GUESS WHO'S BACK
L7 singer Donita Sparks talks film, academia, Trump ahead of band’s July 25 gig
Rock band L7, political as ever, performs at the Danforth Music Hall on July 25.
L7 was a really big band for the teenage me so it was with great excitement that I greeted the prospect of speaking with guitarist/vocalist Donita Sparks last week. Pity we didn’t click.
Sometimes you click with an interviewee, sometimes you don’t. Mostly I click. Sparks and I did not click. Our chat started off well enough and in good humour as she sped down a Santa Monica highway toward home — I’d initially rung her at the wrong hour while she was getting dressed at her doctor’s office, which was a pretty good icebreaker — but deteriorated when I was forced to admit that I’ve not yet seen 2017’s selfmade, crowdfunded documentary L7:
Pretend We’re Dead, took a turn for the worse when I quipped that L7’s apparently adventurous new album-in-progress would be its version of Physical
Graffiti for an insult and then finally went straight to hell when an innocent compliment of “I like the idea of there being a university course on L7” was received as sarcasm.
“I’m in an irritable mood today, but some of your questions sound like they’re a little sarcastic,” she snapped. “We are in academic classes, so it’s not really a funny thing. We are in academia.”
I wasn’t being sarcastic, for the record; L7 — rocking heavy since 1985 — deserves to be enshrined in academia for founding the abortion-rights organization Rock for Choice alone, if not also for penning “Sh-list.” But I was in an irritable mood, too, and definitely not in one to argue. So that was the end of the line.
My L7 love remains strong regardless, so it’s been reassuring that the first two singles issued by the band in nearly 20 years — last fall’s Trump-baiting “Dispatch from Mar-a-Lago” and February’s self-explanatory “I Came Back to Bitch” — have all the bite and thick-trunked stoner fuzz you might recall from such crucial grunge-era recordings as 1990s
1992’s Smell the Magic, Bricks are Heavy and 1994’s Hungry for Stink.
A new album, crowdfunded again, by the reunited “classic” lineup of Sparks, guitarist Suzi Gardner, bassist Jennifer Finch and drummer Dee Plakas is in the works for early next year. Fingers crossed it lives up to the promise of the new tunes.
Meantime, the band — which I haven’t seen play live since a memorably intense North by Northeast gig at the Rivoli almost two decades ago (and also attended, bizarrely enough, by George Wendt of Cheers fame) — will be back in Toronto for a gig at the Danforth Music Hall on Wednesday. Here are some words from Sparks on various topics of interest. On why these polarizing times are perfect for the return of L7: “I think that it’s a good outlet to express our feelings through art at this particular time. I think we’ve always had a strength with sort of ‘anger anthems’ that have some humour to them. And I think that is absolutely perfect for this era that we’re living in.” On the decision to ring up her estranged bandmates and suggest a reunion in late 2014: “I wasn’t nervous. I thought we would be well received. I felt the temperature out there. I knew there was demand for us and I was not longing to do this for 20 years — I could have taken it or left it, to be honest — but I kind of thought ‘Well, if this is something that we want to consider, it’s now or never.’ And everybody was in a position to say ‘yes,’ which was great, and I didn’t think it would be as fun as it is and it’s really fun and that’s why we want to continue to do it. And in order to do that, we feel one way to do that is to make some new music.” On how her reading of that “temperature” was accurate: “We have found that to be true. We’ve found that our old fans have missed us very much and have missed our particular take on things and our tone on things, and we have a whole new crop of young people who haven’t really had much exposure to rock ’n’ roll like we are. So it’s been really great and really fun and I feel like we’re still relevant, which is mind-blowing. Which has been good. We all realize that.” On the rush release of “Dispatch from Mar-a-Lago” last September: “We thought Trump was going to be impeached and we wanted to get that song out before he got impeached and, lo and behold, he’s not impeached. We literally rushed to get that song out, thinking ‘He’s not gonna be in office and this is gonna be irrelevant so we have to get it out now.’ ” On the decision to turn the145 hours of self-recorded video footage from the late ’80s through the ’90s languishing in the band’s vaults into the film L7: Pretend We’re Dead: “As I was archiving our imagery, I knew that we had those tapes and I watched some of them and I thought ‘This is an amazing time capsule of the ’90s. This is an amazing time capsule of the grunge era. We have footage of other bands that is rare and no one’s ever seen it. And we have footage of ourselves, footage that we shot ourselves that’s very intimate, very funny, very poignant. And, y’know, if we weren’t gonna make our own documentary about it, it was probably gonna end up in some university archives at some point … It’s our story told by us with our own cameras. I think that’s pretty unique. It’s about as ‘insider’ as you can get. I think we were pretty open and vulnerable in telling our story and showing a side of us that a lot of fans have not seen. And I’ve heard from other people in bands is that it’s one of the most honest documentaries about rock that they’ve ever seen. So, y’know, we went there.” On the as-yet-untitled followup to 1999’s Slap-Happy currently in the works: “We’re in the writing process. We’ve got a few songs and we’ve been touring so much that August and September are going to be the big writing and recording push. So, yeah, it’s a work in progress and we feel the freedom to write whatever we want to. We have some slow songs. We have some quirky songs. We have some fast punk songs. We have some heavy, slow rock. We’ve got some pop. We’ve got a lot of different ingredients in our recipe and we’ll probably have a whole range of that, like we always have and particularly in the later part of our career.”