Laura Jane Grace’s current solo tour is already booked through June, and it will eventually take her to nearly 30 cities on both coasts, and everywhere in-between. But it begins here, in Florida, her old stomping-grounds. Out of all the venues booked, there is none that she’s worked more often than the High Dive, where she’ll be playing on Friday night, April 14. “When it was Common Grounds, I used to play there all the time,” she says via Zoom from Brooklyn.
Gainesville in the 1990s was an extremely fertile ground for not just musicians, but also a new generation of political activists whose efforts remain a factor today. Laura Jane Grace was an early convert to those cadres, following a traumatic encounter with the police, and the lessons she learned in that era continue to influence her art and her politics, to this day. “Back then, 1997, 1998, there was an awesome group of activists spread out across the state, and we would get together in different cities every month. And every group did Food Not Bombs in their local cities, and we’d organize rides to the protests in the bigger cities. We would all gather in the Ocala National Forest. When I moved to Gainesville, it was primarily because of the Civic Media Center, and everything that was happening around there.”
She’s picked a fine time to come back to Florida, given the current chaos in our politics and our culture. But the timing was no accident for her. The tour began at 926 Bar & Grill in Tallahassee on Tuesday the 12th, and she’ll be at The Social in Orlando on Saturday the 15th, followed by Floridian Social Club in St. Petersburg on Sunday the 16th, then Culture Room in Fort Lauderdale on Tuesday the 18th, before concluding the Florida run at Jack Rabbits on Monday the 19th. There will likely be a number of fans going from show to show, some of whom have been fans from their earliest days.
She may take her full band on the road later this year, but this present spring fling is a more stripped-down, relatively solitary affair for Grace. But she’s got a solid opening act throughout this month: Weakened Friends, a winsome trio formed in Portland, Maine in 2015, consisting of singer and guitarist Sonia Sturino, bassist Annie Hoffman and drummer Adam Hand. Their second album, Quitter, was released by Don Giovanni Records last November; they also have three EPs, and a nice Audiotree session. Joining them, also, is Gainesville’s own Mike & The Nerve, founded here in 2017. Their album Watershed Drive was released in 2021.
Laura Jane Grace was born at Fort Benning, but she is best-known for the she began in her adopted hometown of Gainesville. The most famous, of course, is Against Me! That band has released seven albums, four EPs and two live albums on six different labels since their founding in 1997. Her second solo album, Stay Alive, was released by Polyvinyl in October 2020, and she’s released two EPs as well.
Being an independent artist these days is about more than just playing the actual music, but also cultivating and maintaining a fanbase that can undergird creative efforts. “I’ve been really lucky to have had a wide variety of experiences,” says Grace, “and what’s really contributed to me and my band having such a unique fanbase is that we’ve had the opportunity to tour with a LOT of different bands. And when I came out as transgender, I think that enabled a lot of people who might not feel comfortable at a punk show, queer people or whatever, feel comfortable being there, made it more of an inclusive environment. And, also, at this point I’ve been doing it for 25 years. There’s that segment of the fanbase that’s grown with me. So you’ve got your 40 year-old punk rockers, but what makes punk rock so amazing is that there’s always that newer generation. And then, also the opportunity to play a wide variety of festivals, and picking up new fans from there, writing a book, doing the docuseries. Everything you do like that, you get a little more from, and then you put it all together and it brings it all in. If you stay totally linear and in your lane, in my opinion, that’s what leads to the death of your career, the death of your art.”
After all these years on the road, the logistics of touring remains essentially the same for her, although the all-pervasive influence of technology cannot be denied. “In some ways, it’s dramatically easier,” she says, via Zoom from her home in Brooklyn. “But in other ways, it being easier makes it much more stressful, because of how quickly it moves. When I started out, it was literally a matter of literally writing a letter, putting it in the post box, then waiting however long to hear from some stranger, like, ‘Can we play your house in Rochester, New York?’ And then you’re going out there, totally blind, and you don’t know this person or what the situation will be. We would go out and do tours that were a month long, and maybe like a dozen out of 30 shows booked would actually happen. In the old days, when you were on the road, and the van broke down, you were pretty much fucked–you’d just have to walk down the road to the nearest gas station to find a pay phone to call a tow truck or whatever.”
Ultimately, artists in her realm make the majority of their income from touring, so Grace, like countless other artists, is still kinda playing catch-up on the money missed during the pandemic. “We were three shows into a tour, and it got canceled,” she says. “How bands survive is going out and playing live shows, but I’ve tried to put myself in a position where, if something like that ever happens again, the effect isn’t completely devastating.”
Having started in the music business as a teenager, Grace has matured into a mentor for newer bands, which she views as both a blessing and a responsibility. “I know that there were those bands who did that for me,” she says. “For me, the way that I learned to do it was by looking to the bands who were already doing it. ‘They’ve got a van, we need a van.’ ‘They’re booking their own tours, we can be booking our own tours.’ ‘There’s no record label that wants to put out our record, we’ll record it ourselves. Following the example of others is what allowed me to be able to do it, so of course I feel obligated to do the same.”
These are tumultuous times in Florida, of course, and for Grace the personal is very much political. As one of the leading trans female performers in America, she has long been an influential advocate for LGBTQIA rights in and around her native state, and she shared our general concern with the direction things are going in. “Yeah, I don’t mind talking about this stuff at all,” she says. “Honestly, part of me is scared. There’s a part of me that wonders, could this be my last time touring through Florida, because soon enough, a person like me could be outlawed from existing in the state? In some ways, these things are becoming more and more glaring.” There are no easy answers, but Laura Jane Grace is here to ask the questions.
https://www.laurajanegrace.com/
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