GIRLS + GUITARS
The Real Story of The Runaways
The following excerpt is taken from the opening pages of QUEENS OF NOISE: The Real Story of the Runaways by Evelyn McDonnell
It’s June 1977. Do you know where your daughters are?
Lita Ford plants her leather boots on the stage of a Japanese TV studio.The eighteen-year-old beauty from working-class Long Beach bends her knees, leans back, swings her long blonde hair behind her as if it were a counter-weight to her electric guitar, and shreds. Her left hand runs up and down the frets with easy assurance, deftly picking notes with the creative dexterity of her guitar heroes, men such as Ritchie Blackmore (Deep Purple), Jimi Hendrix, and Jeff Beck. She’s playing hard, rocking leads like no teenage girl has played them before or, arguably, since. Even in a grainy nth-generation bootleg of this 1977 show, her confidence is palpable; her smile perks up the smidgen of baby fat still lingering on her cherubic cheeks. Lovely Lita—with satin short shorts, tight T-shirt, and hard-body Hamer guitar—is hot, and she knows it.
All of them, the five teenage girls from suburban Los Angeles who have banded together as the Runaways, are on fire, performing in front of a live audience that screams their names. Singer Cherie Currie wears her infamous bustier like it’s athletic wear. She commands the stage with the cat-like moves of her hero, David Bowie—swinging her mic as if she’s ready to take someone out with it when she’s not singing in a husky, come-here-go-away voice.
Statuesque bassist Jackie Fox doesn’t need her bandmates’ platform heels; she’s a towering Stevie Nicks in peasant blouse and jeans—saluting the Japanese fans in between coolly plucking the bottom tones that give the Runaways’ glam rock its boogie base.
Laying down the chinka-chinka guitar rhythms of the band’s dirty rock sound, Joan Jett is already Joan Jett: a cute but dark-eyed tomboy in a custom, red catsuit—gymnast meets race-car driver—and, of course, boots. She has outlined her Cleopatra eyes in dark liner and sings with the sexy bravado of one who was once painfully shy.
Behind them all sits the Runaways’ not-so-secret weapon: Sandy West twirls her sticks between her fingers, then hits her drums, hard. Her arms are muscled ropes—West had arms like Tina Turner has legs—and her hair is a blow-dried, feathered, golden California dream. She bangs the sticks together: 1–2–3–4. “It’s all right,” the Runaways sing in unison.
The Runaways were more than all right. Seeing footage of the band at the height of their career, during their triumphant first (and last) tour of Japan, it’s hard to believe they didn’t become one of the greatest acts of their time—that we don’t speak their names in the same breath as the Ramones, Sex Pistols, Kiss, Aerosmith, and Blondie. They had the whole package: Catchy songs, hard riffs, great looks, distinct personalities, and, of course, novelty appeal. (Look: Girls plus guitars!) They also had something that cannot be manufactured, no matter how cunning your maverick manager is: a spark of explosive creative chemistry, the primal energy that Iggy Pop calls “raw power.” The Runaways could play like the boys, but without once pretending they weren’t girls. They tapped into the hormonal horniness that made Ronnie Spector shout, Tina Turner shake, and Janis Joplin moan, only they did it while also armed with electric guitars and loud drums. Watch wide-eyed Cherie snap her arms and reach down into her diaphragm. She pulls up notes dripping with guts and blood, the cherry bomb about to blow.
“It was about tapping into all the things teenage girls feel, and that
means everything, from the sexual, to just the hanging out, to the introspection—you know, self-esteem issues,” says Jett. “Everything teenage girls go through, we wanted to try and touch on.”
Two years prior to their Tokyo takeover, none of these adolescent Angelenas knew each other. They lived in disparate parts of a sprawling city, a swinging corner of a post–women’s lib/Title IX world. They were latchkey kids—children of B-movie stars, of divorce, of death, of immigrants, of Creem magazine, and of rock ’n’ roll radio. But they all found salvation in music, and they also shared a refusal to see their genital and genetic makeup as a handicap.
A charismatic but eccentric music producer and songwriter—the legendary/infamous Kim Fowley—helped to bring them together in the Babylon bohemian bacchanal of Hollywood studios, clubs, and rehearsal spaces. They became the first all-girl, all-teenage rock band to sign a major-label deal, release five albums, get tons of press (some ecstatic, some misogynist), and tour the world. They explicitly saw themselves as the female answer to Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. The Fabulous Five (as Fowley called them) worked their butts off to make it. Along the way they endured perhaps unprecedented levels of abuse, a fair amount of it self-inflicted.
