Buffalo Rising Online

Jan 15th 2008, 1:14pm By Jerome Lindberg

Feb. 15th is a date to mark on your calendar if you’re a fan of the arts or of the Buffalo music scene. At 7 p.m., Villa Maria College will host a collective of musicians, performance artists, dancers, and martial arts inspired performers as a benefit for the Kristen Pfaff Memorial Scholarship Fund. The evening, entitled “Battle Battle” will also serve as the record release party for the scholarship’s founder, Jason Pfaff, Kristen's younger brother. Three years in the making, Jason’s “Battle Battle” project encompasses many musical genres, and will no doubt be a memorable show.

Kristen Pfaff is probably most famous for her stint as the bass player for the group Hole, and locally as an inductee into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame in 1994, shortly after her death. She grew up in Amherst, and attended Sacred Heart Academy on a scholarship. She attended Boston College on a scholarship as well, and was an honor student throughout her academic career. After spending some time abroad in the Netherlands, Kristen then moved to the University of Minnesota, where she helped to organize the college radio station and worked to set up better security on campus. During this time in her life, she was moving away from her training as a classical pianist, and teaching herself to play the bass guitar.

Janitor Joe was the name of Kristen’s first touring band, where she honed her craft on the bass and co-wrote songs. Janitor Joe had several releases, from singles to their full length album “Big Metal Birds“ released on Amphetamine Reptile Records. It was during a tour with Janitor Joe that Kristen was offerered the opportunity to play bass with Hole on their European tour by Eric Erlandson and Courtney Love. After the tour, Kristen left the Minneapolis area to move to Seattle, but not without reservations about having to leave her band and friends. In the words of the former director of the Kristen Pfaff scholarship fund in Minnesota, “I don’t think she looked at joining Hole to become famous, I think she believed in the music and thought of it as a way to affect culture in a big way. She was a women’s rights activist and had much passion for her activism and work outside the music scene.” Regardless, Hole, in 1993 was on the brink of becoming a gigantic group, and the album that Kristen helped co-write “Live Through This” established Hole as a household name.

If you didn’t wear a flannel shirt around your waist at one point in the nineties, then you probably think of grunge music as “what was popular before Green Day”. It’s difficult now to explain fully what exactly the grunge revolution was, but I think at it’s heart there was a thrift store wildness to the sound that had died in early nineties rock. No one embodied this more that Courtney Love’s husband Kurt Cobain. In 1994 Kurt and Courtney were the Brad and Angelina of their time, followed by media and hounded to no end. Kurts suicide not only sounded an end to an era, but also put the future of Hole in question. Kristen, who had been debating leaving the band already, decided to take her leave of Seattle and the demons she had there, and return to Minneapolis. Unfortunately, the night before she left, with all of her things packed, she succumbed to a self administered and fatal dose of heroin.

Kristen was inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame in October of 1994. Skepticism and conspiracies surrounded her death, but her spirit continued to inspire her friends and family to honor her memory. The radio station she had helped build in Minneapolis held a concert for a scholarship in her name at the University of Minnesota, but that scholarship was not endowed and no longer exists. This is why Jason is hoping to raise $10,000 dollars with his production company NOWON productions, in order to create a scholarship at Villa Maria that would sustain itself.

“ Kristen and I always said we would be in a band together.” Jason said as we sat in Spot coffee the last week, talking about the past and the future. In my hand I was holding a picture of Jason and Kristen in their youth, along with a note explaining the picture as “ Jason and Kristen on a family trip to Cape Cod. On this trip they got to meet James Brown, after their father accidentally set off the security alarm at the Kennedy compound/” . Jason explains the significance of the term “ Battle Battle” to me, It was the name of a singing game he and his sister played in their youth. Jason has roots in the Buffalo music scene dating back to the band he played drums for in the 90’s ,Rainbow Girls. Rainbow Girls was one of the opening bands for a memorable late nineties Buffalo Ween concert, and they made it to Minneapolis to play at Kristen’s benefit concert. They were also signed to the infamous CashCow record label. Jason moved into electronic music in the late nineties , his project “Ribcage” had performances at many buffalo multimedia events, including Craig Reynolds’ “Murder the Word” show. Jason then took a break from songwriting when his son Lucas was born, with area songwriter Michelle Weber, and has not performed in public since 1999. The “Battle Battle” C.D. and it’s performance at Villa Maria will be not only his return to performance, but the first show produced by his NOWON production company.

We talked about the local scene, Jason naming Sleeping Kings of Iona and Knife Crazy as a few of his local favorites, and I asked him about his influences, to which he listed : Bjork, Daniel Lanois, Neil Young, The Orb, and Explosions in the Sky. The topic of conversation moved onto the other plans he has for his production company which include an Buffalo Electronic Music Festival he hopes to throw soon, as well as a self sustaining,artistic walkway for pedestrians and bicyclers following the train tracks across New York State, a slightly more ambitious project. But first and foremost is the “Battle Battle” project, the culmination of three years of work.

As head of the scholarship board, Jason hopes to realize a promise he made at his sister’s funeral to “Keep Kristen’s spirit and memory alive forever.” If all goes well, the scholarship could be available for use as early as Fall 2008. The music that Jason has produced, though it may have more in common with Four-tet than Mudhoney, proves that the Pfaff family was blessed with multiple geniuses, and multi-media event he has planned to accompany his music promises to be one of the more interesting nights of music in Buffalo this year. So mark your calendars, and head over to Villa Maria Feb. 15 to support the arts, pay homage to the spirit of one of Buffalo’s great musical exports, and help a brother fulfill a promise to his sister. Tickets and more information are available at www.nowonproductions.com