Interview Dum Dum Girls’ Dee Dee on her favorite girl-group tracks

It’s only been a few years since Dee Dee (whose real name is Kristin Gundred) started recording fuzzy garage demos in L.A. as Dum Dum Girls, and she has since recruited her friends into a harmonizing, black-donning, all-girl band. The Girls have taken their bleak “buzzsaw” sound and refined it into hi-fi distortions on He Gets Me High, their latest Sub Pop EP, out next week. With some help from songwriter-producer Richard Gottehrer (“My Boyfriend’s Back,” Blondie), the four new songs wrap Dee Dee’s vocals—and various ’60s callbacks—in a whole new wall of sound, letting her fondness for the girl groups of the ’60s resonate through the fuzz. The A.V. Club talked to Dee Dee before Dum Dum Girls’ national tour—stopping Feb. 24 at The Empty Bottle—about her all-time favorite girl group cuts. 

The Supremes “My World Is Empty Without You”

Dee Dee: I love the vibe of this one. It’s definitely one of my favorite songs by The Supremes by far.

The A.V. Club: Were The Supremes your first exposure to girl groups?

DD: They were the first girl group I ever heard, and it was because my dad listened to a lot of The Supremes and had their records. I’m a big fan of the Motown sound. I don’t see Dum Dum Girls as limited to an homage to ’60s girl groups, but they play a huge role in what we do. I love vocal groups. I love the incorporation of vocal harmonies, and call and response, within the context of rock ’n’ roll and older pop styles.

The Ronettes “Be My Baby”

DD: It’s a classic for a reason. We did a cover of “Be My Baby” at one show, and people always ask us about it. Maybe we should do it again at some point. What The Ronettes had that really got to me was Ronnie Spector’s voice—it’s so undeniable—and the way the songs were produced. She’s this larger-than-life person, voice, and aesthetic inspiration. I hope I can meet her in the near future and give her some face-to-face admiration.

AVC: What would you say to her if you met her?

DD: Probably something she’s heard a million times: what a huge fan I am, and how I can claim she’s one of a handful of reasons why I wanted to be a singer. I found this great girl group documentary I recently posted about on Twitter, where I happened to see a particularly fantastic clip of her being interviewed while in bed, talking about when she realized she had to be a singer and could do nothing else. She said it had to be rock ’n’ roll, and how she was defining her voice and being influenced by certain singers. I could see myself saying that exact thing about her.

The Shangri-Las “Dressed In Black”

DD: I’m kind of a sap. I really enjoy the lyrics and the pastoral narrative of this song. I happened to marry a wild child, so I pretend it’s about my husband. The arrangement and sentiment is beautiful, and it has a bit of this dark undertone of longing for something that you shouldn’t or can’t have. There’s a lot of melodrama in the girl group song contents, which is something I absolutely love and have tried to impart in my own music.

AVC: Do you think looking back that any of these girl groups are subversive?

DD: If you contextualize music back then, it was at a turning point. Girl groups were a trend; there were so many, and there weren’t a ton of them writing their own songs or playing their own instruments. Girls who were doing this on their own were pretty rare. It was an era of songwriters and backing bands.

Of course until my dying day I will revere The Supremes, but I enjoyed some of the songs that The Shangri-Las did because they wrote songs about topics that hadn’t really been explored before. They played up the bad-girl angle and, as cheesy as that sounds, it was a departure from the more innocent, dainty groups. There’s that classic record cover Leader Of The Pack where they’re standing next to a motorcycle. They embraced a much tougher aesthetic.

The Shirelles “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”

DD: Aside from being a beautiful song, it’s essentially saying, “If I sleep with you tonight, where does that leave me tomorrow?”

AVC: That sounds like some pretty controversial subject matter for 1961.

DD: Tackling that in a pop song at the time was probably strange. Maybe I’m reading into it more than most people do, but it’s still relevant today.

Dara Puspita Dara Puspita 1966-1968

DD: Dara Puspita is an Indonesian all-girl garage band from the mid-’60s who played their own instruments and wrote their own music. What they were doing was politically risky in Indonesia at the time. The first song I heard from Dara Puspita was one of the covers from their compilation put out by Sublime Frequencies. They’re a label based out of Seattle, and they release a lot of strange, international music from the ’60s.

AVC: Things have completely transformed since then. Now you even have your own record label. Who else besides the girl groups made you want to form your own girl group?

DD: A lot of the most influential were pretty in-your-face women. I’m a huge Patti Smith fan—I heard Horses when I was 17, and it changed my life. I love Siouxsie Sioux and Grace Slick. I really looked up to them, and there seemed to be this huge divide between what I could do and what they had done.

It took prolonged exposure to all sorts of different women in music to finally make me realize that it was something I could do as well. I think it stemmed from wanting to be The Ronettes when I was little, or loving The Bangles. It was something that spoke to me, and the music I was writing required other females to sing the harmonies. It turned out to be so enjoyable and so special that at least for right now I can’t imagine doing it any other way.