1995 Press
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12/21/1995

Leesa Harrington was 19 -- nine-and-a-half-months pregnant with Careisse and wondering when the baby would finally decide to appear -- when she went to see a Brubek, Wakeman and Howe concert. Halfway through the show, Careisse started kicking so hard that Harrington had to leave. Maybe the unborn critic didn't like art rock.

A home delivery via midwife followed, and six years later, an angelically round-faced Careisse is bouncing on a couch in the suburban rental home that she and her look-alike mom share with a revolving, semi-communal cast of musicians and hangers-on, flipping through Harrington's Ozzy Osbourne autobiography. "Guess which one I like," Careisse asks at every picture, giggling, then pointing at Ozzy. "Show what you learned," Harrington suggests, and Careisse folds the middle digits of her left hand down to the palm, displaying the two-fingered prong of heavy metal Satanists and satirists everywhere, waving the hand in the air and shrieking with laughter.

Harrington is one of rock's last great true believers, her bedroom plastered with concert posters, backstage snapshots and Xeroxed playbills reflecting a catholic array of stoner tastes: Iron Maiden, Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, Sabbath, Yes, local bands too numerous and varied to mention. As a guitarist and drummer, Harrington's been in most of the local punk rock outfits -- Josephus, Stinkerbell, Manhole, Joint Chiefs.

These days she plays mostly drums, anchoring Carolyn Wonderland and the Imperial Monkeys, a rootsy rock four-piece fronted by a pink-haired Joplinesque singer. Harrington's nose ring and leather studs are minor anomalies in a band that tends to attract a nuevo-hippie element, but the band members are all mutual friends, and Harrington can drum for anyone who needs a solid beat. Besides, the Imperial Monkeys have a small label deal and a booking agency that sends the band across America, and will send them soon to Europe. It's a working band that actually makes money on the road, and Harrington is a single mom with a born musician's drive to succeed on her own terms. "I don't think I'd be a very good example as a parent," she says, "if I gave up doing what I really want to do."

What Harrington does, of course, means that she's sometimes away from home, touring with the band, and since Careisse isn't old enough to go on the road with mom, Harrington sometimes relies on Careisse's dad and the band's extended family to help out. Careisse thinks her mom's nose ring is weird, and she thinks she probably wants to be a teacher when she grows up.

But she also digs drums, and Harrington freaked one day when she walked into a practice space occupied by the Dave Dove Paul Duo and saw that the impromptu free-jazz drummer sitting in was actually Careisse, looking like a 40 percent-sized reproduction of her drum-wailing mom.

"That's something different for Careisse from how I grew up," says Harrington. "My parents were a lot older. When I was born, I had sisters in their twenties. I feel a lot closer to Careisse, just in age, in attitude even. Sometimes we're more like sisters."...

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