Happy 30th Anniversary to 7 Year Bitch’s second album ¡Viva Zapata!, originally released May 20, 1994.
On July 7, 1993 at 3:20 a.m., a young woman’s battered body was found on a deserted street in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. She’d been strangled with the drawstring of her hoodie, which bore the name of a local band, The Gits. Because there was a church on one side of the street and a Catholic Services building on the other, the crucifix-like position of the woman’s body prompted police to believe the murder could be religiously motivated.
She had no ID. However, in a strange twist of coincidence, the woman was identified by the medical examiner, a music fan who frequented the Seattle nightclub circuit. He recognized her immediately as Mia Zapata, the husky-voiced lead singer of the Gits, an up-and-coming band in the grunge scene that had recently captivated the nation.
Zapata had spent most of the evening having drinks with friends at the Comet Tavern, and then left at midnight, stopping off to visit a friend whose apartment was nearby. She left on foot at around 2 a.m. Her body was discovered less than a half a mile away from the friend’s apartment. She’d been beaten, sexually assaulted, and then strangled. Frustratingly, there was very little physical evidence beyond a tiny trace of saliva taken from a bite wound on Zapata’s breast—a sample too miniscule to be tested using early ’90s DNA technology. So the case went cold, and it would be a decade before Zapata’s killer was found.
Her death devastated the grunge scene. “Partly because it was a murder, Zapata’s death genuinely transformed the smaller, more local scene in which she was a leading light,” music critic Ann Powers observed in the Village Voice a year later in 1994. “Talking about Kurt [Cobain] with people in clubs and cafes, I actually feel his presence less than Zapata’s. She is mentioned over and over. Posters asking for information adorn the wall of the Comet Tavern… on some street corners, you can see the fliers made by friends a long time ago. There’s Mia’s warm, big, charming face, and the words: ‘Damn! Damn! Damn!’”
One group saying “Damn!” loudly and viscerally was feminist grunge band 7 Year Bitch, who were dear friends and C/Z Records labelmates with The Gits. The two bands had been scheduled to go on tour together mere days after Zapata’s murder. Feeling angry and powerless, 7 Year Bitch decided that their debut studio album would be a celebration of their fallen friend, as well as a fiery demand for justice. They would title it ¡Viva Zapata!, and the cover would feature a portrait of Mia in Mexican Revolution attire. (The album, however, wasn’t meant to signal solidarity with the modern-day Zapatistas. "She was related to him [Emiliano Zapata]," said drummer Valerie Agnew, "but we're like, no, our tribute is solely to Mia.")
7 Year Bitch had formed in 1990, when Agnew and vocalist Selene Vigil met while working at an Italian imports shop at the most Seattle of all locales, the Pike Place Market. The women would often hit the clubs after work to hear live music, and they soon began dreaming about starting a band of their own. “We would just shoot the shit about it while we were selling fig bars,” Agnew recalled.
They started Barbie’s Dream Car with guitarist Stefanie Sargent, but then their bassist took off for Europe. Soon, they met bassist Elizabeth Davis-Simpson, who worked in another shop at the market and would stop by to shoot the shit, too. Davis-Simpson was recruited, and they renamed the band 7 Year Bitch, an irreverent play on the Marilyn Monroe movie as suggested by their friend Ben London, a member of the Seattle band Alcohol Funnycar. For their first-ever show at the OK Hotel, 7 Year Bitch opened for The Gits.
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"We exist because the Gits existed," Agnew told the Denver Westword. "I went to college with Mia and some of the people in her band, and I moved out to Seattle with them. We lived in a collective house, and when our band got started, we practiced there and used their equipment. They got us our very first shows in town and were always really supportive of us and very connected to us, too."
7 Year Bitch would end up signing with the Gits’ label C/Z records and recording their debut album Sick ’Em in 1992. But then, tragically, the album’s release was marred—and delayed—by the death of 24-year-old guitarist Stefanie Sargent on June 27. Her cause of death: asphyxiation from choking on her own vomit, after mixing alcohol and a small amount of heroin.
