SAFE & SOUND

"What am I doing?" asks Valerie Agnew of 7 Year Bitch, seated in a Seattle bistro and frantically trying to make order out of a chaotic mess of press releases, tour schedules and phone messages. "I'm a drummer, not a fucking concert promoter."

Nevertheless, Agnew is doing her best to organize a benefit concert on the opposite coast, in New York. She's one of dozens of Seattle residents donating their time, energy and music to Home Alive, a self-defense organization whose goal is literally to get women home alive.

The group is the only good thing to come out of the 1993 rape and murder of singer Mia Zapata, a case that remains unsolved. After Zapata's death, some of her friends, including Agnew, singer Gretta Harley and visual artists Jessica Lawless and Stacey Wescott, came together to grieve. Then they decided to try to do something to prevent other women from getting hurt. "We had so much energy, we have to focus it, to put it somewhere," Agnew says.

"It was important to me to respond in some way," adds Lawless, who went to college with Zapata. "I was pissed off, I was scared, and I was hurt. This was something to do. We had no idea it would turn to this."

Home Alive now provides three of four self-defense classes a week in addition to occasional week-long seminars, all of which are taught at the group's classroom and workout space in downtown Seattle. Classes are open to everyone, and funding has come largely from Seattle's music community. "We did benefits to fund self-defense," says Harley, who twice last year had to use techniques she learned through Home Alive. "We didn't necessarily have a charitable mentality. We're not altrustic. We're working toward [protecting] ourselves and our community."

About a year and a half ago, Home Alive decided to put together an album. The artists who contributed include Pearl Jam, the Presidents of the United States of America, Soundgarden, the Posies, and Ann and Nancy Wilson; many of them wrote material especially for the project. Zapata is present on the album with a song she recorded on her own and another with her band, the Gits; the surviving bandmates contribute another song under their new moniker, the Dancing French Liberals of '48. The album also includes spoken word artists such as Jello Biafra, Lydia Lunch, Exene Cervenka and Jim Carroll. "Having spoken word was important to us because it's been a large part of what goes on here," Agnew says. "And we went for a cross section of bands. We've happy to have the Presidents and Pearl Jam, but we wanted to get out some of the lesser-known bands, too."

The musicians who took part all expressed a belief in Home Alive and a desire to do something in Zapata's memory. Pearl Jam's Mike McCready calls the murder "tragic, a real loss. Anything we can do to make things safer for everyone is all right with us." Jason Finn of the Presidents was a bartender at the Comet, a bar where Zapata last spent time with her friends. "Mia was a good friend of mine," he says. "We miss her. But that's all overshadowed by the fact that Val would personally beat the tar out of me if we didn't come across."

The Home Alive website can be reached at http://www.homealive.org