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"  One of the most innovative rock guitarists in America lives in a high-rise on Manhattan&amp;#039;s Upper East Side. Her records are lauded by critics, and musicians are awed by her singular, intricate style and the blizzard of notes she conjures. But she&amp;#039;s dead broke. At 35, she shares an apartment\u2014a three-bedroom inherited from her father\u2014with her Yorkie-Maltese mix, Fig; two 19-year-old aspiring ballerinas; and a college pal. She&amp;#039;d like to marry and have children, but she&amp;#039;s been in only two serious relationships in the past decade. She buys all of her clothes in thrift stores, not for the &amp;quot;vintage&amp;quot; but for the price. In other words, Marnie Stern is the least likely guitar hero we&amp;#039;ve seen in some time\u2014perhaps ever. Think about the gods for a \u00ADmoment: There&amp;#039;s Keith Richards, stoned, cool, above it all, a cigarette forever dangling from his lips; Jimmy Page, the wizard, attacking his double-neck Gibson Les Paul with a violin bow; Jimi Hendrix, grimacing as he strangles screaming notes from the upper reaches of his instrument&amp;#039;s neck. It&amp;#039;s not exactly a brainteaser, but there&amp;#039;s nary a woman in the mix. In 2003, when Rolling Stone unveiled its list of the 100 greatest guitar players of all time, only two women, Joni Mitchell (No. 72) and Joan Jett (No. 87), made the cut.  You might assume that rock&amp;#039;s woman problem had been shredded, at least a bit, by Riot Grrrl in the &amp;#039;90s, but that movement wasn&amp;#039;t about the fairer sex becoming virtuosos of the instrument. The point was to inspire young women to start bands and make some noise\u2014&amp;quot;express themselves,&amp;quot; as Sara Marcus, author of Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution put it. &amp;quot;We were saying, `We don&amp;#039;t have to be experts to play the stuff we have to say\u2014our take is as important as the pyrotechnics of a guitarist who&amp;#039;s been practicing licks in his basement since he was 12.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  But that is precisely the sort of guitarist Stern is, one who&amp;#039;s self-trained\u2014although she didn&amp;#039;t pick up the instrument until the \u00ADancient age of 23\u2014and who dazzles with her technique. &amp;quot;Her complex arrangements evoke emotional turmoil as the songs ping-pong between excitement and panic, ecstasy and despair, extraordinary confidence and harrowing self-doubt,&amp;quot; wrote the music website Pitchfork.com about her eponymous 2010 album. (Pitchfork is the Rolling Stone of the Web, but indie-er.) Stern achieves her sound by tapping strings along the fretboard with her fingertips, creating a frenzied, machine-gun-fire-like sound. It&amp;#039;s the style commonly associated with Eddie Van Halen, but Stern&amp;#039;s is Van Halen channeled by a whip-smart, highly sensitive bottle-blond. &amp;quot;There are a handful of women known for being a female playing the guitar,&amp;quot; says Henry Rollins, former front man for the seminal punk band Black Flag, &amp;quot;but they&amp;#039;re not known for their guitar playing. What makes Marnie unique is that she&amp;#039;s not just a girl with a guitar, she&amp;#039;s a musician who does a really amazing thing with her guitar.&amp;quot;  I meet Stern on a brutally cold January after\u00ADnoon at a restaurant near her apartment. The place is deserted. Stern, bundled in a duffel coat, her scuffed boots soggy from the snow, rises from a couch to embrace me, though we&amp;#039;ve never met. She&amp;#039;s striking, with long hair, bright blue eyes, \u00ADchiseled cheekbones, and a ski-jump nose.  Over the course of our invigorating, at times manic three-hour conversation, Stern will divulge the kind of insecurities \u00ADusually reserved for a shrink. She veers from her intense romantic feelings for actor Ryan Gosling, to her crippling fears about money, to her lingering obsession with bad reviews and old boyfriends. This endearing neuroticism doesn&amp;#039;t jibe with the YouTube Stern, the dishevelled rocker who stomps around stages all over the world, bopping her head, goofing with audiences, and occasionally appear\u00ADing possessed, in a Patti Smith\u2013esque trance. (Study the lyrics from any of her three albums, though, and her tortured side comes howling through. &amp;quot;I got something in my soul/ pushing me to hold onto the pain,&amp;quot; she sings in &amp;quot;Risky Biz.