L7

L7 weren't from Seattle.

Let's get that out of the way first.

They were from Los Angeles, started by Donita Sparks and Suzi Gardner back in 1985, and they'd already been making noise for years before anybody outside the Northwest gave much of a shit about Sub Pop, flannel shirts or whatever else eventually got packaged up and sold as grunge. They didn't need Seattle to teach them how to play loud. If anything, they were one of those bands that made it obvious the same ugly mixture of punk, metal and cheap distortion was happening in a lot of places at once.

The early L7 wasn't even the four-woman lineup most people picture now. There were guys in the band at first, including drummer Roy Koutsky, and the lineup moved around before Jennifer Finch came in on bass and Dee Plakas eventually settled behind the drums. Donita and Suzi were the constant from the beginning, two guitarists who could both sing and write and who never seemed particularly interested in deciding whether they were supposed to be a punk band or a metal band.

Their first album, L7, came out on Epitaph in 1988. And remember, this was Epitaph before Epitaph became the giant punk label everybody knew a few years later. The record is rougher and more primitive than what came after, but the basic machinery is already there: big dumb riffs in the best possible sense, punk tempos, hard-rock guitar, sarcasm, and absolutely no interest in sounding pretty.

I didn't hear that one first.

I got into L7 through Smell the Magic.

Somebody at the store back in Queens had a copy, and "Shove" was the song that got me. Jesus. That guitar comes in and the whole thing just sounds mean. Suzi sings it, which is worth mentioning because people have a habit of remembering L7 as Donita Sparks plus three other women, and that's never what the band was. Suzi sang plenty, Jennifer sang, everybody brought something to the thing. "Fast and Frightening" got me too. That whole record sounded like somebody had taken punk rock, dropped a toolbox down the stairs on top of it and decided the resulting noise was good enough to release.

Which, apparently, it was.

The original Smell the Magic was a six-song 12-inch on Sub Pop in 1990. The CD and cassette that followed in '91 added three more songs, which is why you sometimes see people talking about it like it's a nine-song album and sometimes like it's an EP. Same title, different amount of L7. Record collecting is stupid like that.

And there on the thing were names I was already starting to notice: Seattle. Reciprocal. Jack Endino. Endino didn't record the whole record — some of it was done down in L.A. — but he worked on part of it at Reciprocal, including "Shove." By then I was seeing that guy's name on what felt like every third noisy record I picked up.

I didn't know the whole story yet, but L7 had actually chased down the Sub Pop people and come up to Seattle before that record. They played here in '89, before I lived here and before most of the country had any idea why a little label in Seattle mattered. Sub Pop put out "Shove" through the Singles Club and then Smell the Magic. So no, L7 weren't a Seattle band, but their connection to this place wasn't something invented later by journalists trying to squeeze everybody into the same article.

They'd been here.

They'd recorded here.

They were on the fucking label.

That'll do.

By the time Bricks Are Heavy came out in '92, L7 had moved to Slash and Butch Vig was producing them. I bought it while I was still in New York, months before I moved out here, and I played the hell out of that record.

Everybody knows "Pretend We're Dead." MTV certainly made sure of that. It's a great song, but if that's the only L7 song you know, you're missing most of the fun. "Wargasm," "Everglade," "Slide," "Shitlist" — that's the stuff that kept me playing the album after I'd heard "Pretend We're Dead" for the hundredth time.

Especially "Shitlist."

There are songs you admire because they're beautifully written and reveal something profound about the human condition.

Then there are songs called "Shitlist."

Sometimes you need both.

Butch Vig cleaned things up compared with Smell the Magic, but he didn't clean them up too much. The guitars got bigger, the drums hit harder, and suddenly all that noise had enough shape around it to work on the radio without sounding like somebody had talked L7 into behaving themselves. Jennifer's bass and Dee's drums gave that lineup a ridiculous amount of weight, and Donita and Suzi could pile guitars on top without everything turning into soup.

Then I moved to Seattle in September '92 and discovered that L7 made even more sense out here than they had in Queens.

Not because they secretly belonged to Seattle. They didn't. Los Angeles is all over that band. But by then I'd spent enough time with Mudhoney, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Tad and a hundred Sub Pop singles to hear why L7 had fit so naturally beside that stuff. Punk without punk purity tests. Metal riffs without the metal costume. Cheap jokes. Bad attitudes. Guitars that sounded like machinery having a nervous breakdown.

It wasn't a family tree. It was more like several families living on the same bad block.

The other thing I'd started paying attention to by then was Rock for Choice. L7 didn't just attach their name to somebody else's benefit. The whole thing grew out of an idea involving the band and Sue Cummings from the LA Weekly, working with the Feminist Majority Foundation. The first concert was at the Palace in Hollywood in October '91: L7, Hole, Sister Double Happiness and Nirvana. The idea kept growing from there, with more benefits and a lot of bands getting involved over the years.

That always impressed me about L7. They organized something.

Plenty of bands can tell you what they're pissed off about. L7 helped book a room.

This was also around the time journalists became fascinated by the astonishing scientific discovery that L7 were women.

Every interview seemed to find some new way of bringing it up. Four women playing loud guitars! Women who swear! Women who like Black Sabbath! Women who don't appear particularly interested in explaining what it's like to be women in a band for the eight-thousandth fucking time!

Like somebody had discovered a dog driving a car.

