An interview with 7 Year Bitch is a prime example of getting four for the price of one. All the hours vocalist Selene Vigil, bassist Liz Davis, guitarist Roisin Dunne, and drummer Val Agnew have put in developing their music and refining their vision have resulted in an extraordinarily tight-knit camaraderie. Throw out a question and they pounce on it as a group, words tumbling over each other, one member finishing the other's sentance. As when they discuss their appearance in the film Mad Love, for instance....
Davis: "We only filmed one day."
Vigil: "It was like 12 hours."
Dunne: "They put us up at the Alexis."
Agnew: "We had a trailer with stars!"
Davis: "We got to use our own song ["The Scratch] and be ourselves. I don't
think we would've done it if we were going to be..."
Agnew: "...playing some other band..."
Davis: "...playing some other band and dressed differently and doing a song
that someone else wrote."
Dunne: "They brought in stunt people 'cause they wanted to have stage divers. For insurance reasons they couldn't have any Joe Blow leap off the stage. But one of us said, 'Don't do it..'"
Davis: "I said, 'don't do it.' 'Cause a guy comes up to me and he goes, 'Look at me. Do I look like someone that would stage dive at one of your shows?' And I go, 'No'"
Mad Love, you may remember, was the set-in-Seattle film about Gen Xers in love; one's crazy (Drew Barrymore), and the other isn't (Chris O'Donnel), and the Bitches (who appear in a club scene shot at Moe) are easily the best thing in the movie. Mad Love is just one of many projects the Bitches have been involved with, separatley and together,, since the release of their last album, 1994's Viva Zapata. There have been other films, the Home Alive compilation, endless rounds of touring (a favorite pastime of the Bitches), and finally, the preparation of a new album, Gato Negro.
Vigil made the biggest splash in film, via her star turn in The Year of My Japanese Cousin, which premiered at last year's Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) and has since aired on PBS. Vigil plays an aspiring rock musician who comes into conflict with a cousin who starts out as her fan and ends up surpassing her in popularity. "I was worried because I thought I would be embarressed," says Vigil. "It was really fun, but you never know; they shoot it, choose the scenes, edit it, and put the soundtrack to it, and you just hope it comes out looking OK." Rest assured, the film (and Vigil) did.
The long-awaited Hype, a documentary about the "Seattle Scene," which features interview and preformance footage of the band, finally premiered at Utah's Sundance Film Festival in January. Though the film has yet to find a distributor, NW film buggs will be able to see it at this year's SIFF. The band also appears in Toast of the Gods, a locally-shot, low-budget feature that has yet to be released ("I think we're the only women in the movie that aren't hos," Davis cracks).
Factor in Agnew's work for Home Alive (both the organization and the compilation), and occasional side-projects (Davis backing writer Inga Muscio on her spoken-word outings), and it's easy to see why two years have passed since the Bitches found time to come together in the recording studio."We didn't actually sit down and start working on completing the songs until last summer," explains Dunne. "Then we went in and recorded them last October."
Gato Negro marks a substantial progression from the Bitche's previous releases. The punky underpinnings are still in place, but the overall sound is harder and slower. And there's another new element: The unmistakable presence of the blues. "Deep in the Heart" and "Whoopie Cat" swing along with the ferocity of a whiskey-soaked, backroom bar. "24,900 Miles Per Hour" (Originally written for Mad Love) is a harrowing tale of life on urban mean streets. Distorted vocals on "The History of My future" and "Miss Understood" (which also features some great growls from Vigil) heighten the darker atmosphere.
The album's also the first the group has recorded for a major label (Atlantic), a move they say has allowed them greater freedom."We had more room to pick ehre we wanted to record and who we wanted to record with," explains Vigil. "It wasn't like, 'OK, you have a $5000 budget, so basically you can record here or here, and with this guy or that guy, and that's it.' It opened up more areas of what we could do."
The band ended up in San Francisco's Brilliant Studio, working with Billy Anderson as producer/engineer (the band co-produced0. The Bitches had been introduced to Anderson by one of his former clients, Neurosis, and the fact that Anderson was a muscian himself was another plus. "Billy was a good choice," says Davis. "He's our age and he understands. It was really easy to communicate with him and he's really talented."
Then there was the studio itself. "The room was huge!" says Dunne.
"It was like a gymnasium," agrees Davis. "It has trees growing inside it."
"Thirty or 40 ceilings, skylights," adds Dunne
"We had some cool parties there, some jams," says "Davis. "You're in this big room, with all your instruments set up.."
"...and you're done tracking for the day, and you're still wired," Agnew finishes. "You still got all this energy."
Once again, the band found itself finishing songs in the studio, something that also happened with Zapata, though to a lesser degree. "Normally, we try and play our songs live as much as we can before we go to record them," says Davis.
"A alot of these we hadn't played live until New Year's Eve and our January show at Moe," adds Vigil — two months after the album was completed.
The result was less concern with capturing the band's live sound. "We worked on actually getting the sound of the song, the feeling of the song to come across," says Vigil. "Not like the feeling of us playing live, but the sound of the song itself."
The group also spent twice as long in the studio, recording for three weeks, and mixing for two. "We actually had more time than we needed," says Davis. "I'm really happy with the way the songs came out. I think that they're superior songs show we've gotten better."
The Bitches have also involved in promoting the Home Alive compilation, contributing the track "Mad Dash" to the record, and appearing at release parties in San Francisco and New York. Agnew, who was extensively involved in putting the compilation together, expresses the suprise at how the project grew. "We thought it was going to be just a small independent release," she says. "But once we started soliciting bands, we got an amazing ammount of support-way more submissions than we could possibily have used. Once we got some of the bigger bands confirmed and started getting courted by labels, it gave us the opportunity to take it to another level.
"I think part of [the amount of interest] was because the whole impact of Mia's death is still in people's minds," Agnew continues. "Home Alive has been fairly active. It wasn't like something coming out of obscurity. We have a lot of diversity on the record. There're bands that are already doing well and there're bands that haven't even been able to play out of Seattle yet."
Though the band didn't sppear at the Seattle Home Alive release parties, they did make it back to Seattle for Gato Negro's release party, followed by what they hope will be an extensive round of touring. A discussion about the nature of life on the road throws up a list of groups they'd like to share a bill with (Neurosis, Girls Afainst Boys, Rage Against The Machine; Davis drawing the line at AC/DC), as well as their thoughts on the encroaching corporate ogre — which they may have to face one day,being on a major label.
"I never would have done that "Molson Ice Presents' thing," says Davis. "That's just definitive of..."
"...Wretchedness...," says Agnew.
"..The death knell of being an independent band," Davis finishes. "I wouldn't do a Budweiser tour or something like that. I like the level that we're at. The level we're at is pretty cool."
"Rosin would do a Budweiser tour!" says Vigil.
Rosin agrees. "If Budweiser called me up and said, 'You play in the middle, there's an opener, some big headliner, and you get to play in Spain, I'd go," she says
"And drink alot of Bud!" adds Vigil."We heard Odwalla was looking to sponsor bands, and I woulden't mind getting Odwalla products! Or let's do the Cuervo tour! It just depends on what you drink."
One thing they do agree on is a future that sticks to the basics: "Travel. Tour with the band. Write another record," as Agnew puts it.
"I think each record sounds better," concludes Vigil. "I think what we're doing is getting better. Moving to Atlantic is a better thing because people will be able to find our records. So everything is getting better. I guess when things start to get worse," she laughs, "we'll have to reassess the situation!"
Thanks to Darcy for submitting this article!
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