Future femmes fatale: Take note

Jessica Hopper knew tons of professional musicians, and had played in punk bands herself for years, but she still made a rookie mistake.

“I paid $600 for a guitar that was probably worth about $100,” she says from her home in Chicago. She was in her mid-20s then, working as a music publicist and tour manager when she wasn’t playing bass and guitar in various bands or writing for Hit It or Quit It, the fanzine she’d started when she was 15.

If a savvy, plugged-in woman like her could get hoodwinked, what hope is there for a 13-year-old aspiring riot grrrrrl who has maybe never even touched a guitar?

Well, more than there used to be, anyway.

Published in June, Hopper’s “The Girls’ Guide to Rocking” is a do-it-yourself-manual for future femmes fatale who want to grow up to be Patti Smith or Gwen Stefani or Ida Maria.

The 288-page tome covers everything from finding sympatico collaborators and choosing a memorable name to making cardboard sound baffles to turn your bedroom into a rehearsal space. Stick with it — your band and the book — and you’ll find tips on booking gigs and cutting tracks in Garageband, Apple’s easy home recording application. Also: choosing the right guitar, and how much to pay for it.

Hopper’s prose is breezy and accessible, and there are encouraging quotes from several generations of female musicians (Nina Simone, P.J. Harvey, Haley Williams of Paramore), plus a foldout timeline of notable musical triumphs by women.

Hopper will read and take questions Monday night at Comet Ping Pong, where she’ll be supported by a musical triple bill. Toronto’s Katie Stelmanis and her band will play, along with two D.C. acts, Lucia Lucia and Pree front woman May Tabol, performing solo.

Though the “Girls’ Guide” is Hopper’s first book, she’s written steadily about music for 17 years. Her reporting and criticism appears in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Reader and L.A. Weekly. She also picks the songs heard each week on “This American Life,” the popular public radio story anthology.

Her rock how-to had been percolating for a long time. The author recalls “a conversation with my bandmates when I was about 16, about how we wished we had a book like this. Pretty much the next thought after that was, ‘I would like to write that book.’ Punk is about resourcefulness and sharing, so it seemed fitting.”

But music, PR work and other writing gigs kept it on the back burner until an editor at Workman Publishing approached her with a proposal for a book almost identical to the one she’d first dreamt of writing back in the early 1990s.

Now 32, and engaged to a musician entering his final year of law school, Hopper seems to relish the opportunity to share the resources she had that most girls don’t. Growing up in Minneapolis — the fecund music lab that gave us Prince and The Replacements and Husker Du and The Hold Steady — she didn’t have just one rock ‘n’ role model, but many.

“I’d be standing outside of bars I couldn’t get into, leaving notes on bands’ vans: ‘Dear Afghan Wigs, can you call me after school tomorrow so I can interview you?’ “

Her earnestness made her a tough girl to turn down.

“People were constantly looking out for me, because I was precocious and ambitious,” she says. “I had this funny network of people that I guess saw in me their own awkward, teen-punk selves, and were anxious to help me out.”

But even with a whole scene’s worth of moral support, getting onstage for the first time is never easy.

“I thought for a long time that what I was doing was somehow inferior,” Hopper says. “What I want girls to come away with big-picture is, ‘Start where you are.’ As long as you’re making music that’s meaningful to you, however you’re doing it is the right way.”