Positively Phranc

Biography

Phranc (born Susan Gottlieb in 1957, Los Angeles, California) is an influential American singer-songwriter whose career has spanned several decades. She first gained public attention in the late 1970s and early 1980s punk scene in Los Angeles. With her bleach blonde crewcut and male attire she was an androgynous enigma, well suited to perform in her first band Nervous Gender, which formed in 1978. The writer V/D wrote of her for the punk fanzine Slash, "On stage, Phranc looks like a 14-year-old...

Phranc (born Susan Gottlieb in 1957, Los Angeles, California) is an influential American singer-songwriter whose career has spanned several decades.

She first gained public attention in the late 1970s and early 1980s punk scene in Los Angeles. With her bleach blonde crewcut and male attire she was an androgynous enigma, well suited to perform in her first band Nervous Gender, which formed in 1978. The writer V/D wrote of her for the punk fanzine Slash, "On stage, Phranc looks like a 14-year-old runaway from a boys' reform school." The band was influential in the development of what later came to be known as 'Synthpunk'. In 1980 she left Nervous Gender to join Catholic Discipline, in which Claude Bessey, journalist for Slash zine, was the lead singer. She was also in Castration Squad, an all-girl punk band.

Phranc appears with Catholic Discipline in The Decline of Western Civilization, a documentary by Penelope Spheeris and considered one of the seminal punk movies.

In the 1980s Phranc pursued a solo career. She performs in Paul Morrissey's film Madame Wang's (1981) as Phranque. She began playing an acoustic guitar and released Folksinger on Island Records in 1985. Since then, she has been one of the artists attributed with the acoustic folk revival of the late '80s, also known as 'Anti-folk', a punk-folk hybrid. She self-styled herself the "All-American Jewish Lesbian Folksinger" and with a wry sense of humour released the LP I Enjoy Being a Girl, appearing on the cover with her now trademark 'flat top' hair style.

Phranc was an important influence on the Queercore movement, being acknowledged as such by Team Dresch in their song for her, "Uncle Phranc". In the 1990s many queercore bands and musicians involved in the scene began collaborating with her. She appeared as a guest on the Team Dresch LP/CD Captain My Captain and, as well, members of Team Dresch, Tobi Vail of Bikini Kill, Patty Schemel of Hole and others have played with Phranc on her EP Goofyfoot and other songs. Phranc performs and is interviewed in the seminal queercore documentary She's Real, Worse Than Queer and she has appeared frequently at Queercore events such as Olympia's Homo-a-go-go festival. She continues to record. On her full-length CD of 1998, Milkman, she is joined by Steve MacDonald of Redd Kross, who plays bass. Her newer releases, including Milkman, appear on her own independent record label, Phancy Records.

The 2001 documentary film "Lifetime Guarantee", directed by Lisa Udelson, chronicled Phranc's life with a focus on her day job as a Tupperware consultant. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.