The Gits are one of the reasons this site exists.
I first heard them not long after I got to Seattle. Somebody played me the "Second Skin" single and Mia's voice stopped me cold. I'd heard plenty of punk singers by then, and this wasn't that. She could scream, obviously, but there was all this other stuff in her voice — blues, soul, heartbreak, whatever you want to call it. She could sound like she was about to tear the room apart and somehow like she was barely holding the song together at the same time.
Then I bought Frenching the Bully.
That was it.
The funny thing is that The Gits weren't originally from Seattle at all. They came together at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, back in 1986: Mia Zapata singing, Andy Kessler — Joe Spleen on the records — playing guitar, Matt Dresdner on bass and Steve Moriarty on drums. For a while they had the ridiculous name Snivelling Little Rat Faced Gits, courtesy of Monty Python, before common sense or lack of room on flyers won out and it became The Gits.
They recorded a tape in Yellow Springs in 1988 called Private Lubs, basically live to two-track in a little studio called Sound Space. It wasn't some lost major indie release the way old demo tapes sometimes become after people start assigning ridiculous prices to them. They made a tiny number of cassettes and passed them around. Some of those recordings eventually came out properly as Kings & Queens in 1996. I've never had an original Private Lubs in my hands, and if somebody tells you they've got one, I'd want to look at the damn thing before believing them.
The four of them moved west in 1989 and ended up in a beat-up house on Capitol Hill that everybody came to know as the Rathouse. You'll sometimes hear it described like it was some legendary Seattle club or punk-rock fortress. It wasn't. It was a shitty house where a band lived, rehearsed and had people over, which is probably more important anyway. They worked crappy jobs, practiced, played wherever they could get booked and gradually became part of the city.
That's worth saying because The Gits get dumped into "grunge" histories now mostly because they lived in Seattle at the right time. They weren't a grunge band. They were a punk band, and even that doesn't completely explain them. Joe could play hard and ugly and then suddenly turn melodic, Matt and Steve gave the songs more movement than a lot of hardcore bands ever bothered with, and Mia had this voice that seemed to have wandered in from another kind of music entirely. I can hear Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday in there sometimes, but that's me talking, not Mia giving you a list of her influences. Listen to the way she sings and then listen to The Gits doing Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" and you'll understand what I mean.
They started putting records out in 1990. The first was the Precious Blood 7" on Big Flaming Ego, with "Seaweed" and "Kings & Queens" on it too. Then came "Second Skin" backed with "Social Love" on Broken Rekids in '91, and "Spear and Magic Helmet" on Empty, with Jack Endino involved on the A-side. There was also Bobbing for Pavement, the Rathouse compilation. None of this stuff made them famous. It made people who were paying attention start paying attention harder.
"Second Skin" is still one of those songs for me. That opening guitar comes in and then Mia sounds like she's trying to convince herself of the same thing she's telling everybody else. That's something she was unbelievably good at. There was toughness in those songs, but it wasn't superhero toughness. She could sound scared, pissed off, lonely, drunk, funny, defiant and completely certain of herself, sometimes in about two minutes.
By 1992 they'd been doing it long enough that Seattle had pretty much adopted them. They'd played around the Northwest, hauled themselves around the country and even made it over to Europe the hard way. This wasn't tour-bus rock. This was indie-band touring: booking things yourself, trying to get paid, finding somewhere to sleep and hoping the van still worked in the morning.
Then Frenching the Bully finally came out on C/Z in November 1992.
What a fucking record.
"Absynthe," "Another Shot of Whiskey," "Insecurities," "Kings and Queens," "It All Dies Anyway," "Wingo Lamo," "Cut My Skin, It Makes Me Human," "Here's to Your Fuck," "Second Skin." It sounds mean without becoming stupid and emotional without getting soft around the edges. Steve Fisk engineered most of it, Scott Benson and the band produced it, and somehow they got enough of The Gits onto tape that you can understand what people around here were hearing in them.
Not all of it, though.
I found that out on January 15, 1993.
The Gits were playing the OK Hotel with IMIJ. Six bucks, nine o'clock, all-ages. I'd only been living in Seattle for a few months, and I was still in that period where half the city felt new to me. I'd been playing Frenching the Bully constantly, so there wasn't much chance I was going to miss them.
I don't remember what they opened with. I wish I did. I don't remember the exact set order either, and I'm not going to invent one thirty feet away from the truth just because it makes a better story.
I remember Mia.
That's what stayed.
The voice was bigger in the room than it was on the record. Not cleaner. Not prettier. Bigger. She could push it until it sounded ragged and then pull back and there'd suddenly be all this melody sitting underneath it. She didn't perform like somebody trying to look cool. She looked completely involved in whatever was happening inside the song. One minute she'd be bent into the microphone like she was fighting with the fucking thing, and the next she'd look up and there was a person there again instead of whatever had just taken over.
And she was funny.
That gets lost sometimes when people talk about her now. Everybody remembers the intensity. They should. But the people who knew her remember somebody funny and affectionate and gentle too, and even from the audience you could tell there was more going on than the miserable doomed-punk-girl story people have tried to build backward around her. I didn't know Mia. I'm not going to pretend I did. I saw a singer I thought was extraordinary, and I became one of the many people around Seattle who would go see The Gits when he got the chance.
There's a strange little footnote to that OK Hotel show for me now. The night before, January 14, The Gits played RKCNDY while Doug Pray's people were filming material for Hype!. In 2000, when Seafish Louisville came out, ten songs from that RKCNDY performance finally appeared on the CD: "Absynthe," "Another Shot of Whiskey," "Insecurities," "Slaughter of Bruce," "While You're Twisting, I'm Still Breathing," "A," "Social Love," "Wingo Lamo," "Here's to Your Fuck" and "Second Skin."
