Houston got a lot of rage out of her system early. Born in L.A. and raised in Seattle, she actually grew up around classical music. Her mother is a music professor and a vocal coach; her father, who left when Penelope was 3, taught radical economics. Penelope was tutored in how not to belong. “We were the kind of family that didn’t go in for political parties,” she says. “We were totally atheist. We weren’t members of anything. Members of the faculty– that was about it.” By 1977, when she was 19, she had gravitated toward punk rock. “It seemed natural to me,” she says. “I was interested in music, and I was interested in art and cultural changes.” Her band the Avengers was a cornerstone of punk’s first wave: just three chords and anarchy. “Ask not what you can do for your country / [But] what your country’s been doing to you,” she sang in “The Amerikan in Me.” But Penelope burned out on punk by 1981. “It had turned into hard core,” she says. “Which for me is a teenage genre, and its basic audience is teenage boys.”
Houston wanted to grow up. Throughout the ’80s, she explored art, film and the avant-garde. She moved to San Francisco and took a job in the main library. “It was really a nice place to work,” she says. “It just paid my rent, but I got to see every new art and music book that came through.” In 1986, she stripped her music to its barest elements and began making solo records; her mother gave her a few lessons in breathing and intonation. Now Houston is coming into her own. She lives in a 1909 arts-and-crafts house on a quiet residential street in Oakland. She’s married, and she’s signed to a label (Reprise) where Howie Klein, one of her old punk cronies, is president. And even if she seems a little older, a little more mellow than your standard rage queen, she’s finding a place for herself. “Maybe there’s this need that has yet to be spoken for: people who are over 30 but still have some kind of punk attitude,” she says. Or simply for smart, literate music made without compromise.
