Interview: Bonnie Bloomgarden of Death Valley Girls
Interview: Bonnie Bloomgarden of Death Valley Girls
Jason LeValley of Psychedelic Scene:
Nice to meet you.
Bonnie Bloomgarden of Death Valley Girls:
Nice to meet you, too. Thanks for letting me come here to my table in my room.
LeValley:
You’re in your bedroom?
Bloomgarden:
Yeah. And just in all fairness, there’s a poodle right here.
LeValley:
All right, well, one thing before I start the questions, I wanted to mention that I saw you guys perform live, and it was the last show I saw before COVID kicked in.
Bloomgarden:
Oh, no.
LeValley:
Yeah, the last show I saw for two years.
Bloomgarden:
Well, which show? Well, where was it?
LeValley:
It was in Tucson.
Bloomgarden:
Oh, wow.
LeValley:
There was another band on the bill, and I went to see them, but you are the guys that really blew me away.
Bloomgarden:
Oh, cool. The poodle is moving here.
LeValley:
Okay.
Bloomgarden:
There’s a poodle right here. There it is.
LeValley:
What’s his name?
Bloomgarden:
It’s Tommy.
LeValley:
Cool.
Bloomgarden:
(To Tommy) You’re going to have to chill. You asked to come up here, and it’s time to chill.
(To LeValley) Wow, that’s crazy. Well, that’s interesting. I hope that we left you with a good enough remembrance.
LeValley:
Of course. Yes.
Bloomgarden:
Okay, good.
LeValley:
All right. So you guys are not actually from Death Valley. You’re from L.A. Right?
Bloomgarden:
Yeah, we’re from all over. I’m from L.A.. But we’re not from Death Valley.
LeValley:
Who else is in the band?
Bloomgarden:
Larry Schemel. He’s from Washington. Ricki Sticks. She’s from Colorado. And Sammi Westerville is from Kentucky.
(To Tommy) Okay. You want to go down, you can’t come back up. So those are the rules. Okay? Sorry.
LeValley:
That’s all right. So, Larry Schemel, is that how you say it, yeah? He is the brother of Patty Schemel, who was in Hole and, actually, Patty was in your band at one time, right?
Bloomgarden:
Yeah, she was our original drummer.
LeValley:
Wow. So how did the band form?
Bloomgarden:
You have to forgive my use of nouns and regular speech pattern. We just got home from 65 shows in 90 days, and I’m, like, really confused, but I can answer with the best words I have. Yeah, it started by babies. Patty had a baby, and the baby was best friends with my sister’s baby, and they met at whatever babies do when they’re too young to go to school. They have, like, little gangs, I guess, baby gangs. And they were friends there, and yeah, my sister was just like, there’s this drummer who’s looking to play with someone my sister knew. I was desperately trying to find the band, so it all worked out.
LeValley:
What year was this?
Bloomgarden:
I think it was like 2013, maybe. Something like that.
LeValley:
Okay.
Bloomgarden:
Some such thing around there, give or take a few.
LeValley:
And you’ve been a constant member in the band since then?
Bloomgarden:
Yeah. Me and Larry. Yeah, Larry and I. I don’t know.
C. Elliott Photography
LeValley:
You guys were on Burger Records for a while and now they’ve shut down. And given what happened with them, I wanted to ask if you guys had any questionable experiences with them.
Bloomgarden:
I mean, the thing with Burger Records, what happened is that they weren’t really a record label. They put out and released about 1000 albums a year, so no one was really on the label. And so most of what happened is just what happens in society, but they really got called out. Most of the bands are still playing that were called out and maybe had a cassette come out on Burger but weren’t really signed to Burger. And having said that, in my entire life of being alive, I didn’t notice anything. Definitely things unusual, but not unusual for the way society is in this country. And, yeah, I learned a lot because of people calling it out. And it made me realize a lot of things that had happened to me were also hurting me without me knowing. But as far as if I saw anything that I thought was illegal or more than just weird, I didn’t personally. Yeah. I saw a lot of gross stuff, but I think before Coronavirus, there was a lot of things that were gross that we didn’t call out. And I think it took a major change for people to look at themselves and look at each other and realize that sometimes things are happening that aren’t okay, and maybe even the person that it’s happening to might think it’s okay, but later they changed their mind and it’s not.
Bloomgarden:
And that’s okay, too. But, yeah, when I think back about those times, there’s not a lot of stuff that I wish I had called out or something like that, but I definitely wish that people, society was different all along. So something like that. I think that’s no different than what happens in sports all the time. No different, obviously, than what happens in Hollywood. No different than what happens in politics. It just happened to be the label we were on that got called out. And yeah, it’s more pervasive than you would realize, and it’s shocking and it’s heartbreaking. Some of the things that we found out about people that we do know, but I didn’t see any of those things. So, yeah.