&amp;quot;) To understand Stern&amp;#039;s rarefied brand of indie-punk playing is to know how she mastered the guitar in the first place. In her early twenties, having just graduated from New York University with a journalism degree, she decided she wanted to be an artist, and, hey, why not a musical one? &amp;quot;I never talked about music and didn&amp;#039;t know a lot about it\u2014it just made me feel so good,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;When I told my friends I wanted to be a musician, they were like, `What?&amp;#039;&amp;quot;   Undaunted, Stern got herself a job as a secretary at an ad agency and devoted the rest of her waking hours holed up in her East Village apartment learning to play the used Danelectro guitar she bought for $200. &amp;quot;I had to figure it all out by myself,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I had a four-track, and I started getting the layers down. Once a friend came over and told me I was sounding a \u00ADlittle Faith Hill\u2014`you&amp;#039;re strumming the same thing; you need to focus on rhythm more.&amp;#039; I had no idea what I was doing.&amp;quot; Stern stayed at the agency for six years, practicing guitar every night. &amp;quot;I just kept thinking, If the songs get good enough, eventually I&amp;#039;ll get on a label. At first it seemed completely out of reach, but really it&amp;#039;s like learning to type or something. It&amp;#039;s a physical thing you just practice.&amp;quot;  Meanwhile, Stern and her best friend, Bella \u00ADFoster, a painter, embarked on a self-designed art appreciation course using New York as their classroom. &amp;quot;We both remember it as the happiest time of our lives,&amp;quot; Stern says. Every week, they visited the Met twice and read and discussed at least two books, everything from Twyla Tharp&amp;#039;s Creative Habit to Sylvia Plath&amp;#039;s journals and Art in Theory 1900\u20132000. They called their project Mad as Hell. As they saw it, New York was teeming with young, successful artists who weren&amp;#039;t all that talented, which pissed them off. Their anger fueled their ambition. &amp;quot;We were reading lots of philosophy and talking a lot about what was real and what wasn&amp;#039;t real. I mean, if I met us now I&amp;#039;d probably hate us\u2014but it all made me more confident. My imag\u00ADination was opening up. It was a weird, fertile time.&amp;quot; Her dedication to her instrument was cemented when she \u00ADstarted going to shows at downtown clubs by herself several nights a week. &amp;quot;I was too shy to push my way up front,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d stand in the back and stare at the guitarist&amp;#039;s hands.&amp;quot;  This was pre\u2013social media, when you couldn&amp;#039;t post a song online and collect 15,000 \u00ADlisteners in a week. In 2004, Stern sent a demo of five songs recorded on her four-track to the venerable indie label Kill Rock Stars, home to some of her favorite bands (Sleater-Kinney, Deerhoof, Hella). She got no reply but tried again in 2005 with new material. Again, radio silence. Stern started fishing around for arts fellowships, but at \u00ADFoster&amp;#039;s insistence she gave it one more shot in 2006\u2014which is when she finally got a call back from the label&amp;#039;s founder, Slim Moon, inviting her out for a drink. &amp;quot;Meeting her face-to-face was a turning point,&amp;quot; Moon says. &amp;quot;I realized she was a truly creative individual who wasn&amp;#039;t just steeped in a few bands, copying them and remixing the sounds\u2014like most musicians I know.&amp;quot; A week later, she was signed. Zach Hill, the brilliant drummer from Hella, agreed not only to play on her debut\u2014In Advance of the Broken Arm, an exuberantly loud, chaotic 13-track album\u2014but to produce it. Then The New York Times proclaimed In Advance the &amp;quot;most exciting Rock-n-Roll album&amp;quot; of 2007. &amp;quot;I said to Zach, `This is going to do \u00ADreally well! I can feel it!&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Stern recalls now, ruefully. &amp;quot;I was on a plane from L.A. to New York, and I stared out the window for six hours men\u00ADtally dropping CDs\u2014one into this house, one down the chimney of this house.... I thought I was going to be rich!