Vicki Peterson (lead guitarist of the Bangles) and Susan Cowsill (with her family’s band the Cowsills since the age of eight) are currently tilling the fields as the Psycho Sisters, and it’s given them rare perspective on making music that many lesser talents would lack. Their debut album, Up On The Chair, Beatrice is out now via the RockBeat label. Peterson and Cowsill will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with them.
Peterson: I’ve been a vegetarian for 30 years. It’s not a guideline or an occasional dietary discipline. I just don’t eat meat. Ever. (Unless some mean-spirited person slips it to me somehow undetected.) I’ll eat dairy and eggs, but nothing with a face or a father. I’m not really sure how this came to be such a consistent—possibly the most consistent—aspect of my life. I wasn’t a frail, squeamish child who shied away from eating animals. Steak was my favorite dinner, if you don’t count the spare-rib eating contests I used to have with my father. I loved BBQ of all types and thought white meat was for sissies.
When I was living in Hollywood, cleaning bathrooms in exchange for a couch to sleep on, I rarely ate meat simply because tea and popcorn fit my budget better. At those late night, after-show deli meals with friends, I would order just a salad. Girlish figure and all, you know. I was mildly surprised when I realized one day that it had been more than six months since I’d consumed a serious meat product.
My boyfriend and I were watching a PBS special on vegetarianism late one night. George Bernard Shaw referred to cooked meat as “charred defunct animal flesh.” Yes! Isn’t that exactly what it is? Something clicked, and right then and there Jeff McDonald and I decided to become vegetarians. No shouting from the rooftops or protesting at processing plants, just, “Hey, let’s be vegetarians.” “Yeah, let’s!”
That week the Bangles held a field trip to a Dodgers game. Friends, family, managers all piled into a large van and headed to Dodger Stadium. I was blithely looking forward to a traditional day of baseball, sun and a famous Dodger hotdog. It did not strike me until I was in line and about to order that I no longer eat hot dogs, even famous Dodger dogs. I ordered one anyway, took the frank out of the bun, heaped on the mustard and onions, and ate the bread. I think that was the last time I felt any sort of deprivation at all from a meatless diet.
Touring as a non-meat-eater in the 80’s—and even 90’s—was a challenge, though. Europe was bread and cheese (and chocolate—c’mon, how bad is that?) because places like Germany seemed to put ham in everything. America was chef salads without the chef, and ordering soup invariably meant the waiter had to run back to the kitchen to see if a chicken stock was used in the base, annoying everyone else at the table.
Nowadays I can get a black bean burger at McDonald’s in London, and I’m happy as a clam. (Don’ t eat them, either … )
