ABOUT THE GITS
Written By Tim Sommer
It is not the years we have had without her. (A lifetime now.)
It is the years we had with her. (The wobbly end of our adolescence, the half-remembered taxi-hunting heart of our hop-stinking, dayless youth.)
I refuse to tell this story through the lens of tragedy or sensationalism; she is not a story to be streamed; she is not the ending dwarfing the beginning and the middle. She was an artist full of sparks, wisdom; the usual mundane and spectacular damage that the great ones turn into exquisite noise and poetry, and the kind of voice and presence you might encounter once or twice in your life, if you’re very lucky.
This story is legend, even without its sorry ending.
So let us tell it like this: First, to celebrate what we saw that others did not have the gift of seeing; and secondly, to be thankful that we have very goddamn solid evidence of all this gorgeous, twisted, humid, and beatific magnificence in living music, living memories, even living film. Mia Zapata was the greatest rock singer of her time.
She may have likely been the greatest singer in punk rock history, the woman who married the 78 and the ’78.
Tragedy did not make this true. Mia Zapata made this true, and the ferocious, spring-loaded shrapnel frame that was built around her by Andy Kessler, Steve Moriarty, and Matt Dresdner, made it true.
Anyone who swayed beneath her and gazed up at her while she worked, while she clawed at her soul, while she demanded eye contact, then insisted on looking only inside, knows how extraordinary she was. Anyone who held the neck of a rapidly warming beer and saw this fierce sack of elbows and knees who seemed to be wrestling with time and art and insecurity, all expressed in a voice that belonged as much to Beale Street or Frenchman Street as it did to silly old Seattle, knows they were witnessing a singular, generational, talent.
Mia Zapata (1965 – 1993), the vocalist and front person for The Gits (1986 – 1993), was not the type of voice one usually associates with a punk rock band. She had the sizzle, sass, shriek, grace, rasp, and fury of a classic blues shouter (what if Janis Joplin had fronted Fugazi, we must ask?). Although there was a purity, an accuracy to her voice, she could point it at the stars and scoop cigarette butts out of the venue floor, all at the same time; it sounded like a voice on fire, it sounded desperate and angry and pleading and commanding, all at the same time (what if Amy Winehouse had fronted Fugazi, we must ask?). Her onstage persona was utterly devoid of bullshit, as well: Mia Zapata was a rag doll, a stick figure, a sock puppet, alternately bent with sadness and arched with rage. Sometimes she looked like she was in pain, clawing at an ulcer; other times, like a holy woman on a soapbox, testifying the joy of truth; and still other times, like someone draped in a bedtime t-shirt reading from the inner ramblings and confessions in the margins of her notebooks. The voice, the presence was extraordinary, there was nothing like it anywhere in punk – it was like finding the missing link between Nina Simone and Johnny Rotten (what if Joss Stone had fronted Fugazi, we must ask?)
Mia Zapata was a pure yet twisted soul singer with the heart of a gospel shouter, the gnashed teeth of a punk, and the bleeding heart of a folkie. Her recordings (and the films of her twisting within herself as she rasped herself inside out, like the most sensitive artist you ever met trying to dig a sliced Sprite can out of the garbage disposal) display someone whose place in the world of music has never been filled, not even close. I can aver that every single person who heard Mia Zapata’s voice, that voice that could peel the old green paint off barroom walls and summon us to Shambhala at the same time, was socked, throttled, moved and changed by it.
Now, much of this story takes place in Seattle, Seattle, blah blah blah, and during, ohhh the strange night fog of the early 1990s, but did that matter? No. That didn’t matter. The Gits were beyond era or place. Maybe that’s why they were one of the most important acts to emerge from Seattle during that time: They were in that place, but not of it. They were bigger than us, who trilled with the frisson of “scene”: We came alive in university districts, in loud saloons with tin ceilings and shoebox nightclubs lit by Christmas lights; and under over-bright streetlights on the pavement outside, we begged for phone numbers and cigarettes; and mostly the music was an accessory or an excuse, but sometimes, almost never but sometimes, it was transcendent. But when it was, oh, it humbled us, it awed us, it made our childishness small, it turned an evening out into a lifelong memory. And that was the Gits. The Gits, who defied any categorizations – ferocious bluesy post-hardcore sideways-metal screw-propellor punk rockers? – made a sound most of us pretend artists could only aspire to. Certainly, the Gits sounded (far) less like an archetypal Seattle band, and more like the wonderful realization/destination of American/Anglo-ized metallic an’ fluid punk rock. Ideally, what the Gits combusted should have been hardcore’s magic apotheosis, where it combined art, heart, melody and fury, yet with an empathy and absolute arrow to the soul that evaded other progressives who tried to take hardcore to the next step. Essentially, the Gits never stopped thinking like a rock’n’roll band (in the true twisted BÖC or James Gang sense), even if their chopsticks-on-fire/too-tight braces attack resembled certain hardcore, punk, or metal bands (I’m thinking Ruts, Minor Threat, even early/mid-Maiden). And this is worth noting, again and again: Although Mia was a once-in-a-generation talent – a wrapped-tight urchin/ingenue/artist applying a shredded Bonnie Raitt blues-rasp perfect-pitched alto to thread-shredded screwed-tight punk rock – she was swaddled, supported, instigated, and propelled by an extraordinary ensemble.
