In The Beginning...
American indie rock/pop singer/songwriter who rose to fame in the early nineties. Elizabeth Clark Phair was born in New Haven, Connecticut on April 17, 1967. As an infant, she was adopted by John and Nancy Phair, who had previously adopted one other child, Phillip. At the time of Liz's adoption, her father was a doctor at the Yale-New Haven Medical Center; he is currently doing research on AIDS and is the Chief of Infectious Diseases at Northwestern Hospital. Liz's mother is an instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago. Their family moved to several different locations when Liz was young because of her father's career. Liz even went to England for a year at the age of seven when John received a microbiology fellowship from Sheffield University. She had a hard time adapting to the change, even though she had a crush on Prince Edward and had herself an English accent, as she put it, " the second day." The Phairs relocated to Cincinnati, Ohio for a while before moving permanently to Winnetka, Illinois, a wealthy suburb of Chicago.
I grew up in dialogue. My family table always had discussions that ended up in verbal wars. Whenever the extended family came over, it was sort of a verbal power play. I remember being a young girl at these tables with my dad and my male cousins and my uncle, who was very loud. I didn't know anything, but I wanted to talk really loudly. They loved me to death. Maybe because I'm adopted, they didn't want to mold me. They encouraged me, they were interested in me. I always had a weird net of safety around me.
Liz began to show an interest in music early on, and she began to take guitar lessons when she was in the seventh grade: before that she had played the piano and the recorder, and other various instruments. She was also in a choir, and began to write her own music; in her words, she was always "rebelling against reading music, and I had a good ear and I could just imitate my teachers stuff, and they caught on really early."
Any time any boy had an effect on me... a song had to be written at some point. The songs were the venue for things I never felt like I had a chance to say. If I was obsessed with somebody beyond me or that I didn't know, I'd write to them. It was like my secret fetishism. I'm not one to go running to my friends and tell them what happened that day. I wanted to run to the guitar and say it. A lot of girls weren't out playing sports. A lot of girls were in their rooms, in their little imaginary worlds. That was my songwriting world.
Un-Rock 'n Roll High School
Liz attended New Trier High School, which has a reputation for being a very difficult school, academically, and for drug usage: in an article written by Time Magazine it was said that seventy percent of the student body used marijuana and other recreational drugs because of the pressure put on the students to meet the school’s high expectations.
My high school was very Ferris Bueller, The Breakfast Club... We were so giddy and power-bad, but that attitude changed...New Trier High School (had) a high percentage of people with access to expensive grooming products. There wasn't rock 'n' roll at New Trier. There were 4,000 `Buffy' people, and three punk rock kids, and we'd stare at them in the bathroom. Nobody looked like that. Toward the end of high school, I didn't care about grades anymore. I came up with an existential crisis a bit too young and nearly flunked out. I lost my ability to go to Williams. I kept saying that I didn't want to be guided down a path - I wanted to be my own tugboat captain.
The Oberlin Years: How To Be a Post-Adolescent Bohemian Intellectual And Get Away With It
Liz decided to attend Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, after much debate. Liz found Oberlin to be overly P.C., "heavy and serious" and felt that the school's image of moral and ethical virtue was disingenuous and the social structure "weird" and "inverted." However, Oberlin had quite a developed music scene there, with bands like Codeine, and Come. She was involved in the scene, though only peripherally:
Everyone had a band. It was exactly like Chicago - in fact, a lot of them moved there. There was a lot of rock & roll spirit, but it was an intense place. Neurotic overachievers who want to be hip. Did I ever perform at Oberlin? Never. Oh god, no. I hung out. I was like a band wife. I went out with all the rock musicicans, sat quietly in the rooms while they argued about re-issues and what not, and got drunk, and had my fun.
During her time at Oberlin, she studied art and even interned in New York for artists Nancy Spero and Leon Golub. Liz very much wanted a career in art but soon realized how difficult being a success in the art world was for a female. She recalls an instance where she went through a modern art textbook for one of her classes, saw that out of over a thousand pages, only thirty of the artists were women, and found it very disturbing. Nevertheless, she graduated from Oberlin with a degree in Art History/Studio in Art. After college, Liz pretty much "slacked off for three years." She "did nothing" for the summer after college, and then went to San Francisco, where she also did nothing. Many other Oberlin students had moved to San Francisco and Liz shared a 7,000 foot loft in SOMA (South of Market) with a few of them. They lived a largely bohemian existence, and apparently did little else other than exist. To hear Liz tell it, everyone was good-looking, smart, interesting, and had a lot of time on their hands because no one had jobs – Liz went through her entire savings account supporting herself while she was there. They would sit around in cafes and coffeehouses all day, talking about doing things but never really doing anything.
