Joan Jett never met Mia Zapata, and she never saw Zapata’s band, the Gits, perform. But when Zapata was raped and killed in Seattle in 1993, Jett found herself drawn into the singer’s life and music to the point where it has become a personal crusade. Jett has devoted most of the last year to raising funds to find Zapata’s assailant, putting her own career on hold to play Zapata’s music.
“People say to me, `Why are you doing this? You didn’t even know her,’ ” Jett says. “But someone murdered a woman who I can relate to. She was someone in a band just like me. When I play live, I sometimes get this feeling, like you never know — that person could be in the audience waiting for me next.”
When Jett heard about Zapata’s slaying, and how her killer had eluded a police investigation, she wrote the song “Go Home” with Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, which appeared on Jett’s 1994 album, “Pure and Simple.” The video for the song concluded with information about Zapata’s death, and was seen by members of the Gits, who contacted Jett about helping raise funds for an ongoing private investigation.
“The idea was to do a benefit show with my band (the Blackhearts), which I thought was great, but I thought there might be a way to do something more than that,” Jett says. “Like what if I tried to sing some of their songs? I wanted to do stuff that hadn’t been performed in a couple of years, and maybe bring the Gits’ music back to life.”
The surviving Gits — bassist Matt Dresdner, drummer Steve Moriarty and guitarist Joe Spleen — had formed a new band, the Dancing French Liberals of ’48, and had essentially stopped playing their old band’s material. Their initial skepticism about Jett’s intentions soon dissolved when it became clear how determined the singer was to take her involvement to the stage and the recording studio.
Jett had to take a crash course in Gits music, and found Zapata’s fierce delivery and breathless cadences a difficult adjustment. “I didn’t want to let Mia down or the band down,” Jett says. “In my own way, I believe she knows what’s going on. I think we’re both powerful singers, but whereas my writing is really structured, she would write very rapid-fire; lines didn’t necessarily have to rhyme.
“Plus the songs are so intense, when you perform them live, you get high and hyper. It’s emotionally draining, you put so much energy out, and the song ends, and then it’s, `Oh my God, I need a second here,’ but it’s time to do the next song. So where do you get that second to recharge?”
Jett had a trial by fire doing three benefit shows with the Gits in the Pacific Northwest late last winter. Calling themselves Evil Stig (spell it backward), the quartet’s live performances became the basis for an album, “Evil Stig” (Warner), released three months ago. Now the band is touring to raise awareness of the investigation, which is being funded with proceeds from the album.
And they’re also giving the music of Zapata and the Gits its first wide exposure. In songs such as “Sign of the Crab,” Zapata writes what sounds like a chilling foretelling of her own death: “Go ahead and slash me up, spread me all across this town/Cause you know you’re the one who won’t be found.”
For Jett, singing such lines is a release. “They’re almost like a way of taunting that person,” she says. “With certain lines that Mia wrote, I get this major rush to the point where I almost want the person who did this to be there, so that I can throttle them.”
Evil Stig headlines Saturday at the Double Door.
– After selling a million copies of “Last Splash,” her brilliant 1993 outing with the Breeders, and touring with Lollapalooza ’94, Kim Deal had the itch to make more music. The question was, With whom?
“The Breeders were taking some time off, so at first I thought of doing a solo album,” Deal says. “So I taught myself to play drums and did six songs right off.”
She then enlisted the help of her sister, Kelley, the Breeders’ guitarist, who was struggling with heroin addicton. “I thought doing this would be a way to preoccupy her, to distract her from drugs, but it didn’t work,” Deal says. (Kelley Deal has reportedly completed a drug treatment program and is beginning to play music again.)
Finally, Deal recruited two local musicians from her hometown of Dayton, bassist Luis Lerma and Guided By Voices roadie and fill-in guitarist Nathan Farley, to finish more tracks with Breeders drummer Jim MacPherson. Deal patched together a 12-song disc from the various sessions, dubbed her seat-of-the-pants group the Amps and put out the “Pacer” album on 4AD/Elektra a few weeks ago.
In a way it’s like starting over for an artist who had already established a strong track record with the Breeders.
“When you sell a million records, it’s probably a bad idea to change your name,” Deal acknowledges. But she says even as the Breeders started to sell records, her “instant fame” was more surreal than anything. “I remember hearing (Breeders hit) `Cannonball’ at a disco like Hooters and thinking how weird it felt to be a part of American culture. Like we were a fad or something.”
Although not exactly a fad, the Breeders struck a chord with “Last Splash,” a record that mixed insinuating guitar-driven melodies with weird noises and studio effects. “That was the `hand of God’ approach to record-making,” Deal says. “It was all about sonic textures made for headphone listening. Plus I had this incredible dread being the singer in the band, so I didn’t want to carry a lot of the choruses with just a vocal. There had to be all this other stuff in there.”
On the Amps’ “Pacer,” the production is more spartan, and Deal’s vocals are more pronounced. “Starting this record down in my basement by myself, I just felt I should not be so wimpy about it,” she says. “I’m a pop freak, and writing these verse-chorus songs, I wanted the vocals to be heard. `Splash’ was all about studio trickery, almost prog-rock. On the Amps record, if a song didn’t sound good with just one guitar and a vocal, it wasn’t getting on there.”
Live, the band showed a scrappy, garage-band toughness in a couple of recent appearances in Chicago, first opening for Sonic Youth at the Riviera, and then headlining a last-minute record-release party at the Fireside Bowl on Halloween.
“With the Breeders, if I stopped playing (guitar) in the middle of a song, things would fall apart,” Deal says. “I feel more freedom in this band, because I know Nate’s got the whole song.”
Yet Deal praises the quirky inventiveness of her sister’s unschooled guitar playing, and she’s open to the idea of doing another Breeders album. A lot clearly depends on Kelley Deal. In the meantime, a “leading member” clause in Kim Deal’s contract with her record label, 4AD, enables her to put out records under any band name she chooses. So far, the label’s confidence in her abilities has not been misplaced.
