Features

Woman At Work: Rosie Flores

With the title of her latest album, Working Girl’s Guitar, Rosie Flores is representing not only for her instrument, but also for the often overlooked musical demographic that she’s a part of: female rockers who have the stamina to grind it out over the long haul. She’s been at it since the mid-‘60s, when her dad fronted the money for her all-girl teenage garage rock band, Penelope’s Children, to buy gear.

She laughs, “When we got back home, he said, ‘OK, start booking the shows, because your bill is eighty dollars a month.’”

Flores received further education in the economics of making music on a shoestring budget while crisscrossing the country in a Winnebago with the all-girl cowpunk band the Screaming Sirens. There was a moment in the ‘80s when it looked like she might pull a Dwight Yoakam and go from drawing hip, young crowds at California rock clubs to mass market major label success playing neo-traditional country with a kick. But she’s spent the two and a half decades since recording for indie labels.

To finance this album, Flores pawned her Gretsch Penguin guitar, and then, sold a painting she’d done of Elvis to get her six-string back. She sanguinely shrugs off her resourcefulness, saying, “You just make things work with what you have, you know?”

What Flores has in her bag of tricks, besides recognized abilities as a singer and songwriter, are underappreciated guitar chops. She’s good enough that Texas country songwriter Butch Hancock hired her as his lead guitarist and it isn’t an accident that she played every lick of lead on Working Girl.

She also teaches at the Girls Rock Camp in Austin, Texas, where the young students know more about The Ramones than rockabilly.

“Even the six or seven year olds just wanna shred,” Flores chuckles. “I taught ‘em how to do windmills and go down on your knees and play a solo. [It’s even more than I rock onstage but] because they’re younger, they can get away with it.”