On Nov. 23, punk legends L7 will host their Fast and Frightening Takeover, a three-stage, all-ages all-nighter at the Belasco in Downtown Los Angeles. The epic event will feature fellow local heroes Redd Kross (marking the first time that L7 and Redd Kross have shared a bill in 33 years) and Possum Dixon frontman-turned-superstar magician Rob Zabrecky (“He dated one of us; I won’t tell you which one!” L7’s Donita Sparks chuckles), as well as newer acts that share the same spirit. There will even be a “Goth basement.” Los Angeles rock fans will basically be partying like it’s 1991, or 1985.

“It was a pretty eclectic scene,” says Sparks of when L7 came up in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s — a “transformative time” of “cross-hybrids” when bands like Jane’s Addiction, Hole, the Muffs, and of course Redd Kross coexisted with the likes of Faster Pussycat and L.A. Guns, and underground venues like Scream, Jabberjaw, and Club Fuck provided counterprogramming to Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. (L7 actually played their first show at a Silver Lake art gallery, and another memorable early gig took place at The Recycler’s staff holiday party.) “I kind of wanted to have a bit of that element in [L7’s Fast and Frightening Takeover], the eclecticism and fun of that sort of era.”

L7 recently played another multi-generational L.A. punk festival, No Values, where Sparks proclaimed, “We are proud to be some rare pussy on this stage today!” before launching into their feminist anthem “Shove.” Fast and Frightening will be much more “heavily skewed female” than that crusty, bro-heavy Pomona fest, with “a lot of really ferocious young female” artists like Surfbort, Adult., Olivia Jean, the Paranoyds, the Schizphonics, Babe Haven, and Patriarchy. And while Sparks says “that wasn’t the inspiration” when she was booking Fast and Frightening, she adds, “I wasn’t specifically looking for a lot of females, but to be honest, the fiercest frontpeople I was seeing were women! There’s some maniacs out there, and it is called the Fast and Frightening Takeover, so they either had to be fast or frightening or fun or funny. And some of these gals are amazing. They’re in-your-face. … When [L7] started out, there were women playing, but not a lot of us scary broads. But now there’s a lot of scary broads out there, so this is a cool way to showcase that.”

Looking back on why L7 were considered “scary” when they first hit the scene, Sparks contemplates, “I think people were threatened by us. I think a lot of suits were threatened by us. There was no ‘bidding war’ over L7. The suits [at record labels] didn’t know what to do with L7, really. We were just kind of unconventional — and unmoldable, I would say. You weren’t going to fucking put us in outfits, you know what I mean? We styled ourselves!

“I think we were kind of funny, and I think men were terrified,” Sparks continues. “There’s a saying that women are afraid of men killing them, and men are afraid of women laughing at them. And I think some guys who were probably guilty of some bullshit really just did not want to engage with us, because we were a team of four. We would call people on shit sometimes, and I just think that some dudes were just not ready for L7. And dudes were running the record companies.”

L7, who eventually recorded for Epitaph, Sub Pop, and Slash/Warner Bros., of course did reach a level of success that might have seemed unlikely for such a willfully unconventional and uncommercial girl-gang. Their seminal albums Bricks Are Heavy, Hungry for Stink, and The Beauty Process: Triple Platinum all cracked the Billboard 200, and “Pretend We’re Dead,” an anti-apathy anthem that resonates just as much today as it did in the ‘90s, was a  weekly staple on MTV’s 120 Minutes. While L7 never got as big as “our pals Nirvana,” who actually headlined the very first Rock for Choice show that L7 organized with Feminist Majority Foundation in 1991, Sparks doesn’t blame that entirely on music-industry misogyny or gatekeeping.

“I think there were many, many circumstances when we were the subject of some bullshit, but also maybe we could have had our shit together a little bit more than we did. So, both things,” Sparks muses. “It’s funny, because I used to say, ‘I’ve got no regrets.’ But I’ve got regrets, absolutely, about some stuff. Maybe we should have tried harder on some things, or sometimes we didn’t take things very seriously. Nirvana didn’t take things seriously either, and they got fucking huge, and we kind of had that same sort of attitude, but we didn’t get huge. But at some point, you’ve got to really, really give a shit about your career. I think we could have taken a little more seriously at the time, and I feel I take L7 far more seriously now than I did back then. … We used to have a lot of in-jokes going on; I regret that shit. I think our audience either enjoyed it, or they were just dumbfounded, like, ‘What’s going on?’ Our roadie is out with a vacuum cleaner onstage during ‘Pretend We’re Dead,’ that kind of shit, just being silly. But that’s also what people loved about us, too.”

