Out in the Mountains

 

Celebrating The Changer and the Changed

by Lee Russell

On the fifteenth anniversary of The
Changer and the Changed and the eve of
Cris Williamson's visit to Vermont, I want
to pay tribute to this wonderful album that
meant so much to me and to the woman
(and women) who made it.

If you ask a lesbian to name the album
that best symbolizes women's music,
chances are good that she will name The
Changer and the Changed. She probably
owns a copy and still listens to it.

What makes this one album so special?
Why does it represent women's music bet-
ter than any other? I haven't asked anybody
else this question, sol can only speak about
what makes it special for me.

First of all, it is a beautiful album.,
unified in feeling. Every song fits and
contributes to the whole. There is a perfect
match between the voice, the words, and
the music. The songs are wonderful, con-
sidered individually or as a whole.

The Changer and the Changed is a
product of its time. In a concertl went to in

Boston in 1989, Cris talked about this al-
bum and its impact with some wonderment.
She compared it to a high tide mark on a
cliff. "You look at it and you say to your-
self, ‘Yes, once the water was that high.'"

And in 1975, the water was that high.
The women's movement was still relatively
new, fueled to a great exent by lesbian
energy. Women fonned consciousness-
raising groups, talked furiously about their
lives, debated, argued, and discovered that
"sisterhood is powerful" and "the personal
is political." Many women were willing to
call themselves feminists; the right to legal
abortion had recently been won; and it
looked like we would win the ERA. Meg
Christian had invented women's music, and
a lesbian-feminist collective called them-
selves Olivia Records and began to record
and distribute it. We were changers, and in
the act of making the changes, we were
changed.

In 1975 it looked like change at this
pace might last indefinitely. The Changer
and the Changed was born from this feeling

and captures it. You can hear 1975 clearly
in the chorus to "Song of the Soul." In 1990,
the water is not as high, yet when I listen to
the album now, I'm reconnected to that
time. The Changer tells me that if the water
was that high once, it can be so again.

The Changer is a pure expression of a
woman's world. Women made this album:
wrote and sang all the songs, played the
instruments, produced, engineered, mixed,
distributed (and bought) it, at a time when
this was extremely rare in the music indus-
try (and still is). There were no men in-
volved in its making. While important, this
does not set it apart from other women's
music albums. What is different is the
world that Cris Williamson creates in this
album. It is a woman's world, with a sensi-
bility that is completely female. There are
no men here, not even as a force to react or
define oneself against. And you don't even
notice at first that they are absent, because
nothing seems to be missing. The world is
complete and whole without them.

I have always thought of The Changer

  

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