&amp;quot; Almost as soon as we met, Stern announced in her nasal voice that she&amp;#039;s exhausted\u2014which is pretty much her constant state. When she&amp;#039;s home in New York, she wakes up at 3 a.m., grabs coffee at an all-night deli, returns to her apartment to exercise, then practices guitar and writes music until collapsing midmorning for a three- to four-hour nap\u2014if she&amp;#039;s lucky. &amp;quot;When I&amp;#039;m on tour, I&amp;#039;m so tired from playing and lifting instruments that I fall asleep fine,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I think I don&amp;#039;t sleep when I&amp;#039;m home because I&amp;#039;m like, `Oh, shit.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  Among the &amp;quot;oh, shit&amp;quot; worries that feed Stern&amp;#039;s insomnia are her lack of a love life. Her last boyfriend, a younger musician, broke up with her over Skype a few months ago after they&amp;#039;d been dating for a year. He told her she wasn&amp;#039;t a &amp;quot;doer,&amp;quot; which he said was confirmed for him when the two were on tour in China and Stern didn&amp;#039;t feel like leaving their hotel. &amp;quot;We got to the Great Wall, and I said, `I&amp;#039;m good. I&amp;#039;m not going anywhere.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; She pauses for the first time in 10 minutes. &amp;quot;I am a doer!&amp;quot; she harrumphs. &amp;quot;I drove around Europe for five weeks during horrible storms in a van with no heat!&amp;quot;  Stern&amp;#039;s only other serious relationship was with a photographer named Ash she met after college. The inspiration for one of the most powerful songs on Marnie Stern, Ash broke up with her in 2003, and Stern spent years trying to figure out why. She&amp;#039;d send him notes every year, but he never responded. In the spring of 2009, she learned he&amp;#039;d committed suicide. &amp;quot;How can it be/ And I&amp;#039;ll never, I&amp;#039;ll never know why/ I want to be in your imminent elegant light,&amp;quot; she wails on &amp;quot;For Ash.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;One sick thing about [the suicide] is all those years after we broke up, I was like, `It was me, it was me, it was my fault,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;When he\u2014as horrible as it is, it made me feel a little better.&amp;quot;  As agonizing to Stern as her manlessness are her &amp;quot;tremendous amount of debt&amp;quot; and uncertain future in the \u00ADmusic business. &amp;quot;The irony is, the only reason I became successful was because I stayed with it, went against the grain, didn&amp;#039;t get a `real&amp;#039; job.&amp;quot;  The person perhaps most responsible for Stern&amp;#039;s decision to pursue her dream (other than Bella) was her father, Keith, a stock broker who died of throat cancer in 2000 or 2001\u2014she can&amp;#039;t remember. She wasn&amp;#039;t particularly close to him (&amp;quot;He was kind of a son of a bitch&amp;quot;), but they exchanged letters during his last months. &amp;quot;I ruined my life because I did what I thought I was supposed to do,&amp;quot; her dad wrote. &amp;quot;Go at your own pace and don&amp;#039;t worry what anyone else is doing.&amp;quot; Her father, Stern tells me, loved &amp;quot;working with \u00ADbonsai trees and weaving belts and creating intricate things. But he ended up doing the other and hated it and drank himself to death.&amp;quot;  Stern&amp;#039;s mother, Lynn, is a homemaker who lives in Hollywood, Florida, with her third husband. The two are extremely close\u2014Stern quotes and imitates her constantly and tells me that both of them are obsessed with Bruce Springsteen, whose concerts they attend together whenever they can. Stern says she knows her mother is proud of her but still frets about disappointing her. &amp;quot;I have that Jewish guilt,&amp;quot; she says, referring to the fact that she hasn&amp;#039;t produced grandchildren and can&amp;#039;t help her mom out financially. &amp;quot;A piece of good press will buy me maybe a week with my mom,&amp;quot; Stern laughs. &amp;quot;Then she&amp;#039;s like, `When are you going to make money?&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  Despite basking in critical adoration, touring as often as she can afford to, and having a loyal fan base comprised of older guitar aficionados and hipsters in their twenties, Stern hasn&amp;#039;t captured a larger audience. &amp;quot;People assume I sell a lot more records than I actually do,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I really don&amp;#039;t sell any.