I was with all these intellectuals who were all doing nothing. Like we would get up in the morning, get high, drink coffee, get dressed, go cafe-ing. Sit and have really deep, intricate conversations about ideas and theory. I mean, my day was very verbally stimulating, and I really was having the best time of my life, and doing absolutely nothing. You know, we were plotting a million thousand theater productions, we were considering film. We were training to be an actor; we were really just whiling away the hours - exactly like that book Generation X, only a different set of people. But it was in a way horrifying and satisfying all at once.
Liz has referred to this period in her life as the "lost years" and when one interviewer asked her to go more in depth she replied, "Just tell them that I experimented with a lot of different lifestyles, OK?" It would seem that there are certain things about her time in San Francisco that she doesn't want people to know about.
The End of Doing Nothing: The Starving Artist Years
She left San Francisco at the age of twenty-two because she was broke, but also because she knew that if she stayed, she would continue slacking off for an indeterminate amount of time; she thought if she was back with her family they would give her some sort of structure to aspire to. Liz moved back in with her parents that winter and refused to get a typical nine-to-five job – she wanted to support herself with her art, because everyone around her told her it couldn’t be done. During this time she was doing large charcoal drawings; she would Xerox pictures from medical textbooks and then distort them to show “a psychological or emotional content beyond just a distorted face.” Between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-six, Liz was a self-described dilettante. She had her own apartment in Wicker Park, a hip, artsy neighborhood in Chicago, and used that as her art studio. Selling her pieces usually got her around four hundred dollars a month and she could hardly pay her rent. She also worked with Ed Paschke, an artist in Chicago, around this time.
I made terrible art, cheesy stuff, until I went to college and I was challenged. People wouldn't let me get away with crap. They forced me to make art that was meaningful. (I had) Freedom. I didn't have typical job hours, which I liked. I was my own boss, totally. And creative rewards. I felt great about myself when I made a great piece of art.
There were a lot of downsides to trying to make it as an artist, however: she couldn’t afford to pay her gas bill, so she had no heat. She couldn't afford clothes. When she couldn’t afford to buy food she would go eat at friends’ houses; otherwise, she subsisted on cold canned beans.
It was romantic for 25 seconds a day, but that sustained me. I'd been selling my art (mostly charcoal sketches) month by month, never knew when I'd have money... it sucked, sucked, sucked. And I had bought myself a four-track and I had been playing with it, and I finally thought here I've done nothing with my fall after I graduated, and I have this hot shit degree and I've done nothing, and I know I'm not going to do anything really with it.
Liz, Lo-Fi: The Girlysounds Era
One of Liz's friends in San Francisco, Nora Maccoby, was inadvertently the reason for the spreading of Girlysounds, a compilation of demos Liz recorded with just a guitar and a four-track in her bedroom after she went back to Illinois:
Nora was the reason, way back when, that Chris Brokaw came to San Francisco to visit us at our loft and subsequently charmed me into playing all my secret songs for him while Nora went AWOL during his stay. I guess something went wrong with their love connection. Anyway, good thing because that's when Chris Brokaw dared me to put my songs on tape and send it to him. So you see, without Nora, there would be no Chris. And without Chris, there would be no Girlysounds. And without Chris and Tae Won Yu making dubs, and me, a reputation, you would not be reading this exhaustive rumination at all. Funny.
Liz began making the recordings when she was twenty-three. Any time she was alone in the house, she'd have a whiskey on ice, smoke a cigarette out the window and record. She sent the tapes to Chris and Tae Won Yu, who made copies and circulated Girlysounds around the country in the summer of 1991.
I go in there and rip stuff off - it's like a library. There's about 50 songs. A lot of it is juvenile cleverness. There's verses, there's choruses, there's subchoruses. It just goes on and on. There's a certain naive sound, more breathy. It's more me...And it got known around the country, swear to God, through an underground tape network. It was an opportunity and a fluke, and I went with it.
