After playing a show with her band at a bar in Atlanta, Georgia, Carey Fay-Horowitz waits in line in for the bathroom. The room is dark and its placement is subterranean, as the venue is underneath a bar. As Fay-Horowitz, who stands at 5’2” and has tightly curled brown hair, waits, she is approached by a well dressed and drunk blonde in her early thirties, who readily gives her opinion of her band.

“When I saw that you were all girls, I left the room to go get a beer,” the woman says. “But when I heard your set, I came back and thought you were great.”

This is not the first time Fay-Horowitz has been approached with comments like these. She hears similar remarks from men and women at all of her shows, no matter in what part of the country her band is playing. Although she admits the person is usually trying to give her praise, the sentiment is often backhanded.

“I always pretend it’s a compliment, but what is implied is a little bit more depressing: that female musicians tend to disappoint people, that they have the expectation that we’ll be bad,” says Fay-Horowitz. “It’s like people are surprised that we’re good.”

Fay-Horowitz plays drums in an all-girl band called Songs for Moms, and has been playing the instrument since she was 14. Last summer she was a counselor at the first Girl’s Rock Camp in Portland, where she met Claire McCabe, another counselor.

McCabe learned to play guitar when she was 19 years old, but did not find anyone to play with for years.

“It wasn’t until I was a senior [in college] that I realized I could be in a band,” says McCabe. Although she knew how to play guitar at the time, McCabe was the singer in her first band.

“There were already four or five other guys who were all plugged in and ready to go, and they never even thought of me being able to play guitar,” she says.

On the 14-hour drive back from Portland Girl’s Rock Camp McCabe and Fay-Horowitz decided to give girls in the Bay Area something that they never had growing up. They agreed to bring the Rock Camp for Girls back with them, and they decided that they should be the ones to coordinate the project. The rest of the trip home was spent establishing goals for the camp and making plans on how to achieve those goals.

Bay Area Girl’s Rock Camp (BAGRC) will launch next summer as the first of its kind in the Bay Area. This camp is part of a rising trend of summer camps in the United States and in Europe to help young girls gain self-esteem and empowerment through rock music.

In planning for BAGRC, McCabe and Horowitz have received a lot of support from other Girl’s rock camps after joining the Rock Camp Alliance, which is a consortium of Girl’s rock camps in the U.S. and Europe. The members came together to discuss different ways to run a camp, network with each other and to discuss their individual missions.

“Each camp’s mission is a little different, but all under the understanding that we’re not going to make this a corporation that is a mainstream way to make money,” says McCabe. “That’s not the point, it has to stay non-profit.”

With help from the other camps in the Rock Camp Alliance, McCabe and Horowitz have been instructed on a variety of fronts, from learning how to complete the complicated paperwork required applying to 501c3 tax-exempt status to how to create daily activity plans for the campers.

Girls enrolled in the camp will choose an instrument—guitar, bass, drums, vocals, or keyboards—and will receive instruction from camp volunteers while in session. Every day there will be a lunchtime show featuring a band with at least one female to show the campers different styles of music and how bands can be organized, as well as to provide strong female role models.

Besides giving girls instructions on how to play the instrument of their choice, one of BAGRC’s goals is to fight against gender stereotypes in the music industry and beyond.

One issue BAGRC will address to its campers is sexuality on stage. According to McCabe, girls tend to think more about what they should wear or how they should modify their behavior so they can be more appealing to boys in the audience.

“Girls are sometimes in a position where they’re objectified, so when they’re performing, it’s all about the physical rather than the substance,” says McCabe.

McCabe hopes that by not having male audience members, appearance will not be an issue for the girls and they can focus on what they are doing instead. McCabe comments that a lot of the reason girls stress this is because of the examples they have in the media, such as the idea of the “rocker girl”—a sexy girl with more emphasis on how cool she looks with a guitar instead of the fact she can actually play it.

“It’s a very watered down version of what women are trying to do when they learn to play their own instruments,” says McCabe. “It has more to do with the image rather than the talent.”

Both McCabe and Fay-Horowitz agree that one expectation of girl musicians is that they are not expected to be loud.

“One example is in musicals where girls sing in a pretty soprano or almost like a ‘damsel in distress’ role,” says McCabe, who was involved in musical theatre as an adolescent. “It’s unique for women to be angry in music or to be singing in a way that’s not submissive and beautiful.”

Fay-Horowitz has dealt with this stereotype first hand while on tour with her band. A friend told her that he overheard a sound technician talking about how her band needed more microphones on the drum set and on stage because, as girls, they wouldn’t be loud enough to be heard.

Another important skill to teach the girls is how to work their equipment to install confidence. While on tour with her band, Fay-Horowitz was belittled numerous times by soundmen who thought she and the other members of her band had no idea how to handle their equipment just because they are girls. During Fay-Horowitz’s last tour, one soundman tried to tell her that her band did not know how to set up their equipment correctly because he said they had never played on a stage of that size before, even though they had. He went ahead and set their equipment up his way.

“It sounded terrible because he didn’t take my advice,” says Fay-Horowitz. When she asked members of the other band she was touring with, they agreed with her.
McCabe also says that girls are often stereotyped when they are required to supply technical knowledge about their equipment and hopes BAGRC will give campers the tools to handle situations where they have to confront guys, like when asking for help in a music store. Another co-coordinator of BAGRC, Sarah Mehlfeld, had an experience at a music store where when asking a guy for help to look at a guitar.

“Because the pick guard was shiny, he said, 'Hey, you can check your lipstick in the pick guard before you go on stage,'” says Mehlfeld.

McCabe hopes they can encourage girls to learn how to produce and record their own music, because the media often emphasizes women like Britney Spears who do not write or produce their own music.

“When it comes to technology, you can do it yourself,” says McCabe. “And hopefully this will create an empowerment for the girls when they see themselves in male dominated fields in the future.”