So now I can put that record on and hear The Gits twenty-four hours before I first saw them.
I don't know why that gets to me, but it does.
The other thing that becomes obvious when you dig backward through the singles and the old tape is how much of a band The Gits really were. Mia gets most of the attention, for obvious reasons, but those records don't work without Joe, Matt and Steve. They could turn quickly, leave holes for her voice and then pile back in behind it. The early versions of songs aren't just curiosities either. "Precious Blood," "Seaweed," "Kings & Queens," "Second Skin," "Spear and Magic Helmet" — you can actually hear them figuring out what kind of band they wanted to be.
Mia wrote most of the words, and that's another thing that gets buried under all the talk about her voice. She was a hell of a lyricist. She could write about drinking, sex, insecurity, violence, relationships and self-respect without making any of it sound like a slogan. People have tried to attach The Gits to riot grrrl because of the time, the place and some of the subject matter, but that's too neat. They came out of Antioch before that scene existed, they were a mixed band, and as far as I know Mia never went around calling herself riot grrrl. She didn't need somebody else's category.
By early 1993 things were moving. Not "The Gits were about to become Nirvana" moving. That's bullshit hindsight. They still weren't famous. But Frenching the Bully was out, they had a serious live reputation, they were touring, they were recording another album, and people outside the little Northwest punk world were starting to notice. Tim Sommer at Atlantic was interested enough to meet with them in Los Angeles that June and tell them he wanted to sign them. That's not the same thing as a signed contract, and I hate when the story gets cleaned up into "they had a major-label deal." They didn't. They had real interest from a major label and a band that finally seemed to have some momentum.
They were also working on the second record. A lot of the basic recording was there and Mia had done plenty of vocals, but it wasn't a finished album sitting on a shelf waiting for somebody to mail it to the pressing plant. There was still work to do.
And then July 7 happened.
I'm not going to write out what happened to Mia here. You can find that somewhere else if you really need to read it.
She was twenty-seven years old.
That's enough.
What I remember is what happened around Seattle afterward. Anger first, I think. Anger and fear. It wasn't some abstract story from somewhere else. Mia had been out at the Comet. She was part of this little world. People knew her, or knew somebody who knew her, or had stood ten feet from her while she sang. Suddenly women who'd been walking home from shows and bars for years were having very different conversations about how they got home.
A group of women from the music and arts community started meeting after Mia's murder, and that became Home Alive. It wasn't The Gits' organization and it wasn't just a memorial project. They built something practical out of what had happened: self-defense classes, benefits, conversations about violence and how people could actually protect themselves and each other. The Home Alive: The Art of Self-Defense compilation came out in 1996, but the thing mattered before there was a double CD to put on a shelf.
The Gits, as a band with Mia, were over.
The others eventually finished what they could of the second record, and Enter: The Conquering Chicken came out on C/Z in 1994. I have complicated feelings about calling it a finished Gits album because Mia never got to finish it herself, but I'm damn glad it exists.
"Bob (Cousin O.)," "Seaweed," "Sign of the Crab," "Precious Blood." And then there's "A Change Is Gonna Come."
That one absolutely destroys me.
There are lines on Enter that people have treated like prophecy since Mia died, especially in "Sign of the Crab." I don't like doing that. Songs aren't police reports and songwriters aren't fortune-tellers. Reading every line she wrote as if she somehow knew what was coming turns her work into evidence in her own murder. She deserves better than that.
I don't play Enter: The Conquering Chicken very often.
When I do, I play the whole thing.
The surviving Gits didn't just disappear. Joan Jett got involved after Mia's death, and she eventually played and recorded with Joe, Matt and Steve as Evil Stig — Gits Live backward. They did benefits and made the Evil Stig record in 1995, with money going toward the private investigation into Mia's murder. Hearing Joan sing those songs is strange, but it never feels like she's trying to replace Mia. Nobody could.
Then Broken Rekids put out Kings & Queens in 1996, finally giving ordinary people a way to hear most of that old 1988 Yellow Springs material without finding one of the original Private Lubs cassettes. That's the kind of archival record I love. The band isn't fully formed yet. You can hear pieces of songs that will come back later, hear the distance between Ohio and Seattle before they even knew there was going to be a Seattle chapter.
And then in 2000 came Seafish Louisville.
If you care about The Gits, get it.
It's odds and ends, early recordings, unreleased stuff, live material, and exactly the kind of record that can look unnecessary until you put it on and realize how little of this band we actually have. "Whirlwind" alone would justify the thing for me, but those RKCNDY recordings are the reason I keep going back to it. There are no liner notes in the world that can replace having Mia come out of the speakers again.
That's the thing with The Gits.
There should have been more.
A lot more.
It's been almost nine years now and nobody has been arrested for Mia's murder. I don't know what else to say about that without getting angry. People raised money. Benefits were played. A private investigator worked the case. It was on television. Years went by.
Nothing.
I hope someday somebody answers for it.
But I don't want the last thing on this page to be about the person who killed Mia Zapata. Whoever did it has already taken up too much space in her story.
Put on "Second Skin."
Put on Frenching the Bully.
Find Kings & Queens and listen to four kids in Ohio making a tape because they didn't even know whether the band was going to last.
Put on Seafish Louisville and hear them at RKCNDY on January 14, 1993, when everything was still ahead of them.
Remember the records.
Remember the voice.
Remember the words.
Remember that she was funny.
Remember that The Gits were a fucking great band.
This site is dedicated to Mia for a reason.
