Music

Three questions with Juliette Lewis of Juliette and the Licks

Spencer Patterson

Your shows are famed for their high level of energy. What’s your goal when you take the stage each night?

I want to make people lose their minds. That means I want them to shed their cool veneers, forget their daily problems and their monotony, all that shit, and have people let go and become a Licks lover and join the force, catch the fever. I’m unrelenting. I require participation, for people to snap out of their television gaze. That’s the mission.

What does performing onstage provide for you that performing in front of a camera could not?

It’s the danger, the unknown. It’s a pseudo-danger, but also very real in some cases. Any time you get a group of people together, there’s an electrical pulse and current. Especially with the Licks audience ... it’s not one type of personality. It’s a group of misfits and outsiders, young and old, gay and straight, hardcore and conservative, all these randoms in a room together creating this unity through music, and I’ve fallen in love with it. It’s a powerful experience and medium, and one I was missing all my life. Most people, when they get me, they go, “Why did you wait so long?” I made some nitty-gritty kind of films and did pretty good in them, but that’s not all there was to this little fire.

What’s been the more intimidating experience: sharing a scene with Robert De Niro or sharing a stage with Patti Smith?

The pursuit is the same—I’m always searching for an honesty and being really present. I’ve shot a scene where it’s three in the morning, and I’ve got to pretend my dad just got murdered, and that’s an experience, of course, I’ve never had in this lifetime, and that’s f--king hard, really hard. But then to have a mass of energy and people and performing in front of your peers, that has a different sense of honesty. What’s similar is the surrender—I’m trying to be in the moment and give it everything as purely as I can. It was intimidating just to start this whole [Licks] journey; that’s why I avoided it for 10 years, ’cause I knew it would require so much more than film ever could for me. 

With Scissors For Lefty, Suffrajett. November 30, 8 p.m., $15. Rox, 804-7699.

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