This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen Magazine #100 (June/July 2002). the magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription.

Tret Fure
Coming Home, Bittersweet
by Pamela Murray Winters

"I learn by doing," is a phrase often uttered by Tret Fure.

One of the earliest things she learned was acoustic guitar. Just turned 51, she's been playing for 40 years. "I started when I was 11. My brother came home with a guitar, and he was gonna learn to play, and I just grabbed it from him and started picking out melodies, 'cause I was really good at that. I'd done that with piano when I was five. And then I played violin. But once I found the guitar, I just forgot everything but. There weren't songbooks in those days, so I learned by listening carefully to albums, just putting my ear up to the speaker. I learned to fingerpick listening to Judy Collins, the way she played."

Occasionally, over her long musical career, there have been things she's had to relearn. Just after finishing her second solo album, 1984's Terminal Hold, "we were having a celebration party, and a bunch of the musicians on the album were playing softball. And I was catching bad pitches backwards and bent my thumb and broke it. Fortunately, I'd just finished the album and wasn't going on tour for a few months. But it corrected my playing, because I had a splint on my thumb, and I learned how to hold my thumb correctly under the fretboard and play better."

Fure has had other painful lessons since then, especially in the past decade. The 1993 death of her mother led to a transition that is still going on and has overturned what she thought were the cornerstones of her life.

"I knew that it was a huge shift in my life, losing my mother. I was very, very close to her. And I knew that there was something going on in my life that needed full-circle transformation. But it took me almost seven years to do it, to move away." Her need to find herself led to her departure from her 20-year musical and personal bond with Cris Williamson and also from the West Coast, where she'd lived for 30 years, from a home she had built. "We lived about 30 miles northeast of Eugene, on seven acres of beautiful land. We had horses and cats, and I had a gorgeous garden. [Cris] is still there. She doesn't spend much time there, but she still owns the place."

Fure — pronounced "Fury" — went back home, to the Midwest, where her family (and her slight, charming accent) has deep roots, and to a music that reflects those roots. She was born into a large Norwegian-Irish family and raised in the Midwest, mostly in Marquette, Michigan, a place she "ran from" at 19. "I was running to find myself," she clarified, "to leave the smallness of my hometown and become somebody." She ended up in Los Angeles, where she collaborated with Spencer Davis on Mousetrap ("A friend of mine just found a few on eBay and sent me one. I didn't even have one!") in 1970 and made her self-titled solo album in 1973.

As the decade trucked on, Fure moved increasingly into studio work. She was the first staff producer and engineer for the influential women's-music label Olivia Records, which was founded by a collective that included musicians Meg Christian and Cris Williamson.

She also found kindred souls in the burgeoning punk movement. "I picked up the electric guitar when I was 24. My first album had been released, which Lowell George had produced — it was a great experience, working with him — and I had subsequently been dropped from the [MCA] label, then had started engineering. And at the time I was engineering a lot of punk bands, in the mid-70s, when punk and new wave music started. And I loved the new wave music, because to me it was folk music — there was strong lyrical content. It was folk music set to electric guitars. So I gotta play electric guitar. I picked one up — I really knew nothing about how to play one — but learned by putting together a punk band.

"In L.A. you have to pay to play, pretty much. You pay to showcase at all the clubs — you either pay or you don't get paid. And if you don't get paid, you gotta pay your musicians. So it always costs to play. So all the money I would make as an engineer would go into my band. And I learned how to play by just playing every club in town, playing electric guitar. And it worked! There were not many [women] electric guitar players in those days. Joan Jett, I guess, and a few others. And Joni was playing electric, but she was playing electric the same way she plays acoustic — open tuning. So it was a trip. I really enjoyed that time of music. I learned a lot."

At the dawn of the 80s, Fure began the relationship that has defined much of her public perception thus far, by engineering a children's record for Williamson. Their business and personal connection would engender three duo albums, innumerable concerts, a long and loving union, and a reputation as what Fure now mordantly terms "poster children for codependency."