The Muffs’ Kim Shattuck In Memoriam: ‘Giddiness, Passion And A Trademark Scream’

(Mariano Regidor / Redferns) –
Kim Shattuck of The Muffs performs onstage at El Sol on (June 17, 2015 in Madrid, Spain.

“Kim Shattuck was a force of nature.”

That phrase was repeated again and again, like a mantra, by friends and fans alike, reacting to news that the Muffs’ guiding light had died on Oct. 2 after a very private two-year battle with ALS.  It’s a fitting way to describe a woman who blazed through her songs and her life with a combination of giddiness and passion – which, as often as not, manifested itself in her trademark scream.

Kim Shattuck, Leader of The Muffs, Dies Of ALS

She wove that wail, one of the most recognizable in rock, into songs like “Lucky Guy” with a remarkable musicality that belied its ferocity – yes, she was shredding her throat while pouring out her heart, but it never felt like an add-on or a put on. There was just so much emotion bubbling up – angst, heartbreak, unbridled happiness – that dictionary-borne words wouldn’t suffice.

Shattuck, a dyed-in-the wool Angeleno right down to her Dodger Blue blood, had an uncanny knack for what to say when words were needed. Having left her first high-profile gig in the Pandoras in 1990 after that band turned away from the bubbly-but-raunchy garage-pop that coulda made them the Stones to the the Bangles’ Beatles, she retreated to – where else? The garage, where she laid the groundwork of what would become the Muffs

In a 2011 interview with Guitar World,  Shattuck said “Stuff like the Red Hot Chili Peppers were happening and I was like, ‘I f**king hate them so much, I have to write the anti-Red Hot Chili Peppers songs’. It was so clear to me what I wanted people to write, and they weren’t. I was like, I just gotta write songs, cause no one’s writing the song I want to hear.”

After recruiting fellow Pandora Melanie Vammen and Ronnie Barnett (who’d remain her musical foil for the next three decades), she began doing just that with the Muffs. The band quickly started churning out wildly catchy, stealthily complicated singles like “New Love,” songs that sounded like three-chord wonders until you tried to dissect them and found just how charmingly weird they really were.

The landscape of the early ‘90s being what it was, weird, catchy songs crafted by a statuesque six-foot blonde with an attitude just bad enough to make you think twice about inviting her to headline the Catholic school dance served as major label bait. So, for the next few years, the Muffs brought the noise (and the hooks) to diehard fans and to the fringes of the pop-culture mainstream – the latter forays best personified by their contributing a cover of Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America” to the film “Clueless,” and contributing their own wacky charm to a commercial for Fruitopia.

It was during this period that Kim fully found her voice – literally and figuratively – on the breathless, seamless one-two punch of Blonder and Blonder and Happy Birthday to Me, albums that stood apart from the monochromes of the alt-world of the mid ‘90s and spawned such live staples as “Sad Tomorrow” and “Oh Nina.” They may not have set the charts on fire, but their industry supporters remained steadfast – steadfast enough that those discs have never gone out of print.

While the Muffs’ output became more sporadic after the turn of the millennium, Kim channeled her  peripatetic nature into other projects that showcased her alternately (and sometimes concurrently) goofy and melancholy worldview. Chief among them was the Beards, a blink-and-you-missed-‘em trio that played but a handful of gigs and left one sadly overlooked recorded document, the 2002 album Funtown – highlighted by Kim’s charmingly befuddled “Big Dumb World” and “1000 Years.”

She took a somewhat more surprising detour when she accepted the assignment to stand in for Kim Deal in a latter-day iteration of the Pixies, only to find that her effervescent Californian nature didn’t mesh well with the comparatively dour vibe of the Bostonians. That came into focus when she got called on the carpet, then got fired, for capturing her very essence by stage-diving to celebrate a set well done. As she recalled later, “When I got offstage, the manager told me not to do that again. I said, ‘Really, for my own safety?’ And he said, ‘No, because the Pixies don’t do that.’”

Perhaps not, but when Shattuck, Barnett and drummer Roy McDonald reconvened not long after, ending a hiatus of nearly a decade, Muffs did that – and they came up with a new batch of songs that were, to a one, worthy of stage-diving to. A lot of those were collected on 2014’s Whoop De Doo (titled after a snark attack from Pixies’ leader Frank Black, who described Shattuck’s sacking just that way), an album that captured lightning, laughter and loopiness in one kaleidoscopic bottle. They were clearly having fun again, as evidenced by the tunes and the chemistry that practically leaps from the screen of the video for “Weird Boy Next Door.”

A solid spate of touring behind that set ended in 2017, and little was heard from any of the members until earlier this year when Shattuck unveiled a one-off project by The Coolies, which reunited her with Vammen, and brought Philly garage veteran Palmyra Delran on for good measure. The goal of that release? To raise money for ALS, a disease that, as they said at the time, “hit close to home.”

It wasn’t until this past Oct. 2 that the outside world found out just how close to home. Kim’s husband, Kevin Sutherland, announced early that day that “This morning the love of my life Kim passed peacefully in her sleep after a two year struggle with ALS… She will live with all of us through her music, our shared memories and in her fierce creative spirit. ”



Shattuck kept working for much of her battle with the disease. Even when unable to play, sing, or even communicate by talking, she took the production reins of No Holiday, the final Muffs album – sitting with her bandmates and giving directions via an eye-controlled device often used by those with motor diseases. It’s to Kim’s credit that she engendered the loyalty of loved ones who abided by her wishes to maintain a veil of privacy around her illness; it’s even more of a credit that she crafted a final statement that’s every bit as life-affirming as any of her career.

No Holiday all but demands the listener turn it up – and scream along, through the laughter and the tears.