There is no doubt in my mind that we would have a Hometown Heroes banner reading “Mia’s Louisville” hanging up prominently in the city right now if Mia Zapata’s story did not have such a tragic, early ending.
As a vocalist, Mia’s voice was lightning in a bottle; possessing the bluesy raspiness of Janis Joplin, the soulfulness of Billie Holliday, the ferociousness of Joan Jett, the power of Stevie Nicks, and the poise of Patti Smith, she had the kind of voice that is perfectly suited for any type of music. Born and raised in Louisville, Zapata, along with guitarist Andy Kessler (aka Joe Spleen), bassist Matt Dresdner, and drummer Steve Moriarty, formed The Gits in 1986 while attending Antioch College in Ohio.
The band relocated to Seattle in 1989 and released their debut album Frenching The Bully in 1992, which garnered immense praise and attention – including that of Atlantic Records, with whom the band was set to sign with. A move that would have no doubt skyrocketed The Gits to heights comparable to that of Seattle alums Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. But that never happened.
In the early morning hours of July 7, 1993, Mia Zapata was raped and murdered. She was laid to rest here in Louisville at Cave Hill Cemetery. It would be another decade before DNA evidence was able to positively ID her murderer, who later died in prison.
In the years following Mia’s death, the band found the strength to finish and release the album they had been working on at the time of her death, Enter: The Conquering Chicken. They also released a collection of 1988 recordings titled Kings & Queens, and a compilation of live, unreleased, and alternate takes titled Seafish Louisville.
And now, 31 years later, Mia’s voice and the music of The Gits live again! Sub Pop Records has remastered and re-released all four albums in their discography, as well as a new live album recorded in June of 1993 called Live at The X-Ray, all of which are available now on all streaming platforms. In addition, the physical re-release of the remastered debut album, Frenching The Bully, will be available on vinyl, cd and cassette on January 31, 2025.
And thanks to the wonderful people at Sub Pop, LEO Weekly was able to get a Zoom interview with both Andy Kessler (guitar) and Matt Dresdner (bass).
Although he was not part of this interview, it’s worth noting that drummer Steve Moriarty recently released a book about his time in The Gits titled Mia Zapata and The Gits: A Story of Art, Rock, and Revolution. Neither Kessler nor Dresdner were part of writing this book, but told us they are supportive of it and Steve.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity).
So how did the deal with Sub Pop come about?
Andy Kessler: We had the idea for a box set that would collect all of The Gits recordings, then that sort of metamorphosed into interest from a very small label in putting out at least the first album on vinyl. And then that changed into, well, we could probably find a larger label that could do it better justice and have wider reach.
Matt Dresdner: Yeah, it actually started I think in 2015 when we got together for the first time in 18 years or so to play a benefit show for our good friend James Atkins, who was in a band called Hammerbox. He was battling cancer and we were asked to perform, so we recruited a really good friend, Rachel Flotard, to sing for us.
AK: Rachel is not only a wonderful vocalist, she also works in music management, and she’s the one who really volunteered to manage this project. I think she just had faith that it could reach a lot more people, so it’s really due to her.
MD: She got us to think bigger and approached labels. Eventually everything came together with Sub Pop. We all felt like it just made sense. Sub Pop was really passionate about doing it for us, and in some ways it felt like coming home or putting this catalog in a place where it somehow belonged.
What does it mean to you to have your music remastered and re-released after all these years?
AK: It’s complex, but we’re obviously pretty fucking pretty happy about it. It’s the past, so it brings up a lot of stuff emotionally and psychologically. But it seems like it’s the best summation of it. Your work can rest now; it sounds as good as it’s possible for it to sound, and probably now on as fine a label as there ever was really, so in as right a place as it could be.
MD: Likewise, it’s cathartic in some way. All these years, there have just been so many loose ends. I think largely with all of us and a lot of friends of Mia’s, it was just too difficult to literally open these boxes. There are just emotional landmines everywhere. I wasn’t ready to dig in, and still each step is difficult, but we have great support. Doing it with the right people is really important. The support of Mia’s family has been critical. They’re excited to have this stuff come out and have Mia presented again to the world, and I’m really happy it’s being done, especially at the level that that we’ve been able to accomplish it at.
In the film Hype!, Mia can be seen wearing a Louisville tee shirt. Did she talk about the city much?
MD: She had a close affinity for Louisville and talked about it a lot. She wore that shirt proudly and she would make terrible jokes where Louisville was in the punchline that we never understood, [laughs]. But yeah, it was a big part of her identity.
AK: When I first met her, she called it Low-uh-ville.
MD: She taught us the way you’re supposed to say it. Forgive us if this is insulting to Louisvillians, but she said you have to have two fingers in your mouth, [puts two fingers in his mouth and says Louisville]. And that’s how Mia taught us to say it.
That’s basically right, Lou-uh-vul.
AK: You know, I think I’ve only been in Louisville one time. This was after Mia died, maybe in 95, around then, but I loved it and I thought the people were just so cool and warm and it just seemed like nice place.
MD: That great record store we went to, what was that called?
Probably Ear X-Tacy.
MD: Ear X-Tacy, yeah! We had stickers and an earplug case from Ear X-Tacy.
AK: I forgot about that. So I thought it was really awesome and I thought even about moving there.
A lot’s been said about Mia on stage, but what was she like as a person off stage?
MD: She definitely had an amazing stage presence and persona, but I think in day-to-day life, it was quite different. There was nothing inauthentic. She wasn’t putting on a performance in any way on stage. But she was just a goofy, wonderful, funny friend who was warm and open to people.