I'm not saying being women was irrelevant to L7. Obviously it wasn't. Rock for Choice alone makes that ridiculous, and they talked plenty about sexism and the way women got treated in music. But there was always a point where the coverage stopped being about what they were actually doing and started gawking at the fact that women were doing it.

Listen to the fucking records.

Unfortunately, L7 occasionally gave the press material so impossible to ignore that the songs didn't stand a chance.

Reading Festival in '92 is the obvious one. The crowd was throwing mud and bottles, the show was going to hell, and Donita eventually pulled out a used tampon and threw it back at them. That's the kind of story that will follow a band around forever, and it did. Around the same period she dropped her pants on British television during "Pretend We're Dead."

I'm sure somewhere there's a person whose entire knowledge of L7 is the tampon story.

That's a shame.

It's funny in a completely disgusting L7 way, sure, and the Reading crowd apparently worked pretty hard to earn it. But reducing them to shock stories misses why anybody cared enough to put them on those stages in the first place. Bricks Are Heavy wasn't successful because Donita could piss off a festival audience. It was successful because L7 had figured out how to write heavy songs that stuck in your head.

They followed it with Hungry for Stink in '94, and I like that record more than it usually gets credit for. It's dirtier than Bricks Are Heavy. Less of that Butch Vig punch and more grime around everything. "Andres" is probably the obvious place to start, but "Can I Run," "Questioning My Sanity" and "Fuel My Fire" are all worth it. The Prodigy covered "Fuel My Fire" a few years later, which still makes me laugh a little. L7 wrote it first.

And then there was Serial Mom.

John Waters made a movie about a suburban mother who becomes a serial killer and put L7 in it as a band called Camel Lips playing "Gas Chamber."

Because of course he did.

Honestly, L7 appearing in a John Waters movie makes so much sense I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner.

By this point the classic lineup had been together long enough that it's easy to forget how much each person mattered. Donita got the most press because Donita was the one most likely to say or do whatever made the headline. But Suzi had been there since 1985, singing, writing and playing guitar beside her. Jennifer wasn't just somebody holding down the bass frequencies. Dee wasn't just the drummer. That particular four-person machine is what you're hearing through Smell the Magic, Bricks Are Heavy and Hungry for Stink, and when Jennifer left during the making of the next record, things changed.

The public explanation at the time was that she wanted to go back to school.

Fair enough.

But the important part for the records is that the transition wasn't as simple as Jennifer walks out, Gail Greenwood walks in. The Beauty Process: Triple Platinum was made in the middle of that mess, with L7 functioning more like a trio and the bass duties getting patched together. Greta Brinkman played some, Donita played some herself, and Gail — who'd been in Belly — came in afterward and became part of the touring band.

The Beauty Process came out in '97, and it's a weird record.

I mean that as a compliment.

There are still plenty of big L7 riffs, but it doesn't have the easy identity of Bricks Are Heavy or even Hungry for Stink. Some of it feels slower, heavier, stranger. "Drama" is great. "Off the Wagon" is great. "The Masses Are Asses" is exactly the kind of title you hope an L7 record will have.

Around that period Krist Novoselic directed a little L7 film called The Beauty Process, part concert footage and part documentary and generally as odd as you'd expect. Another one of those Seattle connections that keeps showing up whenever you follow this band around long enough. Not because L7 were secretly ours. They just kept crossing the same roads.

There was also Live: Omaha to Osaka, which came out through Man's Ruin and is worth looking for if you want the live side rather than another studio record. By then L7 had been around long enough that they could actually have a live album with a title like that and have it describe a reasonable portion of their life.

Then came Slap-Happy in '99 on Bong Load.

By that point it seemed like half the world had stopped paying attention.

Five or six years earlier everybody wanted bands like L7. Alternative radio was everywhere, MTV wanted distorted guitars, major labels were signing anything that looked like it might frighten somebody's parents, and suddenly a band that had spent years making this kind of music could have a genuine hit.

Then the radio moved on and people acted like the bands had disappeared.

L7 hadn't.

Slap-Happy isn't Bricks Are Heavy, and I'm not going to pretend it is, but there's something I like about hearing a band that had already gone through indie labels, a major-label breakthrough, MTV, festivals, lineup changes and all the rest of the bullshit end up on Bong Load still making an L7 record. Nobody was going to mistake 1999 for 1992. They didn't need to.

They kept touring for a while after that, and then things got quiet.

Right now the official phrase is "indefinite hiatus."

Which is one of those wonderfully useless band phrases that can mean "we need a break," "nobody wants to deal with this right now," "call us in six months," or "this thing is dead and nobody wants to be the one to say it."

L7 themselves admit it's vague.

So I'm not going to tell you they're broken up. I don't know that. They aren't touring, there hasn't been another studio record since Slap-Happy, and as of right now there isn't much evidence that they're about to start doing either again.

Maybe that's it.

Maybe it isn't.

Either way, fifteen-plus years is a hell of a run for a band that never fit neatly anywhere in the first place. Too punk for some metal people. Too metal for some punks. Too funny for people who wanted everything serious. Too serious for people who thought they were just fucking around. Too connected to Seattle to leave out of this archive, and too obviously from Los Angeles for me to pretend they belonged to us.

Good.

Their problem was never that they didn't fit.

Everybody else's problem was figuring out which box to put them in.

Turn it up.