Rock Star Mommy:: My Life As A Rocker Mom

By Judy Davids

For Moms About To Rock (We Salute You)

When suburban mother of two Judy Davids picked up a guitar and conspired with the neighborhood moms to form an all-mom rock band, she never imagined it would actually happen. Within weeks, the Mydols were born. Did they have a clue what they were doing? Nope. But from that point on, it was full steam ahead and never mind the laundry.

Rock Star Mommy is a rallying cry for every woman who fondly recalls when she spent more time in mosh pits than "Mommy and Me" classes. From the moment Judy Davids donned a pair of go-go boots and jumped onstage, she embarked on an unforgettable journey. Rock Star Mommy chronicles Davids' experiences as a music fan, a mother, and the leader of the Mydols--one of the first "mommy" rock bands in the country.

If you've ever had the urge to grab a guitar, dye your hair pink, and turn your minivan into a makeshift tour bus, you'll find a kindred spirit in Judy Davids. Rock Star Mommy is the perfect companion for any mom who's ever wanted to raise good kids--and raise a little hell at the same time!

"Let's get one thing clear: The Mydols don't take any lip." --People Judy Davids was a suburban soccer mom with rock 'n' roll dreams when she picked up a guitar and decided to start a mom rock band. Soon after, the Mydols were born. Suddenly Judy found herself in the pages of the supermarket tabloid The Sun while shopping for Lunchables. She lives in Royal Oak, Michigan, with her husband, John, sons Dylan and Willie, and a black Labrador retriever named Ozzie.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Citadel Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780806535685

Book preview

mydols

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GETTING HAPPY

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OLLOWING

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HAT

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US

And it really came together when mom sang along.

—Lyrics from The Partridge Family’s C’mon, Get Happy

One of the greatest gifts my mother gave me was time to daydream. In the summer we weren’t allowed in the house (unless we were eating lunch or bleeding) until the street lights came on. So I spent a lot of my youth mulling over my life beneath a maple tree in our suburban Detroit backyard. I was a nice Italian American girl. My grandfather immigrated to the United States and ended up in Motown when Henry Ford announced the famous $5 a day wage. The middle sister of three girls, I had a pleasant middle-class upbringing with a nice little house, a dog named Punky, and, of course, that tree where I spent most of the summer musing over the two images I liked the best—being a mother and being a rock star.

My own mother was definitely not a rock star. She spent most of her day asking, Can you tone it down? She was a librarian in the neighborhood elementary school. At that time in my life, the only woman I’d ever seen who was a mom and a rock star was Shirley Partridge of the 1970s hit TV show The Partridge Family. She became my idol. With her shag hairdo and polyester outfits, she took the rock-and-roll drug-culture image and made it just benign enough still to be exciting for a 10-year-old. She taught me the way to get happy was to have five kids, a music career, and a colorful means of transportation.

Shirley was hip. She drove her family around in a multicolored 1957 Chevrolet school bus to places like Las Vegas, where they opened for Johnny Cash. My own mother’s life did not require that level of physical activity or excitement. On Friday nights while my sisters and I watched The Partridge Family, my mother and grandmother would sit in the kitchen drinking coffee and crocheting afghans while my dad dozed in a chair. The only adult who would watch it with us was my Grandpa Tony, who would always ask us an uneasy What’s this world coming to? in broken English.

Things to Miss About the 1970s

• Tube tops. They’re not appropriate once you’ve breastfed.

• Elephant bells.

• Farrah Fawcett hairdos.

• Cast of Hollywood Squares. Charlie Weaver, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Wally Cox gave squares hope of being famous one day.

Shirley inspired me to sing into a hairbrush in front of the mirror for the next four years. By the time the show was cancelled in 1974, I had already moved on to Elton John and lip-syncing songs at teenage slumber parties. And by college I began dressing like my favorite pop stars—Cyndi Lauper and Boy George—to the bewilderment of my parents. Shirley was the farthest thing from my mind. After I graduated, I got married and the years flew by so quickly. Instead of becoming a rock star, I had two beautiful sons, and I got an inconsequential desk job. It afforded my little boys cute clothes from the Baby Gap, and for a long time, that was enough for me. It would take almost ten years before I stopped buying them blue-colored clothes and bought myself my first pink guitar.

Where Were All the Female Rock Stars?