Without any doubt, the band matched and inspired Mia Zapata to double down. Andy Kessler (guitar -- metronomic and furious), Matt Dresdner (bass -- fluid, punching, beat-addicted and melodic), and Steve Moriarty (drums -- martial and explosive) wrote and performed with a jaw-tightened fury, a clenched soul that shrieked and stomped with precision. Andy, Matt, and Steve matched Mia, pushed her, were the inbreath to her outbreath and the outbreath to her inbreath. The Gits tendered a hyper-musical kind of clenched metal; on a purely instrumental level, they were dime-tight and diamond tough, a band that could have redefined both metal and punk (why “could have”? They did!); Mia was constantly pushed by their power and balmed by their subtlety. In every moment on stage, Andy, Mia, Steve, and Matt displayed the discipline of ferocious restraint; theirs was the sound of the heart and the mind bursting, the sound of that fractioned in-breath before the fist goes through the wall. There is grace in that moment, y’see, because it contains both release and restraint, and that’s what the Gits were: the fist through the wall, the shame and relief after the violence, and the grace when you restrain your soul just before it goes to that place, all at once. Yeh, I swear it’s all true: the Gits were an angry, inflamed slinky fully in tune with and tuned by the Bessie Patti Smith of her time, truly the only singer who could summon Joplin, Poly Styrene, Sam Cooke, Iggy Pop and Ian MacKaye all in the same goddamn song.
The Gits were formed at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio in mid-1986, grabbing and swapping pieces of art, thrash, noise, punk rock, classic rock, and all the sorts of magical silly and bookish jingle bells that an old-school liberal arts education handed you; for the next few years they worked on turning it all into something tough, sensitive, both brutal and kind. Andy, Matt, Mia, and Steve moved to Seattle in middish 1989, landing in a house on Capitol Hill where they (and fellow travelers) woodshedded and rehearsed for the next few years. The Gits put out three EPs in 1990 and ’91 before signing with CZ Records and releasing their first full-length album, Frenching the Bully. Seattle quickly claimed the quartet as their own and embraced the Gits blend of ferocious fangs and soft heart, the slug/slap of the guitars, and the gorgeous, soft underbelly of the poetic emotions. These qualities not only fit in with the doe-eyed/sharp-clawed grunge ethos but earned the Gits the respect of their peers, including Nirvana, who tapped them to open a major local show in 1990.
Then other stuff happened, and their frantic, confessional barbed-heart snowball began rolling up hill very, very fast; the Gits “quickly” (hah! After half a decade learning to implode and explode hearts and stomping their boots on manifold beer-softened, Marlboro-weeded wood stages!) inspired rapture, awe, and the levitation that happened when peak emotion meets peak grindage in front of amps spitting out something that sounded like the mad marriage of Bolan swagger and Dischord tension…all fronted by a genuinely incomparable woman who held her heart in her mouth and shared it, in all its celebration and fear, without hesitation.
And now Sub Pop is re-releasing all four of the Gits extant albums – three of which, sadly (a “sadly” being a word I want to avoid in this celebration of a LIFE), were released posthumously – 1992’s Frenching the Bully, Enter: The Conquering Chicken (1994), Kings & Queens (1996), and 2000’s Seafish Louisville. All have been remastered by one of Seattle’s most respected producers and engineers, Jack Endino. Archival Gits fans – and those yet to discover Mia and the band -- can access all these newly remastered titles across streaming services immediately. It is exciting to know that it will now be far easier for people to discover and access one of the extraordinary, twisted, saucy, seductive, and utterly thrilling rock bands of the last century.
And Mia was a painter, too. Her canvases are full of broken, neurotic, and aspiring figures caught in the midst of transmigration, captured in the middle of a silent scream; they look like her, and they look like she sounded, and they walk the sharp wire between joy and pain (Mia’s painting consistently remind me of two of my favorite painters, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl, both of whom also died far too young). Like her music, her paintings remind me of this: do not speak of promise unfulfilled or what would have been: Instead, say, joyously, she gave us this!
My name is Tim Sommer. It was my great good fortune to have witnessed, multiple times, what Andy, Mia, Matt, and Steve could achieve, to have inhaled that extraordinary mixture of intent and effortlessness. Goddamn fire is what it was, fire fueled by ale, hard-inhaled smokes, casually discarded smokes, and the un-arty desperation that only a true artist has. (Arty people make art because they can; true artists make art because they must, and my god, Mia, and the Gits sounded like they were doing something they had to do. Yeh.) In 1993, I was a new-ish A&R person for Atlantic Records, performing the strange job of trying to make the world listen to the same music I loved. I told the label I had found the missing link between Bonnie Raitt and Iggy Pop (a silly phrase that sold Mia short – she had more in common with Sam Cooke, Gene Vincent, Ma Rainey, Charlie Patton, or my all-time favorite blues singer, Amede Ardoin), and that I had to sign the Gits. They – specifically, my boss, the legendary Danny Goldberg -- said I could, so I decided the Gits would be the first band I signed to Atlantic. In the first days of June 1993, I met with the Gits (over better-than-average Chinese food in a cream-colored room with high ceilings located on Sunset Boulevard at the crack of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills) and told them I wanted them to sign them. They were excited to accept my offer.
Less than four weeks later, Mia died. We leave it at that, because this is not about death -- I have zero interest in the creepy voyeurism of true crime -- it’s about an extraordinary life. I do not say, “You should have been there,” I say, “We are lucky so many of us were, and I am so glad we have this extraordinary evidence of the power and gifts of Mia and the Gits that you now hold in your hands.” And we note that Frenching the Bully, this extraordinary testament to the soul, shock, fury and feeling of the Gits, has been long out of print on vinyl, and this new collection joyfully rectifies that, and the Gits’ entire recorded output is now within easy reach, for the first time.
Although it is impossible to tell the story of the Gits without engaging the hues of tragedy, it is hugely possible to experience their music with awe and without shadow, and with the abandon, emotion, and joy which it was created. So, friends, please listen to one of the greatest Punk Rock bands of all time, fronted by the greatest woman rock vocalist of the last half-century.