Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Documentaries explore wild women of rock
Documentaries on Ohio-born singer-songwriter Lydia Loveless and ’90s grunge group L7 are streaming now at Amazon Prime Video, and if you like independent-minded, rowdy rock ’n’ roll, then these stories are certainly worth exploring.
In Who Is Lydia Loveless?, director Gorman Bechard follows Loveless and her band as they record her 2016 album Real, play a raucous show in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, and tour constantly as they try to eke out a living.
Loveless makes an interesting subject because she’s just four albums into what looks to be a promising career, one in which she has already taken a few left turns.
She grew up creative and shy in rural Ohio. She and her siblings were home-schooled by proudly nonconformist parents — her dad refused to listen to Eddie Money songs on the radio because the singer had once been a cop. She took piano and dance classes, was floored by Billy Idol and Britney Spears videos and played bass in a new wave band with her sisters (Dad played drums).
She was only 16 when she recorded her first solo album, the 2010 cowpunk twanger The Only Man, writing grown-up sounding songs like “Back on the Bottle” and “Grant Me My Man.” She could have cultivated that whole outlaw country vibe, but she was already moving away from it a bit by the time her second album, the brilliant Indestructible Machine, showed up in 2011. Somewhere Else moved even further away from country and Loveless, whose voice is a towering instrument, was proving an adept and wry chronicler of complicated romances, dissatisfaction and yearning.
Being interviewed for Bechard’s cameras, Loveless is at times confident and then unsure. She is self-aware, quick to deflect any pretension and funny (she has a lovable knack for dirty humor). She riffs on clueless journalists, making music in the age of streaming services, the economics of keeping a band afloat, songwriting and reconciling her public image as a fearless, spitfire hellion with the anxieties she
faces off stage.
Curiously, Bechard’s only additional interviews in the film are with Loveless’ band members, which include bassist and then-husband Ben Lamb (they divorced after the film was made) and a former manager. Otherwise, he lets Loveless and her music do the talking.
There is plenty of concert footage, including a 2015 snippet of Loveless with guitarist Todd May at Little Rock’s White Water Tavern. But clips from the Columbus concert filmed especially for the film are particularly powerful.
Loveless is a full-contact performer. She and her band rip through an emotional “More Like Them” from Indestructible Machine. Later, they turn the song “Boy Crazy” into a raw set-closer that finds the singer dropping like a sack of cinder blocks onto May’s amplifier after an ill-advised ascent to the top of a speaker.
It’s a fascinating moment — unscripted, unsettling and raw, like any good rock ’n’ roll.
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One gets the feeling Loveless would have been perfectly at home with the women of L7, the ’90s grunge quartet who regrouped in 2015 after 11 years apart and are the subject of L7: Pretend We’re Dead from director Sarah Price. It is available on Amazon Prime Video and iTunes.
Unlike the Loveless documentary, which deals with an artist in the midst of her career, Pretend We’re Dead is more of the typical rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-let’s-get-the-band-back-together story (minus the riches, actually).
Formed by singer-guitarists Donita Sparks and Suzi Gardner in 1985 in Los Angeles, and solidifying with bassist Jennifer Finch and drummer Dee Plakas, L7 mixed Motorhead-type thrash and punk with a goofball sensibility to become a fierce outfit that embraced feminism and hard rock in equal measure across six studio albums and hundreds of shows.
Pieced together using archival footage and voiceovers from the band with interviews featuring Garbage’s Shirley Manson, Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic, Joan Jett, Butch Vig and others, the documentary opens with a ribald, hilarious prank by Sparks and feeds off the group’s smart humor and grit.
We see band members mugging for cameras; teasing each other and random passersby; filming themselves
making their their third album, Bricks Are Heavy, with producer Butch Vig; picking on interviewers and playing furious shows all over the world in front of swirling mosh pits.
L7 consciously avoided any sort of sexing up for marketing purposes. If they wore makeup, it was smeared on like warpaint, and instead of teasing their hair they colored it haphazardly with streaks of blue or green or red. They wore clothes that looked like they’d been stolen from a homeless camp and looked positively dangerous in those whirling, blurry, black-and-white Charles Petersen photos of the era.
L7 was also socially active, creating Rock for Choice and its string of benefit concerts featuring most of the day’s heavy hitters — Rage Against the Machine, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers,
etc.
Alas, despite notoriety and constant touring, record sales never followed. At their most successful, the band members were pulling in maybe $500 each a month, and after flying back to America from Portugal to open a show for KISS, a jet-lagged L7 came off stage to learn it was being dropped from its label.
Finch had left by then and Gardner soon followed. By
2001, L7 was no more.
As time passed, fans cropped up online and Sparks, who kept up an L7 Facebook page and saw interest in the band grow, reached out to her old mates. They reunited in 2015 and began touring, eventually working with Price on this documentary, which serves as a much-needed primer on the legacy of a unique, hard-rocking band that was almost forgotten.