Babes in Toyland

Babes in Toyland was an American all-female grunge/punk trio formed in Minneapolis in 1987. Members included Kat Bjelland (guitar and vocals), Lori Barbero (drums) and Michelle Leon (bass). Leon left the band in 1992 and was replaced by Maureen Herman. The band achieved notoriety through Bjelland's "baby doll" image, sometimes referred to as the "kinderwhore" look, which contrasted dramatically with the raw power of her singing voice and her aggressive lyrics. The band's first major label album, Fontanelle, sold around 200,000 copies. The lead song on the album, "Bruise Violet", is said to be an attack on Courtney Love of Hole: "You see the stars through eyes lit up with lies/You got your stories all twisted up in mine." (Love is a former bandmate of Bjelland's.) However, in a recent interview, Bjelland has denied this, saying instead that "Violet" was the name of a muse to both her and Love. The band was picked to take part in the 1993 Lollapalooza tour. While the band was inspirational to many performers in the Olympia, WA-based riot grrrl movement, they never participated directly, and were closer to the Minneapolis punk rock and international grunge scenes of the day. The band was the subject of the 1994 book, Babes in Toyland: The Making and Selling of a Rock and Roll Band by Neal Karlen, which dealt with the band's signing to Warner and the recording of Fontanelle. The band also appears in the 1992 documentary, 1991: The Year Punk Broke.

The band split and reformed throughout the 1990s, losing their record label when Herman left the band in 1996. Dana Cochrane, formerly of Mickey Finn, played bass with the band during live gigs in 1996. Leon rejoined for a brief period in 1997, after which the band went into hiatus, and Bjelland and Barbero played with a new bassist, Jesse Farmer, in 2000. But a year earlier, Bjelland had formed a new band, Katastrophy Wife, which seemed to replace Babes as her main vehicle. Babes in Toyland (with Farmer on bass) played a reunion show billed as "The Last Tour" on November 21, 2001--released as a live album called Minneapolism--and this seems to be the last official Babes activity; Bjelland played some shows in Europe in 2002 as Babes in Toyland with a new drummer and bassist, but stopped using the name after Barbero and Herman raised legal issues.