Amy Ray

To back up for a moment, the Indigo Girls weren’t always a big band. They had beginnings that could only really be described as humble. While Amy and band mate Emily Saliers were still in high school, they would sneak into clubs with fake IDs to play. The two of them played covers: Dire Straits or Patti Smith or maybe even “All Along the Watchtower,” but slowly started writing and playing their own material. They played frat parties and dorms and were on the road for most of Amy’s senior year. “We started playing punk clubs because back then, the folk clubs didn't like us because we were too gay and too loud,” Amy says. In 1987, an A&R rep for Epic who was in town to see REM came see them play at Atlanta’s Little Five Points Pub, home to, as Amy puts it, “transients, punk rockers, drag queens, and family.” He convinced them to sign with the major label, but “at that point I thought I would really miss the independent thing because I really loved it.”