Three faces of Mary Timony: The scary, sexy and downright dangerous appeal of Helium's frontwoman

By Jim Sullivan, Globe Staff,  Mar 15, 1996

Sometimes, Mary Timony scares people. Men especially. She knows this. She says it’s not intentional.

Ask the 26-year-old Boston-based singer-songwriter-guitarist about what people misperceive about her and she says, “That I really am a mean and scary person. I guess I should embrace it and go with it, and pretend like I am or something.”

“I really like how girls play guitar,” she says. “It sounds less aggressive; it sounds round and warm. There are so many different things you can do with the guitar. Why not just do it?”

Timony would not scare you if you saw her walking down the street. She might be a semi-bewitching blonde, but she’s no Courtney Love. Certainly, she wouldn’t scare you if you were speaking with her or dining with her. This is a woman who orders a cheeseburger, onion rings and a diet soda for dinner — takes most of it home in a doggie bag — and enjoys many a good giggle, especially on learning that the former part-time occupation of the guy who co-owns her record label, Matador, is somewhat tainted by association. Namely, Matador’s Gerard Cosloy once played bass with the notorious late rock pariah/madman G. G. Allin.

But if you know Timony only from the music she writes and plays with Helium, or from her stage demeanor, well, you might reasonably be intimidated. In her music, Timony moves from breathy menace to abrasive, full-throttle clamor. She’s sexy; she’s dangerous. Both her guitar and her voice can snarl and curdle, usually separately. She sings lines like “You’re gonna pay me with your life” in “XXX” and “I’m small like a superball, throw me at the wall/I’m fragile like an eggshell, I’m mad as hell” in “Superball.” She’s got the girl/woman thing working and admits that when some people meet her, “they think I’m 14.”

Onstage, Timony projects a diffident, icy demeanor, which can be read as: “Do not mess with me.” Timony is asked how close her stage persona is to her real self.

“It’s very far away,” she says, between bites and sips earlier this week at a Brookline restaurant. “The me that’s up onstage is not me at all. I don’t feel like a performer. I would like to feel like a performer, but at this stage in my rock career, or whatever, I haven’t really gotten used to playing onstage. The person is completely different from the person who writes all the music, all the creative stuff.”

Think of it as the three faces of Mary Timony.

The writing — lyrics certainly, and music to an extent — seems often to come from a sad, depressed, angry place.

“I hear people say, `Why is it so dark and depressing?’ ” Timony says. “I go, `Oh, you’re right.’ But it doesn’t feel weird to me at all. It feels really normal. Let me see . . . where does it come from? I don’t know. In {the song} `Skeleton’ I feel like I’m putting on this persona, being this evil monster and people hear it and think, `Wow, she must be evil.’ It’s kinda funny to me, you know? . . . I think that was a phase that may have ended. It felt cool to become a witch or a monster in song, and then it was like I was becoming powerful by becoming this creature and saying whatever I wanted.

“Another thing,” she continues, “is there are death and darkness references, like the devil, and I’m also making fun of myself when I become depressed for being depressed. It’s kind of joking with myself. There’s a lot of haunted-house sounds.”

Helium, which headlines the Middle East Downstairs tonight, began in 1992, pretty much by accident. Timony, a Washington, D.C., native, had been attending Boston University and summering back home. While she was home, she played in the band Autoclave. “A long-distance band,” she says.

Helium’s original rhythm section — drummer Shawn Devlin and bassist Brian Dunton — had formed a project with guitarist Jason Hatfield (Juliana’s bro) and singer Mary Lou Lord. Lord split for another home in two weeks and Timony, whose girlish voice is not unlike Lord’s, was brought in. Then Hatfield exited, leaving the three. Timony pitched her songs to the guys and Helium began. There were two singles, “The American Jean” and “Hole in the Ground,” on two small indie labels, and then Matador, home to more than a few Boston bands, signed them up.

Last year, before the recording of their first full-length album, Dunton left the group and was replaced by Polvo’s Ash Bowie. After he left, Timony went public with some comments about what she viewed as Dunton’s controlling nature — comments she now regrets. “We were both pretty headstrong,” she says now. “We wanted different things for the band, and I think he’s doing something he enjoys more, at Fort Apache studios and managing Fuzzy. Now, it’s fine and we get along pretty well.”

Timony says when Helium gets to work again on its next album, during the summer, she’ll write with Bowie, whom she met through pals in the Dambuilders. She also predicts that there won’t be quite the level of depression within the songs. “It’s actually a really lonely thing to feel like you’ve got to do everything yourself,” she says. “I don’t know if I have it in me anymore. That record took so much out of me.”

On “The Dirt of Luck” and the follow-up EP, “Superball,” Helium shows more depth than the bulk of the noisy alt-rock bands strafing the land. Timony uses keyboards as well as guitars, and her songs often move at moderate, ebb-and-flow tempos. There’s downtime, quiet space. There’s room for songs to evolve and build. There are melodic hooks — those in “Pat’s Trick” are killer — but they tend not to be waved in your face. Helium is not the Gin Blossoms. Helium echoes Sonic Youth, a band it toured with last year. Fully appreciating Helium requires learning their musical language.

“I have heard that our music doesn’t register at first,” says Timony. “I mean, I know some music does; when I first heard Pavement I knew it was great. But, to me, our music makes sense. It’s a little complicated. I definitely do not like music that’s done to the point of being weird.”

Is there a difference between the way men and women approach guitar?
Timony thinks so. “I really like how girls play guitar,” she says. “It sounds less aggressive; it sounds round and warm. There are so many different things you can do with the guitar. Why not just do it?”

Though Helium sold out the Middle East last time it played and has a solid cult audience, it is likely that its music has enough dissonance to keep it on the fringes of alt-rock. Timony has thought about success and says, “The most important thing for me is to be able to make my living playing music and be comfortable.”

Is she close?
“Not there yet, but I’m trying. It’s not like we’re on a huge label getting a lot of money.”

Timony’s day job is working in the shipping department of a video transfer company. It’s a job she shares with several other Boston rock folks. She seems, initially, a bit embarrassed to discuss this mundane aspect of her life, but admits the schedule-adhering part of it actually helps her focus. “I kind of wanted to go back to work,” she says. “So I would wake up early. You know, when you don’t have a job, sometimes it’s kind of weird. And with me, I’m so lazy that it’s like I’ll get an idea in my head and then I’ll be like, ‘I don’t want to get up and practice.’ I have to drag myself to do it.”

We’re all better for it that she does.

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