San Francisco Chronicle Datebook

December 10, 2003

Between her heavy-metal past and her eclectic/punkish present, local musician Karney is hitting all the right notes.

Joel Selvin, Senior Pop Music Critic

Rock musician Karney sat in a Potrero Hill coffee house two mornings after throwing a party for her friends to see her band. “I’m still burned out, ” she said. “It’s not just the playing. It’s all the shopping at Costco and getting the party ready.”

At Lennon Rehearsal and Music Services in South of Market on Friday, she was swamped by friends when she came offstage after a blistering set, with her three-piece band, of material from her forthcoming CD release, “All Connected. ” She accepted their congratulations while she sipped a drink. “It’s hard to get all your friends to go out to a nightclub to see you play,” she said. “But you can get them to come to a party.”

The accomplished native San Franciscan rocker may only now be emerging on the local scene as bandleader, songwriter and performer, but she has been playing music in town since she blew clarinet for the all-city all-star band in junior high school. “I first saw her when I was in the pit band at Lowell, ” said trombonist Marty Wehner at her party, “and she was up there playing ‘Gypsy.”’

She toured with the post-punk modern rocker Angel Corpus Christi and worked briefly with Linda Perry of 4 Non Blondes. “That didn’t last too long, ” she said. “She freaked out when I started bringing my tape recorder to rehearsals.”

Karney experimented with blending heavy metal and hip-hop in her late ’80s band, Stepchildren, whose college radio single, “Jericho,” was remixed by Parliament-Funkadelic’s George Clinton. She composed a number of pieces in the minimalist avant-garde school of Steve Reich and John Cage that have been performed. But she never managed to make her name on the local rock scene.

After years of providing piano accompaniment for modern dance troupes or backing drag queens at local cabarets, Karney, who admits to being somewhere around 40, decided to return to college. She studied electronic music at San Francisco State with an eye toward working in the potentially lucrative field of composing music for video games. She has worked on a number — including “Sim City” and “Star Wars Galaxy” — and did music for many boxing matches and football games. She made MIDI versions of every NCAA college fight song.

She financed her new album with earnings from her first full musical score for a game, for LucasArts’ Armed and Dangerous, an Xbox game released last week. She recorded everything from string orchestras to Celtic folk groups in her home studio.

“I would go from recording French horns at my little studio during the day to Fantasy Studios at night to wail on the mike.” She is taking baby steps toward establishing a following outside the small San Francisco clubs such as the Red Devil Lounge (where she will give a CD release party Jan. 16), touring an acoustic version of her act in the Pacific Northwest for the first time earlier this year. Her previous, self-released CD, “Shellshock Girl,” picked up some independent radio play and made a few converts, setting the stage for her new CD.

“I’d say it did well considering it was a one-nag operation, meaning me, ” said the president of Tangent Records, the label she runs out of the Potrero Hill apartment she shares with her husband, trumpeter Bill Ortiz, who plays with the swing outfit Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers, when he isn’t on the road with Santana.

Soft auburn curls falling to her shoulders frame her apple-shaped face. Her singing and songwriting can evoke ’70s rock queens such as Ann Wilson of Heart, Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac or Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, although the intense drive for self-expression that fuels her writing and singing reeks of punk poet Patti Smith.

In front of a couple of dozen friends nibbling food and drinking wine at the rehearsal hall party, her guitar playing is eloquent, complex, lyrical and carefully harmonized with the band’s other guitarist, John Wedemeyer (the supple rhythm section of bassist Victor Little and drummer Thomas Pridgen, an extraordinary 20-year-old talent, completes the lineup). Their part-time tour manager, occasional rapper Steffen Franz — who performs under the name DJ Standout Selector — lends some vocal harmony and takes over for the anti- war toasting on a dub reggae number. The band mixes an arena-rock flavor with the insurgent spirit of alternative rock and some of punk’s raw energy.

Some of her songs have overt political content, and some of her songs deal frankly with sex. “That’s really because I can’t write a love song,” she said. “I can be honest about a sex song.”

The title track of her first album, “Shellshock Girl,” comes from her German mother’s experience during the Second World War, she said, “walking through fields of dead 17-year-old soldiers.” Her first album also contains her song “Slap,” based on a gruesome story of a domestic violence episode she heard a police officer tell from his first day on the job, a recording she decorated with a double-reed Middle Eastern instrument called the karna played by SFSU jazz Professor Hafez Modirzadeh.

“I decided to lighten up a little on the next record,” she said.

– San Francisco Chronicle