Morgan and Mercedes Landers have learned a lot in the 11 years since they formed their band, not the least of which is how to put up one heck of a fight
By Jon Wiederhorn
For the women of Kittie, who are currently on the prowl for fashion bargains at the Forever 21 in Midtown Manhattan, an evening of shopping is almost as enjoyable as inciting a vicious circle pit from the stage.
“We’re very serious about our music, but we also love clothes,” says 25-year-old frontwoman Morgan Lander, as she examines the silky fabric of a top. “I feel like it’s our duty to go beyond the ‘band T-shirt and jeans’ look of a lot of our contemporaries. We do like Satan, but we can like nail polish, too.”
An hour later, Lander, guitarist Tara McLeod, 22, and bassist Trish Doan, 21, compare their respective hauls. Morgan shows off a fur-lined black hoodie that elicits “oohs” from her bandmates and a plastic bracelet with a snakeskin design; Doan displays a black shirt; and McLeod sheepishly removes red-and-blue panties from her shopping bag. “When you’re in a band, you cannot have a shortage of underpants,” she says. “Girls aren’t like guys. They can’t turn them inside-out. They need a new pair every day.”
Meanwhile, Morgan’s 23-year-old sister, Mercedes—who is also Kittie’s drummer—has just returned from a solo run to a nearby Victoria’s Secret. Her bag contains a long black shirt decorated with little skulls and a tee adorned with lightning bolts. After some prodding, she also pulls out a cushiony black bra.
“Mmmm, nice,” says Doan. Then everyone in the band takes turns feeling the padding. “I bet that’s gonna get a lot of squeezing on tour,” jokes Morgan.
Of course, this is just one side of Kittie; before the image of a girly group of bandmates can set, they display a knack for coming up with crude one-liners that make their prior talk of fashion and hygiene seem quaint. While waiting for the car service to take them back to their hotel, Morgan blurts out, “I wanna fuck a loose whore.” And McLeod replies, “Hey, I’m not loose.”
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“If I were to put an egg in my mouth, I’m so allergic that my throat would close up and I’d have chest pains. I’d look like a bloated corpse, pretty much.”
“I’d drive a hole in your trachea, though, so you could breathe.”
“Yeah, and then you could fuck my trach afterwards, dude… Hey, that would be a great name for a song!”
Oblivious to the squirming waiter who is trying to take their order, Morgan and Mercedes riff on the singer’s food allergies—and other topics—later that night at dinner. The prevailing good humor is almost enough to make one forget just how much the sisters have had to endure over the last three years: battling to get off their label, losing a guitarist and bassist, and struggling with depression.
“It was so hard to stay motivated,” Morgan says, between bites of her salad. “Mercedes would be sitting at her drums and I’d have on my guitar, and, man, you could feel the tension. We would get into fights for no reason, and one of us would end up crying and shouting, ‘Fuck you! Fuck this!’ because we didn’t have a direction or a sense of purpose anymore.”
They considered breaking up the band and getting day jobs, or finishing high school and going to college. But every time they were about to quit, something held them back. “We decided we couldn’t throw away nine years of work,” Mercedes says. “It would just be way too ridiculous. This is what we were meant to do—we just had to just be patient and wait it out.”
And it’s a good thing they did, because, as their self-released new album, Funeral for Yesterday, demonstrates, Kittie are capable of much more than anyone would have guessed based on their first three albums. The ramshackle structures of earlier efforts have been replaced with concise songwriting, strong hooks, and harmonies as exhilaratingly morose as those of Alice in Chains. It probably helped that there were no label pressures or impending deadlines—they could take their time and experiment, and as they discovered techniques that worked, they only became more fired up to make an album that was significantly different from their past efforts.
“Being down in the basement, jamming this new stuff, reminded me of when we were just starting out,” Morgan says. “When we did our first album [2000’s Spit], everything was fresh and we were so excited. Then came the pressure to succeed, and over the next two records we fell out of love with music and the excitement of writing.”
It was a love that Morgan and Mercedes discovered at an early age: The sisters both started playing piano in early elementary school and wrote their first songs together when Morgan was 8 and Mercedes was 6. “We called ourselves the Beautiful Bitches,“ Morgan laughs. “I don’t even think we knew what bitches were. But from the time that we had our own personalities and were cognitive, I think we knew that this is what we were going to do with our lives.”
The girls went on to form Kittie in 1996 with guitarist Fallon Bowman, who Mercedes knew from gym class. Since all three girls were underage, they persuaded Morgan and Mercedes’ parents, David and Deanna, to manage them and book shows. In February 1998, they played a talent show and followed with their first official gig, a concert for 15 people at an Ontario club named Call the Office.
“I remember being so fucking scared,” says Mercedes. “My foot was shaking so badly on my kick pedal that I could barely play. And I played the wrong song for one of the songs, but we actually got called to do an encore.”
“I don’t know if they thought we were awesome or cute or if they wanted to see us be humiliated one more time,” adds Morgan.
In 1999, Artemis signed the band, but before Kittie could record their debut, original bassist Tanya Candler left due to health problems. She was replaced by Talena Atfield, with whom they recorded Spit, a promising—if messy—nu-metal chug-fest that came out in January 2000. Just a few months later, Kittie were getting national news coverage—which led to the first of many confrontations with Artemis.
“We fuckin’ hated people knowing how old we were, and we tried so hard to not release our ages, but our old label thought it was a good idea,” gripes Mercedes.
“It became more about the novelty of girls who were 15 and 17 years old and less about the songs,” agrees Morgan. “We got a lot of criticism for being so young, and maybe we weren’t fully mature, but I would love to see what those guys who were writing about us were doing when they were 12 and 14—getting their first erections, probably.”
