Mannequin Pussy Gets Silly in Philly.

Text by Brian Wilensky. Images by Michael Bucher.

There’s a conversation happening in the basement of Marisa Dabice’s house in West Philly. The singer and guitarist for Mannequin Pussy and Thanasi Paul, the band’s other guitar player,  are discussing the logistics of getting to an upcoming gig in the Boston area with drummer Kaleen Reading. Whose car is available? Who’s down to drive? It’s mid-April and it’s five hours to Beantown, but no one’s concerned about the trip just yet because the show isn’t until May. The next issue on the docket is about playing a birthday party.

“I’m always down to play,” says Paul.

A few snags in their schedule are discussed. It’s not looking good for the party.

After setting up the drum set and plugging in and tuning their guitars, the band blasts through a couple new and a couple old songs, only stopping momentarily to try out a different length for one of the new songs’ verses.

“Let’s try that part four times instead of two,” offers Dabice while playing through the verse.

However, she isn’t singing at practice tonight because she’s been sporadically fighting off bronchitis for days, maybe weeks. In the wake of her ailment, Kat Bean of the post-punk trio Amanda X fills in on vocals for “Clue Juice” at their gig at Everybody Hits less than a week later because Dabice still feels under the weather.

Dabice and Paul, who have known each other since they were five years old, play the song at the practice with Reading, working through its adjusted structure with ease as if it’d never been changed. It shows that this is a tune they’ve been woodshedding for a while. Actually, they were prepping these new songs for a recording session they just wrapped up at Kensington’s Headroom Studio for a split EP with Amanda X to be released later this year.

The practice is quick and they head back upstairs, past Dabice’s roommates in the kitchen, where something garlicky is sizzling in a frying pan. It’s raining outside and a cop car flies down the street with its lights ablaze. Each of the bandmates takes a spot on the front porch, which is mostly bare aside from a snow shovel and a chair that Dabice helps herself to. Each of the three seem comfortable, as if this is where they belong and they don’t want to be anywhere else.

That attitude may apply to where Mannequin Pussy is at the moment for the band as whole, but also as a band relatively new to Philly. Dabice and Paul moved to Philly last summer and fall, respectively, whereas Reading lives in New Jersey. Dabice and Paul started the band as a two-piece in New York City around 2011. They then met Reading and brought her in to move Paul out from behind the drum set to play guitar, the instrument he’s more comfortable with, in 2013. Even being just shy of living in Philly for a year, the bandmates already feel the advantages to the new city.

“It was after our first tour that the second we got back to New York, we realized how everyone else lives in the rest of the country,” says Dabice about the cost of living in New York City. “It was like that slap in the face. ‘What am I doing?’ Especially when you really want to be free to create something and continually keep working.”

Being able to live in a city she can afford is critical for Dabice since she’s a musician who writes not only for the cathartic release but also for connecting with those who listen to her play.

“The act of wanting to create something really drives you insane,” she continues after a pause, as if to consider every word. “If you desire to do something but you’re not actively doing it, then you’re feeling like a failure before you even start. And I got to this point in New York that I felt so creatively atrophied because my mind was on everything else. But I still had this desire to perform and to write music.”

Despite the ongoing degeneration she was experiencing in New York, Dabice still found some time to write with Paul. Many of the songs on their neck-breaking debut album Gypsy Pervert, a 10-song blast that’s barely 20 minutes long, were written as early as 2011. They finally made them into a full-length cassette in early 2014 before Tiny Engines pressed it to vinyl in September of that year.

But because of being held down by full-time jobs in New York City, they felt much less freedom to go on tour at will, which was really impeding the band. This is what can make it tough to be active within a scene in a city with such high overhead like New York is known for having.

“Philly seemed like it was cool and more reasonable to live in,” Paul says. “You can actually do fun things and not have to kill yourself and work all the time. In New York, you can play shows on the weekends and maybe call out a couple days a month. But that’s it.”

The musicians in New York aren’t the only ones taking the heat on the cost of living there. It’s forced many others in its scene to work double-time to keep up. And it’s the pace of the city’s gentrification that’s changing the DIY landscape.

“We were able to pay our rent,” says Edan Wilber of the now defunct warehouse space in New York, Death By Audio, where Mannequin Pussy performed many times. “I mean, it wasn’t aways on time but we were still able to pay it. It ended up being a thing where we went from having a handful of shows every month to me booking every night of the month just to be open.”

Wilber adds that having to overextend himself ultimately over-saturated the calendar for those who attended shows at DBA.

“I wouldn’t have booked it if I didn’t want to see it,” says Wilber, reconciling the need for the money to keep the venue open.

As for the gentrification of DBA’s Williamsburg neighborhood, he says he saw it coming.

“DBA was in a desirable neighborhood but it was on the outskirts,” he says. “So that’s why we were able to exist for so long – because nobody came out there. It was just so far out of the way. Then apartment buildings started showing up. They started redoing the waterfront and it was becoming all these luxury condos. So it’s insane how long we were able to stay and do what we did in the face of such a neighborhood.”

Since the demise of DBA, Wilber has since moved back to Florida, where he grew up, into a house with his girlfriend. He says he’s enjoying simple things that New York took away from him like cutting the grass. Looking back at his time in New York, Wilber says that going to shows in warehouses inspired him to put on even more shows, which is likely a sentiment shared across all DIY scenes.

But in New York, Tyler Kane a promoter for Shea Stadium and booker for Brooklyn Night Bazaar, is still trying to encourage growth in DIY music and to further foster a community.

“When you’re 13, 14, 15 and 16 years old, you want to go to shows and be a part of the community,” Kane says. “I really think we should focus on having more all-ages spaces and not keep them from getting shut down. So kids can go and be inspired by music and be a part of the community.”

Now approaching their first full year in Philly, the members of Mannequin Pussy have already observed some positive differences in the local DIY scene. Some of them are a bit obvious, such as the accessibility of practice space.

“I like being able to practice in someone’s basement in a house,” Reading says, “rather than in New York, where you’re paying rent to live somewhere, plus paying rent to practice somewhere.”

Dabice, however, has been taking note of other aspects of her new city since becoming involved in the Philly DIY community. She sees how everyone in the scene works together to help each other, not to get ahead of one another.

“When we lived in New York, we would get asked to play a show, people would ask me, ‘Hey, how’d you get that show?’” Dabice says. “And it’s like, ‘Yo, we got that show because they fucking asked us to play.’ The question they were really asking was, ‘Are you working with a booking agent? Do you have a PR person? Could you help me out with getting into that?’ Whereas here, I’ve noticed we’ll get on a really strong bill and our musician friends will be like, ‘Hey, I heard you got on that show. That’s going to be sick I’ll see you there.’”

It’s that sort of community feeling that truly empowers artists. In just a short period, Mannequin Pussy has felt the dramatic change from where they’ve come from, whether they’re writing new songs, getting booked on outstanding bills or just being able to live in a place that allows them to do what they live for.

“I feel so inspired by Philly,” Dabice says. “Because it seems like the people who are here are artists and musicians. They’re not just talking. I feel like in New York, people are either talking about what they wanted to make or about money. Whereas here, people are actually doing stuff. So, you see what they’re doing and you’re like, ‘Oh shit, I’ve got to light my own fire, too.’”