POP MUSIC : Survival of the Rawest : Death has touched 7 Year Bitch several times in the last two years, but the group has turned its grief and anger into intense songs that have attracted a loyal following in alternative circles

With everything that’s happened to 7 Year Bitch during the past two years, the Seattle quartet should out-gloom the most notoriously downcast rock bands, from England’s landmark Joy Division to Seattle’s Alice in Chains.

The first trauma for the band was the drug-related death in 1992 of original guitarist Stefanie Sargent. A year later, fellow musician and band mentor Mia Zapata was raped and murdered.

With the suicide of Seattle cohort Kurt Cobain in April and the overdose death last month of the band’s friend Kristin Pfaff, bassist for the group Hole, you couldn’t blame the members of 7 Year Bitch if they wanted to hang it up.

“It’s really hard sometimes to keep going and keep in a good frame of mind when everybody’s dropping away,” says singer Selene Vigil.

But the band has fought back. The group’s gruff new album, “Viva Zapata,” is defiantly celebratory and very much alive.

“I will have my cake and eat it too, just like you,” Vigil rails in “The Scratch.” In “M.I.A.,” a response to Zapata’s murder, she seethes, “Does society have justice for you? Well if not, then I do.”

That ability to balance the dark with the hopeful has combined with the band’s strong survival instinct to gain 7 Year Bitch a loyal following in the world of alternative/college rock.

“Compared to 7 Year Bitch, most bands seem wimpy,” says Jennifer Fischer, publicist at Seattle’s C/Z Records, the independent label that 7 Year Bitch has been on for two years. “The band has a (defiant) attitude, and I think that a lot of people relate to that. You know, just that pure and driven anger.”

The music and attitude attracted major record labels’ interest, and the group recently signed with Atlantic Records, which will release the group’s next album.

“Now it’s just starting to feel like it did right before Stefanie died, when everything was starting to come together,” says Vigil, whose husky speaking voice reflects the wear of belting the songs on tour. The 27-year-old singer is small and compact, and her bleached hair contrasts sharply with her olive skin.

“We were at this super peak when we really felt we knew what we were doing--we had a grip on it and felt it. I thought, ‘God, it’s never gonna be like that again,’ but in the past couple months it has been. It’s starting to click and gel musically and friendship-wise.”

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Much of the grief and rage that 7 Year Bitch felt over the murder of Zapata, leader of the group the Gits, is reflected on the album. When talking about it, Elizabeth Davis’ voice quavers with intensity.

“It stunned us,” says Bitch’s 29-year-old bassist and songwriter. “It’s something we feel and deal with every day because (the killer) still hasn’t been caught. It’s something still very much in the forefront of our heads.”

Valerie Agnew, 25, the group’s drummer, was so moved by the death that she founded a nonprofit organization, Home Alive, that promotes self-defense courses and other safeguards against rape. With increasing participation from other musicians, Home Alive also stages benefit shows and is currently working on a compilation album.

“Mia was also an extremely big influence on me--just the way she sang, and her honesty,” Vigil explains.

“She was the first person who made me feel like I could sing. She was also a big help to our band when we started. They (the Gits) would let us practice in their space and helped us get shows. They were totally behind us.”

Vigil grew up in Spokane, Wash., as one of six children, all of whom were exposed to a wide range of contemporary music. Her father, a hairdresser, loved Motown, blues, reggae and soul music. Her mom, a housewife, listened to country music, especially Johnny Cash.

Attracted to the youth scene in Seattle, she moved to the city soon after graduating from high school and got a job at a health food store. There she met Agnew, a fellow employee.

“That’s when I first seriously started thinking about having a band,” Vigil says. “Val and I thought, ‘Yeah, we should do it.’ We finally got up and did it, and it was terrifying. We sucked, but it was so fun I wanted to do it again and again.”

They hooked up with Davis, a transplanted Southern Californian who worked in the same open market. Sargent, a well-known figure on the Seattle scene, completed the original 7 Year Bitch lineup in 1990, and the group eventually shared stages with such touted area bands as Pearl Jam. The group was signed in early 1992 by C/Z Records, but Sargent died five months later, while the band was recording its first full album.

“We couldn’t even talk about the band after that,” Vigil recalls. “It was more like ‘Our best friend’s gone.’ First and foremost, we missed Stefanie. It wasn’t until a couple weeks later we were able to sit down and talk about what we were gonna do with the band.

“In our guts, all three of us knew we wanted to stay together and keep playing. We just went into the process of figuring out ‘How are we going to do that? Should we keep the name?’ All that stuff. After a few weeks, we finally put out the word we were looking for a guitarist, but it was even a couple months after that when we actually got into it and started looking.”

After completing the debut album, “Sick ‘Em,” by adding old singles and some other tracks they had recorded earlier, 7 Year Bitch went almost six months before hiring guitarist Roisin Dunne, now 28. That’s when the group also resumed touring, starting the momentum that has brought it acclaim and major record-company support.

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Because it’s a female band from Washington that sings raw, abrasive lyrics, 7 Year Bitch is often mistaken for a member of the highly publicized “riot grrrl” movement. That underground scene, based in Olympia and led by the group Bikini Kill is characterized by pop-punk music with a radical feminist thrust and is accompanied by a whole network of fanzines and telephone hot lines.

It’s disheartening for 7 Year Bitch to find that its feelings--formed in the intensity of personal tragedy--are being perceived as part of an easily categorized political agenda. For Vigil, it’s just pure, individual expression.

“I don’t think our last album was political at all,” she says. “That’s a term that gets shoved on us. We are all against war, so we wrote (a song about it). It was something that came out in about five minutes. ‘Dead Men Don’t Rape’ is about rape, and ‘Chow Down’ is about abortion. Those are all personal issues. Everyone thinks we’re taking this big stand, but it’s stuff that happens to everybody.”

In addition to the anger, 7 Year Bitch displays a subtle, sarcastic humor--but not enough to keep the members from being portrayed as the scariest women to set foot on man’s Earth.

“It’s extremely irritating when people call us male-bashers,” says Vigil, who plans to get married soon. “It’s just a totally false and narrow-minded thing to say about us. . . . Just because we have intense songs about relationships, it’s not like I’m a male-basher. Like ‘Dead Men Don’t Rape’ is not a song about men, it’s about rapists.”

In the end, the misconceptions and misfortunes that the members of 7 Year Bitch have been through have made them stronger.

“I guess through all of this,” Davis says, “we’ve become really close and turn to each other a lot. We’re all very aware that what we’re doing is a rare opportunity and we are all really fortunate to have each other. It’s like a dream. I never want to take it for granted.

” . . . I know it sounds cliched, but when people die, it really makes you realize that you don’t know how much time you have. You realize that life is hard and beautiful and horrible, and you just have to jump into it. It makes you live harder. I’ve never lived this hard before.”*