Jennifer Finch, who shattered eardrums and stereotypes as the raucous, barefoot bassist for L7, a scalding feminist band that, with its ferocious blend of punk and hard rock, rode the grunge wave of the 1990s, died on July 18 in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 59.
Her death was announced by L7 on social media. Several days before she died, her family released a statement saying that she had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer.
L7 was a product of the same Los Angeles punk scene that spawned celebrated bands like Black Flag and X. But it became indelibly linked to the so-called grunge movement after signing in 1989 with Sub Pop, the storied Seattle label that brought Nirvana and Soundgarden to prominence. (Ms. Finch briefly dated the Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl.)
Blending the sledgehammer sound of Motörhead with the jackhammer energy of the Ramones, L7 released four albums during Ms. Finch’s decade-long initial tenure with the band. Its 1992 breakout, “Bricks Are Heavy,” which included anthems like “Pretend We’re Dead” and “Wargasm,” was produced with Butch Vig, who oversaw Nirvana’s blockbuster “Nevermind.” “Pretend We’re Dead” became a Top 10 hit on the alternative charts.
Armed with her black Fender bass, known as the Ghost, Ms. Finch was celebrated for her “slob girl” image, including hair colors that called to mind a raging wildfire and an avoidance of footwear during gigs.
A female band in an overwhelmingly male scene, L7 burnished its feminist bona fides by helping found the organization Rock for Choice, a nonprofit abortion rights organization, in 1991. They also put out songs like “Shirley,” written by Ms. Finch as a blast-furnace ode to Shirley Muldowney, who was known as “the first lady of drag racing”: “How many times must you be told / There’s nowhere we don’t go.”
In a much-chronicled act of defiance at the 1992 Reading Festival in Britain, the band’s lead singer, Donita Sparks, responded to an onslaught of objects hurled at the stage by removing her tampon and returning fire.
“They threw mud, I threw blood,” Ms. Sparks later recalled. “And there it goes down in herstory.”
Yet the band squirmed under the inevitable “woman-in-a-man’s-world” narratives, Ms. Finch said in a 1994 interview with Daina Darzin of Rolling Stone. Ms. Darzin wrote that L7 emphasized that they were not “‘foxcore,’ Riot Grrrls, insert-label-of-your-choice-here girls.”
“To create genre out of gender is just horrible to me,” Ms. Finch said. “I think journalism perpetuates that. I hope the story angles for L7 will eventually be the same as for Nirvana or Cracker. There’s a uniqueness in being a woman, but not that much.”
Erin Michelle Fredin was born on Aug. 5, 1966, in a Salvation Army home for unwed mothers in Los Angeles, and was adopted by Robert Finch, an aeronautics engineer, and Sandra (Jacobson) Finch, an Air Force veteran.
During her teens, she took to photography and began chronicling bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Bad Religion. In 1984, she graduated from high school and headed north to study computer science at San Francisco State University.
Despite having minimal musical skills, she soon quit college to play guitar with Sugar Doll, a short-lived trio featuring Courtney Love, the future Hole star, and Kat Bjelland, who would go on to front Babes in Toyland.
When Sugar Doll fizzled, Ms. Finch returned to Los Angeles and became a fan of the fledgling L7, formed by guitarists and singers Suzi Gardner and Ms. Sparks.
The group, named for an old slang term for “square,” was searching at the time for a new bassist and drummer. Hiring was no easy feat.
“Generally, dudes who wanted to play hard rock had no desire to play with women,” Ms. Gardner recalled in the 2016 documentary “L7: Pretend We’re Dead.”
Instead, she said, “there was this persistent chick who had come to see our shows,” adding that Ms. Finch “almost challenged me to let her in the band.”
Ms. Finch was challenging herself, as well. “I didn’t really know very much about bass,” she said in the documentary, adding, “I had to borrow a bass and learn what an amplifier was really quick.”
The band, complete with the drummer Demetra (known as Dee) Plakas, released its debut album on the independent label Epitaph. After moving to Sub Pop, the group issued an E.P., “Smell the Magic” (1990), that was later expanded into a full album, before signing with Slash Records and receiving wider acclaim with “Bricks Are Heavy.”
Riding the momentum, the band performed on the main stage at Lollapalooza in 1994. The same year, it had a cameo as the fictional punk band Camel Lips in the John Waters cult film “Serial Mom,” starring Kathleen Turner.
Ms. Finch left the band in 1996 after grieving the death of her father and becoming sober.
“When you’re younger, there’s so much pressure riding on everything,” she told Rolling Stone in 2017. “I know I caved under that specific pressure.”
She returned to music with the band OtherStarPeople, which released an album, “Diamonds in the Belly of the Dog,” in 1999, and three years later formed the punk band the Shocker. She also started her own label, Little Pusher Records, and worked as a photographer.
In 2014, Ms. Finch reunited with L7, which had splintered at the end of the 1990s. The original lineup released “Scatter the Rats,” its first album in two decades, in 2019. A few months ago, the band unveiled tour dates starting in October; after Ms. Finch’s brain cancer diagnosis was announced earlier this month, L7 said that she wanted the tour to go on without her.
She is survived by her partner, Jack Gregory, and two half sisters, Molly Myers and Megan Rae Blakely. Her marriage to Christian Pedersen ended in divorce in 2007.
Although L7 is remembered as a darling of the alt-rock peak of the ’90s, Ms. Finch always maintained that the group stayed true to its punk essence.
“Punk rock doesn’t have anything to do with poverty or musical style,” Ms. Finch told Billboard in 1994. “It’s an attitude that everyone in this band grew up so inundated with ideologically that it will always be a part of us. It’s like growing up in Sweden — no matter where you go, all your experiences are filtered through that.”
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