The music zeitgeist rolled right over Mia Zapata and the Gits, barely stopping to glance at her eruptive mesh of metal riff and blues fluency, of punk urgency and classic rock swagger. Before and after Zapata’s run, women were meant to warble and coo, not howl in fiery triumph or roll notes on flame around in their mouths, so that they slithered and coiled and hissed out on the stage. It’s one of rock and roll’s great missed turns, her exit and subsequent disappearance, a path not taken, a path just about entirely forgotten.
Well, not so fast, says Sub Pop, a label with authority in the Pacific Northwest’s grunge-punk-rock evolution. They’re reissuing all four Gits albums, remastered by Jack Endino, and packaged with notes from Tim Sommer, the Atlantic A&R representative who might have pushed the Gits out into the mainstream if there had been more time for that.
Four albums, but let’s focus on two for now, the second full-length Enter: The Conquering Chicken from 1994 and Seafish Louisville, a compilation of demos, live cuts and alternate takes originally put out in 2000. You’ll have to read Jonathan Shaw for his take on the debut, Frenching the Bully, or the early recordings collected in Kings and Queens. We split up the bounty, two each, and as it happens, he got the prologue, while I took the post-mortem.
Enter: The Conquering Chicken would, quite possibly, have catapulted the Gits onto a wider stage, enlarging the full-throated blues rock aesthetic that the band had proposed on Frenching the Bully, going head-long and full-on in their celebration of drinking, comradeship and rock and roll. The Gits had already started on it in July of 1993, when Zapata, walking home from a club, was raped and murdered. The band finished it without her, but that was it for the Gits. They broke up soon after.
The tragedy at the end of the Gits story understandably cast a shadow over the bands’ output. It was hard to listen to the music just as it was, without the backstory. But now, more than three decades later, it feels possible to consider these songs as songs, finally, and holy hell, do they rock. Here’s the monster-riffed “Seaweed,” lumbering over an insurgent rhythm, Zapata in middle of it, her voice fluttering and confiding, then erupting in an all-consuming belt. The interplay of bass and guitar is more like Van Halen than anything punk, just gigantically sized, clean and propulsive. Looking to pogo? Try “Drunks” with its manic one-two punch, its thundering speed, its rockabilly flourishes, its all hands shout of the title. “Precious Blood,” by contrast, is all slouchy, in the pocket blues, Zapata not forcing anything, letting the melody roll and flow, as the noise builds in around her. She’s in the same mode on her riff on Sam Cooke’s “Change Is Going to Come,” letting the big notes shudder and blossom with vibrato, snaking the melody around massive metal guitar blasts. And though it’s impossible to pigeonhole Zapata or the band she fronts by genre, it is also instantly clear who they are, seconds into any song, regardless of style or tempo.
The disc closes on a disturbing note, with a track — “Song of the Crab” — that seems to foreshadow Zapata’s untimely end. Against a firestorm of metal-adjacent guitar work, Zapata howls, “Never ceases to amaze me the things you’ll try to pull/Anything to get me in and then get me killed/Go ahead and slash me up spread me all across this town/‘Cause you know you’re the one that won’t be found.” Chilling.
If Enter: The Conquering Chicken marks the natural end of the Gits trajectory, Seafish Louisville comes seven years after the fact. It collects 16 previously unreleased tracks, ten of them live sessions at the RCKCNDY club, a Seattle punk mainstay that closed in 1999. And yet, while the comp is archival, it does a lot to bring the Gits into the here and now. A scorching version of the Gits signature “Another Shot of Whiskey,” a manic take on “A” at unhinged speed, a thundering, blistered romp through “Slaughter of Bruce” — here’s a record that puts you right up against the stage within spitting distance in an eternal hard-rocking present. Seafish also makes the case that whatever you think you know about the Gits, there’s more to discover. A previously unknown cut, “Whirlwind” thrashes and rages at the beginning of the track listening.
Gits revivals recur at intervals. I first encountered the band during a previous one, around the release of the 2005 documentary The Gits. But both then and now, what struck me hardest was how astonishing it was that music this powerful could happen and disappear and fail to move the dialogue. Maybe this time, it will be different? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hear this, if you haven’t, or that you can’t profit from revisiting it if you have.
Jennifer Kelly