By the time girls like me reach the fourth grade, we give up trying to be rock stars and concentrate on dating ones instead. Maybe it’s because I was born to nurture. I focused on everyone’s goals and dreams but my own. Or maybe I was just lazy. Either way, I spent my elementary school years trying to figure out which Beatle would make the best boyfriend when I could’ve been taking guitar lessons. I stared at the cover of my Introducing the Beatles record for hours and then flipped it over and colored the back with Magic Marker. I happily ruined a collector’s item by personalizing it with hearts and stars, symbols of my devotion. (Most days I dreamt Ringo would be my boyfriend.)

In high school, I was a good student who was a member of the National Honor Society and the pom-pom squad. And even though I graduated with salutatorian honors, I continued my seemingly childish infatuation with rock stars, turning my attention during those years to Peter Frampton. (I must have a thing for British accents.)

In 1977 I dragged some of my girlfriends to the Pontiac Silverdome for a ’70s-style megashow. We saw Frampton, the Steve Miller Band, the J. Geils Band, and the Romantics all for $7.50. That was a lot of money for a 17-year-old back then. Our tickets turned out to be horrible. I forgot to take into account when I purchased the cheap seat that 80,000 other people would be there too. I decided we were going to have to sneak onto the main floor if I was to get Peter’s attention. We managed to weave through the crowd all the way to the stage just before he came on. There was a huge Plexiglas barrier between him and me and the remaining 80,000 people in attendance. Once he started singing, everyone rushed the stage and pressed me into the barrier. I could barely breathe. I was perspiring so much from the crowd body heat that I was creating a sweaty Shroud of Turin on the glass. My friends retreated, but I refused to leave because I thought I saw him look at me with my face squashed against the glass. From his perspective I must have looked like an ass pressed against a glass shower door.

I still recall that as one of the happiest experiences of my life. The lengths I would go to for my favorite bands.

Talkin’Bout My G-g-generation

Moms born after 1960 are the first group of cradle rockers. We started on the Beatles when we were in diapers. Rock and roll is the only kind of music many older moms, like myself, relate to. The punk music that shocked us in college is being played today on soft rock stations as we drive our kids to school. Rock and roll is about as normal as it gets. If I wanted to be a freak, I’d rap

With the Band

At 21, I didn’t marry Ringo as I’d planned. I married John instead—not Lennon but Davids. I met John on a beach in 1978 on my last day of high school. It was Senior Skip Day; that’s the day the teachers all look the other way and the kids all meet at Stony Lake in the farthest northern suburbs of Detroit. Even though John and I both went to Hazel Park High School, we never said a word to each other. John had graduated the year before me, and he was home for the summer from the University of Michigan. He walked up to my beach blanket on the sand and tickled my toes. I’m fairly certain at the time I outweighed him by ten pounds. He was a skinny 18-year-old with long blond hair, but he looked every inch the big-shot college freshman to me (not to mention he was wearing a Ted Nugent T-shirt [right on!] and had a strong resemblance to Roger Daltry of the Who). We started dating that summer.

In the fall we both went off to college and began a long-distance relationship. I enrolled in the art program at Wayne State University in Detroit, and John continued his studies at U of M in Ann Arbor. Okay, so we were less than fifty miles apart, but that’s a long way when one of you drives a beat-up car that’s missing the driver’s side window, as John’s did. My mother used to ask him to park it at the end of the street because she was so embarrassed by the mere sight of it. When John received his bachelor’s degree in architecture, three years later, we got married. I had one year of college left and John was accepted into the graduate architecture program at U of M. So I followed him to Ann Arbor, commuting to Detroit for one semester.

In Ann Arbor I found a job working as a production artist for a book compositor and helped put John through grad school. John was a student and I made $5 an hour, but we spent almost every night in a club watching live music when we should have been back in our apartment trying to save money. We struggled to pay the pizza delivery dude, but we never had trouble finding cash for the doorman at Joe’s Star Lounge to see some second-rate band blow through town. It didn’t take a couple of smart college students long to figure out that kids with the band got their names on the guest list, thus avoiding having to pay a $3 cover charge—a huge deal when a couple is practically living on the poverty line. With that revelation, we made it our goal to befriend as many bands as we could.

