The new issue of US alt music journal Magnet (Sept/Oct 1998) has a good feature article on Lisa Germano along with a couple real nice and flattering pics of her.
Here are a few cool excerpts:
Soon after finishing "Love Circus", Germano got together with her friends from Giant Sand - Howe Gelb, Joey Burns and John Convertino - to help create "Slush", the debut album from their OP8 project. At the behest of Watts-Russell, Germano (along with all other 4AD artists) was asked to find someone to collaborate with on three songs. A CD single by each 4AD artist would be released monthly, to be compiled at the end of the year. The project proved unfeasible, but by this point, Germano had already completed her collaboration with Gelb, Burns and Convertino.
"We really liked working together, and we really liked these three songs," she says. "So (Giant Sand's) manager and my manager got together and found a record deal and got (Thirty Ear Records) to pay 4AD whatever it cost to do those three songs. And then we went in and did the rest of "Slush" in four days. (...the result was one of the best 4AD albums of 1997 that was NOT released by 4AD. -Jeff)
Shortly after "Slide", Germano's new album was recorded, she received a phone call from the Smashing Pumpkins' manager, under orders from Billy Corgan to contact Germano about playing with the group on its most recent tour. Initially, she turned it down, unwilling to sacrifice her current happiness to be "Johnny Cougar's fiddle player" for rock's most self-important superstars. But a personal call from Corgan convinced her that her role would be more collaborative. "I thought that was pretty cool," Germano says, "because the last thing I wanted to do is go be a fiddle player in somebody's band right now - or ever". So she flew her cats to Indiana, quit her job, sublet her apartment and took off for four weeks of rehearsals in Chicago and London, to be followed by a four month tour.
And then things started to get weird.
The first thing that happened," she says, "was both MTV and Billboard had specials that said , 'John Cougar Mellencamp's fiddle player joins Smashing Pumpkins.' Then I was like, 'Oh no. This is exactly what I did not want to happen.' But I would have stayed on anyway, because I said I would. Then all of a sudden, the night before the first show, at three in the morning, I get a call in my hotel room from their tour manager. "Oh Billy decided to fly you home. Where do you want to go?' And I just said 'Indiana," because that's where the cats were.
The article also refers to how Corgan then tried to get Lisa to pay for her airfare home and how they wouldn't pay to ship her instruments home from London.
JEFF KEIBEL TORONTO, ONTARIO CANADA