I Love Playing With Fire?????

I certainly don't want to belabor the "drama" of the previous post, but Cherie Currie's response to my apparently fact-deficient post brought this to mind immediately - a page taken from that giant CREEM book that was published a couple of years ago. I read CREEM pretty religiously back in my youth, and being an impressionable teen, I suppose I should wonder if CREEM's dislike of The Runaways became my own dislike.

I find it all somewhat amusing, though not really outright funny. The women of the Runaways seem to have a fixation on ass-kicking, whether they're the kickers or the asses (Joan's letter to CREEM, Cherie's response to my previous post), and it only makes me think about the idea that Rock'n'Roll has historically been a male-dominated field, and how hard it must have been for an all-female band like The Runaways to be taken seriously by anyone, let alone break through to any sort of popularity, nevermind respect.

It also makes me wonder if the women of The Runaways were hard-asses to begin with, or if they had to adopt that sort of ass-kicking posture/attitude to merely exist in that male-dominated world of Rawk. Either way, they stick up for themselves, and that's as it should be, especially with professional music journalists at major publications, and slightly less-so with armchair bloggers with seven readers.

Hotcha! Hank

Something 4 The Weekend # 154

Joan Jett & The Blackhearts: Album: "A Hundred Feet Away" [mp3]

Man, you would think that as a hormonal teenaged boy, I would have had a serious musical boner for The Runaways, but the truth is, I hated 'em. Oh sure, they were attractive to me, especially Cherie Currie and Jackie Fox, and super-especially Joan Jett, but they were a manufactured band, the brainchild of Rodney Bingenheimer, an LA DJ and impresario, and even in my youth, I had no use for that kind of pre-fab bullshit. It seemed Bingenheimer was going out of his way to sell boys like me The Runaways through our dicks, and not through our ears. I can't blame him for that, because the band sucked, and if he couldn't sell the band's music, his only other option was to sell their gender, their sexuality. I wasn't buying it.

Now, I'm not saying the women of The Runaways were horrible musicians, because they were certainly good enough to play the kind of music they were playing, and hang with all the more "legit" Rock and Punk bands of 1970's Los Angeles, their peers, but there was always a sense with this band, and you could hear it in their songs, that they were weak sauce, that they weren't quite good and real enough to matter.

But in the aftermath of The Runaways, there was Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, and for reasons I still can't explain (physical attraction played a part, no doubt), I loved Joan Jett. I loved Joan Jett so much that for the better part of a year I wore a red bandanna around my right wrist just like the one Joan is sporting on this album cover. I took plenty of shit for this from my friends, but I didn't care. Joan was snarly, and angry, and relied on old school rock to inform her own amplified music, and I was cool with that.

These days, I'm much less impressed with the music she was putting out back in the 1980's. She relied on cover tunes to fill up her albums and propel her to stardom, and many of her originals don't hold up so well, but I do respect the fact that she's become a bonafide lifer, closing in on 40 years as a professional musician. I don't follow her career very closely any more, but it's still good to know Joan Jett's out there, living the dream.

Hotcha! Hank