Tish Ciravolo

Ciravolo grew up in Merced, California, where her best friend Barbara taught her to play guitar while they were in high school. Ciravolo—whose first exposure to a female playing rock bass guitar 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 played 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 moved to Los Angeles, where she balanced a series of day jobs (including waitress at Duke's Coffee Shop and assistant to Jay Leno and his former manager, the late Helen Kushnick) with amateur night performances at The Improv and Comedy Store.

Intent on being a rock star during the middle 1980s, she gravitated towards what became her primary instrument, the bass guitar. 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 recalled, "because I didn't want to play with my fingers."