L7’s trailblazing performance at the 1992 Reading Festival has been etched into rock history. Despite being faced with a series of technical difficulties and an increasingly hostile audience, the band – comprising guitarists Donita Sparks and Suzi Gardner, bassist Jennifer Finch, and drummer Dee Plakas – delivered what The Independent then called a “blistering set of infectious political punk-metal”.
“The airline lost our gear, like our pedals, and stuff,” Sparks recalls of the experience in an upcoming interview with Guitar World. “We recovered our guitars, but our pedals were non-existent. We were borrowing stuff from other bands, and when you play festivals, you don't get a soundcheck unless you’re the headliner. We were not the headliners. We were like the third band or something.”
Sparks explains there was also “a lot of feedback going on onstage” as the technical difficulties piled up – but that wasn’t the worst part of their experience.
“The crowd got ugly, and they were just being assholes, throwing mud at us for the whole set, you know, really assaulting us, like hitting us hard on our bodies and shit and on our guitars,” she continues.
“It really felt like an assault, so I pulled my tampon out, and I threw it at them. It’s weird; it’s like if you’re a woman in rock, you’re a minority. It felt like, even though other bands got mud thrown at them that day too, from my perspective, I felt like there was a bit of a misogynist bend to it.”
Sparks asserts that while the band was – and continues to be – popular in England, the crowd “got really fucking shit-faced, unruly, and violent with us”, which provoked her response.
“I don't know what I could have done… but we weren’t going to leave the stage, you know? It was such a disappointment, too, because we were really looking forward to that show.”
While that Sunday at Reading proved to be a zenith for grunge and punk – featuring the Melvins, Screaming Trees, Mudhoney and headliners Nirvana – the conditions were so bad that, as Spark recalls, “that concert broke a lot of bands”.
It also had an adverse impact on L7’s career trajectory. “We were thinking, ‘Oh, man, maybe we’ve got a shot at being bigger than we are.’ It didn't happen. That's the way the mud clump crumbles.”
However, it undoubtedly did inspire a whole new generation of rock fans – and remains a testament to the band’s absolute fearlessness in standing up to what was then an even more male-dominated guitar scene.
Guitar World's full interview with Donita Sparks will be published in the coming weeks.