AK: She was a complex and wonderful person. I said this the other night: when I was having a hard time, she would be the first person I would go to. And she was really super artistic and creative. There’s a reason certain people are pretty passionate, and rock and roll is about being wild and creative. But she was also a real private person, and in many ways there was a side of her that had a lot of humility. She didn’t like talking about herself. She didn’t go around telling people she was in a band or sang. And when we talked about the future, meaning what we saw for ourselves long term because we thought we would probably have the band for a very long time, she’d say when she was old, she just wanted to live in a nice house in the country with a big sheepdog.
MD: She always wanted to be an old lady. She’d always say “I can’t wait until I’m an old lady,” and sit on her porch with a sheepdog and a guitar.
I know the band started at Antioch College in Ohio, but how did each of you meet?
MD: Well, first I became friends with Mia. She was a year ahead of me. She was in the art department, and I was an art student as well, and we just became really tight. A little while later, I heard her sing at an open mic event on campus, and I literally started crying. There was something in the quality of her voice that just touched me so deeply. Anyway, a while later, I spent some time in San Francisco and worked at a big punk club there and ended up being a stage manager and worked with some of the bands I had idolized when I was young like Social Distortion. M.D.C., Circle Jerks, D.R.I. And I had this revelation like, these are just schlubs like me! I really had held them up on a pedestal growing up, and that inspired me. I always wanted to be in a band, but I thought it was something for others. And I realized there’s nothing special about these people. They’re just passionate people who are trying to do something. So I bought a bass while I was out there, and when I came back to campus, I wanted to start a band and I saw this guy [Andy] walking around campus.
AK: He just asked me if I would play guitar in a band he wanted to start. We didn’t really like each other, so I thought it was a strange thing to ask and was real surprised of being approached that way. So a few days later, we actually got together and started playing. And then a few months later we were messing around in what served as our practice space and Steve [Moriarty] was hanging out, so we asked him to get on the drums and just jam with us, and it sounded amazing because Steve had been playing drums far longer than our drummer at the time, and he’d been trained in jazz a bit as a kid. It sounded really powerful and we just kind of looked at each other and knew.
MD: And even with my complete inability to play the bass, Andy’s like “Hit that string,” it sounded good and there was chemistry. Andy’s patience to show me how to play, Mia’s innate ability, and then when Steve joined us, it was just like the chemistry was magic.
On your official website there is an upcoming events page. What can we make of that?
MD: Not very much. If the question is leading to are we ever going to play again? There are no plans for that. But we do have one event on the horizon, which is the record release for Frenching the Bully on January 31st. And the other thing that we’re working on is a short film of live footage from [the movie] Hype! Doug Pray, the director and filmmaker, has been very kind in allowing us to use the footage that he and his crew shot for that, so we’ve been restoring it. And we’re really excited about it because people will actually get a sense of the energy of the band and what Mia was really like on stage.
AK: There’s a lot of video of us, but that one was just shot with such high quality and the audio was really great too. So that’s the only thing that exists like that of that quality.
Are the other albums going to get released on vinyl as well?
MD: We don’t know. There’s currently no commitment to press anything more than Frenching the Bully. And I think at some point there will be a box set, we really hope. That’s going to be a Sub Pop decision, and I think it’ll come down to how well Frenching the Bully sells.
You all have some interesting album titles: Frenching The Bully, Enter The Conquering Chicken, and Seafish Louisville. Is there any meaning behind any of them?
AK: Everything was kind of an in-joke in the band.
MD: We didn’t take it too seriously.
AK: I don’t want to say there are no deeper meanings or anything, but it was really just joking around.
MD: So Frenching The Bully, in particular, we couldn’t decide. We had a few concepts between us and one idea was the French album. And the other one; Mia was inspired by a Santeria oil that she got I think in San Francisco called Taming the Bully. So we decided to combine the French album and Taming the Bully. And our song titles were for us to remember what it was, seriously never really thinking it would be impactful for anyone outside of us. So yeah, it was mostly just kind of us joking around.
AK: Enter the Conquering Chicken was obviously more serious because we came up with the name after Mia as killed. She was the conquering chicken. I don’t know what we were going to call the record initially. I don’t think we’d gotten that far.
MD: And Seafish Louisville was from one of Mia’s jokes. There was some complicated shaggy dog joke where the punchline was supposed to be something like Crab Louie. I don’t know what it was, but anyway she mixed all these things and so Crab Louie turned into Seafish Louie, then she changed it to Seafish Louisville. And she made this joke on stage and we were all like, how is that supposed to be funny? But it was so not-funny that it was hilarious and we decided to use it.
The Gits often get lumped in with the Grunge scene that was happening in Seattle at the time, did you all feel like you were part of that at all?
MD: These labels, I find it kind of funny. The term “Grunge” sort of started to burgeon as we were out here, but it is largely used by other people outside looking in. It’s come to sort of identify an era and a place, and we were in that place in that era, so sure, whatever. But musically, no.
AK: We’re kind of our own thing.
MD: But I don’t really think any of that matters. Whatever people want to call it, I’m just glad they’re checking it out. It’s cool. Over the years we’ve seen these trickles of messages from around the world where the band, the music, and especially Mia has really touched and inspired people. And if we can open that to a new generation who has no idea of what was going on so long ago, that’s a treat and a privilege.
The remastered versions of Frenching The Bully, Enter: The Conquering Chicken, Kings & Queens, Seafish Louisville, and Live at The X-Ray are available now in digital format through Sub Pop Records. Frenching The Bully will be available on vinyl, cd and cassette on January 31, 2025.
This article appears in Dec 18, 2024 – Jan 16, 2025.