Sometimes just hanging out with bands made me feel like I was in one. After a few years of following local Detroit bands like Snake Out, Art Phag, See Dick Run, we were officially part of the scene. John was jumping up onstage singing backup vocals, and I was cutting the bands’ hair in my kitchen.

When I was twenty-five, I finally got my chance to be a musician. A friend of ours was looking for a new band mate. His drummer of several years had quit. He was looking for a replacement, so he tried to teach me, someone who’d never even played an instrument before. After 15 minutes I quit too. I had no sense of timing or rhythm and was totally uncoordinated. I couldn’t move my arms and feet at the same time. But that wasn’t the reason I stopped trying. The real reason is that I caught a glimpse of myself in a glass window, and I didn’t like what I saw. My hair was a mess and I thought I looked fat. I didn’t think I looked anything like the cool girls I saw on MTV. At that moment, I realized that I didn’t want to be onstage and have thirty people staring at me and thinking the same thing. I quit. I thought I looked stupid.

Hindsight is always 20/20. I didn’t look stupid. I just wasn’t ready.

Getting Serious

I wish I could pin the fact that I wasn’t ready on having little kids, but I can’t. I was married for twelve years before I had my first baby. John and I were too busy traveling and goofing off to be parents. All those concerts and nights spent at the bar made us poor. We didn’t own a house. We had few possessions. And the car we owned, a Plymouth Horizon, looked like a giant roller skate—a rusted one at that. However, we did manage to go to Europe six times in the 1980s.

When you refuse to participate in the rat race, you have a lot of freedom. If you can live a happy life on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and the shirt on your back (a 1977 Led Zeppelin World Tour concert T-shirt), you are free to travel the world. During the early part of our marriage we quit our jobs a few times and went to Europe until we ran out of money. When my mother would ask us, When do you think you’ll come back? we’d wonder how long it took to starve to death. We traveled from Ireland to the Greek islands and back. Sometimes we would hitchhike, but mostly we took trains, with John pointing out all the history of European architecture. I think we climbed to the top of every bell tower in France one summer.

When you earn near the minimum wage, it’s easy to walk away from your day job and run off to Europe. But over time, John earned his master’s degree in architecture and got a good paying job with a firm in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. It became harder and harder to take off, even though we had more money.

In the 1990s we settled down in Royal Oak (about five miles from where we both grew up) and got serious—serious about baseball. As the cost of concert tickets went up and up, we replaced concerts with a more affordable pastime. We settled our shorts into $3 bleacher seats at Tiger Stadium.

Being at a night ballgame had similar elements to being at a concert: a blaring sound system, bright lights, and beer, not to mention a lot of people staying up late and showing great enthusiasm for others’ accomplishments when they should be at home getting ready for their own job the next day. We went to about sixty ballgames a year. When we heard that they wanted to tear down our beloved Tiger Stadium and build a new one, we were sickened. We joined a group called the Tiger Stadium Fan Club, which was the first and only fan club I ever joined for a building.

The next eight years of our lives were focused intensely on fighting for something we really believed in—a place that represented our love for one of our favorite pastimes (we were all about killing time) and for each other.

I didn’t know it then, but the Tiger Stadium fight provided me with experience and skills that would serve me well later, both as a mom and as a rock star. I learned to speak in public and appear in front of microphones and TV cameras. I found it was easy to ignore the glare if you did something because you really wanted it—believed in it. And any fear I would’ve had about speaking at PTA meetings or standing on a stage, guitar in hand, was inconsequential after testifying in front of a State Senate hearing.

During this period John and I learned a lot about struggling for the things you believed in even if your opponents are a billionaire team owner and powerful politicians (mayors and governors). We knew we were facing insurmountable odds. A newspaper columnist referred to us as modern-day Don Quixotes, but it didn’t embarrass us or stop us.

We lost. A new stadium was built to replace the one that held so many fond memories. But the experience taught us not to fear failure. If we had to do it all again, we would. There’s more regret and shame in not trying than there is in defeat—more lessons I would draw on when I decided to start a rock band. We matured and moved on. And in the middle of it all, I gave birth to two sons. Incidentally, we took them to many games at Tiger Stadium until it finally closed in 1999.

Fulfilling the Motherhood Dream

I had Dylan, my first son, in 1993. He was so sweet and adorable that I decided I wanted another one just like him, and Willie was