‘We’re Not Tough Chicks’ : L7 is four howling, long-haired rockers who can blast away just about any band--and they happen to be women

“You rock!” is the highest compliment you can pay any band member younger than 30. And “You rock!” means roughly this: “You are capable of making me forget everything but the overweening need to shake my long hair in front of my eyes.”

Rock , the verb--as opposed to rock , the noun, which is what they used to play on KMET--has something to do with volume and feedback and aggression and a steady, idiot-simple beat. To paraphrase Louis Armstrong, if you have to ask what it means to rock, you’ll never know.

Soundgarden rocks. Metallica rocks. Hendrix rocked. Guns N’ Roses rocks, except for its ballads. Motley Crue’s “Shout at the Devil” rocks, though not much of its subsequent stuff does, and a lot of pre-Sammy Hagar Van Halen rocks too. Jane’s Addiction is the greatest art-rock band of our time because even the pretentious stuff manages to rock.

L7 rocks. Even its detractors admit that much. L7 rocks hard.

Hollywood-based L7, possibly the most popular band in the L.A. underground scene at the moment, causes nightclub ceilings to rain sweat, small women to dive off stages and entire crowds to shake their heads rhythmically, violently to the beat. Its sound is characterized by howls and throbbing waves of distorted fuzz guitar, its image by torn jeans, wild hair and whatever shirts its members happen to have been wearing that day.

At large shows, in support of touring national-level bands, L7 tends to blow headliners out of the water, which may be why L7 doesn’t tend to get a lot of big support gigs. L7 was the only Los Angeles band on the Seattle-based Sub Pop label--which in generations to come may be known as the Sun Records of the ‘90s--until it signed to the major label Slash a couple of weeks ago, and it has whipped its long hair in front of its eyes on stages across the United States and Europe.

Oh, yeah: L7 is made up of women, not dudes.

L7, named for the ‘50s slang expression for “square,” is potentially the first female band to rock as if its gender were irrelevant: no T&A;, no love songs, no flirtation, no come-ons, no wronged-woman anthems, no bustiers . . . just rock. They write their own songs, and they manage their own career. When the members of L7 are on the road, they sleep on floors and load their own equipment. Like the Sex Pistols, they’re putting out a message just by being who they are.

On a warm summer evening, just before the band is set to leave on tour to Texas, three of the four members slouch into a worn sofa in the living room of guitarist Donita Sparks’ Echo Park apartment, smoking cigarettes and idly listening to a tape of Frank Sinatra singing “Bim Bam Baby.” Sparks, in her early 20s, wears a battered black T-shirt and has matted Technicolor hair. She takes a big gulp of coffee and sets her cup down hard.

“I pretty much lay off the feminist rap,” she says, “even though I’m a feminist, you know? Because . . . I don’t want to sound like a traitor or anything, but we’ve gotten a lot of fans just by doing what we do. It’s a hard thing; I can’t . . . I can’t even put it into words.”

She looks imploringly at bass player Jennifer Finch, who just shrugs. Suzi Gardner, who shares lead vocal and lead guitar chores with Sparks, smiles but says nothing.

“We’ve always been better at setting an example, anyway,” Sparks says finally. “We get letters from young girls who say that we’re their inspiration for picking up an instrument, and that makes us really proud. We didn’t really have role models growing up. The Go-Go’s were the only girl group playing their own instruments, and they sang about boys.

“The Runaways were like a Svengali project. And the MTV vision is sexist--the women you see are groupie-type bimbos, and the women playing are not much of a threat to anybody . . . .

“It sounds cliched, but we’re not a Russ Meyer fantasy, we’re not tough chicks, we’re not man-haters, and we’re not boy-toys--we’re just people.”

This may not sound like a radical concept, except within the aggressively male context of hard rock.

L7 may have suffered run-ins with club owners who wanted them to dress pretty, and fanzines that claimed to be doing features on the band but ended up running only a picture of the ring in Finch’s pierced navel, so that the all-female bands that came after them would have the simple freedom to be themselves.

“The (record company) people probably figured we’d all get PMS at the same time,” Gardner says. “But Slash, who just signed us, is going to be sitting pretty.”

Sparks and Gardner, who had both played in forgettable pop bands and bumped around the Hollywood rock scene for years, got together in Hollywood around ‘87, quickly recruited Finch and went through a series of drummers, some of them men, before settling on Dee Plakas last year.

L7 played a zillion shows a year at Hollywood clubs--Raji’s, Club Lingerie and the Gaslight--at a time when the post-hardcore sound and neo-’60s garage grooves of the mid-’80s underground were evolving into the neo-Stooges party rock of the late ‘80s.

The band recorded an album for tiny Epitaph Records in late ’88 that was critically well received but whose distributor folded before the record had been out more than a couple of months. A single and an EP for Sub Pop, released last year, got out all over. L7 suddenly found itself popular, with a hard core of fans and its picture on the cover of punk-rock bible Flipside magazine.

L7 toured with L.A. punk band Bad Religion, and then with such Sub Pop heroes as Cat Butt and Nirvana, and then as small-club headliners--often greeted out of town with posters, decorated with half-clad women, that said, “All-Girl Band From L.A.”

When the all-female group Babes in Toyland got together, it hung out at L7 rehearsals; now that band is signed to Warner Bros. It is one of several such groups that have cited L7 as an influence. At L7 shows, the front few rows are dominated by females, stoked at the chance to rock.

In the British music magazine Sounds last autumn, in an article that referred to women exclusively as “chicks” or “babes,” Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, the Jimmy Page of the underground, labeled the L7-fueled explosion of underground female bands “foxcore,” and the label stuck: foxcore shows, foxcore pictorials, a foxcore spread in Spin (for which L7 declined to be interviewed). The band loathes the term but feels a certain camaraderie with most of the bands, which are, after all, women who rock.

“Now all these girl bands are cropping up,” Finch says, “which I think is cool. It’s like a domino thing in a way. But I think it’s a shame we all get lumped together as ‘foxcore,’ because stylistically we’re very different. It’s like lumping black bands together or Mexican bands or bands with Asian people in them. It’s sexist, it’s narrow-minded, and it stinks.”