this also reminds me of my first drum lesson when i was 16. my instructor looked at me and said, “this is good…you have big hands for a girl.” i’ve had that thought in my head ever since.

Thank you for all you write!

(“Un-cle Walt-er” and “Aunt Al-i-son” almost scan the same…)

There was a core collective of six to eight who made the main decisions, plus they hired others for specific projects (like, Joan Lowe was the sound engineer on their most successful albums) who of course could give input but they weren’t actually part of the collective. To save money, they mostly all lived together, and sometimes one or more of the “employees” also lived with them, blurring the living collective into the Olivia collective per se.

However, their opening statement in Paid My Dues, 1974, p. 18, reads “Olivia will be operated on a collective basis, in which musicians will control their music and other workers will control their working conditions.”

In 1975, the Olivia Collective issued a statement of income and expenses in 1974 which was printed in Paid My Dues. The reasons they gave for this public accounting were “we believe feminist institutions should be accountable to the women who support them…We think it is our responsibility to you to tell you how the money you gave us was spent.”

The original group planning Olivia Records late in 1972 included ten members, but only five went on to become the original collective: Ginny Berson, Meg Christian, Judy Dlugacz, Kate Winter, and Jennifer Woodul. This article states:
Olivia began as a collective and remained so for the first seven years. “We changed structure because it stopped working” says Judy [Dlugacz]. “What we didn’t realize then but recognize in hindsight is that a collective works only if it’s small and the people have the same commitment, ideologies, and goals.”

In July 1988, Hot Wire Magazine published the first of a two-part article by Judy Dlugacz titled “If It Weren’t For The Music: 15 Years of Olivia Records”, pp. 28-35 . She describes the origin of Olivia as: “In 1973 10 women got together. Some of them had been part of The Furies, the radical lesbian feminist newspaper out of Washington, DC which had been run by a lot of fairly high-powered gals — like Ginny Berson, Charlotte Bunch, Rita Mae Brown, Jennifer Woodul, and Colita (sic) Reid. Several women from that group were looking for a way to work together on an on-going basis after The Furies disbanded.

The original meeting was at the home of Ginny Berson and Meg Christian on 27 January 1973.

“There was also a group that had been part of Radical Lesbians in Ann Arbor (including me) who had recently moved to D.C. We were also looking for something on-going to do politically.”

The original group of ten met together for half a year. They made Olivia into a corporation but tried to come up with alternative structures such as a collective. Then the number dropped to eight, and by the time the decision was made to move to Los Angeles in 1975, the collective consisted of five members: Ginny Berson, Meg Christian, Judy Dlugacz, Kate Winter, and Jennifer Woodul.

In the planning stages, they were contacted by engineer Joan Lowe who owned a small record company in Oregon. She offered to do anything to help them, including coming to them and serving as engineer. They accepted her help. She came to D.C. and recorded their first 45, Meg Christian singing “Lady” and Cris Williamson singing “If It Weren’t For The Music”. This 45 was used as a fundraiser and brought in enough income to make their first LP, I Know You Know with Meg Christian in 1974. After the move to Los Angeles, they were a living and working collective for financial reasons.

When they had enough money again, they made a second album in the summer of 1975, Cris Williamson’s The Changer and The Changed. Joan Lowe again came to town and served as engineer. This sold beyond their wildest expectations, 40,000-50,000 albums a year, and by 1988 had sold over 250,000 copies.

Dlugacz stated “The living collective remained for seven years, and we just kept adding people to the working collective.” She names the addition of Sandy Ramsey and Robin Brooks.

Olivia Records’ move from Los Angeles to Oakland occurred at the end of 1977. Dlugacz states “In 1978 about fourteen of us were living in this one ten-room house. It drove us all a little crazy. Eventually the living collective broke up into people living in separate spaces.” The collective also headed into difficult financial times. Kate Winter left right after Olivia produced the Teresa Trull album Let It Be Known in 1980. Meg Christian left the collective in 1984, leaving only Judy Dlugacz of the original five. Judy was president of Olivia and the company has remained in her name.

She states that circa 1975, “We had a commitment to using women, and particularly at that point in time our premise was based upon a fairly separatist viewpoint.” She goes on to discuss the flak their received for their insistence on women-only concerts, other negative feedback, and states “I think the strongest example was at the point where we were working with a transsexual. This was a very major turning point for us. We were still in Los Angeles, and we had been looking for a woman engineer who was a little closer than Joan, one who lived at least in California. Someone mentioned Sandy [Stone] and we interviewed her. She had tremendous credentials, which was terrific. It seemed like yet again lightning had struck and we had found the perfect engineer. So were going forward, about to start BeBe K’Roche, our third album, when we got a call from Boo Price. She said that she was now recording Margie’s album Songwriter; they had been in the studio where we were going to record BeBe, and an engineer there had told her Sandy was a transsexual. I took the call from Boo, and when she said, ‘I just wanted you to know’, I said ‘Thank you very much.’ I got on the phone and called over to Kate Winter to ask what a transsexual was. She had a friend who was a transsexual, so fortunately she was able to describe what it was to the rest of us.” (See article for remainder of this long episode.)

According to their own public records:
The 1976 album BeBe K’Roche lists “The Women of Olivia” as Ginny Berson, Robin Brooks, Meg Christian, Judy Dlugacz, Sandy Ramsey, Teresa Trull, Kate Winter, Jennifer Woodul, and the women who distribute Olivia Records.

That same year, the Judy Grahn/Pat Parker album lists “The Women of Olivia” as Ginny Berson, Robin Brooks, Meg Christian, Judy Dlugacz, Sandy Ramsey, Teresa Trull, Kate Winter, Jennifer Woodul, and the women who distribute Olivia Records.

In 1977, the Teresa Trull album The Ways A Woman Can Be has a photo insert which shows “The Olivia Records Collective”: Ginny Berson, Robin Brooks, Meg Christian, Judy Dlugacz, Sandy Ramsey, Teresa Trull, Kate Winter, and Jennifer Woodul.

All of the above information is drawn from contemporary primary source documents, not later revisionist versions. I can’t list them all here without having this comment delayed, but one of the best sources is from Queer Music Heritage’s excellent collection online at http://www.queermusicheritage.us/olivia7.html
of Olivia herstory, album covers, and JPEGS of pertinent articles from women’s publications of the times (you’ll have to read through the articles yourselves, it’s not indexed). Also, RainbowHistory dot org slash furies has almost all of the copies of The Furies newsletter, the phenomenally influential lesbian-separatist publication which had national distribution (preserved online courtesy one of the collective members, JEB). Olivia arose directly from “The Furies” (with some later input from Radical Lesbians members). I transcribed the first essay from The Furies and published it online at my personal blog.

A lot of the work that I do (musically, not at the Day Job) seems to be collective, whether strictly or not, and I just wonder how it goes down for others. The personalities involved probably have a lot to do with it. In Vox Populi, we had the blessing/curse of some very well-informed and geeky, but also very stubborn people…..that particular dynamic makes it hard.

Hairball (#93),
it looks like a viola to me, unless there’s some weird perspective going on. The body width and shortness of the neck are what make me think, yes, viola.