"For us at the time it was like ... we thought everything was just going to go really well," Agnew recalled. "We were playing really well. We'd had a really good show in New York. It seemed like things were going up. And everything just basically plummeted to the bottom bowels of the earth. There was a time when I didn't think I was ever going to be able to hear a guitar again. We were devastated."
In the zine Hit It or Quit It, put out by a teenage Jessica Hopper, Sargent had been so excited—and fierce—when talking about her band not long before her death. “I don’t want it to be like ‘there’s this really great girl band, 7 Year Bitch,’” Sargent asserted. “[I want it] more like ‘there’s this really great band, by the way, they’re girls.’ I don’t want people to say ‘they’re really good—for women.’ ”
Sargent had also told Hopper that she’d left San Francisco and moved back home to Seattle specifically to get away from substances. “I just decided to come back to Seattle because it was boring in San Francisco and everyone was fucked up on drugs,” she said. “I guess the new trend there is to die—I’m so glad I left there when I did.” However, Seattle had become a heroin hotspot in the wake of the emerging grunge scene.
Sargent wasn’t a hardcore user, though. “She wasn’t a junkie,” said Barbara Dollarhide of C/Z Records. “You can just screw up once, and it’s eternity.” Her best friend Lori Barbero of the band Babes In Toyland agreed, citing peer pressure: “Stefanie was never a junkie. She was a joiner.”
7 Year Bitch took a six-month break, eventually recruiting guitarist Roisin Dunne to replace Sargent. But then the death of Mia Zapata in 1993 inevitably opened up the still-fresh wounds from Sargent’s death the year prior. "We'd just been in L.A. with Mia for the anniversary of Stefanie's death," Agnew recalled, "and she was giving us this pep talk, saying, ‘You've got to hang in there and pull through all this shit.' And then two days later, she's dead."
Sargent’s death would inspire songs on ¡Viva Zapata! along with Mia’s murder, though 7 Year Bitch’s aim when they first started working on the album wasn’t necessarily to mine the darkness. "We didn't go into the album with the idea of us making a record about all of these bad things,” Vigil explained. “Every song came up and it was written about what we were thinking about at the time. There's not really a theme. But after it was all over and I listened to it, I thought it was a pretty intense record."
Produced by Jack Endino, ¡Viva Zapata!’s release would be promoted by Atlantic Records. 7 Year Bitch had signed to the label a month prior, after Courtney Love recommended the band to label president Danny Goldberg.
¡Viva Zapata! begins, rather defiantly, with unabashed desire. “I want it! Give it to me! I love it!,” Vigil growls acapella on “The Scratch.” And then comes a thrusting swagger courtesy of the rhythm section. “Don’t give it to her, you’ve gotta give it to me.” The song might be about lusting after someone else’s husband—the seven-year itch on full display—but then, between buzzing guitar riffs, the desire turns inside out as Vigil sings, “Well, I’m the bitch and you’ve got the itch, I’m sorry son of a bitch.” By the song’s end, the narrator has turned positively threatening—and possibly cannibalistic—as Vigil snarls a departing promise: “You better watch out what you’re wishing for. I will have my cake and I will eat it, too, just like you.”
The song would end up being featured in the 1995 movie Mad Love starring Drew Barrymore as a Seattle teen who falls in love with the boy next door while also experiencing a manic episode. (Prozac Nation, The Virgin Suicides, and Girl, Interrupted had all been published in the two years prior, meaning teen-girl “madness” was just as much in vogue as grunge was.) 7 Year Bitch even got a cameo in the film, performing “The Scratch” at legendary ’90s venue Club Moe, where Casey (Barrymore) and Matt (Chris O’Donnell) have their first date.
“We spent a lot of time there,” Vigil said of Club Moe. “We lived four blocks away and our practice space was right across the street. Sometimes you’d finish and wander over like, ‘Let’s see who’s playing tonight.’ A lot of bands came there, I remember seeing Flaming Lips there.”