The music was the same thing as art, only I got recognition. So I thought, `Cool! I'll do this for a while.'
Liz's Adventures in Guyville
The tapes became infamous and many influential people involved in the independent music scene heard them, leading to John Henderson, head of Feel Good All Over, an independent record label based in Chicago, offering to record some of the material from Girlysounds with Brad Wood, who had founded Idful Music, a recording studio in Chicago. But Liz and Henderson, who Liz had moved in with, couldn't agree on what direction to take with the music: he wanted a very stark, concise sound, but Liz wanted something else. They fought over what he saw as her compromising her artistic integrity, and she moved out of his place. The only thing that their working together produced was two songs for the band Ashtray Boy: she sang on "Infidel" and "Shirley Maclaine" for them. She didn't do anything musically for a while after that incident until Brad Wood called her to see if she wanted to record. They recorded one song together, "Fuck and Run", and were very pleased with the end result. From then on out she would work with only Brad Wood on what was to become her debut album, Exile in Guyville, although Henderson did let Wood know that Matador Records was interested in Liz. In 1992, Liz sent Gerald Cosley, the head of Matador Records, a cassette with six Girlysounds songs on it. He liked what he heard and signed Liz to make two full-length records and one EP. She was given a three thousand dollar advance to record a single which actually became Exile in Guyville. Liz never expected the album to garner the kind of attention that it did: she figured about a thousand people would hear it. (Exile in Guyville ended up selling several hundred thousand copies). The term "Guyville" was coined by a musician from Hyde Park, Chris Holmes, of Sabalon Glitz. It was used by Urge Overkill in a song, "Goodbye to Guyville" and basically refers to the tendency of music scenes to be dominated by males.
And then people in the music scene - that's what the whole point of Guyville was - were shocked that I could make songs, or have intelligent lyrics. I wanted them to be embarrassed for all the nights they sat around, lording over the conversation, talking about music, never including me, and never really asking my opinion.
Liz attacked the project with obsessive intensity. She had no idea how to make an album so she used the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street as her template, going through and collecting all the songs she had written the past few years and picking out the ones that she felt responded to the songs on Exile on Main Street. Liz went so far as to group her songs the same way the Rolling Stones album did - in chunks of five songs, four songs, five again, and four again. She made list after list, going through the album song by song, switching the sequence to make sure the songs matched up thematically, either answering the Stones song or being an equivalent of it. Her reason for being so passionate about the album, it seems, was that she couldn't talk to "this man" (presumably, an ex) anymore and decided that she'd just use the voice of Mick Jagger as his so she could explain her side of the story to him.
It was like writing a thesis, talking a song of mine and somehow putting it in a dialogue with a song on Exile, both sonically and lyrically. You can hear what '6'1"' is about if you listen to 'Rocks Off' and then you listen to '6'1"' and then you think about it. Just as the lyrics and then the guitar parts on Exile On Main Street lead you to an impression rather than an actual image, in my songs - and in the juxtaposition and sequencing - I tried to do the same thing.
The recording took place during the summer of 1992, at Idful Studios, with Brad Wood, in Chicago. Casey Rice, an engineer at the studio, was convinced to play guitar for the record, and the rest of the instrumentation was mostly done by Liz and Brad. They recorded the parts singly; Liz would do the guitar part, then she would let them know what kind of sound she was going for and what kind of instruments they would need to use. The group basically made the record backwards: usually the rhythm section is recorded first and then come the vocal and guitar parts, but Brad and the others worked around her vocals and guitar. Liz would run into problems later in her career with producers who were less able to help her "flesh out" her songs in the studio.
With the release of Exile in Guyville, Liz became a darling of the rock critics. The album was praised immensely, making the Village Voice's rock critic poll for 1993 and was deemed album of the year by Spin. Rolling Stone even called her the best new female artist. Liz became the poster girl for up-and-coming women in rock and was said to be "(leading) alternative rock's postpunk 90s naturalism to a captivating new pinnacle" by the editor of Billboard. With lyrics like "I want to be your blowjob queen" and "I know that I don't always realize/
How sleazy it is messing with these guys," her image as the modern, sexually aggressive single girl was cemented in the minds of those involved in the indie rock scene. (Of course, this image was further emphasized by the album's cover, a topless picture of Liz she had taken herself in a photobooth at the Rainbo Club and was convinced by Nate Kato of Urge Overkill to use as the cover). But along with the admirers, she also had her fair share of negativity: in the local scene in Chicago she was sometimes trashed in the press, with people questioning her credibility. Steve Albini also seemed to have an irrational vendetta against her.
