Chris Fortuna
Style Idols: Juliette Lewis
Issue #35
The actress-musician kicks and lunges her way to style-icon status
By Amy Schroeder
Published: March 1st, 2008 | 2:55pm
A line of fans snakes through the aisles of a fully stocked record store located upstairs from Reggie’s, the southside Chicago venue where Juliette and the Licks will perform in a few hours on this frigid Friday evening in November 2007. The band is autographing albums, and I’m watching from the sidelines, soaking up Licks culture before interviewing Lewis in about an hour.
The 20- and 30-something fans look as though they’re containing their excitement to maintain their cool factor. How common is it, after all, for an actress who’s made a name for herself starring alongside Hollywood’s most elite — and scored a number of awards including an Oscar nomination for her role in Cape Fear — to ignite a second career as rocker, indie-style? And how likely is it for her to embark on a two-month, small-venue tour in the throes of winter?
When Lewis unveiled Juliette and the Licks at Johnny Depp’s Viper Room in 2003, followed by a West Coast tour, audiences were blown away by Lewis’ energy and rock vocal skills. And though some listeners assumed the band was an experiment or promo hijinks linked to a movie, that was far from the truth. The Licks are the real deal, something Lewis had been itching to do for more than a decade but didn’t have the time. But she made time and stuck with it, performing relentlessly and working hard like any new band should. Juliette and the Licks teamed up with producer-songwriter Linda Perry and released an EP (… Like a Bolt of Lightning) and a debut full-length (You’re Speaking My Language) in 2005. Two years later, the band released its second album, Four of the Floor, with Dave Grohl on drums.
Tonight’s Chicago performance — with guitarist Todd Morse, bassist Jason Womack, and drummer Ed Davis — is part of the quintet’s first headlining tour in the U.S. in two years. “We started our U.S. tour opening for Chris Cornell for a month to, like, 2,000 to 3,000 people. That was a nice crowd — he’s very rocknroll,” Lewis later tells me. “Then we opened for Muse for two weeks. Now we’re playing little small clubs to make sure we can sell those places out before we graduate.”
Lewis says one of the reasons she’s focusing on music now, at age 35, is because she got wrapped up in acting, starting at an early age. Lewis got her first major role in a miniseries called Home Fires when she was 12 and then made appearances on The Wonder Years and I Married Dora before landing a role in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. “As a kid, I always thought I was going to do music, but then I got successful acting and got complacent, in the sense that that’s all I knew. Even though film is not a medium that’s completely and utterly fulfilling to me, I really love it,” Lewis says. “But acting doesn’t challenge me in the way that writing songs, leading a band, and designing things for our next record do.” Lewis explains that she needed time to develop a musical point of view, something she thinks she wouldn’t have been able to do at age 20 but that she could at 30. “I was always using music in my acting to prepare for roles. To me, cinema and music go hand in hand. Now I’m just giving attention to the other side of my art.” This isn’t to say that she’s throwing in the towel on her acting career. Since Lewis launched her music career, she’s landed roles in a number of films, including Starsky & Hutch, Old School, and Catch and Release.
After watching Lewis and the Licks sign autographs, I head to the bar downstairs to wait for Lewis’ manager to tell me she’s ready to talk. “Are you here for Juliette too?” asks a woman sporting a hooded black military jacket and multicolored hair. Nodding my head, the woman tells a story of how she’d just gotten her ticket stubs for tonight’s performance signed by Lewis herself. The fan had asked her to write something in reference to Natural Born Killers. “But Juliette doesn’t do that apparently,” she says.
The Licks’ manager, a get-down-to-business Brit, meets me at the bar and escorts me “backstage” at Reggie’s. Backstage is actually a small, fluorescent-lit, low-ceilinged basement with an assortment of dudes – the Licks, mainly – sprawled on beat-up couches. I hear a toilet flush, and Lewis exits the bathroom, greeting me with a handshake and a smile. Sans makeup, she’s wearing black stretch pants and a hooded sweatshirt. As is often the case when you meet people you’ve only seen onscreen, she’s much more petite in person than she appears onscreen. One of the guys asks Lewis if he can add a friend to the guest list for tonight’s show. “Sure,” she says. “If we were playing L.A., the whole crowd would likely be on the guest list.” Looking around the room and realizing it’s too cramped to do an interview, she suggests we go outside, a surprising suggestion since it’s maybe 15 degrees and she’s accustomed to L.A. weather. She leads me into the back alley and I’m not sure where we’re going, until I see that she’s steering me toward her tour bus.
When we get on board, I follow her to the back of the bus to a four-foot-by-five-foot room she calls home for the duration of the tour. Avoiding small mounds of clothing, we sit about three inches from each other. I turn on the tape recorder and thank her for the interview, feeling badly that I’d interrupted the few minutes she had to down a salad and bottled water. I announce that our conversation should include fashion stuff because she’s one of our “Style Idols,” she sums up her look. “I’m not so much the minimalist black-dress girl,” Lewis says. “I like to dress something up — whether it’s with a scarf or a ribbon around my neck — something with a bit of glitter or flash.”
Looking for examples, she picks up pieces in the colorful mounds, including a scarf she got in Budapest. “A fan in Germany got me this,” she says, a blue scarf in hand. “I like a bit of street glam. I like Rod Stewart in the late ’70s — he wore these canary-yellow pants. I’m inspired by Mick Jagger in, like, 1982, when he was wearing a leotard and soccer pants. I’m sort of more of what I was as a 10-year-old. I just have access to better clothes, I guess.”
Inspired by the circus and wrestlers, Lewis requires her stage clothes be practical and fit like second skin because she moves around so much. “I need knee pads because my knees get black and blue,” she says. “I’m starting to think, ‘Oh no, are my knees going to go when I get older?’ I tend to drop to my knees when I perform.”
Dropping to the floor is just one stage antic. At tonight’s show, wearing a fitted red pantsuit and a matching jacket emblazoned with “LAPD” on the back, which she takes off after the second song to reveal a sort-of unitard getup — plus, her signature feathered headband — Lewis lunges, jumps, and kicks her way through the songs. Instructing the crowd that she’s “going to whip them into shape,” the crowd lives vicariously through her insatiable energy and appetite for rock construction. Her pipes are as strong as her body is flexible. Lewis says she tries not to get her hopes up too much about a show’s turnout, though it doesn’t appear she has anything to worry about. “I’ll always think that 30 people might show up, but we sold out this venue, so that’s a good sign,” she says. “I’ve fallen in love with the Licks audience — it’s usually a mixed bag of young and old, hardcore people, sweet girls, conservative types, gay kids, straight kids … just everybody.”
At this point, I’m convinced that everyone should consider a career change – or at least an experimental switchemup experience. As Lewis shows, if you’ve got passion and you work hard, you don’t have much to lose. “I feel like in everybody lives a beating heart,” she says, “and you just gotta jumpstart it.”
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