The second track on ¡Viva Zapata!, “Hip Like Junk” could have easily been taken from Stefanie Sargent’s anti-drug lament to Jessica Hopper in her Hit It or Quit It zine. The song explores the dark side of drug abuse and the desperation to be hip—the tragic weakness in being “a joiner.” “Watch you bang, bang your head against the wall.” The song is driving and swirling, and relentless in its refusal to let anyone who’s using off the hook—“When you start lying to yourself, then don’t come running back to me.”
On the next song “M.I.A.,” 7 Year Bitch unleashes their fury over Zapata’s murder. An obvious play on words, M.I.A. speaks both to Mia’s being “missing in action,” slain in her prime at the too-young age of 27, and her murderer still roaming free. Roisin Dunne’s guitar wails, and Vigil begins her taunts to the killer: “Will there be hundreds mourning for you? / Will they talk of the talent and inspiration you gave / No / Who besides your mother will stand in sorrow at your grave?”
Vigil is masterful in her vocals, capturing conflicting emotions with nuance. Ultimately, the song turns something personal into the universal, highlighting the maddening, unjust danger all women face when simply walking alone. In her final lines, Vigil addresses Zapata with mournfulness and, at the same time, the killer with a seething rage: “Society did this to you? / Does society have justice for you? / If not, I do.”
“Derailed,” with its sludgy bass line and forward chugging, speaks to the feeling of being gutted in the wake of multiple tragedies—“It's happy hour on a sad train / I need these drinks to dull the pain.” Meanwhile, “Rock A Bye” returns to the rage with a zigzagging, buzz-saw, glass-smashing fury—“Well, I drink and I cry / Clench your fists, grit my teeth / Lotta smoke, wipe my eye / Why'd you have to go and die?” However, the song ends with an intonation to “Wake up! Wake up!” as though Vigil is trying to rouse herself for a long fight ahead.
“Icy Blue,” also featured in Mad Love, is a chilling tale of domestic violence: “Are you gonna let him, let him love you to death? / Are you gonna let him? / 'Cause if he can't break your heart / Well, maybe he'll bust a couple of ribs.” Despite the disturbing subject matter, the song is a cool, ticking meditation, one where Vigil imparts intimidating patience—'Cause I keep track of my friends / And I keep track of my enemies”—and we get the palpable sense that it’s only a matter of time before Zapata’s killer is found.
Although Mia’s case had gone cold not long after her body was found in 1993, her friends never gave up their relentless pursuit to find out who murdered her. Nirvana and Soundgarden chipped in money for a private investigator. Joan Jett offered support by fronting the Gits for a benefit concert and recording a live album of Gits songs. For her own part, 7 Year Bitch’s Valerie Agnew formed a women’s self-defense group called Home Alive. More benefit concerts followed, with Nirvana playing one such show at Seattle’s Kind Theatre. Meanwhile, the story of Zapata’s murder was featured on episodes of Unsolved Mysteries, 48 Hours, Investigation Discovery’s Dead of Night, and the documentary The Gits.
Finally, on January 10, 2003, police arrested Jesus Mezquia in Miami for Zapata’s murder. DNA technology had advanced and, using a process called Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) that “amplifies” the tiniest segments of DNA, the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory had been able to find a match in CODIS for the saliva sample taken 10 years prior. “Thank god that the medical examiner saved the one piece of DNA evidence that existed in this case,” Leigh Hearon, the private investigator Mia’s friends had hired, told Forensic Files.
After serving almost two decades in prison (he’d been sentenced to 36 years), Mezquia died in 2021. “I was actually thinking for years how I would react when he was released,” Gits drummer Steve Moriarty said. “He affected a lot of people in my life in a very negative way for many years. He was a profoundly distracting influence on my life for the last 25 years. Good riddance.”
Mia Zapata’s memory lives on through the countless people who loved her; through the Gits’ own incendiary and hard-rocking recordings; and through ¡Viva Zapata!, the ferocious and fiery love letter 7 Year Bitch penned in honor of their fallen friend. The album remains a Seattle-scene staple, having been recognized by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Paste, and Guitar World as one of the era’s best grunge albums.
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