Throwaway Style is a monthly column dedicated to spotlighting the artists of the Pacific Northwest music scene through the age-old practice of longform feature writing. Whether it’s an influential (or overlooked) band or solo artist from the past, someone currently making waves in their community (or someone overlooked making great music under everybody’s nose), or a brand new act poised to bring the scene into the future; this space celebrates the community of musicians that makes the Pacific Northwest one of a kind, every month from KEXP.
This month, columnist Martin Douglas dives into the catalog of beloved Seattle-via-Ohio band the Gits, which was recently reissued in full by our friends at Sub Pop Records.
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There are some vocalists who are described as vessels for the sound of Heaven; the song you hear as you enter the pearly gates and St. Peter reads your admittance file. Mia Zapata is more like the voice you hear as you’re taking the eternal elevator down to Hell.
Rock music has been the home of many good singers and even a healthy handful of great ones. Over the course of its 70-ish years, the style of music has produced precious few truly exceptional singers; Zapata has been fairly designated as the platonic ideal of a rock singer. The band whose claim to fame is more or less Zapata’s membership, the Gits, provides the surefire backdrop for their vocalist to unleash a lifetime of pain and righteous fury. To call back to one of her early bands at Antioch College, you could say she was “puking the blues.”
Zapata was born in Chicago and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. According to the memoirs of Zapata’s bandmate, drummer Steve Moriarty—titled Mia Zapata & the Gits: A Story of Art, Rock, and Revolution—she spent part of her life in New York City, where her mother, Donna, lived. At one point, Donna Zapata was one of the highest-paid television executives in the United States. Also according to Moriarty’s book, she was also the great-great-granddaughter of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata Salazar. (“Or somethin’ like that,” she is quoted as saying.) By the time she hit double digits in age, Mia had learned how to play guitar and piano. But the story of her life as a musician really began at Antioch.
Located in Yellow Spring, Ohio, Antioch College is widely renowned as a historic liberal arts school, a progressive institution that was one of the first to admit women and African American students. Coretta Scott King was a notable alumni and Cecil Taylor—the iconic jazz pianist—taught music there in the late 1960s. Much like the well-known progressive college I’ve written about in this column before—the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA—Antioch used an independent study model (one it refers to as a co-operative) rather than traditional classes and letter grades.
In his book, Moriarty referred to Antioch’s student body while he attended as, “an eccentric cross-section of youth counterculture and outsiders—hippies, homosexuals, hicks, gender activists, single mothers, Christian fundamentalists, transgender kids, Deadheads, radicals, feminists, punk rockers, and computer geeks.” Within the environs of what he described as “an Ohio redneck bar,” a charismatic young woman invited him to sit with her and her friend. That woman was Mia Zapata.
Moriarty was part of a group of students that cleaned up and organized shows at a then-abandoned theater building on campus. (He writes vividly about the first show, headlined by Dead Kennedys.) Concurrently, he had dreams of starting a band.
Throughout college, Moriarty played in two bands, Big Brown House and the Sniveling Little Rat-Faced Gits, the latter a reference to a Monty Python skit (with written permission from the famous comedy troupe). Later, the band name was shortened to “the Gits” because their full name couldn’t fit on the spine of a record or cassette sleeve (Moriarty maintains the long version was the band’s official name for many years). Big Brown House used Antioch’s independent study program to write and record a cassette in Ann Arbor, Michigan—and in 1988, the Gits pooled their money to quickly record a demo tape.
The demo was originally titled Private Lubs and sold out of its 100-copy run in mere days; it was officially issued in 1996 by the label Broken Rekids as the album Kings & Queens (and rereleased on Sub Pop late last year as part of the Gits catalog). Its songs were tracked live due to only having enough money for six hours of studio time, which bassist Matt Dresdner liked, according to Moriarty, because his favorite band the Minutemen recorded the all-time great punk album Double Nickels on the Dime the same way.
For what is essentially a demo, the Gits arrived nearly fully formed (and seasoned from playing wherever they could in Western Ohio) when it came time to record. It’s appropriate that the Gits were lumped into the grunge scene (somewhat mistakenly), because even in Yellow Springs, they sounded like they could’ve been comfortably slotted alongside bands like Mudhoney and Mother Love Bone (more on that in a bit). Guitarist Andy Kessler (who went by the great alias Joe Spleen) had a fittingly “grungy” guitar sound, and Dresdner’s bass bounced alongside those guitar parts with low, muddy tones.
Moriarty himself added a singular flair to the Gits. Having been a student of jazz drumming since the age of ten, he developed a style that applied jazz principles to rock music. The tightness of punk rock was augmented by a loose swing in Moriarty’s capable hands; he would continue to perfect this approach (perhaps best on the band’s official debut album Frenching the Bully), but on a few of the songs on Private Lubs/Kings & Queens, you can hear him trailing ever-so-slightly behind the beat. The swing is a crucial element to what set the Gits apart from their contemporaries.
