Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [159]
So I started playing with Valerie, Lisa Orth, Selene, and Stefanie in Barbie’s Dream Car. I was intimidated by everybody. The only people I’d really hung out with before were Seventh-day Adventists. Lisa left, so we moved our sessions from Lisa’s loft to the Rathouse basement. We started from scratch and had three songs but no band name.
Our first show was opening up for the Gits for a books-for-prisoners benefit at the OK Hotel. We needed a name for the flyer, and Ben London came up with 7 Year Bitch, which I did not like, but then it stuck.
SELENE VIGIL-WILK We played a house party at a professional snowboarder guy’s place, and that’s when I met Eddie Vedder and his girlfriend at the time, Beth. She really liked our band. Eddie became a friend.
VALERIE AGNEW (7 Year Bitch drummer) Pearl Jam couldn’t open some shows for the Chili Peppers, so the Peppers’ management asked who Pearl Jam would want to replace them, and Eddie said that they should call us. And I will never forget the day that they called. Selene and I were living together in this little house, and we got home and there was this message on our machine, and we literally fell down on the floor, just screaming and laughing. “No way! The manager from the Red Hot Chili Peppers is calling us? What’s going on? This is crazy!”
ELIZABETH DAVIS-SIMPSON I don’t think I related to the Gits as much as the other girls did. Those guys were hard-drinking intellectual liberals, and I really admired them and thought they were awesome, but I didn’t really fit in or relate necessarily. Mia was the one that I related to the most. She was really encouraging of 7 Year Bitch, and she would come down when we were rehearsing and say, “Keep doing it. Keep playing, keep writing music. You guys are doing really good.”
BEN LONDON 7 Year Bitch were not well-skilled musicians at that point, but there was the delivery and the intent, and everything was very charming, and you had some really attractive women that were part of it. And so I think Daniel saw … One thing I’ll give Daniel House is, I don’t think he ever saw a dollar sign he didn’t like. So he put a seven-inch out with them on C/Z.
DANIEL HOUSE For me, the 7 Year Bitch song title alone that is undeniably confrontational, without knowing any of the lyrics, is “Dead Men Don’t Rape.” That sort of militant attitude was so shocking. I had a girlfriend who had in fact been raped in her own apartment, and I had previous experience with my mother having been raped when I was a kid and being aware of it, and so for me, those lyrics alone, that song title alone, brought me to a place where I’m going, “Fuck, yeah! That’s right.”
STEVE MORIARTY C/Z wasn’t a good experience ’cause Daniel couldn’t really understand where we were coming from artistically or personally. We would say, “We don’t wanna do this show that you have us lined up to play with these bands that have a poster with a bunch of references to pussy on it. Mia doesn’t wanna be objectified as a female singer.” He wouldn’t get that, and he would do it anyway.
We held our nose and signed to C/Z because he had enough money to put out our record, and that’s what we were looking for right then. We decided with 7 Year Bitch to do it, thinking we would be the main bands on his label and anything that he tried to throw at us we could boycott if we didn’t like it.
DANIEL HOUSE The Gits were, from the day I first started talking to them, innately paranoid and mistrustful. They were of the opinion, it seemed, that everybody was out to take advantage of them, everybody was out to fuck ’em over. They almost seemed to resent that we as a label, as a business entity, were going to be making a profit off of them if they saw success. At one point, I had to say, “I don’t know if I can do this if you are just going to be so paranoid and mistrustful of our relationship before we’ve even started.”
MATT DRESDNER Daniel seemed friendly enough, but he had a