Susan Dietrich joins the Zoom meeting from her home in Denver, Colorado. She’s sitting by her keyboard. On the wall behind her is a clock with no hands, just the word “NOW”. She’s in her mid-70s, kindly, soft-spoken.
“Is my helmet on straight?” she asks. It’s a plastic Viking helmet with white wings and a little red ball on top of it. It’s on straight.
Those with esoteric musical tastes may know Dietrich better as The Space Lady. She plays ethereal, echoey, space-age covers of ’60s hits on a tinny ’80s keyboard, with a few quite brilliant originals thrown in. Hers is a common internet-age story: decades after playing music in total anonymity, a tape passes into the right hands, the internet takes notice, and an invisibly obscure musician finally finds the audience that has always eluded her.
“I’d always thought of myself as an outcast”: Susan Dietrich embraces the term “outsider music”.Credit: Terri Loewenthal
The name usually given to these artists is “outsider music”. Not everyone likes that.
“I love it,” says Dietrich. “I’d always thought of myself as an outcast. I thought, ‘Oh, there is a category for my music. There is a place for me in the world.’”
The origins of Space Lady are humble. In 1982, Dietrich was busking on the streets of Boston when a drunk grabbed her accordion out of her hands and smashed it against a concrete wall. It was her livelihood, and she couldn’t afford to replace it. But she could just about afford the new Casio MT-40. It was portable, had a built-in rhythm section, and it only cost $150. With a dreamlike new sound and a plastic helmet her husband found in a costume store, she became The Space Lady – an eccentric fixture on the streets of Boston, and later San Francisco, throughout the ’80s.
She wasn’t always welcome. She was ushered out of the city’s railway stations, and often found herself performing outside in the rain and fog. “It was just a notch above begging,” says Dietrich. “I was chased around town by merchants. Sometimes people in apartments above me had enough after an hour. I needed hours and hours to make a living.”
Eventually, she moved home to Colorado to care for her elderly parents. She remarried and trained as a nurse. She continued to play music in her parents’ Methodist church and played folk songs in coffee houses and nursing homes with her husband. “I went back to the mainstream,” she says.
The Space Lady was an eccentric fixture on the streets of Boston, and later San Francisco, throughout the ’80s.
But when a Space Lady song was included on a compilation of “outsider music”, her alter ego began to garner a cult following. Her husband was curious as to why she was getting emails from around the world. So she bought a new MT-40 on eBay and showed him.
“It had been 15 years since I played my Casio,” she says. “The only thing I could remember was [Stan Jones’ country number] (Ghost) Riders in the Sky. He was astounded. He insisted I return to my music.”
The internet had diversified the music landscape, and outsiders could find a global audience. Her old demos, which she once sold on cassette on the street, were remastered and reissued as The Space Lady’s Greatest Hits. She began to tour. The Space Lady came in from the fog.
Today, her music sounds startlingly contemporary. When I first heard one of her songs a few years ago, the celestial Synthesize Me, I thought it was new. Dietrich is bemused when I tell her this.
Andy Burns isn’t. “Susan is a real maverick,” he says. “Her DNA is all over DIY music now. John Maus, Ariel Pink, Molly Nilsson … it’s clear she’s had quite the influence on a lot of music like that.”
Burns has arranged her current Australian tour, and will be supporting her at the Northcote Social Club on the 10th. He’s also performed with other “outsider musicians like Eugene Chadbourne and Jim E. Brown”.
“I’m naturally drawn to artists that do everything on their own – record, tour, do everything,” he says. “Working with people like that is inspirational.”
The helmet has been repaired across the decades. The original silver plastic base cracked in the Boston winter. The red ball fell off and rolled into a drainage gutter. But the simple essence of Space Lady – and her repertoire – remains the same. Only the audience has changed.
“They seem to be quite young,” says Dietrich. “They’re two or three generations younger than me. It’s astounding that my music is still relevant to them. It’s rejuvenating to look out over a sea of young people’s faces smiling and cheering me on. What did I do to deserve this?”
The Space Lady will play The Red House, Sydney, on January 10 and Northcote Social Club, Melbourne, on January 11.
