JENNIFER FINCH'S SCRAPBOOK

Jennifer Finch is one of the greatest punk rockers who has ever lived. She started Sugar Baby Doll in the mid-80s with Courtney Love, and played bass for L7 from 1986 to 1996. She was on stage at Reading when Donita Sparks pulled out her lady business and shouted "Eat my used tampon, fuckers!" She rubbed shoulders with the only bands of her era that mattered--Bad Religion, The Cramps, Nirvana, Suicidal Tendencies, Nick Cave, etc.

One day, bored between sets, she decided to find a way to hold on to her tour memories, which apparently amounted to an enviable life of dicking around and playing great shows. She's kept thousands of scrapbook pages hidden in cardboard boxes accumulating dust in her little home for 20 years. We don't really know why she decided to share her photos and stories with us after so many years, but we're glad she did.

Vice: You left L7 in 1996. What have you been up to since?
Jennifer Finch: A band that I was singing in and writing songs for, Other Star People, signed with AM Records. If you come across any photos of me with bleached blonde hair, they were probably taken around this time. I wore way too much make up, I looked like a drag queen!

What happened to you after?
At the start of 2000 I was playing left, right, and center. Then I started getting graphic design jobs. I was even teaching graphic design at a school in Los Angeles between tours. It was always under a different name. Graphic design took up a lot of my time when I was traveling with the different bands I played with, my clients were always surprised to hear I was in France or Turkey when they were trying to get ahold of me. I used to tell them I was on vacation.

What exactly does your job consist of?
I've done a bunch of different things. I started as a programmer before moving into graphic design. I worked as a press agent a few years ago for some websites. I also do online marketing. I make sure that the codes and the content are optimized for Google. I also try and find addresses that could have a strong resale value or that I could update with whatever their owner might need. I love it. I've worked on all types of sites, from art magazines to comedy sites. I've even made one about archeology.

Coming from a girl who used to play bass in a band like yours, it's sort of hard to imagine.
I've never lived like a rock star. I've always done a lot of volunteer work. I have a really small house and two tiny dogs. If you want the full story, I lived there with my boyfriend until two months ago. We were together for four years but I think he's too big for all of it. For the sake of his ego and my furniture, we decided that breaking up was for the best. It's sort of like the story of the fish and the bird that fell in love but couldn't live together—not on land nor in water.

Tell us about what pushed you into taking the behind the scenes pictures of your band.
I was a bit bored, but not to the point where I regretted being a part of it. You've got a lot of time to kill on tour. It's part of the reason that a lot of rockers fall into drinking and doing junk.

But you were taking them for pleasure, not for what they might be worth later?
I like observing everyone, even people who freak me out. I've always loved watching people. Taking their picture is something that has always felt perfectly natural. I've had these old negatives piled up in boxes for over 20 years.

What made you decide to release the archives today?

The girls in the band have had children since they were taken. I didn't want to hurt anyone so I waited until the children had grown up before doing anything with them.

Beyond all the parties and getting wasted, your pictures are also extraordinary documentations of the birth of grunge.
Yeah, that's maybe true. To come back to your previous question, putting them online really allowed me to understand what people thought of me.

Where did the desire to take pictures come from?
My dad was an amateur photographer, he developed small series of photographs and recorded film footage for his own enjoyment, and always encouraged me to do the same. I still have a whole box of sequences in my garage that I recorded of my friends and I in my garden. I was passionate about horror films and monsters, Godzilla, zombies--even though they terrified me. Each film had its own theme and costumes. Most of the time we would end up trashing my doll houses because they were easy to destroy.

And because it's fun.
Yeah. I did that between the ages of six and 12. My dad would film us and when I would give him a role to play, it would be up to me to direct him. He was incredibly difficult to convince, but I was very stubborn and it's been a very useful quality when it came to playing music.

How so?
Well, it made me creative. And I noticed that when I brought my camera to gigs, I often got a better space, right next to the stage. At 15 I understood that I could get myself invited to concerts in exchange for a few shots.

That's a good fucking plan.
Tell me about it, I used to develop my film myself and never thought the result was that great. So I just avoided speaking to the band I'd just shot so they wouldn't catch on to the fact that what I'd done was rubbish.

You were around when Courtney Love was starting out, as well as others whose careers then went stratospheric. Suicidal Tendencies and the Cramps, notably.
I photographed a lot of people. Some turned into stars, others didn't.