&amp;quot; Her finances have been so dire that she has set up kissing booths at shows to help pay for parking tickets ($3 for a peck on the cheek, $10 for lips, $100 for tongue\u2014she pocketed a few hundred bucks for her e\u00ADfforts). &amp;quot;I guess I always thought something will \u00ADhappen\u2014a commercial, a single, or I&amp;#039;d be married\u2014something,&amp;quot; Stern continues. &amp;quot;But it just hasn&amp;#039;t. Not to say it won&amp;#039;t, but it hasn&amp;#039;t yet.&amp;quot; While there are undoubtedly legions of starving, struggling male guitarists, many in the industry believe that women\u2014especially hard-core ax slingers like Stern\u2014have a tougher time than the boys garnering fame and fans. Some of the reasons are familiar. Just as you hear that there aren&amp;#039;t many female \u00ADlegal partners because relatively few women went to law school until the past couple of decades, it wasn&amp;#039;t until the 1970s that female rockers, such as Heart&amp;#039;s Nancy and Ann Wilson, began entering the music industry in substantial numbers. And by that time, the argument goes, guys like Hendrix, Page, and Eric Clapton had already staked a claim to the electric guitar. Michael Molenda, editor in chief of Guitar Player magazine, isn&amp;#039;t convinced; he thinks the hurdle for women is more elemental. &amp;quot;Sadly, \u00ADguitar rock is very penis oriented,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s this whole male sexuality going on\u2014all the posing, the volume, the aggres\u00ADsion, the drama.&amp;quot; Even when someone as androgynous as Prince thrusts his pelvis, bites his lower lip, and wields the long neck of his guitar, the message seems to be: No girls allowed.  The XX-drought also could stem from the fact that whether it&amp;#039;s nature or nurture, the majority of women just aren&amp;#039;t attracted to the techiness of music like Stern&amp;#039;s, either as players or listeners. Your average guitar shop is like a hardware store: Stand around for a few minutes, and you overhear a bunch of guys animatedly discussing their tools in inexplicable jargon. Is an instrument&amp;#039;s action &amp;quot;high or low&amp;quot;? (Translation: Are the strings well off the fretboard or close to it?) Is the gauge of its strings adequate? (Sample snippet: &amp;quot;Man, Stevie Ray Vaughan, he used a high E as thick as a friggin&amp;#039; cable!&amp;quot;) Oh, and don&amp;#039;t forget the granular debates about the pros and cons of various amps, monitors, and microphones.  None of this is to say that rank sexism is dead. Listen to the misogyny that dripped from the pen of The Washington Post&amp;#039;s former (male) music critic: &amp;quot;Fifty years after Elvis Presley recorded `That&amp;#039;s All Right Mama,&amp;#039; the grand total of pantheon-worthy female rock guitarists is zero.&amp;quot; He listed some female guitarists considered great\u2014Bonnie Raitt, Jett, Mitchell\u2014only to pinpoint why they weren&amp;#039;t. (He did allow that Jett was &amp;quot;a fabulous rhythm guitarist&amp;quot; who brought &amp;quot;glorious tough-chick leather and a lot of swagger to rock, but that isn&amp;#039;t the same thing as chops.&amp;quot;)  As for Stern, when she started out, she says, she felt &amp;quot;absurd&amp;quot; answering questions about what it was like to be a female guitarist. &amp;quot;I really do think it&amp;#039;s about the individual.&amp;quot; But by now she knows there&amp;#039;s no escaping that in the male\u00ADdominated world of guitar, she&amp;#039;s a shredder, a genius, and most noticeably a woman. Her reaction to that can be muddled and contradictory, which is perhaps inevitable when you&amp;#039;re constrained by something as immutable as your gender. &amp;quot;Onstage, I&amp;#039;m ridiculous, goofy, silly, self-deprecating, I say `vagina&amp;#039; constantly,&amp;quot; Stern tells me at one point. &amp;quot;Unconsciously, I&amp;#039;m trying to temper the technical stuff. I don&amp;#039;t want to be seen as this math-rock geek.&amp;quot; Later, however, when I note that in videos her clothes often look ill-fitting, her hair unwashed, she says, &amp;quot;For stage I try to dress down, because I want people to take me seriously. Even if I wanted to [dress up], I wouldn&amp;#039;t\u2014I want people to listen to the music.