The story always seems to go like this: some kids meet in high school (The Ramones) or college (R.E.M.) with dreams of forming a band. They gather in someone’s basement or garage, sneak in some cheap beers and fumble through their chosen instruments until they start to get the hang of them. They play a few back yard gigs. And, voila, a band is formed.
In the case of Spitnkitn, though, the drive to it was more along the lines of three full-grown moms dropping the kids off at school, getting jacked up on really good coffee and slamming out the frustrations and ironies of life, both personal and beyond, in three-note chords.
So was born the East End band Spitnkitn back around 2010, when friends Lindsay Morris (guitar), Barbara Dayton (drums) and Susan Nieland (bass) found their mutual love of hard-driving, often female-forward music.
For those of us well beyond our twenties (or thirties, or forties), the idea of getting together with any consistency for… anything … is a tough sell. Time, work, family demands and ever-clashing schedules make most good intentions (or rock n’ roll dreams) fly right out the rolled-down window of the speeding Trans-Am of life.
East End residents Morris, Dayton and Nieland have not only defied the usual work-life balance suspects, they also prove with Marhsall stack-boosting volume (for those in the back who can’t hear) that late middle-age female rockers are alive and well and ready, willing and able to blow the doors off.
“I have always been musical. I was in band when I was little and played the glockenspiel and the flute, and piano. Then I got into playing guitar,” says Dayton, who grew up in Patchogue and took up drumming at the very un-teen age of 39. “I was an exchange student in Bolivia when I was 16 and a lot of people would get together and play guitar and sing songs, and that’s where I learned how to play very basic guitar.”
But there was a musical itch to scratch that carried through the decades, and she knew that time wasn’t on her side. “I said to my husband, ‘I don’t want to be on my deathbed and never having played the drums; I know I’m meant to be a drummer!'”
Morris has been playing guitar since she was 12 and growing up in Michigan, and she always loved to sing. Nieland? Your garden-variety piano lessons from tiny-tot time to her early teens. “I played bass for one minute in college,” laughs the Denver, Colo. native. “That was it. But when they asked if I could play bass? I said, yeah, sure!”
Dayton, the part-time managing director for the non-profit Fighting Chance, and her husband, a recovering punk rocker from Boston, started playing together for fun. One night at a party at which Morris and Nieland were also in attendance, the conversation turned to great possible names for as-yet-unformed bands. Spitnkitn was thrown into the mix, and a little bit of lightening struck all three of them.
“When the kids were little, we’d all gather at my house because that’s where the drums were,” says Dayton. “They’d come to the house around 9 or 10 a.m., have coffee, play music, talk about life stuff and share things. It was always very therapeutic.”
They learned covers of favorite musicians and bands, like PJ Harvey (“The album ‘Dry’ is one I go back to and never, ever get sick of,” says Nieland), the Stooges, the Pixies and Heartless Bastards. They began writing their own music, too. Anthems like, “You’re Makin’ Dinner Tonight,” “Mental Wipeout” and “Walk On.”
“We’ve all just been building our skills over the years and getting better and faster,” says Dayton.
Their first gig was at Ashawagh Hall, a “super family-friendly event and we were just getting into our PJ Harvey moment — which is not that conducive to little children running around,” laughs Morris.
“But I have a really cute video of us playing and all of our kids dancing!” says Nieland. “It was pretty funny.”
Fifteen years later, and the trio is still going strong.
This weekend, you can catch Spitnkitn — and maybe even tap into some of their undying rock ‘n roll energy to form your own band, you punks — at Sag Harbor’s Masonic Temple (200 Main St.) on Saturday, Dec. 12 at 7 p.m. For more information and show tickets, click here.
And for a little musical preview of their punk prowess, listen to this track recorded by local music producing legend, Cynthia Daniels of East Hampton’s Monk Music.
