs I write are about personal things – emotions, being human, you know? There’s times when I do get a little bit more political.

To me, the reason I’m writing a song for the most part is for myself. To express myself and get something out, with a few exceptions. “Babblin’ Mules”, which is on the single, is a pro-choice song, and it was for myself too, because I feel really strongly about the issue; but it’s also kind of cool, because I have had people come up to me about the song and notice what it’s about…

Laurie: It’s about a lot of things.

Coleen: It’s nice to sneak a message in there sometimes, although that’s not how I set out writing a song.

Q You also manage to sneak in more than a few musical styles at once.

A Laurie: [laughing] We can bash any genre.

Linda: We can wreck anything.

Coleen: We’re very diverse individuals. we have a lot of similar tastes and a lot of varying tastes, I don’t like anything that’s one-dimensional. I can say the same about the people in the so-called “scene”, you know? I like country, I like blues, old jazz, rap, heavy metal… why not?

Why not, indeed? A good enough reason to start a band, and a good enough band to pull it off. Whether or not they get the attention they deserve remains to be seen, but when the big moment arrives for these three ladies, you can rest assured they’ll have followed their hearts all the way. Maybe somebody ought to make a movie about that.

© J.Free / The New Puritan ReView; 1991; 2025