“Remembering Jennifer Finch, the Bassist Who Gave L7 Its Attitude” • Music With Depth PR
Just minutes ago, I learned that Jennifer Finch, the bassist for grunge band L7, has died. This came just days after it was reported that she had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer. The band released an official statement via Instagram. Clearly, this is sad news.
Perhaps a week before the reports of Finch’s diagnosis, I found myself thinking about L7 and a phase in the ’90s when I was really into them. Their music was especially helpful when I’d sit at my kitchen table and create comics with extreme, gratuitous violence. The energy of their music helped me connect one frame after another, where it felt like I was generating a constant flow of creativity. At the time, it was “Bricks Are Heavy” (1992) and “Hungry for Stink” (1994), and then I moved on to other things.
When I thought about them again recently, I realized I hadn’t listened to anything since and caught up with “Scatter the Rats” (2019) — one release after Finch had already left the band, her last album being “The Beauty Process – Triple Platinum” (1997). Fortunately, their sound remained consistent, because what would L7 be without her? As it turns out, she returned for “Scatter the Rats,” writing one of my favorite tracks, “Garbage Truck.”
Jennifer Finch’s Attitude Was Key To L7’s Sound
What stood out to me about L7, on top of the gritty production, was Finch’s bass playing. What’s been said about her playing is that it was more about attitude overall. I felt that come through on those albums, where the bass stood out to me. I could feel their grunge coolness translate into the comics I was creating.
Her involvement with other riot grrrl and grunge-rock icons includes her history with Courtney Love, having played alongside her in the pre-Hole outfit Pagan Babies, whose demos featured Love on vocals after the group relocated from Portland to San Francisco. Finch later appeared as the bassist in Hole’s 1994 music video for “Doll Parts,” the band’s first single released after bassist Kristen Pfaff’s death that June.
It’s also worth noting that her bass guitar, nicknamed “The Ghost,” has a history of its own. Finch has described it as a hybrid between a Fender Jazz and a Precision Bass — a black Fender that came into her possession in the mid-to-late 1980s. Considered less than top-shelf, its low-end quality made it ideal to experiment with as a kind of canvas, and with each early L7 show, she’d add to or strip away its look. Around 1989, while working at an L.A. screen-printing shop, she and a friend applied a screen print of the Crimson Ghost — a figure from a 1946 film serial that the Misfits had adopted as their own emblem — onto the body, giving the bass its name.
The Ghost logged serious mileage over the years. It appeared on L7’s “Shove” for Sub Pop’s singles club and toured alongside Helmet, Nirvana, the Melvins and NOFX. It was retired from live performance in 1993, then returned for L7’s 2016 reunion. During a tour with Nirvana, the band reportedly didn’t travel with a backup bass, so Krist Novoselic would often play Finch’s for fun.
Finch eventually donated the bass to the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas, where it isn’t kept behind glass — visitors can pick it up, plug it in and play it in the museum’s jam room.
She was definitely open to engaging with the people, also very active on social media so she came across as an open book. Check out her official site where she would blog, and promote interviews she would do podcasts with. Jennifer will surely be missed.
[Featured image sourced from Andreas Lawen, Fotandi via Wikimedia and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license., cropped]
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