What was your life like at the time?
I was on tour a lot, I didn't have a fixed address. I was moving every 6 months and hated it. I used to cry a lot and was ready to give up on keeping in touch with my friends! My life was stable when I lived with my dad, but I had a hard time staying put. I ran away all the time. In one way or another, going on tour to play music came really naturally. I was incapable of putting down my bags. One day, a friend suggested that I buy the little house that I now live in. Which I did.

You must hold on to some unique/unusual memories of everything.
My memories are difficult to relate or to explain. I wouldn't say I preferred the public, the success, the crowd. All the good bands during that period experienced the same thing. What I honestly liked most was the interaction: the adventures that I had with the other girls. The worst thing we went through must have been when one of our roadie friends died on our tour bus. It was a very painful time that, in combination with my father's death, was the push that persuaded me to stop everything.

Yeah, that must have been hard.
I miss the solidarity and camaraderie between the girls in the band, however. When Suzi [Gardner, the band's singer and guitarist] and I talk on the phone, we remind each other of the best stories. I can't imagine anyone today believing them.

Girl stuff?
Yeah, and it all happened so fast! I sometimes feel as if it never existed, never happened. Let's just say the good times were great and the bad ones, atrocious.

Are there things that happened to you that you've tried to forget?
Yeah. A friend often says to me "1,2,3, close your eyes and when you open them again you won't remember a thing. Abracadabra!" Some guys once came onto our bus to shoot heroin and left their needles on the floor. I was walking around barefoot and stepped on one. I was so freaked out that it took me 18 years to be able to laugh about it.

I saw a Facebook photo of you where you look absolutely wasted. Some guy left a comment beneath it proclaiming that he took it and you answered him explaining that you were in no state to remember. I found that pretty funny.
I'm glad it makes you laugh. For me, the most significant things were about "girls nights." There were four of us in L7. We used to get wasted, sleep around, go to gigs. We were young; we should still have been in school! It was a very peculiar period for American pop culture and history. We still hadn't heard of AIDS, for example. We rebelled against the decadence of the 1970s, making it filthier still. We were interested in all kinds of music and forms of art, and that's probably what inspired our behavior.

A whole swathe of your work is concentrated in the diaries you held over the years. Notably, there's one recounting your trip through Lollapalooza--that one's awesome.
I have a lot of albums like that one. I kept a really beautiful one from our tour with the Beastie Boys at the start of the 90s, for example. I loved just buying any old crappy camera, you know, the kind you buy at a corner shop, to photograph anything and everything. Then I used to stick the pictures in a notebook and write down a bunch of stuff. I know a lot of others who did the same.

People who were hanging out around you?
Exactly. I kept memories of all the people I met while on tour, whether fans, band members or technicians. All of them wrote little notes in mine or left me their own observations.

Why bother doing something so creative and meticulous when you could have just gone to loads of wild parties and slept with tons of people?
I did that, but it just so happened that I had a camera on me all the time. L7 once played a festival, a huge thing. We were sharing a stage with a lot of people, superstars. While running around trying to get autographs, I ran into Robin Zander from Cheap Trick who was doing the same thing as me. So we walked around together. It was a big day for me.

Music and photography are two complementary disciplines, wouldn't you say?
Entirely. Although I think photography is more a question of opportunity.

And what would you say makes a good photo?
Obviously the subject matter. I once took a picture of Nick Cave drinking a can of Slim Fast. He was pretending he was wasted, it was really strange and, honestly, very funny.

Are there any pictures that you've refused to or haven't got permission to show?
Yeah. Loads. It's really annoying as well.

I'd assume you still listen to music? Things like that don't just disappear.
I'm very fickle. What I like today will be so out of fashion by the time this is published! I've been into a lot of aggressive music for the past few years. Things like Shrinebuilder, Sons of Otis, Electric Wizard… I really like Die Antwoord too. I like them so much that I designed their website! I'd love to take their picture but since I no longer practice I'm worried I wouldn't be up to scratch. Otherwise, yes, I still make music. I actually broke a string on my Gibson this morning.

Have you thought about making a book about all of this?
Yeah. I'd like to publish a series… provided people find my photographs interesting.

INTERVIEW : CLARISSE AND PAULINE MÉRIGEOT-MAGNENAT
PHOTOS : JENNIFER PRECIOUS FINCH
TRANSLATION : KATHERINE DOYLE