The Gits (2005)
Aug. 7th, 2008 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersThis documentary was apparently finished in 2005, not long after Mia Zapata's murderer was convicted, but it wasn't released until earlier this year. Thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
holyoutlaw, I've now seen it on DVD. I think I just need to do a brain dump after seeing this. It will be incoherent, but what the fuck.
This is a documentary about the Gits, a punk band that started out at Antioch College in 1986 but then moved to Seattle shortly thereafter. I saw them at least three times in the early '90s here, but only because they frequently played with 7 Year Bitch, who I saw a zillion times. They were C/Z label-mates, and I seem to have liked C/Z bands more than Sub Pop bands. Vexed, 7 Year Bitch, Hammerbox -- those were three of my very favorite bands of that era. (Starting a little earlier in the case of Vexed, in the late '80s.) In fact, one of the greatest shows I've ever seen was at the Off-Ramp with the Gits, 7 Year Bitch, and Hammerbox all playing. The thing I always remember about that show, which was truly epic, was a moment late into it, perhaps during Hammerbox's closing set after the moshpit had largely cleared of exhausted people, when my friend Tami did a stage dive, her umpteenth of the night. The three of us left at the front of the stage caught her, but the inertia of her dive carried us drunkenly toward one of the massive pillars in the middle of the floor. Tami's head was aimed right at the pillar, and we were helpless to stop our momentum. Fortunately the floor was a big pool of spilled beer by then, and my feet slipped out from under me, causing us all to hit the slick cement in a jumble. Tami's brains saved by spilled beer! We were all delirious from beer and slamdancing endorphins by that point. The world and life was utterly perfect as it was.
So I saw the Gits maybe three times, and the way I remember it is that I liked them every other time I saw them. Maybe I liked them well enough twice and really didn't like them the other time, I don't know. Just another punk band. Then Mia was murdered in 1993, and I started getting an education. I've tried to write about this before, and it's difficult to get it right. I was surprised at how many people I knew who had hung out with her drinking and shooting pool at the Comet, including my old girlfriend Robyn. I'll always remember running into a crying Tami before a Clarion West reading at Elliott Bay Books a day or two after her body was found. "She's dead," she told me through her tears. I thought she was talking about her mother or her sister or something. I had no idea that she was talking about Mia, or that Mia had meant that much to her. The women in 7 Year Bitch were close friends of Mia's, too, of course, and their shows became fierce exorcisms of the community anger and despair at her death. Valerie Agnew, the Bitches' drummer, along with some other friends founded Home Alive, which still teaches self-defense to women fifteen years later. Tami and I saw a performance by Evil Stig (Gits Live spelled backwards), which was the remnants of the Gits with Joan Jett singing Mia's lyrics out of her journals, all to raise money to hire a private detective to investigate Mia's murder. The private detective was unable to solve the crime, much to everyone's frustration.
A few years later, I was hanging out at the Elysian a lot, and Steve Moriarty, the drummer of the Gits, was the music booker there. I had several long conversations with him at the bar, mostly about this and that, sometimes about the Gits (I faked knowing their music more than I really did), or about the Bitches, or about bands I wanted him to book, or about the leg he had just broken in a bad fall on an icy sidewalk. I was in no way connected to anything in the music scene, except as a spectator, but somehow Mia Zapata's death was a binding force even for bystanders like me. He was a very friendly, interesting guy to talk to.
The movie brought up other memories too. It touches on the 1992 death by heroin overdose of Stefanie Sargent, who was the Bitches' first guitarist. Mia wrote a song about her called "Seaweed," inspired by a day spent cavorting with her in Lake Washington. Made me think of another show at the Off-Ramp when Stefanie asked if somebody could get her a drink. I was standing by the stage and offered her my half-empty pint of beer. She laughed and said, "Thanks, but I want my own." Someone else -- a friend of hers -- promptly obliged, but I got her cheerful grin out of it.
So many bruising, ecstatic nights spent in a thundering world of music. It all seems completely meaningless and distant to me now, and yet watching the documentary dragged up such feelings! I could never make out Mia Zapata's lyrics, and I could barely make out her voice over the wall of guitar and drum noise. In the clear recordings used in the movie, much clearer than I ever heard at the shows, her voice is amazing. Deep and blue and strong. Her death at the hands of a complete stranger who raped and murdered her still seems incomprehensible. Yet I feel torn by the sense that her death is only meaningful to me because she was an artist, a musician. I didn't know her, wasn't even in love with her band. How many others have died just like her yet completely invisible to me?
I don't know. All I know is that all I have to do is to put on 7 Year Bitch's "M.I.A." from their second album ¡Viva Zapata! to be catapulted into an explosive fury at her death. I even quoted a bit from it as an epigraph for the review of Suzy McKee Charnas' novel The Furies that I wrote for NYRSF: "Who would be so shocked by the brutal murder of a killer?"
As in:
Somebody just like you gonna rape and strangle you?
Would you mutilate yourself?
And who would be so shocked by the brutal murder of a killer?
Will there be hundreds mourning for you?
Will they talk of the talent and inspiration you gave? No.
Who besides your mother will stand in sorrow at your grave?
Mother may I?