The Sophomore Effort
Because of the album sales of Exile in Guyville, Matador Records got offered distribution deals from several major labels. Matador eventually decided to work with Atlantic Records, who would release Liz's follow-up album, Whip-Smart. Liz decided to work with the same group of people she'd worked with on her previous album, once again recording at Idful Music. They employed the same "backwards" method of making the record: Liz would pick a guitar riff and then Brad would record the bass, drums and other parts to make the whole thing sound like a cohesive band. The album took about a month, altogether, to record, and was done in two parts: sessions were done in August 1993 in Chicago and January 1994 in the Bahamas. Liz calls Whip-Smart a less sexual album than Exile in Guyville and describes it as a “rock fairytale:”
A little myth journey -- from meeting the guy, falling for him, getting him and not getting him, going through the disillusionment period, saying, 'Fuck it,' and leaving, coming back to it. There is a real entrance and exit to the album, with each song rolling on to the next one. 'Crater Lake' illustrates when you think (the relationship is) done, but it isn't really done. The following song, 'Alice Springs,' is saying, 'I guess it will never work'; the subsequent song, 'May Queen,' says, 'Work? Who wants it?' Like, I got over and out. It's a real encapsulated thing. It's almost more representational, like 'Here are the songs that mark my journey,' instead of 'These are the songs I sang on my journey,' which is more Guyville. So in a sense, it's more removed.
Whip-Smart was one of the most eagerly awaited releases that year. It was mostly received well by critics, and even produced a single that was given immense radio and MTV airplay, "Supernova", an homage to Liz's future husband. Rolling Stone and Spin both wanted to feature Liz on their cover but in the end Rolling Stone won out, with the condition that Liz grant an interview exclusively to them. Predictably, Spin was not pleased with the situation and yanked a review praising the album. Whip-Smart eventually went gold, but it was at the bottom of the Billboard 200 charts after only ten weeks. The most likely reason for this was Liz's refusal to tour: she became notorious for her crippling stage fright when she toured to promote Exile in Guyville, and she also felt overwhelmed by all the promotion she had done and the pressure she felt in releasing a record after such a phenomenally successful first album.
Despite all the turmoil going on in Liz's professional life, her love life began to improve. She married Jim Staskauskas, a film editor she'd met while making a video for "Stratford-On-Guy", on March 11th, 1995. She moved in with him and his teenaged son, Aidan, in Wicker Park.
When she got back from her honeymoon in April 1995, Liz began a limited solo tour that was comprised of just Liz, her guitar and occasionally a piano. During this time, she performed several songs that had not been previously been recorded, some cover songs, and even some Girlysounds songs.
After all the drama she went through with Whip-Smart, Liz decided to take some time off. She got in touch with her old friends and began to set up house with Jim. On December 21st, 1996, Liz's son, James Nicholas Staskauskas, was born. Liz felt simultaneously different and the same after her son was born:
Motherhood has changed me a lot. It was instant adulthood, in a positive sense. It makes me feel like a real human being. I feel good about doing something well that was hard to do. It makes me want to do more things that are hard and do them well...Motherhood surprised me. I thought that motherhood would turn me into the baked cookie angel. But I'm still the same person. At first I was so preoccupied with learning how to be a mother that I wasn't really myself. Now I'm stronger, and I like myself a lot better.
Juvenilia, whitechocolatespaceegg, and Bootlegs
During Liz's time away from her career, Atlantic Records ceased the distrubution deal they had with Matador, but they were able to secure a distribution deal with Capitol Records instead. Liz began to work with Jim Elison of Material Issue on songs that were drastically different from her previous work: covers of "Turning Japanese," the Banana Splits' theme, "The Tra La La Song" and "Rocketboy." For a while, Liz played around with making demos at her house before deciding to record her third album, whitechocolatespaceegg, in the studio with Scott Ritt, who is probably most known for producing many of R.E.M.'s albums. Scott and Liz worked together for over a month straight, six 16-hour-day weeks. When they were finished with around twelve songs, Liz decided to set up some recording equipment in her house to experiment with the tapes, which she thought sounded too "clean." Her intention was to make them a little rougher sounding. The duo had worked well together for the most part, but they did face some frustration because of the differing ways in which they worked: Ritt was used to working with a band that came to the table with most of their material and how they wanted to sound already worked out, and Liz was used to her backwards way of making a record, starting from scratch and gradually adding things.
