“We didn’t want everyone to remember us because Stefanie died of a heroin overdose. I would rather they listened to the album and think, Oh, that’s some pretty rippin’ guitar playing for somebody who was just getting started.“
7 Year Bitch: Valerie Agnew, Selene Vigil, Stefanie Sargent, and Elizabeth Davis. Photo: Sally Lander
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Formed in now legendary Seattle underground music scene in the early ’90s, 7 Year Bitch — like so many other punk bands — learned by doing. Encouraged by their friends in the band The Gits, 7 Year Bitch went on to sign a record contract with Atlantic and tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage Against the Machine.
But fate wasn’t kind to 7 Year Bitch. First, their guitarist, Stefanie Sargent, died. Then, one year later, their close friend and mentor Mia Zapata, singer of The Gits, was raped and murdered. 7 Year Bitch continued for a few years until they split up in 1997, but their impact in rock — especially for women in rock — is undeniable.
7 Year Bitch drummer Valerie Agnew talked with us in January 2009 about what it was like to be a band in Seattle at that time, the shock of Stefanie and Mia’s deaths, how anger at Mia’s murder led her and others to action, the end of innocence in the Seattle music scene in the ensuing years, new developments in Mia’s case, and what the members of 7 Year Bitch are up to nowadays.
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RACHEL ARIEFF
What was your relationship to Mia? Were you close friends?
VALERIE AGNEW
Everybody in my band felt pretty close to her, but I knew her from Antioch, when we had our beginning math class together. And I didn’t know her as well at Antioch. I got to know her better when we moved to Seattle. We were friends with those guys, but, you know, it was college, we always left campus a lot, and we didn’t have more than three months at a time together.
So it was when we all lived together in Seattle, which was in 1990 and ’91 that we really became closer and spent a lot more time together. Our band [7 Year Bitch] hooked up and they helped us get started and all that stuff. So it was from living with her at the Rathouse that the bonds got deeper.
RACHEL ARIEFF
The Rathouse was that weird house that was owned by that warlock?
VALERIE AGNEW
Exactly. Yes. It was at 19th and Denny in Seattle and it was me and Andy and Steve and Carla and Juilan that all lived there. And Mia, of course. So it was like a fun time, good times place.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Had you ever played music before you started with 7 Year Bitch?
VALERIE AGNEW
Well, no, just an earlier incarnation of the band that was called Barbie’s Dream Car. But it was just preceding 7 Year Bitch. So prior to that, when I was at Antioch, I didn’t play at all. Steve [Moriarty, drummer for The Gits] gave me my very first drum lessons and taught me the basics on drums. So the first real practicing that we did was in the living room of the Rat House, actually. It was right outside of the door to Mia’s room, and the practice space was right below Mia’s room, so she had to listen to us learning our instruments from the get-go, and she was always really supportive of us.
The Gits were such a huge inspiration to us and to a lot of other bands, I think. But they also literally, like physically made it possible for us to play, too. We didn’t have gear at first, and we had to borrow all our equipment from them, and they got us our first shows. So they very much took us under their wing at the get-go.
RACHEL ARIEFF
I liked your story in the documentary about how intimidating it was to practice underneath’s Mia’s bedroom, and “Ooh, don’t listen to us!”
VALERIE AGNEW
Yeah, it really was. We would be like, “Oh, God.” But she was always so cool about it. And then when we went on and got signed and things like that, she was always very supportive about it. And she was really good friends with Stephanie, who was our guitar player. In fact, Mia introduced us to Stephanie.
Mia and Matt, the two of them, brought her to us and brought us together. So that was a big thing. They had met Stephanie just from their forays out into the Seattle community, but we hadn’t met her yet. And she was our original guitar player and one of our best friends, so that was a big connection for us, that they were responsible for, directly.
RACHEL ARIEFF
And how did you meet your singer, Selene Vigil?
VALERIE AGNEW
Selene and I worked together at a little health food gourmet shop down in the Pike Place Market. And that’s how she and I met there, and we just became instant friends. We’re still best friends now. I mean, we were really close. And that’s how we met Elizabeth, and we’re still best friends with her as well. Like, she worked upstairs in the market, and she would come down sometimes to talk or buy something on her break, so the three of us really met through work, through our jobs.
RACHEL ARIEF
Had Selene sang before?
VALERIE AGNEW
Well, she was in Barbie’s Dream Car with me, so that was her experience singing. But prior to that, no. In fact, when we very first started talking about starting a band, she wanted to play electric violin.
RACHEL ARIEFF
The D.I.Y. thing is something we take for granted in America, starting a band with no gear or experience, etc. Was D.I.Y. a conscious ethic amongst your band and other bands in the scene, or was it something you didn’t even think about?
Photo: Dan Stone
VALERIE AGNEW
Well, in a way, the Rathouse collective was an intentional D.I.Y. effort. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was a political move, ‘cause it wasn’t, it was more of a creative thing. But Steve and the rest of us in the Rathouse had a whole thing around that, where we were just trying to get bands that didn’t have labels, a way to get the music out and get it heard. And everybody was trying to get their singles together and figure out the step-by-step process of how to do that.
So I think there was intention on that part, but as far as 7 Year Bitch was concerned, that was just all that was available to us. (laughter) You know what I mean? We couldn’t have done it any other way than that. There wasn’t anybody that was gonna give us that stuff, or whatever. I mean, we ended up scrapping together our own instruments pretty soon after we figured out that we really loved doing it. Then we went out and bought some used equipment and went from there. But all that stuff was sort of a trial and error thing.
But I think the thing that we noticed, once we did start touring and got enough songs down so that we could remember them enough to make a fucking tour (laughter), we went to Europe. We were lucky enough to get to go to Europe a couple of times. But one time, it was a full European tour. And the thing that struck us was that bands are treated much better in Europe than they were in the United States. Well, at that time they were. I don’t know what it’s like now. Generally, people were just more appreciative and willing to be hospitable.