LeValley:
Well, you guys have a new– I think it’s new– single out called “When I’m Free”.
Bloomgarden:
Yeah.
LeValley:
And it was produced by Peaches, who’s a very outrageous character.
Bloomgarden:
Yeah, she did a remix of it.
LeValley:
She remixed it. Okay.
Bloomgarden:
Yeah.
LeValley:
Did you actually work with her?
Bloomgarden:
No, I’ve idolized her forever. And yeah, I think that was a song that happened during Coronavirus when we were just trying to think of fun and new and exciting ways to do stuff with songs that don’t include playing them. And so I think David, our label boss, David Dickinson, suggested doing a remix and I was like, this might be a crazy idea, but what if we asked Peaches? And I guess she liked the message of the song and was down to do it, so that’s cool.
LeValley:
Did you ever meet her?
Bloomgarden:
No, not yet. No, not yet. I have in the past. I have seen her in the past when I used to live in New York and I guess she lived in New York years and years and years ago, but not since she knows of my band or whatever. Okay. Yeah.
LeValley:
So I follow you guys on social media and I know that you had to cancel some shows due to COVID. I think it was COVID, right? It was a little mysterious at first.
Bloomgarden:
Yeah, well, yeah, we did have to cancel some shows. It’s really weird because, like I said, I played a festival with a 103 fever like four years ago that no one didn’t know that. That’s not what you’re supposed to do. I just had no idea. I mean, it seems like the smart thing to do, but you weren’t allowed to cancel shows before. And we were really nervous to cancel shows. But actually, not only do we lose money and the booking agents lose money and the promoters and people are traveling to these shows. These are made up shows from years and years ago. But the first band that we were doing the tour with, they told us right away, they were like, thank you so much for canceling. Like, we live with our grandma and she can’t get sick. And we were like, okay, cool. But yeah, a lot of people, everyone was super supportive, which was awesome. I noticed some types of music people are less supportive than others when it’s talking about just being extra safe, which was the decision we made, was to be as safe as possible.
LeValley:
What do you mean? People react differently when someone is sick in a certain genre of music?
Bloomgarden:
Yeah, I’ve just noticed like, when a lot of bands pull out of stuff, people are like, “Hoax” or whatever, like freak out about it. And we were expecting some sort of backlash, but we didn’t get any at all. And that made me feel really good and made us feel really good because it’s heartbreaking to go from never from. It’s just heartbreaking. More than heartbreaking is that we had a very strict schedule and if we missed one date, if it hadn’t happened on the date that it happened, it happened when we were on the West Coast. We had to drive like 8 hours a day to get to the next place. There was no time to just stay where we were and isolate. And luckily it happened in the one place when we were finally on the West Coast where it was like, okay, we don’t need to drive like 8 hours a day just to make it to the next show.
LeValley:
How many shows did you have to cancel?
Bloomgarden:
I think we canceled three or four. I can’t really remember exactly. But we found out someone was sick. They didn’t know that they were super sick, and they didn’t know that they had Covid. But we were supposed to cross into Canada that day, and I was like, we’re not going to a different country until we test. Like, that’s not going to happen. Everyone gets sneezes and sniffles on tour. You wake up early and you’re up super late every day but I was like, we’re not crossing the border.
LeValley:
How many of you had it?
Bloomgarden:
Only one.. We tested in that CVS parking lot and then isolated for a week and nobody else got it, which is amazing because we’re just in a van sleeping, five people in a room every day for a month.
LeValley:
Yeah. That’s truly amazing.
Bloomgarden:
Yeah, it is. I don’t really understand how.. I understand how you can get it, but I sometimes don’t understand how we didn’t get it. I mean, it’s just like, you know, you’re exposed to it all the time. It’s a twist on a classic, if you will. Touring is already hard to maintain health, but it’s a real twist with that Covid going on.
Jason LeValley
LeValley:
Yeah. Speaking of touring, you guys are going to be heading out to Levitation pretty soon, I think. Or not real soon, but in the near future.
Bloomgarden:
Yeah.
LeValley:
Have you guys played Levitation before?
Bloomgarden:
Yeah, we have. We’ve gotten to play it a few times. And I feel bad saying this, but we played the pre-party the year it got canceled because of the storms. And it was like one of the most fun nights ever because everyone knew that was the only show, so everyone was there partying. But then we stayed at a hotel that night and they made the right decision. Somebody would have died. That storm was crazy. There was lightning, and the hotel was right outside where the venue is supposed to be. So that definitely was the right decision. Also very hard. I can’t imagine how much that sucks, but they definitely came back from that. And then we played it again, I think, in 2019, and it was amazing. So much fun. I love Austin.
