Before Tobi Vail co-founded Bikini Kill in Olympia, Washington, in 1990, before that band and her Jigsaw zine helped launch the riot grrrl movement, she was a young Go-Go’s fan who just wanted to know where all the other rock ‘n’ roll girls were.

“Before I got into punk or hardcore, whatever independent music, the Go-Go’s were my favorite band and I belonged to the fan club,” Vail says on a recent call from her Olympia home. “That’s when I was pretty young. I think I saw them for the first time right after I turned 13.

“I was completely obsessed with the Go-Go’s,” she says. “Even though they had commercial success, I didn’t really understand why people were constantly making fun of them or putting them down, at least teenagers. And I think serious critics also didn’t take them seriously.

“So I sort of developed, I guess, an early feminist critique of the world or whatever on that,” Vail continues. “I remember going to visit my dad when he lived in Oakland. I would go to Berkeley and walk into the record stores and be like, ‘Do you have any bands with all women in them? Or all girls?’

“They’d be like, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s the Go-Go’s, and there’s the Bangles, and here’s the Pandoras.’ I’d say, ‘Are there only three?’ and they’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s a good question,’ and they’d tried to find more and they couldn’t.”

in 1983, at 14, Vail discovered the punk and hardcore scene in Olympia at the time, and threw herself into it, going to every show she could, and always – always – looking for girls like her in bands on stage.

“We had Bon (Von Wheelie) from Girl Trouble,” she says. “Heather (Lewis) from Beat Happening. Donna Dresch was in a bunch of bands; she was a teenager. Patty Schemel (later of Hole) was around. There were just people here and there.

“You would stand in the audience and be like, ‘OK, I’ve been here four hours, and I’ve seen one girl onstage. But there’s other girls in the audience.

“So then it became a question in my head,” Vail says. “Like, ‘What would the world be like if it was actually just as many girls onstage as in the audience? I still think about that.”

Bikini Kill, which Vail co-founded with singer Kathleen Hanna, bassist Kathi Wilcox and guitarist Billy Karren in 1990, quickly roared to the forefront of the riot grrrl scene that Olympia also incubated at the time. Its righteous feminist anger delivered a jolt to the punk world at large, making the three women in the group heroes to many even as some angrily dismissed them with misogynist slurs and sometimes violent threats.

The band split in the late ’90s but reformed in 2019 without Karren and has toured regularly since then.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Vail talked about her earliest days in the Olympia music scene, co-founding Bikini Kill, why it eventually split up, and what it is like to tour now as 50-somethings.

Q: What’s it like coming back together as grown-ups to tour and play together again?

A: So when we started, I had just barely turned 21. I think Kathi was 20, and Kathleen was 21, about to turn 22. Now Kathleen and I are 55, so it’s very different. I remember when I was 25, and we were playing a show at ABC No Rio in New York City. And I was like, ‘Man, I’m too old to be doing this,’ like ‘What am I doing with my life,’ you know?

Then Mike Watt (of Minutemen and Firehose) showed up at the show, and I was like, ‘Oh, man, he’s totally old, and he’s still doing it. Maybe I can keep doing it for a little while longer. He was probably 35. It’s all relative. When you get older, you realize that all that kind of self-imposed stuff is just, you know, it’s not real.

But playing shows now, it’s been great because we’ve always been an all-ages band, and the shows we’ve been able to play have been big enough that they’ve been able to be all ages. Many different generations have been showing up all over the world, and that’s been very cool and weird.

Q: It must be interesting to look out and see people who were there when you were 20 or 21, and also people who are that age or younger now.

A: Plus, there’s our older peers. I don’t know if you heard but we just added Frightwig to our show in San Francisco, and they’re a little bit older than us, so we’re not even the oldest people in the room. It’s kind of mind-blowing (to see the different ages). And then people will bring their little kids, like little little kids.

Q: Let’s go back to before Bikini Kill. What were your connections like to the Northwest music scene then?

A: Oh, very involved. I got into the Olympia music scene during the first hardcore punk era, the end of the first era in 1983 when I was 14. I was not just kind of involved, it was my whole entire life. Like, I went to every show; I knew everyone. That’s how I ended up getting a radio show (on community station KOAS at Evergreen State University).

I started playing in bands probably about 14, maybe a little younger. So I’d been involved in the scene for about seven years before Bikini Kill started.

Q: What was it about the local scene and bands and music that drew you in?

A: It was a mix because Olympia is small. So any kind of live music that was original songs, not cover bands, would fall into the realm of the shows I would go to see. My parents are young, and they were into music. My dad played in a band in the ’60s. Then he played in a Northwest garage band in the same style as the Sonics.

In the late ’70s, he started playing in a power pop-new wave band, so he was recording these great original songs in our living room. It wasn’t that different than the music I was going to see. And there was a drum set right there and everything.

Q: So let me move to founding Bikini Kill. How did you and Kathi and Kathleen find each other and recognize you could make a band together?

A: We all three were students at the same time but we didn’t meet at Evergreen. I met Kathi downtown, just at a job, working in a sandwich shop. I met Kathleen when she was doing spoken word and organizing shows. I can’t remember exactly how it happened. I think it was like I was trying to start a new band, and so was Kathleen. And then it ended up that we’re talking about collaborating, and I was like, ‘Hey, maybe Kathi would be good.’

Q: And as the band got going, and Bikini Kill started to tour more widely, what was that like? I’ve read that though you had a lot of female fans who loved you there was also a lot of misogyny in the clubs.

A: Well, very immediately people reacted to us super strongly. I kind of knew it was going to be like that. I knew that we were good, or I believed that we were good. So I think we just had a real attitude, and that kind of pushes people, you know? Like, we really did have to fight for our right to exist, because not only were we young women in a male-dominated realm, but we were also explicit about our feminism.

Kathleen was really outspoken, and she would talk about sexual abuse and rape and things really in your face that just were not being talked about, especially before the #MeToo era. We were just like, ‘What? What? This is punk! This is like a part of being a punk.’

But for some people, it wasn’t their definition. And like depending on the show, sometimes there would be fights, there’d be actual violence, there’d be threats. Other times, it’d be just really fun. So it was, it is, a mix.

Q: So why did the band split up in 1997?

A: I think we all really respect each other, but it’s hard to get along and be in a collective, like we were, for seven years. There were a lot of conflicts and we really didn’t know how to deal with that yet. We were under a lot of pressure. That said, we survived a lot. We survived our friends dying of drug overdoses or suicide. We didn’t have much money and we survived all the Northwest winters which are very rainy. So everything felt like a battle.

We had a list of things we wanted to do. Touring Japan was the last thing on my list and we toured Japan, and I was like, “Hey, we’ve done everything on this list. Like, I don’t know, we could do it all again.’ But I don’t know. I was kind of just burned out.

Q: You were saying that sometimes people say, ‘Oh, the music world is much better for women’ now, but that’s not necessarily true, is it? What’s better? What’s not?

A: I think the music scene, definitely the underground scene in Olympia, it’s super queer, super trans-inclusive and really freaky. And a lot different than it was in the ’80s, although it was great then, too, in a different way.

Definitely things have changed in some ways, but we still live in the same society. If you’re a feminist, your goal really is to end sexual assault and transform society so that everyone has a place to live and they can be free from economic deprivation and racism.

We definitely don’t live in that society. I think we’re still, everyone, within the feminist realm, working towards transforming all of society, not just like the music scene.

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