L.A. Reader Magazine

By Liane Bonin

November 18, 1994

molten mental

lava diva’s ‘sweet grunge’ gets inside fans’ heads

It’s another gray, bottomless weeknight — the kind that even the neon blur of Sunset Boulevard can’t rescue. Record-company hacks and aging scenesters sit yawning in the darkened corners of the Roxy, while a few lost-looking riot grrls clutch lunchboxes to their chests, as if hoping to hold on to the last remnants of a dissipating scene. For all its aspirations to midnight noirism, Los Angeles has curled up and tucked in early, as usual.

But at ten till ten, the true believers start filtering through the door. Many of them members of the fake-ID contingent, they press toward the stage, leaving all pretense of detached coolness with the regulars at the backroom tables. That all-important buzz — not the whispering of industry execs who smell incipient record sales, but something decidedly more sincere — is snowballing through the crowd. Lava Diva is up next.

Fueled by singer-guitarist Dawn Fintor’s haunting deep-throated howl and grounded by drummer Greg Bernath and bassist Johnny Sabella’s fiercely exotic rhythms, this trim three-piece plants one foot firmly in the rawest of rock material, while dipping the other into darker, spookier, and more experimental territory. These artfully woven tales of regret, body piercing, and broken hears go far beyond cliché to hit emotional pay dirt.

Despite its merits, Lava Diva is still very much a struggling act. The band doesn’t have a record deal and has never toured — unless you count a few shows in Northern California about a year ago. At the moment, hovering over stale coffee in bland Sunset Boulevard java hut, the trio is trying to figure out how they can afford to keep up their mailing list, with postage running more than five hundred dollars a month. “If we had that kind of money, we’d be buying equipment,” explains Fintor with a wry smile. “We were thinking we could ask people to bring stamps to the show to alleviate some of the cost.”

It’s not a bad deal — for a handful of stamps, give or take a cover charge, fans receive a generous serving of sweet and sour musical transcendence. Lava Diva’s material is so intensely personal that any song could have been excavated from the mindfields of the band’s audience, so it’s no surprise that fans are almost missionary in their allegiance. Says Diva regular Brian Smith, “When I first saw them, I told Dawn afterwards, ‘I feel like you wrote the songs straight from my head.’ It’s like when you find the perfect line in a book and you’re almost mad that you didn’t write it yourself, but you’re still happy just to know it’s out there.” Smith and other hardcore LD followers have tracked the band since its inception two years ago, recruiting friends and spreading he word regarding what Fintor, Sabella, and Bernath once jokingly called “sweet grunge.” It is a facile label for a sound that defies easy categorization, much like the group itself.

There is no small irony in the way Sabella and Fintor came together. After “not liking” each other in high school, they cemented their friendship when Sabella recommended Fintor to her guitar teacher. But it took the 1992 riots and that tense, countrywide curfew to plant the seed of Lava Diva.

“We came out of it with four songs. We were really bad, and we were just making stuff up to make a set,” jokes Sabella, the group’s restless extrovert. In search of a drummer, they contacted Bernath, who was somewhat more impressed with their “really bad” material. Agreeing to do a few gigs “for fun” before joining the group outright, Bernath brought with him a talent for unorthodox percussion and an imposing handmade drum kit that bears no small resemblance to a kid’s erector-set masterpiece.

Bernath and Fintor had worked together previously, but Sabella had never performed in a band before. “Fuck, I hated it,” she says. “I remember the first show; I hated it so much I never wanted to play again. The second time was just as bad, if not worse.” Sabella swore she would never play bass again if things didn’t improve after the sixth gig; fortunately, Lava Diva’s third show “was actually really fun.”

Having conquered stage fright, the band currently struggles with media pigeonholing. Despite Bernath’s presence, Lava Diva has somehow ended up with the “all-girl band” label. “It got to the point where we were going to take a picture of Greg’s dick and send it to everybody and write ‘Lava Diva’ under it,” cracks Sabella. While the presumption may be a testament to Sabella’s and Fintor’s considerable stage presence, they reject the implicit reverse sexism on principle. “People come up to me and say, ‘Oh my god, you’re probably the best female bass player I’ve ever seen,’ and I’m like, ‘Is this a compliment or an insult?’” says Sabella. “Are you complimenting my playing or insulting my gender? Thank you and fuck you.

“The press seems to have labeled us as females because they don’t know what else to say,” continues Sabella, “whereas the people who come to see us never give the impression that they’re seeing us as females, or a female singer or female rock band. They say, ‘You guys are a great band,’ period.”

Perhaps the industry’s confusion is due in part to the band’s reluctance to play into the L.A. club scene’s hype and self-promotion. The appearance of show-biz types at a gig may inspire nervous gropings toward greatness by other bands, but Sabella, for one, is unmoved.

“Fuck, you should play well anyway. If my cousin drives twenty miles to come see me, that is what motivates me to play well.” That may sound like glib, we-love-our-fans lip service, but the members of Lava Diva actively blur the boundaries between themselves and their followers. According to Fintor, “We usually cross the line first. We’re the ones saying ‘Hey, come over to our house tomorrow; we’re having pizza!”

For a band born amid a scene as bleak as the L.A. riots, Lava Diva’s benevolence seems a small but fitting bookend to the event two years later. The band is a subtle reminder that sometimes disparate elements come together to create — not friction, but wickedly harmonious combustion.