Momma Mia
I'll see ya
I'll see ya
I'll see ya
holyoutlaw, I've now seen it on DVD. I think I just need to do a brain dump after seeing this. It will be incoherent, but what the fuck.This is a documentary about the Gits, a punk band that started out at Antioch College in 1986 but then moved to Seattle shortly thereafter. I saw them at least three times in the early '90s here, but only because they frequently played with 7 Year Bitch, who I saw a zillion times. They were C/Z label-mates, and I seem to have liked C/Z bands more than Sub Pop bands. Vexed, 7 Year Bitch, Hammerbox -- those were three of my very favorite bands of that era. (Starting a little earlier in the case of Vexed, in the late '80s.) In fact, one of the greatest shows I've ever seen was at the Off-Ramp with the Gits, 7 Year Bitch, and Hammerbox all playing. The thing I always remember about that show, which was truly epic, was a moment late into it, perhaps during Hammerbox's closing set after the moshpit had largely cleared of exhausted people, when my friend Tami did a stage dive, her umpteenth of the night. The three of us left at the front of the stage caught her, but the inertia of her dive carried us drunkenly toward one of the massive pillars in the middle of the floor. Tami's head was aimed right at the pillar, and we were helpless to stop our momentum. Fortunately the floor was a big pool of spilled beer by then, and my feet slipped out from under me, causing us all to hit the slick cement in a jumble. Tami's brains saved by spilled beer! We were all delirious from beer and slamdancing endorphins by that point. The world and life was utterly perfect as it was.
So I saw the Gits maybe three times, and the way I remember it is that I liked them every other time I saw them. Maybe I liked them well enough twice and really didn't like them the other time, I don't know. Just another punk band. Then Mia was murdered in 1993, and I started getting an education. I've tried to write about this before, and it's difficult to get it right. I was surprised at how many people I knew who had hung out with her drinking and shooting pool at the Comet, including my old girlfriend Robyn. I'll always remember running into a crying Tami before a Clarion West reading at Elliott Bay Books a day or two after her body was found. "She's dead," she told me through her tears. I thought she was talking about her mother or her sister or something. I had no idea that she was talking about Mia, or that Mia had meant that much to her. The women in 7 Year Bitch were close friends of Mia's, too, of course, and their shows became fierce exorcisms of the community anger and despair at her death. Valerie Agnew, the Bitches' drummer, along with some other friends founded Home Alive, which still teaches self-defense to women fifteen years later. Tami and I saw a performance by Evil Stig (Gits Live spelled backwards), which was the remnants of the Gits with Joan Jett singing Mia's lyrics out of her journals, all to raise money to hire a private detective to investigate Mia's murder. The private detective was unable to solve the crime, much to everyone's frustration.
A few years later, I was hanging out at the Elysian a lot, and Steve Moriarty, the drummer of the Gits, was the music booker there. I had several long conversations with him at the bar, mostly about this and that, sometimes about the Gits (I faked knowing their music more than I really did), or about the Bitches, or about bands I wanted him to book, or about the leg he had just broken in a bad fall on an icy sidewalk. I was in no way connected to anything in the music scene, except as a spectator, but somehow Mia Zapata's death was a binding force even for bystanders like me. He was a very friendly, interesting guy to talk to.
The movie brought up other memories too. It touches on the 1992 death by heroin overdose of Stefanie Sargent, who was the Bitches' first guitarist. Mia wrote a song about her called "Seaweed," inspired by a day spent cavorting with her in Lake Washington. Made me think of another show at the Off-Ramp when Stefanie asked if somebody could get her a drink. I was standing by the stage and offered her my half-empty pint of beer. She laughed and said, "Thanks, but I want my own." Someone else -- a friend of hers -- promptly obliged, but I got her cheerful grin out of it.
So many bruising, ecstatic nights spent in a thundering world of music. It all seems completely meaningless and distant to me now, and yet watching the documentary dragged up such feelings! I could never make out Mia Zapata's lyrics, and I could barely make out her voice over the wall of guitar and drum noise. In the clear recordings used in the movie, much clearer than I ever heard at the shows, her voice is amazing. Deep and blue and strong. Her death at the hands of a complete stranger who raped and murdered her still seems incomprehensible. Yet I feel torn by the sense that her death is only meaningful to me because she was an artist, a musician. I didn't know her, wasn't even in love with her band. How many others have died just like her yet completely invisible to me?
I don't know. All I know is that all I have to do is to put on 7 Year Bitch's "M.I.A." from their second album ¡Viva Zapata! to be catapulted into an explosive fury at her death. I even quoted a bit from it as an epigraph for the review of Suzy McKee Charnas' novel The Furies that I wrote for NYRSF: "Who would be so shocked by the brutal murder of a killer?"
As in:
Somebody just like you gonna rape and strangle you?
Would you mutilate yourself?
And who would be so shocked by the brutal murder of a killer?
Will there be hundreds mourning for you?
Will they talk of the talent and inspiration you gave? No.
Who besides your mother will stand in sorrow at your grave?
Mother may I?
Momma Mia
I'll see ya
I'll see ya
I'll see ya
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Date: 2008-08-08 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-08 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-08 04:18 pm (UTC)The thing I love about that particular story is not only was she saved by beer, she was saved by *wasted* beer.
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Date: 2008-08-08 04:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-08 04:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-13 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-13 11:12 pm (UTC)