Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [158]
As we got closer to graduation, we were all like, “We want to keep playing music.” When we discussed where we wanted to go, four cities came up. The general discussion in this group—it became more of a collective later—was that New York and San Francisco were too expensive, Chicago was too close to where we already were, and Seattle just seemed like this great place. I was mildly aware of Soundgarden, but we didn’t really know that it was going to be a good place for music at all.
We arrived as an army of people, in August of 1989. It was not only the core members of the Gits and Big Brown House, but others, including Valerie Agnew, who ended up being the drummer in 7 Year Bitch.
MATT DRESDNER (the Gits bassist) When we first moved out here, Valerie was dating Steve, our drummer. And I ended up dating Stefanie Sargent. They were interested in starting a band, and we helped them. They started in our practice space at the Rathouse on our equipment. We helped teach them, Stefanie and Valerie specifically, how to play their instruments.
BEN LONDON Rathouse was the name of our collective, which was a combination of Big Brown House and the Gits’ original name, the Sniveling Little Rat Faced Gits, which comes from a Monty Python skit. And that’s what we called the group house that the bulk of these people lived in, on 19th and Denny in Capitol Hill. Steve Moriarty and Valerie Agnew; Julian Gibson and Carla Sindle from D.C. Beggars; Andy Kessler and Mia Zapata were the primary people living there. That’s where we practiced in the basement. It was very much like the community center for our social scene.
STEVE MORIARTY Why was it called Rathouse? Don’t remember. Oh, oh, the guy that owned it was a warlock, and he said there had been rats in the house but he caught one and cooked it and ate it and then all the other rats knew that they had to leave the house. I think that’s where it came from. The place was disgusting when we moved in.
ELIZABETH DAVIS-SIMPSON (7 Year Bitch bassist) I came over from Eastern Washington. Walla Walla. My parents wrote contemporary Christian music and performed music. My dad—he just died a couple years ago—was a musician since the ’20s. All my oldest siblings played guitar and sang and did a lot of music in church. In third grade, I had an aha moment when I got punished for innocently asking my teacher a question about original sin, and I realized I was not going to be a Christian.
After graduating from Walla Walla University, I was working on a fishing boat in Alaska with my boyfriend, and the boat ported in Seattle. My boyfriend was a guitar player, and he thought, Oh, I’ll buy my girlfriend a bass and she can play along with me. I played with him one time and then I was like, “I don’t want to play that kind of music,” which was introspective and sensitive and complicated, so I just started playing along with AC/DC and Stooges records, and it came real fast for me.
SELENE VIGIL-WILK (7 Year Bitch singer) We were in a band called Barbie’s Dream Car for a minute. Elizabeth, who also worked at Pike Place Market, ended up being the bass player and then the other girl left, and Stefanie Sargent joined. Me and Stefanie knew each other; she stayed with me off and on and we used to see each other around at shows.
ELIZABETH DAVIS-SIMPSON I worked in the Pike Place Market, upstairs from the health-food store where Valerie and Selene worked. I used to go down there and get snacks, and I would see Valerie and Selene there, and I thought, These girls are the hottest and coolest chicks in Seattle. I kind of idolized them. Then I saw Valerie walking up the street with cymbals and I said, “Hey, I just started