Tish Ciravolo

Tish Ciravolo is a Los-Angeles-based bass player and guitar designer, and the president and founder of Daisy Rock Guitars.

Ciravolo grew up in Merced, California, where her best friend Barbara taught her to play guitar while they were still in high school. The young Ciravolo—whose first exposure to a female playing rock bass was Suzi Quatro as Leather Tuscadero on Happy Days—was a quick learner and by age 16 was on tour with a band called Plateau.

When Plateau ended up playing in Kansas City, she decided to stay there and enrolled in Penn Valley Community College as a journalism and business major. After receiving her degree, she relocated to Los Angeles, where she balanced a series of day jobs (waitress at Duke’s Coffee Shop, temp positions, assistant to Jay Leno and his former manager, the late Helen Kushnick, to name a few) with amateur night performances at The Improv and Comedy Store.

Intent on being a rock star during the middle 1980s, she gravitated towards what would become her primary instrument, the bass. Like her influences Simon Gallup and Tim Butler, she played with a pick. “They kicked me out of the Dick Grove Music School after five minutes,” she recalls, “because I didn’t want to play with my fingers.”

Ciravolo played in several bands over the years, including Rag Dolls, The Velvets (a female Psychedelic Furs-type outfit), They Eat Their Own (new wave pop), and eventually, her own group, Shiksa and the Sluts. Then she entered her “big hair metal phase,” as the bass player for the band Lypstik from 1988 to 1992. “We had a billboard on the side of the Roxy and everything,” she says. “We did the windmill head shaking routine when we played, which was big at the time. We were also house band at the Whisky for a time, and played in the Battle of the Bitches at FM Station.” Finding other creative outlets, Ciravolo also made two independent films (The Wake, and Birds & The Bees) and wrote sitcom with partner Karen Peterson.

In her early 30s, Ciravolo chose to put her bass down for a while and have a family.

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