People would offer us places to stay all the time, the promoters were really generous with food and drink and things like that. Whereas in the United States, you’re lucky if you get a six-pack of beer if you’re an unknown band. But we were on tour through Europe and nobody knew who the hell we were. We had never been there before. We got treated just as well as bands that had been there multiple times. So that was, for us, a noticeable difference in the way the scenes are in the two different places.
RACHEL ARIEFF
What part of Europe did you go to?
VALERIE AGNEW
We traveled all over. We started in England, and then we played in France, we played in Spain, we played in Italy, we played lots of shows in Germany – because at the time, the German mark was the strongest currency. So bands really needed to do a lot shows there in order to cover the costs of their tour. We played in Copenhagen, the Czech Republic. We went all over. The Gits did as well. We really loved Amsterdam and Copenhagen and Spain and Italy.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Do you remember the now-legendary music scene in Seattle as being special at the time you were experiencing it, or were you too busy to realize it?
VALERIE AGNEW
Have you ever seen the documentary of the Seattle scene called “Hype”, the one that has all the footage of The Gits playing? The director is Doug Prey, and the film is actually a pretty excellent representation of how lots of local bands were, as well as bands that existed way before us and The Gits. The foundation bands of the scene are interviewed in this movie and they talk about the hype and how that went.
But I think we were very aware of the scene that was developing because the whole Sub Pop thing was blowing up, and Soundgarden and Pearl Jam and Nirvana were blowing up, and that was right when we were all there doing our thing. But we were focused on our little stuff, and we weren’t trying to emulate anything. It was a very strange but exciting time to be there. I mean, you had to make fun of it when you were there, because there were pictures of grunge-dressed people showing up in Vogue magazine and things like that.
I mean, it was just ludicrous. It was so ridiculous. We were like, “What the hell is going on?” But at the same time, it was funny. No harm was being done, it was just odd and weird. But the movie “Hype” is great. And it has the best footage of The Gits in terms of sound quality. Some of their best footage comes from that. Unfortunately they’re not interviewed in it, I don’t think.
Photo: Sally Lander
RACHEL ARIEFF
When 7 Year Bitch played in New York before The Gits, there was some envy on their part because they’d mentored your group. I know they got over it quickly, but were there some tensions between the groups?
VALERIE AGNEW
We never really knew what exactly they were thinking or feeling because they didn’t say it to us, you know? So we didn’t know. But there were definitely moments where we felt like, “Wow, this is weird. We’re getting all this attention and here’s this band that’s infinitely better and more experienced than us and got us started.” I think the way we felt about it was that every chance that we had to talk about them, we did, because we genuinely loved them, and thought that they were a great band that people should be listening to.
We didn’t do it out of guilt, or because we felt we owed them anything. It was just natural for us that whenever there was major label interest, or when for instance Doug Prey approached us to be in the “Hype” film, we all said, “Have you talked to The Gits yet? Because if you haven’t, you definitely need to.” But I also think that we just totally had a different experience. And the way things happened were very much happenstance. It wasn’t like we went after some sort of goal and we were knocking people out of our way in order to get there.
The Gits. Photo: Jackie Ransier
But I think there was a natural frustration for them when they felt like they wanted to be getting some of the opportunities that we were getting. Which they ended up getting on their own, and then actually got many more than us in a lot of ways. They did a little more touring and stuff.
So to answer your question, whenever we were aware that they might be feeling a little bit jealous, it always made us uncomfortable and a little sad, because we just thought they were so great. But it was such a small blip on the screen, it’s not even really worth talking about.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Steve said that The Gits were a more introverted band, and that 7 Year Bitch was a more social band that knew how to network better.
VALERIE AGNEW
(Laughter) That’s one way of looking at it. It’s also that we were just mouthy and kind of obnoxious, maybe. (Laughter) They might have been a little more cynical, maybe.
RACHEL ARIEFF
But 7 Year Bitch was also an all-woman band, and that attracted a lot of attention.
VALERIE AGNEW
This is true. Yeah, and that was the way it was. And then Stefanie died, and so that brought publicity to the group. Because that was happening so much in Seattle at that time, so all these things contributed. I remember people accusing us of exploiting that fact, which is just ridiculous, because we named our album after Stefanie, and then we named our album after Mia, when she died.
It was a very personal thing for us, but there are cynical people out there in the world of journalism that would literally write reviews saying – I remember some guy in Phoenix or New Mexico thought that we were manipulating it and trying to take advantage of that, and use those tragedies as a way of getting ahead. I was just like, “Fuck you, dude. You have no idea what you’re talking about.” But people have those ideas sometimes, and we just tried to let it roll off our back and do whatever we believed in.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Did you encounter hostility in the press or with certain audiences because you were a band of women with attitude?
VALERIE AGNEW
No, not at all, actually! And it was interesting, because that was one of the most-asked questions that we’d get in interviews: whether or not we were getting a hard time, or if there was a struggle for us. And we would always try to be humorous about it in our answers.
But in a lot of ways, things were NOT hard for us. And I think some of the things we got to do were BECAUSE we were an all-girl group at a time when there was a lot of interest in that kind of thing. So for us, we didn’t experience a negative side at all, other than that we had to constantly talk about the fact that we were an all-female band, which started to drive us crazy.
RACHEL ARIEFF
The Riot Grrrl label…
VALERIE AGNEW
Well, that was frustrating for us, not because we have anything against the Riot Grrls. We just weren’t Riot Grrlls. We had nothing to do with that movement, we never did, and when we went on our first big tour of Europe, every single promotor said, “Riot Grrls, from Seattle!” And they even called us the Godmothers of Riot Grrls. Which we were just like, “We can’t take credit for that, first of all. And it’s not us at all.” It misrepresented us. It discredited Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill and the people who actually DID start the Riot Grrll movement.