One onstage stunt that Sparks can never totally live down, but definitely doesn’t regret, was an infamous 1992 incident at England’s Reading Festival when she removed her tampon and tossed it into the crowd — a response to the violent audience’s hurling mud at the band. “I think some people thought it was wild, and I think a lot of people thought it was gross, and it’s both, so whatever,” she shrugs. “I think for a while I did regret that. I did not want my mother to find out about that. Not that my mother was a prude at all, she was very hip person, but she had a lot of class, and I just thought that she would think that that was just a really lowbrow fucking thing to do. But she actually kind of got it. She’s like, ‘You were being assaulted, and you did something.’ … So, I do not regret that at all. It was ridiculous and funny and feminist and absurd. And we were being pummeled with mud really hard, and it was a fucking assault. … I’ve thought about this over the years, because I always get asked about this, and it’s like when you’re a woman in rock and that goes down, just in my wiring I took it as misogynist. … When you’re an outsider in a dude’s world and that goes down, it’s just like, ‘Fuck!’ And it wasn’t women throwing [mud] at us; it was dudes. So, that’s how I took it. I kind of tried to laugh it off, but it really when it was going down, I was like, ‘Fuck, man. This is harsh.’”

L7 obviously always stood up for themselves, so Sparks’s conversation with Lyndsanity understandably veers towards the above-mentioned Rock for Choice, an L7-curated series of pro-choice benefit concerts inspired by a small Planned Parenthood fundraiser Sparks had organized in her pre-fame days called Rock Against Coat Hangers. “Abortion rights were under attack, and nobody in rock was really doing anything about it. … There were other bands doing benefits for Nicaragua or Rock Against Racism or all kinds of things, but nobody was focused on any women’s issues. I think some women did not even call themselves ‘feminists’ at the time, honestly. So, we were different, and maybe more outspoken on that stuff,” Sparks recalls. But as L7’s star rose, they found many allies —  Sparks says they never had any difficulty recruiting artists, male or female, to take part. Over the years, their Rock for Choice shows not only featured Nirvana but also Bad Religion, the Beastie Boys, Bikini Kill, Foo Fighters, Fugazi, Kim Gordon, Hole, Joan Jett, Lunachicks, Meat Puppets, Mudhoney, No Doubt, the Offspring, Pearl Jam, Liz Phair, Iggy Pop, Zabrecky’s Possum Dixon, Radiohead, Rage Against the Machine, Rancid, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Ween, White Zombie, and X.

Sadly, abortion rights are still under attack three decades later, and they’re “not the only thing on the chopping block, for sure,” Sparks laments. “I think that this election was a big shock to people. I think it was kind of like, ‘Oh, we got this, it’s cool,’ and I think a lot of people are shell-shocked still. … I think this is pretty unprecedented. It was Reagan, and then it was Bush, and then Clinton got in, then W got in — and we thought that was bad! But then Obama got in, and it was like, ‘Yeah, woo!’ So, this is unchartered territory, for the United States at least. I don’t think we’ve ever had anything this bizarre.” But in an odd way, that makes a celebratory event like the Fast and Furious Takeover perfectly timed.

“I heard that MSNBC just lost half their audience, because people just don’t want to watch the news right now because we’re just so fried,” Sparks notes. “So, that’s another reason why I feel this festival is like, hey, we’re the cool culture. Collectively, we make the scene with everybody, with the audience and the bands and everything. So, let’s celebrate. We deserve some fun. We deserve to shake our asses to some rock ‘n’ roll and dance to a dance party. We deserve a night off from that stress and sorrow. I think that this is maybe a good excuse to get out of the house, see your friends, see some bands — and see a lot of women in bands, too. So, come on out if you want to show support for women.”

Watch Donita Sparks’s full, extended video interview in the YouTube player at the top of this article for more talk about the Fast and Frightening Takeover, L7’s early days in the L.A. club scene, the state of rock in 2024, women in rock in the ‘90s, politics, the Spice Girls, and other fascinating subjects.