ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, January 15, 1997 TAG: 9701150011
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID BAUDER ASSOCIATED PRESS
The circumstances of life - marriage, a daughter and the need to work temporary jobs to pay the rent - may have conspired to thwart Amy Rigby's rock 'n' roll dreams.
Embracing them as inspiration, however, enabled her to produce a work of enduring quality.
The 37-year-old songwriter's album, ``Diary of a Mod Housewife,'' is a tale of survival in the face of an unforgiving world and an uninspired marriage.
The Pittsburgh native is a veteran of New York's rock underground, with a career that included two little-noticed albums by her band, the Shams.
When that band broke up, she decided to use her own life as research. ``I didn't want to fight about sex and laundry with my husband unless I could turn it into a song,'' she wrote in the new album's liner notes.
As a result, Rigby's songs resonate with life's little truths. They feel lived in.
``Sad Tale'' tells of a splitting couple doomed to raise their child together by telephone. On ``Down Side of Love,'' Rigby sings about how ``that tingling feeling when you're first holding hands soon gives way to a list of demands.''
Her Dylan-flavored ``20 Questions'' features a narrator greeting a drunken beau with a mixture of anger and vulnerability.
``Do you still love me?'' the singer demands. ``Did you ever love me? Do you still find me attractive? What time do you have to get up in the morning?''
Finally, the kicker: ``When are you going to get a real job?''
Rigby defines a mod housewife as someone being dragged into adulthood against her will. It's a woman who blares Elastica on the headphones while pushing a supermarket cart, who squeezes into a thrift shop miniskirt despite varicose veins.
``After years of trying to be in bands and to get people interested and never really succeeding I started to see what it was I had
to offer as a writer,'' Rigby explained during a lunch break from her temp job in midtown Manhattan.
An art student when she moved to New York City from Pittsburgh in 1976, Rigby found music a more direct form of communicating.
The joy she feels making music invariably comes with guilt attached: she doesn't have a ``real job'' and can't really be working because she's having so much fun.
Her camaraderie with the other temps inspired one of her best songs, ``The Good Girls.''
``My mother never went to work,'' Rigby sings. ``She stayed at home and didn't get paid. I do double time, I'm slaving 6 to 9. I'm so tired at night. I think I got it made!''
Rigby admits she's thought about making her day job permanent, giving up her music dreams.
``I say it every morning to myself, even today I said it,'' she says. ``I'm terrified every day. I'm terrified about how I'm going to pay my bills. I just go back and forth between feeling like the luckiest person in the world and the looniest person in the world.''
Thoroughly a New Yorker, Rigby sings in a tender voice to music that's a little bit folk, a little bit country and a little bit rock 'n' roll. Radio programmers know it as Americana.
She's opened concerts recently for Marshall Crenshaw and Jim Lauderdale, and set up performances at radio stations and in bookstores.
This rung of the rock 'n' roll ladder is about as far from chartered airplanes and room service as you can get. Even though Rigby's estranged husband, Will, is a drummer, he made only a cameo appearance on the album. It was cheaper to have him stay home with their daughter, Hazel, than hire a baby sitter.
And Rigby has no assistants to set up concert dates. She gets on the phone and does it herself.
``At this point, I probably don't cry too much anymore when I hang up the phone from one of those rejection calls,'' she says. ``I probably recover a lot more quickly than I used to.''
Hazel, 8, sometimes feels neglected when Rigby makes her business calls. Yet, Rigby was filled with pride when her daughter noticed that Rolling Stone magazine gave mom's latest album a higher rating than Tina Turner's.
``I feel like I kind of waited my whole life for that - to have made a work of art and to have people understand exactly what I meant,'' she says. ``It really feels like an achievement.''
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Musician Amy Rigby's CD ``Diary of a Mod Housewife'' isby CNBa tale of survival in an unforgiving world and an uninspired
marriage. color.