So we always tried to deflect it back to the people were actually were responsible for it. But it’ll probably follow us to our graves. But so much time has passed that it doesn’t matter to us anymore. But at the time, it was very frustrating because that was the part where we felt like people just could not take it if we werent – they had to categorize us in that place. They HAD to. It seemed they couldn’t accept it unless we were Riot Grrls. So that felt limiting, I think. Like, can’t we just be what we are?
It was frustrating that they couldn’t accept that there could be lots of different varieties of women’s bands with women musicians playing for different reasons. We weren’t doing it for political reasons the way the Riot Grrls were. We had a lot of respect for the Riot Grrls and people like Kathleen Hanna, so sometimes we would talk about it and people would think we were badmouthing them, but that was an unfortunate part of journalism. We were supportive of them and what they were doing, it wasn’t that we thought that the Riot Grrls were bad.
RACHEL ARIEFF
The journalist Ann Powers says in the documentary says that a lot of bands today are influenced by Mia and don’t know it. Do you agree?
VALERIE AGNEW
My honest answer would be, I have no idea. I would have to ask those bands. People would ask us that stuff too, if we thought we were role models for women in society. And there’s just no way to know that unless somebody was to say, like we always said of The Gits, that they were a direct influence on us. So as far as a cultural thing goes, I don’t know. But I would assume that anyone who saw Mia perform would be heavily influenced by her. And The Gits as a band.
Mia Zapata. Photo: Jackie Ransier
RACHEL ARIEFF
What was your reaction when you found out that Mia had been murdered?
VALERIE AGNEW
Complete and abject horror. Just stunned, devastated and horrified. It was the worst news. My other reaction was that – and I think we talked about this in the film, or maybe that part got edited out, I can’t remember – as soon as we found out that she had been strangled, we also felt that she must have been raped. Without even the police telling us that detail, we knew. I remember us all talking about it, especially with women, those two crimes seem to go hand in hand. And so it was like this extra layer of horror. Not only was she dead, but she’d suffered a terrible death. And that was really shocking and really hard to take.
RACHEL ARIEFF
And then you had to go on tour pretty quickly after that, correct?
VALERIE AGNEW
Well, there was a mini-tour of the East Coast that had already been scheduled with The Gits. It was supposed to be 7 Year Bitch and The Gits playing, I think it was like four or five shows out east. And we had a few moments or days or maybe a week where we thought we were just gonna not do it at all. But then we talked about it and decided that we should. And that was a sad tour, because we just missed them and Mia terribly.
Also, it was hard to be away from the Seattle community that soon after this had all happened, because we felt very much like we wanted to be around all the people that knew and loved her and The Gits. So that was difficult. But that’s also where my idea of Home Alive started. And I was in communication via the phone with several friends back in Seattle who ended up also co-founding Home Alive with me.
On the tour, we had lots of long drives where I mulled things over and had a lot of deep anger and frustration, but also fear. So it was sort of a contemplative time about what to do with that, how to handle that.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Who were the other co-founders of Home Alive?
VALERIE AGNEW
There ended up being nine core members of the organization. But at the earliest inception of it, we had up to 30 people, men and women, coming to the meetings. This was before we even had a name, we were meeting in my living room. So there was lots of brainstorming and ideas, and how to do something to prepare people to prevent this kind of violence from happening from them.
You have to remember that at the time, there was so little known about Mia’s murderer, that they were thinking that it was very likely that it was somebody that was known in the community, and that may even know all of us. So there was an extra level of panic about it. We felt like we were being preyed upon.
RACHEL ARIEFF
The aftermath of Mia’s murder must have been a mind fuck for friendships and relationships between men and women in your community.
VALERIE AGNEW
Yeah, it was really hard. It sucked. It was awful. And we felt for our male friends, who were being asked to give semen samples and blood samples and things like that. Which they all did very willingly, because of course they wanted to get as much information out there as possible. But still, it was very psychologically difficult for the whole community, I think.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Did you know anything about self defense before you started Home Alive?
VALERIE AGNEW
No, not a thing. Not a thing, actually. And originally when we started it, we were gonna raise the money to give to an already existing self-defense organization because we knew so little about it. But we did do a little bit of research, and several of the members took a class down in L.A. I can’t remember what the name of it was, but it turned out that that particular organization had pretty bad ethics. Well, the instructor was a man who was dressing up in a suit that allows you to kick the shit out of him without hurting him. But we found out shortly thereafter that he was sleeping with some of the students. And we just felt that that was really not okay. I mean, the teacher-student love relationship is sort of a weird thing anyway, but to throw it into something where self defense is being taught, we just thought that was really fucked up.
And that was basically the reason why we decided to learn and teach self-defense ourselves, rather than try to comb through the ethics of some other organization. Because that way we knew that the integrity would be intact, and we’d be teaching what we wanted to teach, and not somebody else’s version of it.
It was a huge thing to take on, because all of a sudden we had to train ourselves. And so we paid several people in the organization – I was not one of them – to take the self-defense training themselves, and then teach it to the rest.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Even Mia wrote a song where she addresses a guy who had raped a friend of hers, so this kind of violence was something that was very present in many people’s minds even before she was murdered.
VALERIE AGNEW
Yeah. I think you probably relate, and I’m sure this is the same for women in Spain. I would guess that all of us know somebody who has been raped or sexually or physically assaulted by a man, you know what I mean? It’s an unfortunate reality of modern-day life, I guess.
I always loved Mia’s lyric about that. About taking a pan to your head. (laughter) Talk about D.I.Y., right? She was like, “I’m gonna take care of this myself.” (laughter)
RACHEL ARIEFF
In Spain, women prefer to take the big leg of ham and bash their husband over the head with it when he gets out of line.
VALERIE AGNEW
Yeah. (laughter)
RACHEL ARIEFF
One of the interesting things about the Home Alive philosophy is the insistence on not giving up one’s lifestyle. The organization says, “We don’t want to give up our freedom. We want to go out. We don’t want to be victimized passively by having to live less fulfilling lives, staying at home out of fear.”
