Thursday, June 05, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Music: Occupation: rock star

Jucifer finally gets its due

By Newt Briggs

At first glance, Amber Valentine looks almost plastic--a sort of Mod Barbie complete with fake eyelashes, pink lip gloss, bottle-blond tresses and six-inch platform heels. But when she hoists her devil-horned Flying V guitar and plugs into the dozen amps that dot the stage, she becomes a ruddy-faced she-devil, belching shrieks from lungs full of fire. In a blink, though, she is sullen again, tenderly keening out the tale of a young girl helplessly suffocating in a car trapped beneath a snowdrift. Valentine--like her band Jucifer--is a puzzle, a startling fusion of vulnerability and power, beauty and brutality.

This enigmatic quality seems, at least partially, a product of roots; Valentine's were grown deep in the red clay of rural Georgia. Raised a stone's throw from the Alabama border, Valentine recalls passing lonely country afternoons with forays into her parents' record collection. "My parents said that by the time I was 2, I was already picking out stuff that I liked. Apparently, I had a fondness for Art Pepper and Grand Funk Railroad," she says with a laugh. "I'm pretty sure that Grand Funk wouldn't be my first selection now."

From then on music assumed a central role in Valentine's life (although it was not always in plentiful supply). As a teenager her only source for anything besides jazz and Southern boogie was the half-hour of reception she got from the college radio station in Atlanta every week. "I would record it and play it over and over, but I had no idea what I was listening to," she says. Still, it was enough for her to know what she wanted to be when she grew up: a rock star.

These aspirations, though, did not jibe with the world-view of her peers, who expected her to fit into the mold of either "a country preppy or a country redneck." "I briefly tried to pretend to be both of those things," she says. "People were nice to me, I guess, but they didn't really know me. So at a pretty early age--like around 13 or so--I just stopped trying to please people. It was hard. I was miserable for a lot of my teens, because I didn't really have anyone to hang out with."

Ultimately, Valentine's experiments in selfhood--excursions that took her from punk bars to hippie communes--led her to Athens, Ga. (home of, among others, R.E.M.). There, she met future boyfriend Ed Livengood and started a band. After three weeks, their drummer quit, and Livengood moved from bass to drums, forming the lineup that would become Jucifer.

From the get-go, Valentine and Livengood were a strange pair--a sweet-looking guitarist and a grungy drummer churning out low-end rumble that rattled walls with its ferocity--but Athens took to them like dogs to a fire hydrant (they even had their pictures plastered across a regionally distributed ketchup bottle). And if that weren't enough, Valentine and Livengood earned the attention of Athens native son Michael Stipe, who liked the pair enough to write them up for Interview magazine and shoot their promotional photographs.

It's all been sort of a shock to Valentine. A zealous vegan with R-O-C-K-S-T-A-R tattooed across her knuckles, she seemed, perhaps, more a flake than the heir apparent to Athens' rock throne when she arrived on the scene almost a decade ago. But Jucifer's most recent album, the critically acclaimed I Name You Destroyer, has thrust her to the cusp of rock 'n' roll celebrity (she's even inspired comparisons to Debbie Harry)--not a bad achievement for a simple country girl.

"I'm a weird one all right," says Valentine. "For a little while, I thought that I would find my kindred spirits in punk rock, and then I found out that there were plenty of assholes there. Then I thought that maybe the hippie way was the way to go, and I found out that there were plenty of assholes there, too. Finally, I kind of realized that you find good people where you find them, and you really can't figure it out from what they listen to or what they wear."