Jennifer Finch was still a teenager when she met Flea at a friend’s house sometime in the early Eighties, fresh enough into the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ career to make his acquaintance as “Mike.” “She had a light in her,” Flea tells Rolling Stone now. “She was smart.
She was funny. She told me she wanted to play the bass, and I sat down with her and showed her some things to get started. She told me later that it was her first bass lesson.”
He recalls seeing her swinging her bass with her band L7 years later and reflecting on how she had risen above a scene riddled with drugs. “It was a feat to be a survivor, to thrive, to be making art with all that pain and all those survival mechanisms [we shared],” he says. “It was a feat to turn it into something beautiful that made people happy.”
Courtney Love befriended Finch shortly after hitchhiking from San Francisco to L.A. in the summer of 1983. “[Her dad’s] house is the closest thing to a home I’ll ever have,” Love tells Rolling Stone in a tribute that will be published separately in full soon. They bonded over their favorite records from Love’s U2 and Echo and the Bunnymen to Finch’s SST hardcore and the Chili Peppers. “She dragged me to shows,” Love says. “There wasn’t a day she didn’t stand by the strange girl from up north. We had guitars and taught each other to play. The Runaways were our Sex Pistols.”
Since Finch’s death from brain cancer at age 59 last month, her bandmates, friends, and peers have been remembering how music and friendship formed the double helix of her soul. That’s also apparent from Finch’s upcoming memoir, completed shortly before her death, which gives her account of how she maintained her punk roots and cultivated friendships with the era’s who’s who. The book, Shooting Up and Making Out: A Memoir of My Life in LA and L7, cowritten with Jeff Alulis, will come out via Da Capo on Jan. 19.
In the book, Finch recounts how a tumultuous childhood at the hands of an abusive adoptive mom led her to want to escape her homelife. Out of her mother’s clutches, she made lasting friendships with Love, Flea, and others, and fell in love with punk rock, photography, and heroin while still a teen. After playing in a short-lived band with Love and future Babes in Toyland singer-guitarist Kat Bjelland, she joined L7.
“She was hounding us to join before our other bass player even left,” L7 singer-guitarist Donita Sparks, says. “She had a lot of chutzpah.” Before long, she was playing buzzsaw punk alongside Sparks and singer-guitarist Suzi Gardner on the L.A. club circuit.
When Tom Morello was still a Midwestern transplant finding his way in Los Angeles, years before Rage Against the Machine, Finch welcomed him into town and helped him find his footing as an artist. Years later, when L7 were touring through San Francisco where Morello’s band Lock Up were recording an album, L7 hung out between gigs. “I was always surprised that someone that cool was that nice to me,” he says. “I’m clearly bringing a lot of insecurity to that statement. But she just was in one of the coolest bands of all time in the L.A. underground scene.”
Finch was the type of person who would meet friends of friends, and she made time to meet Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, at Love’s suggestion. The pair quickly discovered they were kindred spirits. “Jennifer told me on many occasions that she felt music had saved her, and she wanted that sort of salvation for everyone whom she connected with; especially young women who wanted their own future in music,” Corgan says. “She did not see herself as above anyone or anything and was personally repulsed by the aura of instant celebrity that came with grunge’s first wave.”
A PERFECT FIT FOR Finch’s daring spirit, L7 played fast and frightening metal-tinged punk with hummable guitar riffs and catchy vocal hooks, which they perfected on their indie-label breakthrough EP, Smell the Magic,and major label albums, Bricks Are Heavy and Hungry for Stink, all of which played well on both MTV’s 120 Minutes and Headbangers Ball. Finch’s songwriting contributions to the band shine on “Everglade,” a swamp-grunge rocker about a Floridian female mosh pitter beating up dumb redneck dudes, the sick-of-it-all cool of “One More Thing,” and “Shirley,” a raging rock ode to drag racer Shirley Muldowney. “What’s a beautiful girl like you doing racing in a place like this?” a man asks in a sample on the last song. The answer sums up Finch’s outlook: “Winning.”
“[Jennifer] had a lot of energy,” Sparks says. “She had great style. She was great onstage, great moves. She was brave.”
In chapter after chapter, she charts that band’s rise from van tours to the indie-rock success of Smell the Magic’s “Shove” to the MTV fame of Bricks Are Heavy’s “Pretend We’re Dead” and gigs with Nirvana. “Kurt adored Jennifer, and she was one of the few people he spoke to a few times a week,” Love says. (The book addresses the effect Kurt Cobain’s death had on her friends and her. “She got me through that horrible month and didn’t leave my side,” Love says.)
As L7 took off in the early Nineties, she fought to become sober, a difficult prospect for a touring artist but one she clung to for the rest of her life alongside offering to help others. “She got very involved in the sober community, and I think she helped other artists using her knowledge and experience,” Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman tells Rolling Stone.
She also wrote a full account of her own exit from L7 as pressures mounted behind the scenes in her personal life. She gives no quarter to people who wronged her, discussing sexual assaults and how she held the men accountable. She also advocates for women’s rights throughout. “A very early Rage Against the Machine show was playing a reproductive rights benefit that L7 spearheaded, Rock for Choice,” Morello says. “It really helped to rally our community, which had disparate levels of political awareness and interest around that very important issue.”
In the book, Finch, who also played in the groups Other Star People and the Shocker, addresses other illnesses she faced including adenomyosis and thyroid cancer, though it concludes with a happy ending in which she talks about how she’s at peace with her life and accomplishments.