VALERIE AGNEW
Yeah, definitely. I think we all were unanimously in agreement about that, and with every decision that we made about how we expanded that organization, we tried to keep that core idea in mind. I mean, in the early inception we tried to organize shuttle vans to take people home from shows so that they didn’t have to be out walking at night and things like that.
But we had to pick and choose which things ended up being the most efficient. So some things had to fall by the wayside because you just couldn’t do everything. Every good idea that came up wasn’t necessarily sustainable, or financially affordable, and that’s why we ended up just focusing on the self defense.
We spent hours in our meetings. Some people felt really strongly about one thing, and other people would feel really strong about another thing. We worked hard to come to consensus on that stuff. It was a very interesting process of working that closely with those women. And there were people who friends of Mia’s. And I think The Gits, even, at that time, didn’t necessarily support what Home Alive was doing. Or they didn’t like it because they felt that it was turning Mia into a martyr. And while I understood that on a certain level, I also just believed that what we were doing was a good thing. And I know that in our hearts, we were doing it out of honoring Mia, and that we had no desire to turn her into a martyr at all.
But it was just tough. Everybody deals with those things differenty, and a lot of different people in the mix, we can’t have everybody on the same page all the time. But in the end, I feel like the organization is a success. It still exists today. And that’s all good. I think that all of the core members of the group are happy about that.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Are you still involved with the group?
VALERIE AGNEW
I’m not involved in it anymore. There were some other core members who stayed involved a lot longer than I did. I moved out of the Seattle area, and that made it very difficult to stay involved. I served on the Advisory Board for a while. But I’m still in touch with about four of the members on a regular basis. We’ve remained friends. The others have sort of lost touch. Every once in a while we talk about trying to have a reunion, but no, it’s moved on into its own thing. And other great people have taken over and kept it running, which I’m really thankful to them for doing that.
RACHEL ARIEFF
How do you feel about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning the sentence for Mia’s killer?
VALERIE AGNEW
I think we all felt the collective groan of, “Oh my God, you gotta be kidding.” And we have to drag this stuff up again, and a certain sense of dread around the fact that we all have to revisit this, and it’s kind of that classic thing that the victim’s family suffers all over again. I feel a lot of empathy for her parents because I think that they just really want this to be over and be able to move on.
But really I don’t know a lot about the legal part, what happened with things, but I sort of feel like the judge who was responsible for giving the exceptional sentence in the first place should have known the law, and known that that could possibly come under scrutiny. So it’s a little frustrating just in terms of the justice system around it.
But I also feel 100 percent, like 150-fucking-percent sure that this jury is gonna recommend the same thing. I mean, they’re gonna sit through the dirty details and all the horrible shit that they had to the first time around, and they’re gonna convict him the same way, and if they can give more, they probably will. So I’m not at all worried that he’s gonna get a lesser sentence. It’s just unfortunate that the taxpayers have to shell out more money to go through this again, especially when the guy doesn’t even want his sentence reduced.
RACHEL ARIEFF
I read about that. He’s perfectly happy rotting in prison.
VALERIE AGNEW
Yeah, I really was surprised by that. And I thought, “Well, I can’t think of how many countless hours all of us have spent wondering why the fuck this guy did this in the first place, and what’s going on with him.” Is that his way of trying to take responsibility for it, or is he just a sick fuck? And then I decided I didn’t even want to know that. I just don’t even want to spend any more energy thinking about the guy, you know?
I haven’t really talked to Steve or Andy or Matt about it, or anybody from Home Alive about it. We’ve sort of emailed around loosely, like it’s on our radar screen, that this is about to happen. And I guess as things progress with it, I’ll have a more concise reaction. But ultimately, my thought was like, “Whatever.” It’s just one more bureaucratic process that has to be gone through. I don’t know the law well, so I don’t really understand it, but if that’s the way the law is, then that’s the way it should be done by a jury. And I just think they’ll do it. They’ll convict him again.
VALERIE AGNEW
The conviction doesn’t change whatsoever. He’s without a doubt convicted guilty; but there’s actually even a chance that he’ll get a longer sentence. He had several prior convictions for things, one in Florida and one in Palm Springs, that were not allowed to be presented in the original trial. The prosecutor didn’t seem concerned that the jury was going to lessen the sentence.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Is it true that the first concert that 7 Year Bitch did was opening for The Gits?
VALERIE AGNEW
Yes. That is true. The first person that we ever got paid by was Matt Dresnder, the bass player for The Gits. After that show, he walked up to me and handed me forty dollars and we couldn’t believe it. We were like, “What??! We’re getting paid??!!” I think the club was Squid Row. I think we were even borrowing their equipment still.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Were you nervous to be playing in front of them?
VALERIE AGNEW
Well, we were nervous to be playing live, period. (laughter) But I think it might have actually been easier because they were our friends and they were being really supportive and we were like, “Somebody’s gonna pay attention to us. (laughter) At least our friends will be watching.”
Photo: Sally Lander
RACHEL ARIEFF
What was the song creation process like for the group? Did one person write the lyrics and then bring them in, or did it work differently?
VALERIE AGNEW
We co-wrote the lyrics on the song called “Dead Men Don’t Rape”, but Liz was the main songwriter. When Stefanie was alive, Stefanie wrote some of the riffs, but it was primarily Liz. And she would write some of the drum parts. So Liz was the writer, and then we would all collaborate on arrangements and that kind of stuff.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Liz told me she used to live in Valencia, Spain, about 20 years ago.
VALERIE AGNEW
Yes, she did.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Did she go to school there?
VALERIE AGNEW
Yes. I was trying to arrange for her to be at the interview today, but she’s getting hand surgery.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Do you have a favorite 7 Year Bitch album?