LeValley:
Yes. And you did a Levitation Sessions album, right?
Bloomgarden:
Yeah, our astral projection session.
LeValley:
What do you mean?
Bloomgarden:
Well, I wasn’t allowed to see other people because of Covid, so we astral projected and met up in this practice space and just recorded it that way, which is a phenomenon. And actually in the beginning of the session, there’s like a 15 minute instructional guide how you too can learn to astral project. We want to make it very clear we were not meeting each other’s bodies and that astral projection would be involved.
LeValley:
Okay. Not sure I follow exactly. Were you guys in different rooms?
Bloomgarden:
I’m just kidding. Of course. It’s like astral projection. It’s where you leave your body right. And so the whole point of it. Yeah, so we said, let’s all meet up on the Astral plane. So we gave an instructional video for how to do that so people could party.
LeValley:
Yeah, well, I guess this was kind of an unusual thing because of Covid but I was trying to get a sense of what it was like to do a Levitation Session.
Bloomgarden:
Yeah, well, ours was very different than all the rest of them. We did one very early on and I was completely brainwashed by fear. I wasn’t capable of being creative too much. Other aside from just we did the best, we had a super fun time. It was super awesome. It was so good to meet up at the end and talk to people on the Zoom meetup or whatever it was, but they’ve gotten way better and yeah, all the Levitation ones have just gotten better and better and better. They’re amazing. Those sessions are like really super cool.
LeValley:
Cool. Let’s see. Are there any other festivals on the horizon for you guys? I mean, I know Desert Daze is coming up. I don’t think you’re playing that one though.
Bloomgarden:
We’re not playing it, but I am going to be on a panel as a speaker. I don’t know when this is coming out. Do you know?
:LeValley:
This interview? Oh, pretty soon. Like within a week probably.
Bloomgarden:
Okay, well I’ll just keep it a secret. I’ll keep what it is a secret for now, but I will be there as a panelist for something I’m very excited about. Huge honor, very excited. A new career path for me has opened up. I’m really excited about it, but yeah, we will be there and support. We love Desert Daze. We love that family. And it’s their 10th birthday, so that’ll be awesome.
LeValley:
Is the music of Death Valley Girls influenced at all by psychedelic drugs?
Bloomgarden:
Yes.
LeValley:
Okay.
Bloomgarden:
I mean, theoretically and conceptually, and literally I think, but my interest in reality and consciousness has been a lifelong thing and all of that goes hand in hand with psychedelics, whether or not you do them. Just the ability to study the mind under different circumstances and consciousness, psychedelics is a really amazing tool for that and I’m a huge proponent of people using the right types of medicines for them. Like I’m very into it. I’m not a huge druggie or anything, but I used to be. Psychedelics definitely helped me steer my life into a livable plane of existence.
LeValley:
Oh, that’s great.
Bloomgarden:
Yeah.
LeValley:
What do you think makes psychedelic music psychedelic?
Bloomgarden:
I have no idea. I’ve been trying to figure that out for so long, I don’t know. I guess what I’m imagining when people say we’re psychedelic, which I’m always confused by, is I think the usage of different instruments is the only reason why I think we are. People are always like, “they’re psych-rock” and I’m like, in what way? I don’t really know if we are, but I think when you use instrumentation that’s more obscure than regular rock and roll or… I don’t know. What do you think it is?
LeValley:
Well, I’m asking the questions today.
Bloomgarden:
Okay.
LeValley:
Yeah, but it’s a tough question, I’ll give you that.
Bloomgarden:
Yeah.
LeValley:
All right, well, last question here. Speaking as a musician, what is the one thing that you’d really like to do before it’s all over?
Bloomgarden:
Like, before the world ends?
LeValley:
Yes.
Bloomgarden:
What would I really like to do? Oh, I would really love to go to Japan and Australia. And Mexico and Colombia. There are so many places I just want to go and spread our message of rock and roll, so there’s not just one. There’s many places I want to go.
LeValley:
Yeah. Right on.
Bloomgarden:
Yeah.
LeValley:
Well, thank you, Bonnie.
Bloomgarden:
Yes. Thank you so much.
LeValley:
Yeah. Good luck at Levitation. I’m sure you’ll have a blast.
Bloomgarden:
Thanks so much. I’m super excited to play with Hunx and his Punx. I love them. It’s going to be such a fun show.
LeValley:
All right, take care. Thanks again.
Bloomgarden:
Have a good day.
LeValley:
You too. Bye.
Gallery
Recent Articles
