Real Life Rock Top 10: February 7, 2025

Hard Times in the Pacific Northwest, Duplicity in New York, Struggle in Pennsylvania, Jerk in Berkeley

1-3 Steve Moriarty, Mia Zapata and the Gits: A Story of Art, Rock, and Revolution (Feral House), Gits, Frenching the Bully (Sub Pop, originally 1992), & Live at the X-Ray Club 1993 (Bandcamp/Sub Pop). The Gits were a ferocious, compulsive punk band: bassist Matt Dresdner, guitarist Andy Kessler (aka Joe Spleen), drummer Steve Moriarty, and writer and singer Mia Zapata, a perfect punk name, though it wasn’t—she was a descendent of one of Emiliano Zapata’s many children, some acknowledged, some not. Sparked by a Dead Kennedys show, they formed at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1986, moved to Seattle in 1989, and struggled to sustain themselves, playing where they could, scrabbling across beneath-the-cheap tours, putting out singles and LPs on nowhere labels until July 7, 1993, when Zapata, on her way home from a show, was found in a Seattle alley raped and murdered. She was horribly beaten; if she hadn’t been strangled she would have died anyway. “If one does an Internet search today for The Gits or Mia Zapata, information about her murder, the investigation to find the murderer, and the conviction of him ten years later predominate the results,” Steve Moriarty begins his extraordinary chronicle of the band’s life. “The music, the lyrics, the people involved in creating the music are secondary or absent altogether. This cannot stand.” And here it doesn’t. Until the last two pages of the book, everyone is alive, and if death is lurking, it’s simply the danger of everyday life: the punk vow of involuntary poverty, streets that aren’t safe, Zapata diving to the bottom of the whiskey river, pushing as hard as you can for a goal that might seem to recede even as it’s pursued.

Moriarty puts his cards on the table, raising the stakes as high as he can, and throughout his testament he never cuts a corner or minces a word. The book is full of life, of adventure and defeat, success—making a song come out right—and failure—nobody noticing that singular event, erasing it as it if never happened. “The goal was never to live happily ever after. Giving meant more than getting, and the musical mission trumped my personal aspirations for family or fatherhood. The musical mission of The Gits was the most important epic of my young life. I believed our songs could influence people who could then shape world events. Mia was there to define and deliver the invitation to anybody who would listen and understand the communique.”