VALERIE AGNEW
I would say that “Sick ‘Em” is my favorite because it was our first, and Stefanie’s on it, and there’s just a lot about it that I like. It was hard, though, because we got halfway through recording it, and Stefanie died halfway through the recording process. So it’s more of an EP than a full-length album.
There were things that we hadn’t intended to have the recording be on the album. We intended to have the song on the album, but we wanted to re-record it. So the quality of the sound recordings is very irregular. If you were listening to it on a good stereo and paying attention to the technical side of it, it’s not the best in terms of that, but I love Stephanie’s guitar playing on it, and I like the simplicity on it.
My favorite 7 Year Bitch songs are “M.I.A.,” which is the song we wrote about Mia, “Rockabye”, which is the song we wrote about Stefanie, and “Crying Shame”, which is on our last album, Gato Negro. I guess the first album is just near and dear to me for whatever reason. Sentimental reasons.
RACHEL ARIEFF
How aware of Stefanie’s drug problem was the band, and how did you all deal with it?
VALERIE AGNEW
Well, we knew that she had been struggling with some stuff for a while, but she actually wasn’t really strung out when it happened. Unfortunately, she was one of those people that had quit, and then used once after having a period of sobriety. And it’s very common that you end up taking the same dosage that you would have taken when you were using heavily, so that was what caused the problem.
It wasn’t that she had been strung out for consecutive days, because if we had known about it, we would have intervened. That’s what was so shocking for us, is that she had been clean for eight months when it happened. So that was what was hard. So it was a combination of that, and she was drinking. So it was just a total stupid accident. The alcohol caused her to throw up and she asphyxiated on her vomit. It wasn’t actually a straight O.D.
RACHEL ARIEFF
How did you find out about her death?
VALERIE AGNEW
Her roomate called and told us. We actually had been looking for her all weekend. She was supposed to show up for a meeting, I think it was on a Friday, we were all to meet to talk about our very first tour that we were trying to pull together. She never showed up for the meeting, and throughout the whole weekend, I can remember it was Gay Pride weekend. She didn’t show up for work, and we got concerned.
So Selene and I went over to her house and tried banging on the door and yelling up to her window, and no response. So we called and left several messages. And then her roomate got home after having been gone for the weekend, and was the one who found her. So she called and told us, and we went over there as soon as we could, and met her mom there, and dealt with that whole thing.
And that’s where the lyrics from “Rockabye” come from, actually, is Selene’s take on sitting there in Stefanie’s apartment. The lyrics said something like, “Don’t you roll my baby away, there’s a couple more things I wanted to say,” and that came from us watching her being rolled out in front of us. It was pretty sad. So that song was directly about the anguish of losing her.
RACHEL ARIEFF
You had said before that some people in the press had accused 7 Year Bitch of exploiting Mia and Stefanie’s deaths because you had dedicated albums to both of them.
VALERIE AGNEW
Yeah. Like, the cover of our E.P. from “Sick ‘Em” is a picture of Stefanie that says, “Here I am, and here I go,” which is a phrase that she used to say all the time, and it had her dates on it. So the picture was a direct memoir to her. And then we named the second album after Mia. And the painting on the front of the album is a painting of Mia that an artist named Scott Musgrove did. And on the back of the album is a painting that Mia did of her supposed distant relative, Emiliano Zapata. It’s a portrait of him. And then the track on that album is “M.I.A.”
So for us it was a creative decision, but it was also a very emotional, friend-related decision. We didn’t think of it in terms of commercie or what press would say about it. We just did exactly what we wanted to do, for the four of us. But we didn’t pay a lot of mind to those people.
There was some press guy in Alberquerque or something that wrote some scathing review that said how disgusted he was that we were exploiting Mia’s death to try to sell album and all this shit. And we were just like, “Whatever, dude. Get fucked.” (laughter) We didn’t lose a lot of sleep over that. We just kind of scratched our heads, like, “Wow, you’re twisted.”
RACHEL ARIEFF
There are always people who are going to project their own shit onto artists.
VALERIE AGNEW
It was hard after a while, because it got to a point where there couldn’t be any press about 7 Year Bitch without talking about Stefanie’s heroin overdose. That got to be a little hard too. That’s a thing of the past. It’s part of the history and it’s all true, but at the same time, we really wanted to move away from it and just move on.
We didn’t want everyone to remember us because Stefanie died of a heroin overdose. I would rather they listened to the album and think, “Oh, that’s some pretty rippin’ guitar playing for somebody who was just getting started.” Do you know what I mean?
And the same thing kind of goes with Mia. I think Pete said it really well in his letter. While we want to be realistic about the reality of what happened, at the same time…
That’s why I’m so happy that the movie got made. And this is what I said to you earlier. Although it illustrated the horrible part, there’s so much footage of them playing that it just gives people a chance to get to know that side, which I think is really great.
RACHEL ARIEFF
What a horrible year for everyone in the scene. First Stefanie died, then Mia dies… In the documentary, one of the guys from The Gits said that you called him when Mia went missing and said, “I hope it’s not a repeat of Stefanie.”
VALERIE AGNEW
Yeah, and ironically, they both worked at the same pizza place. It was Piecoras Pizza. So it was kind of eerie that they were both employed there, and it was several days that they were missing and everyone was trying to find them. They were the kind of people that you would notice if they weren’t there.
RACHEL ARIEFF
After Stefanie died, how did Roisin end up joining the band as the new guitarist, and how did things work out with her?
VALERIE AGNEW
Well, Roisin and Stefanie were friends. We all went down to L.A. and hung out with Roisin after we had decided to approach her about playing in the band, and everybody just got along really well. It just clicked and it made sense. We drove our van down there and picked up all her stuff, and drove back up to Seattle and that was it.
Roisin and Stefanie were totally different in terms of guitar playing, but she was great to work with, and there was no weirdness about it in terms of comparisons or anything like that. Stefanie was a much more experienced guitar player than Roisin was, but she worked hard at learning it and we went on from there.
