Le Butcherettes about so much more than blood and gore

Teresa Suarez grew up being hypersensitive and scared.

If you’ve ever seen her perform as Teri Gender Bender with Le Butcherettes, it’s hard to believe that there have been times when the passionate performer says she’d just “disappear off the map,” as she puts it, and “hide in my room for days because I was just so scared of the world and handling situations, simple things like going to get groceries.”

The overwhelming sense of hysteria, she says, is something she inherited from her mother. Although Suarez’s mom was loving and nurturing, she was also overbearing and overprotective. She couldn’t help herself. Suarez, the singer who made a name for herself with commanding stage presence and a provocative live show that involved pig heads and plenty of blood, explains that her mom’s debilitating sense of dread was essentially embedded into her consciousness as a child by her father, who exposed her to scenes in her native Mexico not meant for impressionable eyes.

“It’s probably from her childhood,” Suarez says. “My grandfather would take her, when she only 6 years old, every time there was a killing in the town, he’d take her to see the body. So I think that’s where it comes from, basically, being surrounded by death and violence at a young age. My grandfather thought he was doing them a favor by exposing them to the real world — this is what happens after the soul leaves the body.”

Suarez’s mother passed on her panicked upbringing to her kids. Music was a subtle source of conflict in her household, Suarez says. “I’d play very softly because the neighbors would bang on the walls,” Suarez remembers of playing guitar in the house. “My mother was very hysterical. She’d be like, ‘You have to play low, or else they’ll send the cops.’ You know, she’d exaggerate everything. ‘The cops will come and then you’ll get kicked out of school.’ So I’d always play very softly.”

Likewise, “it was a constant battle between my mom and my father because he loved playing the music loud, and my mom was scared of it,” Suarez says. “She said, ‘No, you can’t. You have to keep it low or the neighbors are going to come and hurt us.’ I found that very interesting to see how music was causing conflict between my family, and I kind of liked it. Part of me feared it, but part of me liked it. I was like, ‘Ooh, I want to cause this sensation in other people.’ ”

Suarez had her chance to do just that a few years later when she moved from Denver to Mexico after her father passed away from a heart attack. It was there that she came up with concept for Le Butcherettes. Early on, when some people saw the band, which featured Suarez performing in a bloody apron backed by a friend of hers on drums, they wrote it off as a gimmick, just a shock-rock act built on blood and gore.

But Suarez says she put plenty of thought and consideration into what she was doing. Everything had meaning and symbolism, from the name of the act to the presentation. It was all a metaphor. The name, she says, was inspired by her feeling like a piece of meat in her everyday life, something she says that other females felt in the scene at the time in Guadalajara, which was predominantly populated by male musicians.

“There were a lot of women going to the shows, a lot of punk rocker girls, and I related to them, because we were frustrated,” Suarez says. “We were sick of being harassed in the public. One girl jumped … she got on the stage and jumped toward the crowd and crowd surfed, and the guys there basically started molesting her. She was like, ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ That will always traumatize me. She was crying and weeping. I was so infuriated. I felt so useless. I couldn’t do anything.”

All that pent up passion deserved a package that did justice with the presentation. “I love superhero women in comics,” Suarez notes. “So I doodled up these women that looked like butchers, and they were cutting up meat. But the meat represented that hate and that agony that one carries inside that causes cancer. So they were cutting up those tumors in my drawings. And then I said, ‘Whoa, it would be cool if I added an apron.’ So I added an apron, and I had a red ink pen, and I splattered blood on their aprons. And I thought, ‘This could be cool if I just make this a band and focus my energy on it.’ ”

Drafting a friend to play drums, Suarez set the scene on fire with a set that dazzled as much as it dismayed. Le Butcherettes received a negative reaction from the local press, but that drove the band and fueled its resolve, which became even stronger after the original drummer split with the band and a timekeeper named Cesar Rosas signed on. More than just a drummer, he helped guide Suarez’s career, along with Omar Rodriguez-Lopez of the Mars Volta, who was living in Guadalajara at the time.

As fate would have it, Suarez met Rodriguez-Lopez and Rosas on the same night at a show that the latter’s band was slated to open and the former was on hand to watch. The power failed that night, but rather than bowing out, Suarez performed by herself without any amplification. “It was going to be a canceled show,” she recalls, “but I said, ‘Screw it. Let’s do it a cappella.’ So I did an a cappella show in the dark. I had a pig head. I still did everything, just with no music.”

The set was captivating enough to convince the pair to introduce themselves afterward, and together the two of them helped launch Le Butcherettes, ultimately helping Suarez and company overcome whatever adversity they faced at home. “We worked together as a team,” Suarez says. “We used people’s hate as energizers, like, ‘Oh yeah? You think we’re going to die? Well, no. We’re going to fight until we actually die.’ ”

Or until it just feels that way. After playing hundreds of shows in Mexico, Suarez eventually decided to move to Los Angeles. Thing is, when she did, she didn’t tell anyone, including her mom, something she still regrets. “I left Mexico and started a fresh page, like a coward,” she says. “I was going insane. I wasn’t even thinking about other people. I thought I was going to die,” from the stresses of life, she says.

“And so I thought it was just too much. I was thinking, ‘I’m too fragile for this,’ ” she continues. “So I thought, ‘Maybe if I just leave, I can never look back, and it will be OK. But it was the opposite. I never slept. I had guilt. Eventually after a month, I called Mother and told her, ‘Hey, I’m OK. I’m here in L.A. I’m making it work. Don’t worry about me.’ ”

Easier said than done for a woman who constantly fretted about her daughter being kidnapped and even once warned her to be on the lookout for suspicious characters near the stage who might have designs on dousing her with acid. Luckily, all of her mom’s fears proved to be unfounded. Suarez, who lives with her mother in El Paso these days, has fared just fine back in the United States, making friendships with fellow artists who are just as focused as her, like Rodriguez-Lopez, who has been instrumental in Suarez’s life as a musician and an influence.

From producing Le Butcherettes and putting out its music on his label, Rodriguez-Lopez has been a key advocate for the band. Through her association with him, Suarez has made fans of and cultivated friendships with the likes of Henry Rollins, Mike Patton (who’s issued the band’s music on his Ipecac imprint) and Iggy Pop (with whom Suarez has collaborated).

They all probably see the same thing: Suarez has a captivating story that’s allowed her to create compelling art. And while she still admits to being addled with anxiety, she’s learned to cope with the help of her family and friends and bandmates, along with ensuring she’s eating right and breathing deep instead of reacting impulsively to stressful situations.

“I’m working on it now,” she concludes, “because I just cannot pass that on to my children.”

Read more from Dave Herrera at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at dherrera@reviewjournal.com and follow @rjmusicdh on Twitter.