I was 18, beginning my first year at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and just about to complete my first month living away from my parents. Antioch was a tiny, well-intentioned but run-down wreck of a school that tried to keep afloat by living off its glorious revolutionary past. But the good people of Antioch had also granted me a four-year, full tuition scholarship, and I jumped at the chance to get out of Wisconsin… even if it meant sliding over to the equally unglamorous state of Ohio.
One night I attended the performance of a group of fellow students in the basement of one of the dilapidated campus buildings. The band was very basic: just a singer and two or three musicians backing her up, playing the blues.
The band was good. But what really stood out was the singer. She was a lanky girl with a sad face and dirty looking, dyed blond hair with dark roots. This girl sang in a scratchy, world-weary voice that was rich with experience, seductive without being too pretty; a sleazy voice, dark and burning like bourbon. Her voice contained not only attitude and charisma, but also sorrow and injury. It was a voice that conveyed power: the power that comes not from hiding behind a mask, but from allowing yourself to be completely naked.
It was a lowdown dirty voice that made no sense coming out of this skinny white girl just barely out of her teens. But there it was.
This lowdown mystery girl’s name sounded as exotic as she seemed: Mia Zapata.
I remember I was sitting on one of the plastic folding chairs in the front row alongside my father. He had come down to visit me; it must have been for my birthday. I remember how even my square, mainstream dad – a most un-rock-n-roll man whose musical gods were Liberace, Neil Diamond and Frank Sinatra – was absolutely mesmerized by this strange creature, this singer named Mia Zapata.
I had just turned 18. Everyone in the band was just a few years older than me, but seen through my 18-year-old eyes, they seemed far older. Oozing knowingness and experience, they were Adults.
And I was just a kid, sitting next to my eternally worried, overprotective father.
My father and I disagreed about many things: politics, music, and feminism chief among them. But we were both in complete agreement that Mia Zapata was a revelation.
After that night, I would often see Mia Zapata around campus, riding her clunky secondhand bike and wearing junky secondhand frocks. Her hair always looked messy, like she didn’t give a fuck about how she looked. She looked serious, as if lost in troubling thoughts. I was thoroughly intimidated by her and never dared approach her, though I did buy the cassette by her new band, The Gits. The cassette was called “Private Lubs” and I memorized all the songs. My favorite song on the cassette was “Pirate Love”. I didn’t realize at the time that it wasn’t their song, that they were covering Johnny Thunders. But Mia sang that song like she owned it.
I longed to be like Mia Zapata. I didn’t just want to be able to sing like her. I wanted to have her confident, I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude. Everything I heard in Mia Zapata´s voice was something that was missing from my life. I wanted to have the sense of power she seemed to exude. So often I felt weak and absurd with my eating disorders, my fat and ugly body, my constant sense of shame, and my sense of dread for where I was headed.
Mia Zapata seemed powerful and fearless. Her confidence seemed to burn like an ember from deep inside her, making her as untouchable as a hot coal. A goddess.
So, remembering her show that night, I enrolled in voice lessons through the pathetically resource-deprived Antioch Music Department. The only option available was a single classical voice teacher, though she was kind enough to allow me to choose my own repertoire. Inspired by Mia, I chose blues songs.
It was a ridiculous choice. My teacher had my white ass singing old slave songs in a pseudo-operatic voice.
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
A long ways from home,
A loooong waaaaays from my hooooooome…
I was horrendous. But, in my defense, Mia Zapata was partially to blame.
Mia graduated soon after that and moved with her bandmates to Seattle, where the independent music scene was thriving. They were going to see how far they could make it as The Gits.
They went very far, forming part of what is now the legendary Seattle music scene of the early ‘90s. Their colleagues were bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Seven Year Bitch. The music industry was starting to sign many of these bands to big contracts. In fact, the Gits themselves had attracted quite a bit of industry attention. After The Gits' hugely successful West Coast tour, Atlantic Records began the process of offering the group a record contract.
Then, on a summer night in 1993, Mia Zapata was raped and murdered while walking home from a friend’s house.
For years they looked for the murderer. The remaining Gits -- Steve Moriarty, Andy Kessler (Joe Spleen) and Matt Dresdner -- joined up with Joan Jett, recording the album Evil Stig and raising funds for Mia’s murder investigation. Angry and devastated, some of Mia’s friends formed a women’s self-defense organization called Home Alive.
Ten years later, by sheer chance, they found Mia’s killer.
He already had a lengthy criminal record for burglary, assault and battery, and indecent exposure. Every one of his ex-girlfriends had filed domestic abuse complaints against him. He was living free in Seattle when Mia had the hideous luck of crossing his path that July night. Pinpointed in a random DNA check of convicted criminals, he was tried and convicted for Mia’s rape and murder and sentenced to a mere 36 years in prison.
I remember how mysterious, adult and knowing Mia and her band looked that night 20 years ago, playing on a shabby stage for a small gathering of their classmates -- plus one middle-aged Neil Diamond fan -- at Antioch College.
I remember how my dad became distracted from his enjoyment of the music by something that was happening a few seats down from where we were sitting.
A young couple was getting it on. They were wrapped in a tight embrace, lips locked, legs intertwined, hands groping and caressing. My dad was shocked and outraged at this indecent display of raw sexuality that was happening right in front of his daughter. His only daughter, who had left the nest only a few weeks before to attend college three states and seven hours away. His precious daughter, who was about to plunge into this stinking cesspool of a world without his protection, save for sporadic visits such as this one.
“How can they behave like that?” my father hissed, twisting around in his folding chair to shoot dirty looks at the smooching young couple completely oblivious to the world around them. “Someone should stop them!”
While my father fretted about the lack of morality police on campus, the dolorous voice of Mia Zapata wailed in the background – the voice of a girl just a few years older than his darling daughter, yet who already seemed to know too much.
I was 18, beginning my first year at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and just about to complete my first month living away from my parents. Antioch was a tiny, well-intentioned but run-down wreck of a school that tried to keep afloat by living off its glorious revolutionary past. But the good people of Antioch had also granted me a four-year, full tuition scholarship, and I jumped at the chance to get out of Wisconsin… even if it meant sliding over to the equally unglamorous state of Ohio.