Roisin decided to leave the band because of personal reasons. We had done quite a bit of touring, and at the time, she had a person in her life that was very important to her that was having some physical problems, some health problems. And she decided that she needed to not be on the road so much, and be able to help and support him. So she didn’t leave because of bad blood or anything like that. She just needed to make a change in her life.
When she left the band, it was much harder. We asked Lisa Beatty, who had been our sound woman for years, a good friend of Mia and Stefanie, to play with us. But I think at that point it all had started to become difficult for the rest of us. We were living in different places. Selene was in L.A…
RACHEL ARIEFF
Why did everyone end up leaving Seattle and moving to different cities in California?
VALERIE AGNEW
Different reasons. I just really needed a change. I needed to get out of there, and my boyfriend was down here, and I had a lot of friends here in San Francisco. I had some personal reasons for why I needed to get out of Seattle. Selene was dating her boyfriend, who’s now her husband. He lives in L.A., so we decided that California was a better place for us. Elizabeth stayed up in Seattle at first, and then she decided to make the change. It was just sort of a natural evolution of things.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Seven years is a pretty long time for an underground band to last.
VALERIE AGNEW
I always joked around about that. “Can’t we just stay together for at least eight so we can avoid the cliché, for God’s sakes? We’re called 7 Year Bitch and we’re gonna break up after seven years? Jesus.”
RACHEL ARIEFF
I think it’s great that you maintained the cliché.
VALERIE AGNEW
I know, it’s kind of perfect. (laughter) I guess we had the seven year itch.
RACHEL ARIEFF
You should form another band called “20 Year Hags” if you really want to make it last.
VALERIE AGNEW
Yeah, right! (laughter)
RACHEL ARIEFF
Do you agree with the statement on the MySpace page that when Roisin joined the band, it allowed the band to go on mentally and musically?
VALERIE AGNEW
Yes. When Roisin joined the band, she helped us move forward. Yeah.
RACHEL ARIEFF
I enjoyed the story you told in the documentary about when the Rathouse flooded and the instruments were bobbing around in the water.
Photo: Dan Stone
VALERIE AGNEW
That winter was really cold and it snowed like crazy. Nobody is prepared for that kind of cold, and most houses don’t have insulation. I didn’t realize how bad off our pipes were down in the basement, and they burst and it was just chaos. Steve went in just trying to drag out things that were bobbing on top of the water, and everything was completely submerged.
And then we realized that it was probably extremely dangerous for him to go in there and go into the water, because if there was any electric current through there, he would have been killed. So after the fact, we were like, “Oh my God, we shouldn’t have done that. We should have drained that before we even let him go in there.” But we just panicked because everybody’s gear was down there: The D.C. Beggars, The Gits… everybody’s stuff was there. It was awful. I remember we had everything upstairs and we were trying to dry it out with heaters for weeks. It was a mess.
I remember we played a show there on New Year’s Eve in the living room. Mia was recording the show for most of the night, and while there’s unfortunately no footage of The Gits, there’s footage of 7 Year Bitch, of D.C. Beggars… It’s so funny because you can hear Mia muttering to herself and dropping the camera nd putting it back in the tripod, and doing these quirky things, very Mia style.
It was also during the first Iraq war and we were all screaming things about getting into the war. There was a lot of energy at that party, and I really wish the footage of The Gits had come out because they were in rare form that night. It was just a bunch of friends in our living room, but it was a moment when Mia was still alive, and it was still the age of innocence for us. Julian says it in the film: we were all innocent and happy and everything was great. There are a lot of memories of that place for sure.
RACHEL ARIEFF
In the documentary there are a few stories about how goofy Mia could be: convincing people to let her drive their car when she really had no idea of how to drive and almost flipping the car over; cooking and almost burning down the kitchen…
VALERIE AGNEW
She was just full of stuff like that. She was very impulsive and when she set her mind to do something, she would throw herself into it fully. But her father described her as being quiet and introverted, and there were many facets to her.
The night she was killed, Selene and I were hanging out with her. Actually, The Gits had been down with us in L.A. a week prior to her death. It was right around the anniversary of Stefanie’s death. So we were all staying at this hotel together, and we were drinking and eating, and there were some exciting stuff going on for both bands. We had label interest, so it was this mixed thing where some good things were happening and everybody was up about it, but it was also the anniversary of Stefanie’s death, and we were all thinking of her.
Video: Mia dedicates “Seaweed” to Stephanie Sargent at her last show with The Gits
And Mia hung out with us a lot that night, and we just told old stories about Stefanie, and it was really great. And then Mia ended up doing a solo performance down there. And I didn’t get to see it, I don’t remember what I was doing, but I didn’t go to see her. Some of my other bandmates went – I think Elizabeth went, and I remember her telling one of us that she was really psyched to play by herself. It was one of the only times that she had done it and gotten paid all by herself, and she was like, “Ha ha, I’ve got my own money and this is cool!” She was being funny about it.
So when we got back to Seattle, we were at The Comet together that night. Mia was in a really good mood. We were all in a really good mood. We were drinking but we weren’t wasted or anything. She wasn’t either. Just a couple beers or something. We were sitting at the end of the bar. Just before she left, she came up and gave both me and Selene a big hug and kiss and said something about Stefanie, that she was glad we were still playing, even though all that had happened, and that we couldn’t give up. She was just really warm. And that was the last time we saw her. That was the last time I saw her.
RACHEL ARIEFF
What was it like for the band to move from a small label like C/Z to a major label like Atlantic?
VALERIE AGNEW
When you get to a big label, if you don’t do what they request of you – if they work hard to try to get you on a radio show, and then you decide you don’t want to do the radio show for whatever reason – you think the radio show sucks, or whatever. But if you keep saying “no” to them when they keep presenting you with options and things that’s basically their job to do. then they’re gonna stop trying. And eventually that’s when bands end up on labels where they feel like they’re not getting any attention anymore, and the label isn’t doing anything for them. And sometimes that’s because the band’s not doing well, and the label just doesn’t want ot do more for them.
