Andalusia Rose

Rock singers don't come much wilder than Wendy Lee Gadzuk, who for many years fronted Philly hard-rock outfit The 440's before moving to Arizona and shredding guitar with Whiskey Bitch. She's changed her sound radically with her new Oakland trio, Andalusia Rose, mixing such moodily melancholic ballads as "A Thousand Miles" with slide guitar - driven, hard-blues workouts like "A Little More," where her fierce vocals reveal a newfound rootsy soul. Gadzuk occasionally reaches into her punk past with blasts such as "Promised Me the World," where her searing, jangling guitar contrasts with the burning melodicism of her singing. She says that the band's name and many of her new lyrics came to her in a dream, when a ghost named Andalusia Rose told Gadzuk, "You are my channel. Go forth and sing to the people." - Falling James - L.A. Weekly

Andalusia Rose are a three piece from San Francisco’s Bay Area. Comprised of front woman and head honcho Wendy Lee Gadzuk, alongside “low end alchemist” Jeff Vengeance and drummer Paul Jarvis, they formed in 2012 under the watchful eye of Venus and some smoldering patuli incense.
“Andalusia Rose is the Patron Saint of Roses,” explains the band. “She became honoured as such after her tears of anguish over being unable to bear children fed the soil where she grieved and impregnated it with the seeds of a thousand rose bushes. She became sought after far and wide to sing and weep her crystalline tears into the soil, creating magnificent rose gardens across the land. She died childless, but left behind a legacy of beauty and magic to her name. Andalusia Rose lives on. These are her songs.”
More important than mythology, Andalusia Rose’s songs are bloody ace. A distinct blend of Rebekah Delgado, Nick Cave and Patti Smith punctuates their work, particularly on lead song “A Thousand Miles”. Elsewhere the trio rock and roll their way through a weird and wonderful world of garden decoration, commonly referred to as their self-titled debut album. - Drunken Werewolf

Blues music plays softly in Wendy Lee Gadzuk’s East Oakland studio, packed with well-worn and comfy furniture, rock memorabilia, a three-legged cat, and the raw materials of her mixed-media assemblages: animal remains, a bag of baby doll heads, old jewelry, and hardware she scavenged from furniture discarded by the roadside, stripped with a screwdriver kept in her purse for just that purpose.

She concedes to being from the South, “technically,” born below the Mason-Dixon line in Maryland.

Soft-spoken, bordering on demure, she has the unmistakable air of a Southern belle, despite her flaming red hair, full-sleeve tattoos, and provocative art.

The centerpiece of “This I Know to be True” is a turkey carcass from the first Thanksgiving she spent with her then-boyfriend’s family, painted in layers of acrylic wash. Exhibited at the Alameda Museum with Alameda Women Artists in 2010, it added “new energy and a different perspective,” according to AWA president Bonnie Randall Boller.

She created “The Sickness” for a group show at San Francisco’s Modern Eden Gallery earlier this year, adorning a birdhouse with lace, bones, female genitalia crafted in white leather, an ex-boyfriend’s hair, and her own menstrual blood—contained in glass vials—the piece illuminated from within by a glowing red bulb. “I’m at this age now where things are starting to change in my body,” she says. “It’s a reflection of both the physical and the mental states that we all go through that are natural and normal but can also be classified as being a sickness.”

Gadzuk earned her BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 1993 with a concentration in jewelry and metal smithing. When her jewelry was stolen from a gallery, she took the insurance money and bought a guitar. The rest was rock-and-roll history, with Gadzuk fronting several acclaimed bands, notably the post-punk folk-rock group The 440s. “That was like a new chapter,” she says. “I started doing the band, and touring, and putting out records, and focusing on that.”

She had an unfinished piece languishing for over a decade, “these cool metal hearts that represented different feelings I had about love and how it’s changed over the years. Guarded, and the inside is very soft.” Her cat gave her the nudge she needed … by urinating on it. “I took the piece apart and cut out some new leather pieces, and all of a sudden this whole flash of inspiration came. Everything came flooding back. That was when I started doing what I’ve been doing.”

Gadzuk now unites her art and music. She is currently working on a piece housed in a guitar case, and images of her work grace the CDs for her new band, Andalusia Rose. “For years I felt like my creativity had to be compartmentalized,” she says. “The music or the art. I couldn’t do both, or if I did they were both very separate from one another. I’m realizing now that it all comes from the same place.”

More work can be seen at WendyLeeGadzuk.com. She can be reached at Sparkle440@Comcast.net to schedule a studio visit. - Oakland/Alameda Magazine

Veteran local music fans will likely remember Wendy Gadzuk from her past Tucson bands, The 440s and Whiskey Bitch. Gadzuk is currently living in Oakland, Calif., and has a new trio,Andalusia Rose, which released a six-song, self-titled EP last year and will make its Tucson debut this week. Like her former projects, Andalusia Rose kicks much ass, but there's a twangy-bluesy Southern rock vibe this time around—and, I'd argue, the songs are better, too. Heck, there are even some lovely ballads (check out "A Thousand Miles," on its Bandcamp page, for example). - Tucson Weekly