“Jennifer sounded like herself, and that’s the greatest compliment I can give to anyone”
Flea
“I fucking really admire people who can live between being a very humble, graceful, caring human and a warrior,” says Melissa Auf der Maur, erstwhile bassist for Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins. “I cannot wait for Jennifer’s book to come out. For her to die prior to her story being told in her own words is so tragic.”
What’s most evident from reading Shooting Up and Making Out, though, is how her we’re-all-in-this-together punk spirit guided her through tough times. Although she filled the book with famous names and a chapter about dating Dave Grohl, it never feels name-droppy. Her friends say that’s because she was integral to her scene and she always managed to maintain a strong, positive energy.
“In my 62 years, I can think of nobody more loyal or honourable,” Love says. “[She was] a true friend, who also gave me the security of having one house where I was safe.”
“Jennifer was excellent in a crisis,” Sparks says. “Whether we had a flat tire in the van or the promoter didn’t want to pay us, or somebody had to go to the hospital, she would spring into action. I get kind of paralyzed at that shit like, ‘Fuck, what do we do?’ And Jennifer’s already out the door dealing with it.” (Adds Flea: “She was sharp as a fucking tack. She was sweet. She felt good to be around.”)
Although she could maintain positivity, it wasn’t until later in her life that she became aware of the impact she had on others. In a chapter titled “Fourteen and Shooting,” about a gallery showing of photos she took as a teen of the L.A. punk scene, she reflected on how the media perceived L7 as she watched attendees, some younger than she was when she took the photos, peruse her view of punk history.
“They were trying to make sense of moments they hadn’t lived, and I was curating a past that I hadn’t fully processed myself,” Finch writes. “I connected it back to my decade in L7. How we fought so hard for a place in the narrative, only to realize that the mainstream didn’t want us in the story. They needed us to exist as outsiders, to contextualize their more commercially successful bands as more authentic. We were a reference, not a revolution.”
Finch’s friends say that’s not true and that L7 nevertheless sparked change — even if Finch and her bandmates weren’t aware. Auf der Maur first saw the band in Montreal in 1991, before she’d even picked up a bass. “Something about seeing all women in that level of grit and power made such an impression on me,” she says. “I obviously was a rock fan, but I hadn’t yet chosen my instrument or chosen to make music my life.” She credits seeing Finch — as well as bassists like Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Hole’s Jill Emery — with the revelation that “the bass just called to me.”
“L7 broke the mold and recast this idea that heavy music was essentially the providence of one gender,” Corgan says, “and they did so in a way that made their message a message of unity for all.”
Those who spoke with Finch in her final months, as she came to terms with her brain cancer diagnosis — announced publicly only five days before her death — say she knew she was loved. “I talked to Jennifer about three months ago: ‘How you doing?'” NOFX vocalist-bassist Fat Mike Burkett says. “She goes, ‘Mike, I’m doing OK. I got the best partner, and people were treating me really well, and I’m at peace.’ She wasn’t happy about it, but she realized what an impact she made on this world, how important she was, how many people’s lives she made better.”
When Love learned how sick Finch was in June, she traveled to be by her friend’s side and spent the final five weeks of Finch’s life with her. “She could not have written her chaotic ending better herself,” Love says. “More than 100 people were fighting to get in, arguing that they were on the list as if it were a club, because she had more than 100 passionate friends who would hock their houses for her. There were bouncers rotating at the door … the tired, the sick, the hungry, the famous and tons of ex-boyfriends [showed up], all regretting their wrongs. She loved it. Everyone remembering her with love and sobbing.
“I was always surprised that someone that cool was that nice to me”
Tom Morello
“At 4 in the morning, when her body shut down and the medical staff said it was time, I heard someone say, ‘But we ordered breakfast for 8, and Flea’s coming at 9,'” Love continues, adding that the irony of the scene made her laugh.
L7 fans will get a chance to say goodbye to the group this fall when they embark on a “Last Hurrah” farewell tour. The band already played a handful of dates this summer with Tsuzumi Okai filling in for Finch after she announced she was sitting the tour out due to illness. Sparks says Finch’s doctors had given her hope she’d be able to make it to the fall dates, but now she describes the aftermath of losing Finch as something like a fog, especially as L7 prepare for fall tour dates.
“It’s a really weird feeling of grieving but also having to keep the ball moving forward,” she says. “I wrote this down: ‘I just have to do a little bit each day, and if I can do a little bit each day, I can get through this and all of us can get through this.’ It’s just really a little bit at a time.
“The tour is supposed to be joyous saying goodbye,” she continues. “We can celebrate Jennifer. Now there’s going to be a lot more emotion with it for sure. We’re tying up our career with a ribbon. That’s what Jennifer wanted us to do, so we’re doing it.”
Finch’s own personal legacy has been slowly coming into focus. “The outpouring of love that has come to Jennifer and L7 since her passing has been remarkable and touching and kind of overwhelming,” Sparks says. “I turned off my phone for a couple days because I was just like, ‘I can’t take this.’ It’s a heavy thing. It’s a really heavy thing.”
“Jennifer sounded like herself, and that’s the greatest compliment I can give to anyone,” Flea says. “She knew what she loved and she went for it. She put her whole body into every note. She vibrated with the instrument. She was a true rocker.”
Pre-order Shooting Up and Making Out: A Memoir of My Life in LA and L7, out Jan. 19.
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