But a lot of times it’s because the bands fight the label so hard on anything that they just give up. They’re like, “Okay, if you’re not gonna take our suggestions and let us do our job the way we’re supposed to do our job, then there’s nothing we can do for you.”
And I think that was the biggest difference for us. When we were on a major label, we had to learn that pretty fast. ‘Cause when you’re on a smaller label, you just have more contact. You know the people more, so it’s a little easier to see how things go and it’s really cut and dry. Small labels don’t have a lot of money to put into things like that. They can get a tour set up and they can get your record distributed, and that’s about it. And they have a publicity department that has access to whatever resources they have, and the difference with the major is that they’re supposedly able to hook you up with all these different things.
But we got lucky and we worked with people at the label who we really liked, and they liked us, and we had a good relationship with them. There was some bad blood between 7 Year Bitch and Daniel House, who was the owner of C/Z Records for a while that had to do with a distribution deal that went bad, and just some miscommunication. It’s all water under the bridge now, but at the time, we were really frustrated with him, and he was frustrated with us, so we actually found the major label experience to be easier than the independent label.
So I don’t think there’s any way to generalize it. I think it’s different for every band, and every situation, and I have NO idea what it’s like now. I mean, it’s so different with the internet. I mean, we didn’t even have cell phones back then, you know? Everyone’s on MySpace… In some ways, it’s exciting and bands have a lot more ability to promote themselves, which is kind of cool. But it’s so saturated out there, that it could be even more frustrating now than it was back then.
But Daniel House has put on his website that we got dropped from Atlantic Records, and that’s not true at all. I think that Daniel was trying to get a dig at us, maybe he was mad at us or something. But we didn’t get dropped from the label. We might have gotten dropped from the label after another year of working with them, who knows? But the reason the band broke up had nothing to do with the label. We just decided to go our separate ways.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Yes, I read somewhere else that 7 Year Bitch got dropped from Atlantic. And then Gato Negro was with a different label.
VALERIE AGNEW
No, “Gato Negro” was the one and only album that we did on Atlantic. But we did not get dropped from Atlantic. What you read came from Daniel’s website and it ended up in Wikipedia. Somebody took an excerpt from Daniel’s website at C/Z with misinformation on it, and we never fixed it. The band hasn’t been together for so long, I didn’t even know we had a MySpace page. We don’t do anything to maintain anything about our press anymore.
So we just didn’t realize that that information was out there. And then when I did read it, I was like, “What the fuck is he talking about? We didn’t get dropped, motherfucker!” (laugher) We were all pissed off about it. I called the rest of the band and asked, “Should we try to get this fixed?” And we were kind of like, “Ehh, whatever. I doesn’t matter.”
RACHEL ARIEFF
So the band broke up while it was signed with Atlantic.
VALERIE AGNEW
Correct.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Don’t you hate that about the internet? Whatever’s on there, right or wrong, becomes the official truth. Is it true that your last album was on a different indie label, Man’s Ruin?
VALERIE AGNEW
We had a single that we put out on Man’s Ruin. We put out a little 7-Inch with him. It’s called Miss Understood. It’s one of the songs off Gato Negro.
RACHEL ARIEFF
What in your opinion was 7 Year Bitch’s best gig?
VALERIE AGNEW
I think our favorite tour was with Alice Donut. They were an amazing band. It was a long tour, I think it was close to six weeks, and we went all the way up into Canada. We did a lot of long drives with them, and we were caravaning three bands on the tour. Because they had two bands for their van, and half their band rode in one van, and half their band rode in the other.
And we just had all our band with us, but we’d get to ride with the other bands sometimes. We’d go through crazy stretches of road up in Canada where we’d drive brutal 15-hour drives in between towns. We all had CB radios. Alice’s Donut would be tripping on acid, telling us crazy stories over the CB radio and we’d just been bantering back and forth and cracking up.
It was just really fun. Every night was fun. There was no part of that tour that was a drag. We were opening for them, which was awesome. Their crowd is really fun and dedicated. They have almost a cult following. And they were just so great. Watching them play was really inspiring, it got us inspired, and we’d all do a big jam at the end of show. Several of us would get up and play with them… Because at the end of their shows, they always switch instruments and play these different songs. Like they did a great Sabbath cover.
The opening for Rage Against the Machine and Cypress Hill was also memorable because we were playing to such huge audiences and we were so new to that. The very first big show we ever did was opening for the Red Hot Chili Peppers way back when Stefanie was still alive.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Did you get to know any of the Chili Peppers?
VALERIE AGNEW
Yeah, we hung out with them a little bit. They were really friendly and very nice, actually. But we just hung out with them for those days of the shows. We didn’t stay in touch with them afterwards. And Selene is married to the drummer of Rage Against the Machine. They met while we were on tour, and they’ve been together ever since. Well actually, they didn’t get together while we were on the tour, but they met on the tour, and they ended up hanging out, I can’t remember exactly when it was later, but they’re now married and they have two little boys, Luka and Alex.
And Elizabeth has a son too. She’s got a new boy, and his name is Thor. And I might as well be married. My partner Max and I have been together for ten years, but we don’t have kids and have no plans to do it. And Roisin’s living out in New York with her husband, and they don’t have any kids either.
RACHEL ARIEFF
How do you make a living now?
VALERIE AGNEW
I have always worked since I was 17 in the retail health food industry. I work at a worker-owned collective here called Rainbow Grocery. I work in the produce department there, and I’m also a massage therapist. So I have my own massage business. And Elizabeth is also a massage therapist. And Selene is a Pilates teacher. So we all went from rock-n-roll lifestyle to a super-healthy lifestyle.
RACHEL ARIEFF
It’s totally logical.
VALERIE AGNEW
It’s true. After you live hard, I guess you’ve got to live clean or something. (laugh)
RACHEL ARIEFF
Do you play music at all nowadays?