Mercedes was especially irked by critics who gleefully referred to Kittie as “jailbait rockers” and accused them of being sexually provocative by naming songs “Spit,” “Suck,” and “Do You Think I’m a Whore?” “We were playing rock and roll, which is a sexual thing, but we never went onstage in short skirts and no underwear and let everyone see our coochies,” she says.
Not ones to be cowed by flak or condescension, Kittie toured and promoted themselves relentlessly through 2000. They opened for Slipknot, then played Ozzfest. Their single “Brackish” received strong radio airplay. And by October, Spit was certified gold. A month later, Kittie launched a tour with Pantera, an experience that remains one of the high points of their career.
“Vinnie and Dime were my two favorite people in the universe to hang out with and shoot the shit,” Mercedes recalls. “By the end of the night, we’d all get really drunk and break stuff. And I will never forget all the times I barfed.”
But while there were plenty of good times, there were also headaches—and not just from hangovers. The Landers weren’t getting along with Bowman, who wanted to take the band in a less metal, more electronic direction. In 2001, she left the group to start the industrial outfit Amphibious Assault, so Kittie recorded 2001’s Oracle as a three-piece and hired guitarist Jeff Phillips, who now plays in Thine Eyes Bleed (also managed by David and Deanna Lander), to flesh out their group’s sound on tour. A year later, Atfield left, citing financial concerns, and Jennifer Arroyo came aboard. Next, guitarist Lisa Marx joined the band in time to help record 2004’s Until the End, which was a clear step up from Oracle. But while the album was haunting, atmospheric, and impressively heavy, Artemis not only failed to promote it but then went on to append Kittie’s contract to slash the recording budget for their next album—an act that prompted the Landers to sue.
Unable to subsist during the down period, Arroyo and Marx both jumped ship (Arroyo now plays in Suicide City with ex-Biohazard guitarist Billy Graziadei). In March 2005, Kittie finally severed ties with Artemis and received an undisclosed out-of-court settlement for unpaid royalties and 11 breaches of contract.
Despite the positive resolution, it remains a series of unfortunate events that the Landers prefer not to look back on. “The whole point of us continuing as a band and having this new rebirth is to forget all that,” insists Mercedes with a shade of annoyance at even being asked about Artemis and Kittie’s many former bandmates. “All of those people don’t matter at all. They’re dead to us. That’s why we called the album Funeral for Yesterday.”
*****
When Kittie finally began to seek out new members in mid-2005, they didn’t have to look far. McLeod was recruited from a local band called Sherry (the rest of the lineup was fortysomething men), who were regulars on the club circuit around Kittie’s hometown of London, Ontario. “They invited me to jam, and they didn’t ever tell me not to come back,” says McLeod with a smile. “After a while, I just kind of figured I was in the band.”
Kittie had a bit more trouble finding a new bassist. The band auditioned several players, but none worked out. They were initially reluctant to try Doan because they thought her parents wouldn’t let her join. “She was at a pretty expensive school at the time, so we were like, ‘Umm, I don’t know…’” explains Morgan.
When Doan convinced the Landers that her parents were okay with her leaving school, they agreed to bring her in. “I talked to Mercedes on a Thursday, and she said, ‘Okay, can you come over Saturday?’” recalls Doan. “I had two and half days to learn a bunch of songs.”
Like McLeod, Doan had played in a small local band, called Her. And while she was gung-ho about joining Kittie, she hadn’t exactly followed their career that closely. “I actually thought they broke up after their first release,” she admits with a hint of embarrassment.
The new Kittie recruits are well aware that they’re the ninth and 10th members to join the quartet over the past decade, but they’re not worried about history repeating itself. “We get along great,” says McLeod, playfully punching Mercedes on the shoulder. “Nobody acts like a princess, and nobody wants to be catered to. When you live on a bus with three other women, it’s not always a breeze. But it’s a breeze for us because we all respect each other.”
That respect proved helpful during the trial by fire that followed Doan and McLeod’s inauguration. The two had less than a month to learn Kittie’s full set before their first show with the band on September 29, 2005. At the same time, they had to master their parts for Funeral for Yesterday because they were scheduled to enter the studio in December. The band recorded the album in Red Bank, New Jersey, with producer Jack Ponti, an industry veteran who once managed India.Arie and has written songs for Bon Jovi, Doro Pesch, and Alice Cooper. It was he who also inspired Kittie to launch their own record label and helped them secure distribution through EMI.
“We talked to a bunch of indie labels, but when it came down to it, starting our own business seemed like the right thing to do because we’ve always been a self-sufficient do-it-yourself band,” says Mercedes. “We never had help paying for tours, and we do all of our own merch, and we have our own clothing line [Poisoned Black]. So it was just the logical next step.”
Originally, Kittie planned to call their label Kiss of Infamy, but a cease-and-desist order from the lawyers of Kiss demon-bassist/entrepreneur Gene Simmons put the kibosh on that. The band has since renamed the company X of Infamy. “We were really, really bummed out,” Morgan admits. “Gene Simmons apparently owns the word Kiss in anything that has to do with entertainment. But the ‘X’ is clever, because ‘XOXO’ means kiss anyway. And, hey, just being on Gene Simmons’ radar is kind of cool, y’know?”
The Lander sisters have clearly learned—probably out of necessity—to be philosophical about the continual strife that has plagued their band. “It’s pretty easy to get a big head if you have any sort of issues,” explains the singer. “And I think fame tends to unmask your true nature, which can be a lot to deal with when you’re really, really young. But because of the family nature of this band, we’ve always had our heads screwed on, which is how we’ve managed to survive.”
“The song ‘Never Again’ sums everything up,” she concludes. “We’re taking a stand never to be treated a certain way again, never to be walked on again or let ourselves be vulnerable. We’ve dealt with these things before and made our mistakes, and now we’re fucking warriors.”
