The connection between Kat Bjelland and Courtney Love was so mythologized by the music press within the ’90s that it’s troublesome to discern truth and fiction. As is to be anticipated from a “soulmate, sister-type” connection between two sensible, inventive, aggressive girls with traumatic childhoods and habit points, the pair fought as bitterly as they bonded. They traded lyrics and clothes and insults within the press. One level of competition, possible overblown within the identify of promoting, was the battle over their shared aesthetic, sadly dubbed “kinderwhore.” We’ll in all probability by no means definitively know if it was Bjelland or Love who first dyed her hair white-blonde, donned a classic babydoll costume, and picked up a Rickenbacker guitar to create some of the iconic appears of the Nineteen Nineties. However given Love’s fame, there’s little question who historical past most associates with the picture.
Quickly after they met in 1984, Bjelland and Love started taking part in music and dealing collectively at Portland’s strip golf equipment. They moved to San Francisco and began a band known as, at varied factors, Sugar Babydoll, Sugar Babylon, and Pagan Infants, which additionally included future L7 bassist Jennifer Finch. In 1987, when Love left San Francisco to pursue an appearing profession in Los Angeles, Bjelland headed for Minneapolis, lured by the scene that had nurtured the likes of the Replacements and Hüsker Dü.
Bjelland first encountered Lori Barbero from afar, admiring her sense of rhythm as she watched her dance at punk golf equipment. Barbero was enmeshed within the Twin Cities scene, working on the infamous bar the Longhorn, managing the band Run Westy Run, and letting each touring artist underneath the solar crash on her flooring. She had barely performed the drums earlier than Bjelland requested to jam, and taught herself by drumming alongside Bjelland’s riffs. Barbero developed a method largely performed utilizing the butt-end of her drumsticks, a primal, regular thump that acted as an earthbound foil to Bjelland’s sky-scraping vocals and alien riffs.
The pair shaped Babes in Toyland in 1987 with singer Cindy Russell and bassist Chris Holetz. That lineup lasted lower than a yr earlier than Bjelland took the reins as frontwoman. Following a disastrous, aborted reunion with Courtney Love (accounts fluctuate on whether or not she was ever truly a member of Babes in Toyland, however everybody agrees it ended badly), Bjelland and Barbero recruited 19-year-old novice musician Michelle Leon as their bass participant.
In 1989, the trio signed with the Twin Cities indie powerhouse Twin/Tone, identified for launching the Replacements and Soul Asylum, and launched their debut album, Spanking Machine, in Spring of 1990. It’s a whirlwind of no wave dissonance, shockabilly riffs, and Bjelland’s snarling surrealism, gesturing at subjects like consuming issues (“Fork Down Throat”), jealousy (“He’s My Factor”), and abandonment (“Ache in My Coronary heart”). Barbero sang one music, the bluesy lament “Dogg.”