North Hills, Pittsburgh; a tiny Borders bookstore, any given Saturday night, circa 2004. Erin Lindsay Dragan,16, sits onstage, playing the guitar and singing to a small crowd of store patrons and coffee drinkers.
At the end of the night, she walks out with fifty dollars, and she’s never felt more empowered.
November 2022, and she’s playing Pittsburgh’s Light Up Night with headliner Joan Jett, the frontwoman the Blackhearts. So, how did we get from there to here?
Dragan’s parents were spring cleaning their attic one year when they found an old acoustic guitar. The way Dragan tells it, she was immediately drawn to it, asking her parents not to throw it away. She didn’t want it as a toy, though, the way that other kids her age might—she meant to properly learn to play, right from the get-go.
“I remember buying a chord book with, like, allowance money when I was ten, and I remember teaching myself how to play a G chord, a G major chord, and it feeling like that was the thing I was meant to do. But about a year later, my mom was like, you know, do you want lessons?” she said in an interview this past fall.
And so, seven years of guitar lessons began, although Dragan quickly found that she didn’t respond to the usual styles of teaching. While Dragan’s instructor initially started her out on sight-reading, he began to realize that she was more of an auditory learner, and had instead been listening to what he played and playing it back.
“It was like, all right, we're going to learn the blues scale today, and we're going to jam until you get it,” she recalled.
Voice lessons, however, didn’t come until Dragan went to college.
She wound up playing at Borders, she said, mostly due to the age restrictions at most other venues. She mentioned the Club Cafe in the South Side, in particular, as a venue that allowed minors to play, but only if they were accompanied by a parent.
“I remember getting lectured by somebody about like, don't you dare come near the bar, you know, because I think they were just so afraid of losing their liquor license or something.”
Borders was more of a place of independence for the young Dragan. She was paid fifty dollars per performance, plus whatever she made from merchandise sales, which at the time mostly came in the form of CDs. Some nights, she said, she’d walk out with upwards of two hundred dollars—huge money for a teenager, she pointed out.
In fall of 2005, Dragan started at the University of Pittsburgh, already with a declared major. She went for English Writing on the poetry track, as well as a minor in religious studies, which later became a second major, along with a certificate in what was then called Women’s Studies.
She wasn’t much for parties but tried to go to as many open mics as possible. It was a good way to meet people and eventually opened the door for other opportunities.
“I connected with a guy named Josh who also grew up in western P.A., and he was also a great piano player,” she said. “And so that formed the basis for the band I had through most of my Pitt years, which was called The Meridians.”
The band also featured a bass player and a drummer. They played mostly at parties, though they did have some of what Dragan calls “legit gigs,” including playing at the Club Café, this time sans parents.
Just before Dragan’s final semester at Pitt, The Meridians disbanded due to a combination of conflicting interests and simply growing apart. “I mean, we really believed in that band for a while. And threw all our extra money into it,” she said. “That's the thing about music. You can pour tons of money into it and there's a good chance it might not work out.”
Dragan graduated in 2008, a semester ahead of schedule, and promptly left for Flagstaff, Arizona, to pursue an MA in English. Two years later, though, she’d find that there was a different path she wanted to try following.
“I just thought, You know what? I'm just going to move to New York and see if I can do this. If I totally mess that up, I'm young enough that I think I can bounce back,” she said. “I just kind of shoved what I could in my car and drove back across the country to Brooklyn. And I spent the next seven years there.”
The music scene in New York was a lot different than it was in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh’s scene, as Dragan left it in 2008, was a good deal less cohesive than the one in New York, which could at times be frustrating, she said.
“There were a few dive bars [in Pittsburgh] you could play, a handful of decent bands, and just a smattering of good musicians, but they didn't really seem to be hanging out with each other that much, or, like, trying to play on one another's records.”
Meanwhile, in New York, things were bigger and more interconnected. There were more musicians and bands, and with that came a wider variety of genres and styles, and more venues and opportunities to choose from.
Dragan said, “It was much better infrastructure. In terms of the music scene in New York, people wanted to help one another out. I know a lot of people complain that New York is really cutthroat. I didn't really see it that way. I actually think Pittsburgh's more cutthroat than New York, because Pittsburgh is much more clubbish than New York, even though I think that's slowly starting to change.”
But that isn’t to say that New York was without its drawbacks for Dragan. High rent all over the city meant insecure living for residents, and also a high turnover rate for venues. The pandemic would later force a lot of them out, too, but even back in 2010 when she was there, Dragan said, some great venues would only last around three years before rent increases shut them down.
The cost of living was, ultimately, a huge deciding factor in Dragan’s move back to Pittsburgh in 2017. By then, she had a husband and a child, but even her and her husband’s combined incomes were at times barely enough to support them. “I felt like once a month I was having some sort of finance-related breakdown, you know, where we were just like how a lot of the U.S. is—one catastrophic mishap from ruin—and that is so stressful to live under," she told me.
So when her husband was offered a job at the University of Pittsburgh, a move back to Dragan’s hometown seemed like a great option. They returned in October of 2017, and Dragan spent the first few months settling into their new apartment and getting their 14-month-old daughter accustomed to the change in scenery.
Around December of that year, Dragan decided to dip back into the Pittsburgh music scene and was surprised at the changes she saw. “You know, the scene is a lot smaller because Pittsburgh is about one-twentieth the size of New York City,” she said. “But I feel like the quality of talent in Pittsburgh can go toe to toe with New York 100 percent now.”
A weekly event called AcoustiCafe at Mr. Smalls Theatre in Millvale was what really jump-started her return to the fray. Her friend Eric George, now the drummer of her current band, initially introduced the idea to her. Eric had been an old friend of Dragan’s, actually—he used to watch her play at her high school Borders performances.
“When I went to AcoustiCafe that night in December,” Dragan said, “I had reached a point where I was settled enough and felt good about, you know, everything.”
Later, Eric would introduce her to a friend and former bandmate of his named Dave Traugh, who would become the bassist and third member of “Lindsay Dragan and Her Band,” which played as a trio for several years. Clay Colley, their sometimes keyboard player and a former classmate of Traugh’s, joined later, adding what Dragan calls “A kind of a love of refinery that I think only a keyboard player can give.”
The newest addition to the band is Steve Hobaugh, who joined shortly after his performance with the band at WYEP’s Hellbender Ball this past fall. It was initially an addition out of necessity—the Hellbender Ball was a Halloween-themed event at Lawrenceville’s Thunderbird Music Hall in which Dragan would be performing in costume as Joan Jett, who usually performs as a quartet, not a trio. Colley’s sporadic participation with the band meant that they were down to three members for this performance, leading them to bring on Hobaugh as a second guitar.
“He was just so easy to work with,” Dragan recalled. “He was prepared. Every single practice [he] was like just ready to rock. He shaved a mohawk into his head for the show and told nobody about it—he just showed up at Thunderbird with a mohawk.”
A week after the ball, he was brought on as a permanent addition to the band.
Joan Jett isn’t just a costume for Dragan, though. She cites Jett’s music as a constant source of inspiration to her own and, now, a sign of how far she’s come in her career.
About her band opening this year’s Light Up Night in Pittsburgh, an event that Joan Jett and the Blackhearts headlined, Dragan said that she felt lucky, both in the sense of the promotion her band was getting and in the opportunity itself.
As for what’s coming next, Dragan said, “I've had a couple ideas rolling around in my head, so stay tuned.”
Listen to Dragan and her band here.
—Rebecca Reese
Rebecca Reese, T5F communiations intern in the Fall 2022 term, is a senior Writing (fiction) student with a minor in English Literature and a certificate in Television and Broadcasting Arts.