Pleased to Meet Me: Laurie Lindeen

"WHY WOULD AN educated Midwestern white girl think that when she got her college degree, the best job out there was forming a band?"

Soon after Laurie Lindeen asked herself this question, she ended up with a novel.

"Petal Pushers: A Rock 'n' Roll Cinderella Story" is Lindeen's memoir of growing up in Madison, Wisc., and eventually marrying Replacements singer Paul Westerberg and starting a family. In between, Lindeen tells of moving to Minneapolis and touring the country as frontwoman for the all-female punk trio Zuzu's Petals.

But for all the fun she had with her band, "I was never a rock star."

And Lindeen cautioned, "I didn't write a tell-all — I wrote a memoir. It's not just the beginning and end of my band. ... It's a book about fronting an all-women indie rock band, but it's also about growing up Midwestern, it's about how women learn to deal with their bodies, it's about women in music and it's a lot about my relationship with my father."

Of course, her relationship with one of alt-rock's idols plays no small role in "Petal Pushers," either.

Lindeen and Westerberg became friends while she was attending the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

"We used to goof off and drink beer and smoke cigarettes," Lindeen said.

After she moved to Minneapolis to pursue her rock stardom dream, she and Westerberg eventually started dating.

"A lot of what happens in the book is that I start self-sabotaging [Zuzu's Petals] career," Lindeen said. "I'm traveling and going out with him at this point, and I could never put up with the pressure of the type of fame he had. Not that I was ever going to get it, but I didn't like the person I was in that job and I couldn't handle it.

"We started going out right when I was really getting stressed out in the band, so he was a great person to be with because he really gave me perspective and helped calm me down."

Zuzu's Petals eventually broke up and Lindeen prepared for the life of suburban domesticity.

"It was very painful at the time, and the other two [band members] did not want to stop. I just couldn't do it anymore," she said. "[But] it was a great decision. To this day, I thank that I had the good sense to pull the plug when I did."

Throughout her time with Zuzu's Petals, Lindeen wrote, whether it was songs or notes to pen pals across the country.

"When I was in the van all day, I was writing letters. I started writing letters to Paul, and he's like, 'You know, you're a writer. You should write.'"

Lindeen took his advice and exchanged songwriting for novel writing.

"Writing songs was great because when I was young, I was pretty wild and had a pretty short attention span," she said. "Songs were the perfect format to be clever with words and then you get to repeat yourself in the chorus."

Nowadays, Lindeen's more methodical, forcing herself to advance on her work daily, and that sort of schedule suits her just fine.

"I'm just much better [in] a room by myself, typing. I was just not the gregarious, fun, go-get-'em person you need to develop a [musical] following. I was more a 'don't-look-at-me-shut-up' type of a person."

Lindeen has already begun work on her next novel, which she said picks up where "Petal Pushers" left off.

"It's going from the most culturally esteemed position of a rock singer to the most socially reviled position as a rock wife, and being dropped into suburbia and the awful adjustment and the surprises and all that good stuff," she said.

"I certainly wouldn't recommend rock wivery for the faint of heart."

» Olsson's, Dupont Circle, 1307 19th St. NW; Mon., 7 p.m., free; 202-785-1133. (Dupont Circle)

Written by Express contributor Katherine Silkaitis
Photo by Ann Marsden