Kristen Pfaff was a key innovator of the Minneapolis sound of the 90s with her band Janitor Joe. She came from a musical family, studied piano and cello in childhood, and later taught herself to play bass guitar alongside Pixies albums.
She’s most often remembered for her brief tenure as Hole’s bassist, playing on their 1994 album Live Through This before her death that year at age 27.
Pfaff’s story is tragic, as so many of that era are. Young indie musicians with unresolved emotional issues collided with drugs, money, and fame. They either imploded or got extremely close to it, with promising talent often becoming just another statistic.
Today, May 26, would have been Pfaff’s 59th birthday. So, in honor of her talent, here are some of my personal favorite bass lines she contributed to the Janitor Joe album Big Metal Birds.
“Voucher”
“Voucher” isn’t what you put on when you want clean, precise, elaborate bass guitar. Here, Kristen Pfaff leaned into her grimy, distorted sound right from the start.
What sounds like the opening bass work is a tangle of sludge that becomes a relentless driving force throughout the track. With Janitor Joe, Pfaff was the embodiment of grunge not as a genre, but as a visceral feeling.
“Boyfriend”
Another example of Kristen Pfaff’s ability to endlessly pound away at your eardrums is “Boyfriend”. Here, she opens the track with a steady bass line like a hammer on an anvil, and doesn’t let up once.
It’s fuzzed-out and dirty, but Pfaff had a way of making it sound like being wrapped in a warm hug. Somehow, even as she’s relentlessly hammering away, it’s comforting.
“Limited Edition”
The opening bass lines of “Limited Edition” are a little more dexterous than the previous work, but Kristen Pfaff had precise control of her instrument. She could drag her bass through the metaphorical sludge, or she could make it dance.
Here, the bass is fuzzed to hell in a way that makes it sound like what I imagine licking a 9-volt battery feels like. Listening to Kristen Pfaff play bass on this record made me feel like I’d been chewing electrical cords. But in a really good way.
“Boys In Blue”
On “Boys In Blue”, Pfaff further demonstrates her command of the bass guitar. The opening is maybe a little too quiet. But at the same time, any louder and it would lose its mystery. Here, you have to strain to pick up Pfaff’s intricate bass work.
You want to press your ear to her amp, feel the vibrations of the strings in your chest. Pfaff rolls through a consistent beat, looping and tumbling over itself. But it’s precise, every note in its place. And that was the unsuspecting talent of Kristen Pfaff.
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