MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (AP) — Laurie Lindeen is late for an interview, but she has a good excuse: Her 9-year-old son had a baseball game across town.
It’s a domestic life now for the former rocker, who is married to Paul Westerberg, ex-frontman of The Replacements. For about seven years, Lindeen led the pop trio Zuzu’s Petals. She chronicles her life on the road and shares her coming-of-age story as a former cheerleader in a new memoir, “Petal Pusher: A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story.”
“I was witness to some cultural moments I certainly didn’t think were going to be cultural moments at the time,” Lindeen says, settling down with an iced tea at a coffee shop in Minneapolis’ hipster Dinkytown area.
Lindeen, 45, is dressed for summer, wearing a straw hat with upturned brim, purple shirt and blue jeans with rolled-up cuffs. Her dishwater blond hair is held in front with a barrette. A fan of thrift shops, Lindeen and her band mates were known for wearing prom dresses and other vintage clothes and for placing their purses on stage so they wouldn’t be stolen.
Through it all, Lindeen stresses, Zuzu’s Petals were ladylike.
“We did rock fairly hard, and we were definitely into that, but we were just also like normal, American girls. … We just sort of, you know, used our smarts and held our own,” she says.
Zuzu’s Petals never achieved the notoriety of Babes in Toyland, another Twin Cities girl band of the late 1980s and early 1990s. They recorded only two albums (both out-of-print) on the indie label Twin/Tone Records. (Rhino Records is scheduled to release a Zuzu’s Petals best-of, “Kicking Our Own Asses,” on August 28.)
But Zuzu’s Petals endured, zigzagging across country and opening — but not headlining — at First Avenue, the downtown Minneapolis nightclub immortalized by Prince’s 1984 movie “Purple Rain.”
“We stunk for about three solid years at least — I mean, really stunk — and so most people had written us off by the time we were getting kind of good. So cutting our teeth on these poor people, they sort of had already discarded us, and we had to, like, travel to find people,” Lindeen recalls.
Lindeen didn’t pick up guitar until she was 25. In her book, she compares her do-it-yourself approach to the “Think System” used by con man Professor Harold Hill in the Meredith Willson musical “The Music Man” — think the music, and you can play it. The Tony Award-winning show is one of Lindeen’s favorites.
“All the guys that we were hanging out with at the time had been in about 70 bands and had been locked in their rooms playing guitar since they were 12,” says Lindeen, who sang alto in her high school choir. “Because we didn’t have that background, the cool thing is we created something really unique and figured out a way to make it sound pretty good, instead of the traditional ways like the guys who learned (Eric) Clapton records and all that stuff.”
Lindeen bemoans how bookstores are placing her book — which she says is more of a coming-of-age story than a rock bio — between John Lennon and Marilyn Manson.
But her editor, Peter Borland, said “Petal Pusher” has been doing well since hitting the shelves in May. He agrees with Lindeen that the book is about more than music.
“I thought anyone could relate to that moment in your life when you’re younger and anything is possible,” said Borland, senior editor at Atria Books. “And she does get married and has a kid. It’s not about becoming the next Joan Jett.”
The oldest of four children — three girls and a boy — Lindeen says she was “extremely normal growing up,” except it was the 1970s in Madison, Wisconsin. In her book, she writes of the pain of her parents’ divorce and her own struggles at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she flunked out four times.
“I never went to class,” Lindeen says. “I was a party girl. I wasn’t prepared for college, I started at 17 and I just basically assumed I was there to have a good time.” (She eventually earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Minnesota and went on to a master’s in creative writing.)
It was during a Thanksgiving trip to Chicago in the early ’80s that Lindeen, then 24, suffered a health crisis that pushed her toward forming a band.
She was walking to a Replacements show with her friends when her left leg and hand suddenly became numb and paralyzed. She discovered she had multiple sclerosis, a disease of the central nervous system. Lindeen was hospitalized, but after steroid injections and physical therapy, regained control of her body. The only lingering effect of her MS episode, she says, was that the disease left her legally blind in her left eye.
After her recovery, Lindeen decided to move to the musical hotspot of Minneapolis and form a band. She supported herself as “the mean waitress” at a Dinkytown breakfast eatery.
“I could have decided to roll over and die at 24, but I sort of used it like something that’s like, ‘Well, this could happen again. What do I really want to do?’ And what I really wanted to do was get that band going,” she says.
In 1988, Lindeen enticed her friend Coleen Elwood to join her on bass (the band’s original drummer was replaced by Linda Pitmon). Inspired by the 1946 Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Lindeen decided to call her band Zuzu’s Petals, after the rose petals belonging to daughter Zuzu that Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey discovers in his pocket at the film’s uplifting end.
“Petal Pusher” details the band’s long hours in vans, bars and cheap motels: “A lot of filth. A lot of grit. A lot of unkind people.”
“I just think that was underground rock culture, and maybe we were ripe for the picking, because we’d come in in our dresses and be really polite, because we were taught to be polite. … (Promoters thought) ‘Well, let’s make mincemeat of these girls,’ you know.”
Elwood is now a yoga instructor in Minneapolis while Pitmon is a professional drummer in New York. Twelve years after breaking up, Zuzu’s Petals recently reunited in St. Paul in a forum sponsored by Minnesota Public Radio. But there are no plans to continue the band, Lindeen says.
“I thought it was hilarious,” Elwood says of Lindeen’s book. “I was a little nervous going in, but I thought it was great. I thought it took a lot of courage … and I laughed my head off going down memory lane. It sounds like it was made up, but this stuff was real.”
Home life with Westerberg, who coaches son Johnny in baseball, is “swell,” Lindeen says.
“It hasn’t always been. There’s been a lot of challenges. But we’re a family. And we are devoted to our son, and Paul’s healthy right now. He quit drinking a couple of years ago — again — which was critical,” Lindeen says. “We’re on stable ground right now.”
After releasing the albums “When No One’s Looking” (1992) and “The Music of Your Life” (1994), Lindeen broke up Zuzu’s Petals in 1995 without achieving their goal of writing a catchy hit like “Our Lips Are Sealed” by the Go-Go’s.
“I was getting older. I was looking at the end of my childbearing years, if I kept it up. … Co (Elwood) and I were always like, ‘Let’s just get one huge hit, and then we’ll all go do something else.’ We were never in it for life.”
For her next book, Lindeen is planning a sequel: “Rock and Roll Housewife.”
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