&amp;quot;  Stern gently mocked the fascination with her gender by titling one of her songs &amp;quot;Female Guitar Players Are the New Black&amp;quot; (though weirdly, the lyrics are about lost love, not being a woman guitarist; she chose the title, she says, because someone posted it on her MySpace page, and she liked the way it sounded). &amp;quot;The last album was personal and emotional, and in the aftermath, I&amp;#039;m embarrassed about it, quite honestly,&amp;quot; Stern says. &amp;quot;I thought a lot of people would be able to relate to it. But the Pitchfork review basically said, `She&amp;#039;s awesome\u2014too bad the record is such a bummer.&amp;#039; It was basically a critique of my self-esteem. I said to my [half] sister, `Would they have written that about a man?&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  Slim Moon is doubtful. &amp;quot;Pitchfork is a power\u00ADful filter in the genre that she&amp;#039;s working in\u2014it&amp;#039;s been really great for indie rock, and in many ways they have really great taste,&amp;quot; he says carefully. &amp;quot;But they&amp;#039;ll anoint any old ugly dude as a genius for his musical creativity. The only women who seem to get an 8.5 or higher [out of a 10-point rating] are always of a certain type\u2014usually petite and young with a hairdo.&amp;quot; Corin Tucker, the former guitarist and singer of the influential all-women punk band Sleater-Kinney and one of Stern&amp;#039;s biggest influences, also thinks rock music has a ways to go on the female objectification front, but she&amp;#039;s witnessed progress. &amp;quot;In 10 years [Sleater-\u00ADKinney] went from being heckled, with people shouting `Show us your boobs!&amp;#039; to being well respected all over the world,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I love seeing Marnie&amp;#039;s confidence; she just doesn&amp;#039;t seem angry or suspicious about being in front of a rock audience.&amp;quot; Not that she could be faulted for feeling that way sometimes. &amp;quot;Online, someone wrote, `She looks good\u2014for my grandmother,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Stern says. When a slightly negative offhand comment Stern made about the band Best Coast was quoted in an interview, the boyfriend of a Best Coast band member publicly called Stern an &amp;quot;old desperate bitch.&amp;quot; Stern, whose bawdy sense of humor is integral to her stage banter, responded by making T-shirts emblazoned with odb. &amp;quot;I told the story onstage and then sold the shirts,&amp;quot; she says, sounding quite satisfied. Another lady shredder\u2014who has broken through recently\u2014is Aussie phenomenon Orianthi, but she&amp;#039;s nine years younger than Stern, and as The Guardian in London put it, she&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;a cock-rock guitarist in the body of a California babe. She looks like Britney, she plays like Slash.&amp;quot; Above and beyond the gender mash-up, Stern&amp;#039;s appeal is limited by the reality that she&amp;#039;s not as poppy as Orianthi, for one (who did a stint on American Idol last season and had been handpicked by Michael Jackson to play guitar on what would&amp;#039;ve been his final tour). Stern just can&amp;#039;t hide that her playing is technical, her voice soaring but also shrill, and that her lyrics, smart and searing as they are, can be hard to make out over her noisy riffs.  While Stern is obviously yearning for more in her life\u2014a man, popularity, financial security\u2014you get the sense that she won&amp;#039;t cheat on the guitar to get there. &amp;quot;When we were doing the Mad as Hell thing, I said to Bella, `I have no money, I have no job, I have no husband, I have no children. I have nothing the outer world would tell me I should have.&amp;#039; But I felt so good about where I was with music, I&amp;#039;d never been happier.&amp;quot;  We&amp;#039;re winding down our marathon gabfest and Stern&amp;#039;s distilled energy has subsided somewhat. Her voice lowers a notch as she searches for the words to describe her frustration, and her hope. &amp;quot;Now it&amp;#039;s like, how do I get back there?&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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