Here’s how I wish the story of the Gits could be told: Four hardworking musicians finally escaped the grind of underpaid gigs and indie recordings and followed such compadres as Nirvana to global fame, led by the poetic howls of Mia Zapata, heiress apparent to Janis Joplin and Patti Smith.
Here’s the story you may already know, as told by shows including “Unsolved Mysteries” and “Forensic Files,” and the documentary “The Gits”: Talented singer found raped and murdered on a Seattle street just as her band was on the cusp of success.
In an attempt to bring what might have been to life, the seminal Seattle label Sub Pop is releasing remastered recordings by the Gits on Nov. 13. While the band was together, Zapata, the bassist Matt Dresdner, the guitarist Andy Kessler (a.k.a. Joe Spleen) and the drummer Steve Moriarty released only one album of their complex thrash rock (Kessler calls it “five-chord punk”): “Frenching the Bully” (1992). Sub Pop’s digital releases will also include three LPs of unfinished recordings, early work and live tracks. In December a concert album, “Live at the X-Ray,” will arrive for the first time.
“It’s been a long, long road to get to where we are,” Dresdner, 57, said in a video interview from Seattle with Kessler. “There were decades through which I didn’t have the bandwidth or emotional strength to attack a project like this.” As the group worked to finally make its music available, a “secondary motivation” arose, he said. “Mia’s talent as a singer — the music we were able to make together — we hope will be the first sentence, moving forward.”
The Gits formed after Dresdner saw Zapata perform at an open mic at Antioch College, a small liberal arts school in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1986. “When we started the band, it was because I fell in love with Mia’s voice,” he said. “It was so beautiful and so powerful, and so intimate.”
Raised in Kentucky, Zapata told people she was related to the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, though this seems unlikely. She learned to play guitar and piano at 9, and was drawn to the emotive power of blues and punk. In spite of her affluent background, she chose a bohemian existence, working in bars and living in communal houses.
With the Gits, who became part of Seattle’s punk scene in 1989, Zapata was a formidable stage presence, singing her guts out in T-shirts and torn jeans, her hair usually blond and matted in dreadlocks. She drew and wrote in journals that often became the starting points for lyrics set to her bandmates’ propulsive music.
Zapata wrote about emotional struggle: depression, anger, guilt. “I see the same mistakes that I once made / All that I can tell you there is a price to pay,” she warns with a snarl in “Bob (Cousin O).” In “Spear and Magic Helmet” Zapata acts out a superhero fantasy of avenging a friend’s rape. But it wasn’t a fantasy, it was a message: She wrote the song to call out a local musician, according to a biography by Moriarty, “Mia Zapata & the Gits: A Story of Art, Rock, and Revolution,” published in August.
Her bandmates say Zapata used to joke that all her songs were about “the torment.” In life, she was different. “Most of the time she was hilarious,” Kessler, 57, said. “She had a lot of lightness.” The Gits, after all, were originally called the Sniveling Little Rat-Faced Gits, after a “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” skit.
By 1993 the Gits had certainly paid their dues and honed their sound. “Second Skin,” from “Bully,” captures the band’s intensity: The jazz-trained Moriarty’s snare leads with an urgent call to action. Kessler — Pete Townshend to Zapata’s Roger Daltrey — steps in to announce the harmonic structure, one stroke per bar. After Zapata launches her growled demand for protection from pain, Dresdner drops in, and the Gits are off. “I need a second skin / Something to hold me up / Can’t do it on my own,” Zapata sings, her strength — emotionally, vocally, and lyrically — propelling the raw recording.
Allison Wolfe’s band Bratmobile played with the Gits at the Jabberjaw in Los Angeles in June 1993. “We were cheering for them,” she said, remembering Zapata as serious and focused. “It was a very powerful show, very punk.”
Tim Sommer, an Atlantic Records representative who wanted to sign the Gits, was also at that show. Like many bands of the time, they were wary of the temptations of cash. But they were ready for a break. “We would have liked to not have to work [expletive] jobs,” Kessler said. “We would have loved to have had the opportunity to almost exclusively focus on being the Gits.”
Ten days later, Zapata’s strangled, beaten body was found. She was 27, and had been attacked after leaving the Comet Tavern around 2 a.m.
As part of the effort to reset the narrative, Moriarty’s book stops before this ending. But Zapata’s death is part of her story, just as violence against women is part of the narrative of American life.
For many women in the music industry — or just any woman living and working on her own — Zapata’s murder was a worst nightmare come true, the cautionary fate we had been warned about on our many nights out late, living independent lives. Friends, led by Valerie Agnew, the drummer for 7 Year Bitch, founded Home Alive, an organization offering self-defense classes. Wolfe’s mother paid for firearms lessons for the three members of Bratmobile.
Rachel Flotard, a founder of the band Visqueen, moved to Seattle in 1994. “I was walking around with my guitar, going to practice, and on the same streets, in the same buildings,” she said. “For a woman in Seattle, the story of Mia Zapata was just part of the fabric, and part of how you took care of yourself as a woman in a band.”
The tragedy had a particularly devastating impact on Seattle, which was then a focus of international attention. The Gits were featured in the 1996 documentary “Hype,” about the impact of the “grunge” media frenzy. Because most sexual assaults are committed by people who know the victim, the investigation into Zapata’s attack focused on her friends and associates. “It tore their scene apart because they were suspecting each other,” Wolfe said.
The Gits played shows with Joan Jett as the frontwoman to raise money for an independent investigator. They participated in segments for crime shows that they saw as a necessary evil to keep the case alive. That pressure may have helped, finally, to resolve it. In 2003 a match registered in Florida for DNA found on Zapata’s body. A year later, Jesus Mezquia, a man with no apparent connection to Zapata, was convicted of her murder. He died in 2021 while serving his sentence.
It’s hard to imagine a more shocking end to a burgeoning band’s career. It took decades, and the illness of a friend, James Atkins of Hammerbox, for Dresdner, Kessler and Moriarty to even think of playing together again. In 2015 and 2016 they performed benefit shows for Atkins with Flotard on vocals. She recalled everyone being in tears by the end of the first song at their initial rehearsal together: “I learned and felt how much her bandmates loved her.”
The shows led to talk of getting the Gits’ music back in circulation, with the help of Flotard, who also manages bands. “We want to make sure that when we’re no longer on this Earth, this body of work that we made together is available,” Dresdner said. “We’ve been working closely with Mia’s family who’s really supportive and wants her legacy to be acknowledged and available to people.”
Flotard said she relished the opportunity turn the Gits’ music toward the future, rather than the past. “I wanted to treat this music and to treat the idea of listening to her sing as something to be celebrated and feel joy,” she said. “How wild all these years later would it be, in the age of streaming services and things that didn’t even exist, for her to have a new life and inspire anybody who was thinking about maybe getting up on a stage and playing? We have a lot of fighting coming up, and we need all of those fight songs.”
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