But, no surprise, the clarion vocals of Zapata were ultimately the biggest part of the Gits’ singularity. I can hardly imagine what it was like for the 100 people who bought the first Gits tape to hear Zapata’s wail for the first time—or rather, to have it unleashed on them.
There is a thin line between cliché and universal truth. One is mostly surface and of little substance (while still altogether true); the other is something that cuts to the heart of the matter with plaintive clarity. Both are spoken frequently. With that said, a lot has been mentioned about Zapata channeling the blues in her vocals. And it doesn’t take more than a cursory listen of “Cut My Skin, It Makes Me Human” to tell she’s cut more from the cloth of singers like Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday than anyone in the rock realm. (Save the frequent comparisons to Janis Joplin, who was a bit of a blues aficionado herself.) You can also hear it in the cadence of her singing, like on the shuffling “It All Dies Anyway.”
And while we’re on the subject of that particular song: It’s both flattering and accurate that music fans beyond the Seattle area have favorably compared contemporary Seattle band Black Ends to Nirvana, but when I hear the blues-inflected twang of many of the songs on the trio’s very good full-length debut Psychotic Spew, I hear Gits tunes like “It All Dies Anyway” and “Monsters.”
As Moriarty writes in his book, the Gits moved to Seattle after a somewhat random decision. They loved the fact that it wasn’t New York, Los Angeles, nor located in the Midwest. It wasn’t too hot, too cold, nor too expensive at the time (the latter being why San Francisco was ruled out). The Gits, Big Brown House, and their friends in the D.C. Beggars all moved to Seattle around the summer of 1989, and into a cheap four-bedroom house on 19th and Denny famously called The Rathouse, after an anecdote about the home’s landlord (according to Moriarty, “self-described as a white warlock”), where he burned the tail of a rat to discourage infestation. Apparently it worked.
Moriarty writes that the Ohio transplants were unaware of what was happening in the Seattle scene outside of Mudhoney and Soundgarden—at the time, the area’s two most popular bands by a wide margin—prior to moving here. Upon arriving in Seattle, they found that many of the city’s most established musicians had known each other since they were teenagers (and some even went back to elementary school) and weren’t exactly welcoming to the scene’s influx of newcomers.
Thankfully, there were other outsiders, and the Gits (as well as their sibling bands) found themselves in league with those bands. This would manifest itself in the formation of Rathouse Records and its inaugural release, Bobbing for Pavement: The Rathouse Compilation.
Over the course of the next few years, the band made friends (most famously with the beloved punk quartet 7 Year Bitch), played well-received gigs around Seattle, worked at bars and diners to make ends meet, and were ignored by major labels during the Great Grunge Gold Rush of the early-1990s. Moriarty suspects in his book that although the Gits had one of the most dynamic singers in the scene, she was a woman in a local and national rock landscape dominated and suffocated by men—as well as the fact that Zapata was virulently feminist and incredibly outspoken in general. Plus, she didn’t fit the image of what a woman rock singer was “supposed” to portray.
And still, they persevered. They built their fanbase organically and worked hard to grow their profile; as national media paid attention to the Seattle scene, the Gits were just to the left of the city’s most popular bands, but still getting noticed.
The Gits were on the upswing. In 1990, they scored an opening gig for Nirvana—whom most knew were not far off from an unprecedented level of stardom. They officially changed their name to the Gits (instead of it simply being an abbreviation of the longer version). They booked U.S. and European tours. And, at long last, they recorded their classic: Frenching the Bully.
Produced by Steve Fisk and Scott Benson at Avast! Studios, the Gits’ studio debut is, in its purest essence, a 33-minute exorcism. Moriarty writes openly about Zapata’s searing empathy in his book, as well as how topics like community and resilience were common lyrical themes of Gits songs. Par for the course for the descendant of revolutionaries (and a budding revolutionary herself). As a lyricist, she was also a great communicator of internal struggles; it’s easy to interpret the very title “Frenching the Bully” as an act of self-destruction or embracing the part of you that doesn’t like yourself.
It’s hard to deny in the Year of Our Lord 2025 that we are living in a post-lyrical rock music world, where any person who even lands in the ballpark of cleverness (with the right PR team) is hailed as a poet. With the Gits—even as far back as the first reissue of Frenching the Bully in 2003—Zapata has been hailed as such a powerful singer that, as the quote from the River Cities’ Reader that adorns this album’s Wikipedia page insists, “the lyrics are irrelevant.” I find that statement to be wildly untrue.