Liz let Gary Gersh, the current president of Capitol Records, listen to the first incarnation of whitechocolatespaceegg. He told her it didn't have any potential hit singles, so she went back and worked on the album some more. Liz's manager talked her into working with Brad Wood again, which she had been reluctant to consider. However, when Liz went back and listened to her other records, she saw how much Brad had been a part of fully realizing the "Liz Phair sound" and agreed to work with him again. Brad and Liz began recording at Velvet Shirt Studios in January of 1998. The songs that came from these sessions ended up being some of the album's best: "Polyester Bride", "Johnny Feelgood", "Uncle Alvarez", "Go On Ahead" and "What Makes You Happy."
I got to work with great people on this album, people who I really admire and respect. And I learned a lot. This four years (between albums) wasn't just about, "Oh, can we squeeze something else out of Liz Phair while she's busy having a baby." It was about me wanting to grow, and wanting to get a sense of what other bands get at the beginning (of their careers), just by virtue of having already worked at it for so long. I became famous much sooner than I should have, from an experience standpoint. I was totally inexperienced, I didn't know anything about the business, and everything happened just like that. So this time - between Whip-Smart and whitechocolatespaceegg - was my time to actually learn what it's like to do all these different things, to try different things and to appreciate what all you have to do.
Liz got the idea for the album in a dream while she was pregnant. While she was carrying her child, she couldn't use caffeine or drugs (she said she was so "sober it hurt" during this time) so she occupied her mind with reading. After reading a book on intuition, she decided to channel Scott Litt and wrote the song "Big Tall Man." "What Makes You Happy" is a song that had been in the works for six years before she was finally satisfied with it. "Only Son" was rumored to have been about her brother, Phillip and some business-related trouble he got into. Liz gives her audience a peek into her marriage in "Go On Ahead". Whitechocolatespaceegg is described by Liz as being about what she wants, and not caring what others want for her or what they think about her choices.
Liz had hired a new team,
AMG, to manage her just before the whitechocolatespaceegg release. AMG is a very influential
talent agency and had the ability to make Liz more well known. Liz was in the public eye more then ever now, with her music being featured in several television shows and films; she even modeled for
Levi and
Calvin Klein.
She also headlined a solo tour and opened for
Alanis Morissette later in 1998. In 1999, Liz did a small college tour, with varying degrees of success.
Perhaps the biggest step for Liz was to join the
Lilith Fair tour on its last year. Having to perform for such large crowds made her more comfortable with being onstage, and Liz enjoyed herself on the tour, making
friends with many of the musicians. Despite the extra effort Liz put forth to promote the album and herself, whitechocolatespaceegg did not do especially well critically or commercially.
Other interesting recordings from Liz's years out of the spotlight are Juvenilia and the WSCE Sessions bootlegs. Juvenilia was an EP that was released in 1995 and was Liz's first official recording to include Girlysounds songs: "Batmobile", "California", "Dead Shark", "South Dakota" and "Easy." The EP also included some previously unreleased tracks and "Jealousy", a song from Whip-Smart.
Scott and Liz had left behind some master tapes and one other tape of recorded material when they were by themselves in a studio. A fan somehow got a hold of the WSCE sessions tapes and distributed them to members of the Liz Phair mailing list, Support System.
The six tapes include several different versions of the songs on whitechocolatespaceegg and many that didn't make the final cut, such as Bloodkeeper, Bars of the Bed and Hurricane Cindy. The other tape, known as the Shelved Demos, somehow got out to one of Liz's fans in 1996. Eventually, a two-disc set of these songs was compiled and became the WCSE Sessions.
Liz also appeared on the PBS program Sessions at West 54th and did vocals for Sheryl Crow ("Soak Up The Sun") and Ben Lee ("Away With The Pixies") in 1998. She also contributed a song, "Erecting A Movie Star", to the film First Love, Last Rites with the band Shudder to Think.