VALERIE AGNEW
I don’t, no. I haven’t played in years. Elizabeth played in a band called Von Iva. She’s no longer in the band, but they’re currently on tour, and they’re doing really well. I think there’s a link to them on the old 7 Year Bitch website. And Selene did some stuff for a while, for a couple years. She did some projects with a couple people. I haven’t played music in about eight years.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Do you miss playing music?
VALERIE AGNEW
Sometimes I do. San Francisco’s expensive, and I live in an apartment, not a house. Whereas in Seattle, everybody lived in houses, and there were basements that you didn’t have to pay extra rent for. But here you have to pay extra rent for the practice space, and for me it doesn’t make sense because I would only be doing it as a hobby very infrequently, and it doesn’t make sense to shell out that kind of money for something like that. Although I did find this cool drum kit that is actually small enough to fit into an aparment, and I’ve been eyeing it.
My boyfriend plays bass in a band and he and I have worked on some songs together. In fact, me and Selene and him, and my friend Pamela who is the guitar player in a band called AC/D-She, I don’t know if you’ve heard of them…
RACHEL ARIEFF
I saw them in Spaceland in L.A. They were fucking great! Agnes Young was totally hot.
VALERIE AGNEW
Yeah, they’re aweome. And Pamela is Agnes. She’s really good.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Did you ever get to know Courtney Love or anyone in Hole?
VALERIE AGNEW
No, I didn’t. Elizabeth was really good friends with Kristin Pfaff, their bass player who died. Elizabeth was subletting Kristin’s aparment when Kristin died. We were on tour, but she had been subletting it up until the time we went on tour, and then we got the news about her passing while we were on tour. We had to get Liz to the airport and fly her out so she could go to the funeral. I met Courtney a few times in a bar type of situation, hanging out with a group of people, shooting the shit. She was always kind to me. I didn’t know anything about her personal life at that time.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Was this before she was famous?
VALERIE AGNEW
She was not as famous at this time. I remember going to see Hole play at the Off Ramp, and really liking them, thinking they were really great. And Liz was kind of friends with Eric. But I just peripherally knew them. Courtney always seemed really smart to me. I don’t know. She seemed like a very well-spoken, smart, interesting person. Later I found out she was a nightmare, but that was’t any personal experience I had with her. I really didn’t know her.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Did you get to know the women from L7?
VALERIE AGNEW
Yeah, I love L7! I love those girls. I totally love Donita and Dee, I got to know them the best. And Jennifer a little bit. Suzy, not really so much. But I adore them. I got to see them play here in San Francisco recently, the Donita Sparks Project, with Dee on drums. That was really fun to see those guys. They’re still doing their thing. They kick ass.
They’ve always been inspiring to me and they still are. I just think that they’re great. We got to open some shows for them – us and Love Battery got to do a couple of dates with them, and that was great for me. I was really excited to be playing for them. It’s intimidating to open for L7, Jesus Christ, because I think they’re so great. But it was really fun to open for them.
RACHEL ARIEFF
What was the most intimidating opening band experience for 7 Year Bitch?
VALERIE AGNEW
Oh God, it’s got to be opening for the Red Hot Chili Peppers for sure. When I did that, I had never even had monitors for the drums onstage. So the stage sound guy was asking where I wanted my monitor, and I didn’t even know how the hell to answer him. I was like, “I don’t fucking know.” (laughter) It was totally intimidating. They were nice about it, but they were also a little condescending.
But it was really fun, because I remember the first time I hit the kick drum when we were sound checking. And the kick drum was miked so loud, and we were in this huge arena! And I was like, “Holy shit! What the hell is going on?” And there was a similar kind of thing when we opened for Rage Against the Machine and Cypress Hill, because they were such big venues. But we weren’t quite as green. We at least knew a little more about how to handle our equipment and deal with monitor mixes and shit like that. But the very first time we ever did it, I was like, “Oh my God. We are so in over our heads.”
I remember the manager for the band calling and asking us what we wanted on our rider. And at that time, I didn’t know what the fuck a rider was, so I was like, “Uh, what’s that?” And he said, “Oh, never mind. It’s cool, never mind,” because then that, of course, meant that they didn’t have to spend any money on us.
And then I said, “No, really. What is it?” And he’s like, “Well, you know, the list of stuff you want in your backstage room. Beer and stuff like that. “ And I was like, “Cool! Yeah, of course!” And I started listing off all this shit. I’m like, “We want two cases of this.. and we want this and we want that and we want this…” And I’m thinking, “That’s cool! Hey, check this out! He asked us if we have a RIDER!” And we showed up for the gig, and there was a bottle of water and a six-pack of beer, and that was it. (laughter)
RACHEL ARIEFF
What bastards! (laughter) Where did these gigs take place?
VALERIE AGNEW
We were in Canada for three shows. It was Vancouver and two other towns. And then RATM was a whole month tour of East Coast cities. It was a tour with us, Funkdoobiest, Cypress Hill, and then RATM. So that was an interesting tour for us, too, because it was like, you know, two total rap bands, and then RATM, and then four little white girls. You know, it was like, “Oh my God!” (laughter) And we got hassled a lot by some of the crowds on that tour. But those guys were really cool. We were treated really well by the other bands and by the other crew and stuff. It was fun.
RACHEL ARIEFF
Who was the biggest diva or devo you’ve ever met?
VALERIE AGNEW
That’s a good question. Well, in a positive way, Diamanda Galás. I got to meet her once because a friend of mine used to work selling her posters when she came to San Francisco. And she got sick or something and couldn’t do it, so she called and asked if I could fill in. I mean, I just volunteered and went down there.
So I got to meet Diamanda Galás and her assistant backstage because they had to give me the posters. And I was so nervous to meet her and so awestruck and totally intimidated. I was like, “Oh my God.” But she was totally great and warm and wonderful, but definitely a diva. But a good diva, not in a bad way.
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