Zapata’s lyrics, free-flowing in its use of expletives, hint at a teeming world of interiors (“Insecurities,” “While You’re Twisting, I’m Still Breathing,” and what is widely known as the band’s calling card, “Second Skin”), existential crises drowned in alcohol (“Another Shot of Whiskey”), and striking back against abusers and rapists in her own music community (“Spear and Magic Helmet,” a song that literally drove the musician it’s about right out of town). I understand the emphasis on Zapata’s singing, but it feels necessary for me to opine that perhaps Zapata was such a strong singer because she felt what she was singing so deeply. It’s also crucial that I reiterate here that Zapata was a lover and a student of the blues, a style of music where the singer and the words being sung are inextricably bonded.
As the Gits increased the size of their cult following—even while grieving the passing of their friend, 7 Year Bitch guitarist Stefani Sargent, in individual ways—they continued touring and writing new songs. One such gig was documented for posterity at, as Moriarty describes in his book, “a little DIY club and bookstore called the X-Ray Cafe, which served coffee and held punk shows on weekends.” After Frenching the Bully, Sub Pop’s release of Live at the X-Ray serves as an essential document of the Gits, displaying them at the height of their powers on the opener of their Spring 1993 tour.
What’s the difference between recording an album live and recording a live album? Approaching the latter brings an element that amplifies the energy of the performance: the crowd. There is a tendency to put a little more oomph into what you’re doing if you’ve got an audience (hopefully) whooping and hollering for you and dancing around to your music. The gathering of what Moriarty refers to as “pimply artsy youth and pre-teens with cool parents” were enthusiastic while the band crammed into the small space and roared through a selection of Frenching the Bully favorites, singles, B-sides, and new songs in less than 40 minutes. There was no barrier between the band and the audience, and the performance was made better for it.
Shortly after being courted by Atlantic Records, on the cusp of the major label contract the Gits had worked toward for years, an event that would upend their whole world happened. I don’t want to spend too much space on the tragic, brutal, and unforgivable actions that led to the death of Mia Zapata. There has been enough coverage of this heartbreaking incident, and if you’re one of the folks out there obsessed with true crime podcasts, you’ve already heard Karen and Georgia from My Favorite Murder discuss the sexual assault and killing of Zapata—and if you are one of the podcast’s many superfans, you were probably live in the audience while this episode was being recorded.
In the attempt to unearth Zapata’s stirring music from beneath the endless coverage of her murder—or even the important things that sprung from it, like the now-sadly-defunct Home Alive organization (which thankfully lives on as a resource guide), I just wanted to acknowledge it so we can move on.
Originally released in March 1994, about eight months after the tragedy that comprised the final moments of Zapata’s life, the Gits’ second LP, Enter: The Conquering Chicken, feels more like a hint of promise than anything else. It feels like part of what would have been an outstanding major label debut for the Gits. Opener “Bob (Cousin O.)” is a rousing opener that, like much of the album, gives more space for Zapata’s vocals and pushes them to the forefront. (“Guilt Within Your Head” is also an excellent example.) A song like “Precious Blood” is even more sparse and fits what label execs might call “a clear radio hit.” There are admittedly a couple throwaways, like “Italian Song” and “Drinking Song,” the former feeling like a joke that didn’t have a chance to be undercut by Zapata’s blazing intensity and emotional depth. The latter is a fine bar band song that feels like it might have been a B-side if Zapata were alive to revise a couple more songs or write new ones. The band’s cover of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” feels less like a Gits song and more like Zapata doing live band karaoke. Of course her singing on the song is absolutely stirring, but the music that supports her falls back so far the players nearly sound anonymous.
The fierce “Sign of the Crab” finds Zapata screaming at a would-be murderer, which feels uncomfortably prescient, as her murder occurred on July 7th. Under the astrological season of Cancer, the crab. It is indeed a great song, but life followed art in the most heartbreaking way on this particular song.
Is the story of the Gits akin to a Greek tragedy? A lesson that sometimes the most deserving talents don’t always get the chance to reap what they sow? If there’s anything that the music of the Gits proves, it’s that true talent lives forever. The band as a showcase for Zapata’s exhuming a lifetime of pain through her magnanimous voice; a chance for someone who was taken before it should have been her time to find new audiences, over and over again.
To give Mia Zapata and the Gits the fitting tribute they deserve, I have once again decided to forgo writing about new NW albums this month. But fear not! I’ll have some fresh recs for you in February!
With Rewind, KEXP digs out beloved albums, giving them another look on the anniversary of its release. In this installment, KEXP writer Dusty Henry delves into Nirvana’s final studio album In Utero for its 25th anniversary.
With a new album, Digital Garbage, slated for release this September, KEXP chats with Mudhoney frontman Mark Arm about his days in Green River and beyond.