Liz Wades Into the Mainstream
While Liz was vacationing in the Caribbean, Capitol would end its distribution deal with Matador, with the condition that Matador would keep all of its artists except for Liz Phair, who would stay on with Capitol. Capitol saw her as potentially becoming much bigger, and so did Matador, which is why they let her go: they saw her as moving further away from indie, and thought a big label would be more suited to her needs. In the fall of 1999, Liz moved to Manhattan Beach, California with her son, Nick, while her husband stayed in Chicago; the marriage was beginning to show some signs of stress. Liz felt at home in Los Angeles:
I don't want to be dissing Chicago but I'm really excited to be here. In Chicago, I always felt out of step (with the music business). Here, I feel like my identity's completed.
She alternated between spending time with her son and recording some new material in 2000, and becoming involved in various projects. Liz appeared a few times on television channel VH1, and recorded the theme for the show Cursed as well as contributing some songs to the film Julie Johnson. Liz even had a small role in the indie movie Cherish in 2001, and became a spokeswoman for Apple and The Gap.
In 2001 the Chicago Tribune ran an article saying that Liz and her husband had sold their home in Chicago and Spin reported that they were separating (they were actually in the final stages of their divorce). Liz did some work on an upcoming album later that year, meeting with producer Matt Mahaffey and sound engineer Ken Andrews, and even Brad Wood briefly, although he would not be as big an influence on this album as in the past. At the end of 2001, Michael Penn came on board to produce, and helped Liz "flesh out" some songs she'd written with songwriter Gary Clark. On the self-titled album, Liz worked with a countless number of mainstream producers, including The Matrix, the production team responsible for Avril Lavigne's debut album. Bassists Mike Elizondo and Wendy Melvoin, who worked with Dr. Dre and Prince respectively, and session drummer Matt Chamberlain, would all have a hand in Liz's album. Later, she would also work with Pete Yorn (he does guitar and drums for "H.W.C.") and Walt Vincent. Liz's self-titled fourth album was finally released after several sessions of editing, much anticipation, and many delays. This album, and Liz, suffered from immense backlash. Some liked it, but many people did not want to see the former indie rock goddess go mainstream and branded her a sellout, which was rather ironic, seeing as she never felt accepted in the scene in the first place.
People are like, 'Don't be commercial, then. Just be... Wilco.'...But even when I made Guyville, I was hating indie then. The whole album was about how much I hated indie. I was sick to fucking death of that snobbery... So here's your question in life: Do you acknowledge who you are even if people don't like you for it?...Should I pretend to be cool so that you will approve of me? After I had my kid, the revelation I had was, Life is incredibly short. I like who I am. And I'm just gonna like what I like and go for what I want to go for.
Where She Is Today
Liz keeps a relatively low profile now, touring occasionally. Her latest album, Somebody's Miracle, is set to be released on October 4th, 2005. Like Exile in Guyville, it's supposed to be a song-by-song response to an album by a male musician: Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life.
Discography:
Demos:
Girlysounds
Albums:
Exile in Guyville (1993, Matador Records)
Whip-Smart (1994, Atlantic Records)
whitechocolatespaceegg (1998, Capitol Records)
Liz Phair (2003, Capitol Records)
Somebody's Miracle (2005, Capitol Records)
Funstyle (2010, Rocket Science Records)
Singles and EPs:
Carnivore (1993, Minty Fresh Records)
Supernova (1994, Matador Records)
Juvenilia EP (1995, Matador Records)
Polyester Bride (1998, Toshiba-EMI Records)
comeandgetit EP (2003, Capitol Records)
Insanity (2003, Capitol Records)
Why Can't I? (2003, Capitol Records)
Extraordinary (2004, Capitol Records)
Everything To Me (2005, Capitol Records)
Sources:
Juvenilia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juvenilia
Lis Phair bios. http://www.matador.recs.com/bios/bio_liz.html
Liz Phair discography @ Never Said. http://mywebpages.comcast.net/discographer/liz/index-main.html
Liz Phair's Guyville: Official Liz Phair Community. http://guyville.lizphair.com/guyville/?u=babyblue
Liz Phair - Phair Junkie Hangout. http://www.phairjunkiehangout.co.uk/index2.html
Mesmerizing - Liz Phair Biography. http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Club/2471/biography.html
Nashville - A Liz Phair Website. http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Towers/8529/index.htm