jizzy
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Post by jizzy on Jun 22, 2010 12:46:10 GMT -5
CRAWDADDY OCTOBER 1976
RUN RUN RUN RUN RUNAWAYS By Charles M Young
Cherie Currie asks to borrow a sheet of paper from my steno pad which she folds lengthwise and stuffs in the crotch of her red jumpsuit. “My skin is allergic to the metal in the zipper.” Says the lead singer in The Runaways. I sort of stand there, gazing at her half exposed breasts, wondering if I’m supposed to make some witty double-entendre or sympathize with her plight. “Look, you don’t have to believe me!” she explodes suddenly, turning away. “I can’t dance when I itch.” I protest my belief and suggest she autograph the paper for me after the practice session. Stomping back to the stage, she sears my retinas with an on-Christ-not-another-a****** look. The rest of The Runaways are charging around the SIR rehearsal studios in Hollywood with squirt guns – much to the frustration of several roadies from other bands who want to get down to some serious flirting and have only wet tshirts to show for their efforts. Every frew minutes, bassist Jackie Fox screeches from around the corner, “You can squirt me anywhere, but NOT in the face! You’ll ruin my mascara!”
Cherie spends the break practicing a complicated move where she twirls her microphone around both thighs and has it pop up between her legs, ready for the next verse. She slams the mike into the floor several times and finally bangs it into her head. “Dogs***! f**kthis thing!” She speaks as if the mike and the universe were in conspiracy to bruise her temple and she is not going to tolerate this injustice.
Returned from the water wars with soaked hair and no make-up left on her face, rhythm guitarist Joan Jett steps to the microphone and repeats to no one in particular: “Dogs***ttt. f**kkk. You notice how she always puts the emphasis on the last letter? Dogs***tt. f**kkkk”. She underlines her observation with some earsplitting licks on her guitar from “You Drive Me Wild”.
Cherie tries her moves once more, this time wrapping the mike around her foot. “I’ve gained five pounds,” she tells Joan, her anger gone. “I’m up to 103” Joan murmurs her approval. The weight gain is good news because Cherie (shuhree) has been ailing off and on since she spent four days in the hospital having her tonsils removed. That was three months ago, and it is hard to believe that she could look any thinner or paler. With her hair bleached as blonde as Lady Clairol can make it, she appears almost albino. I have to look twice to decide she’s stunningly beautiful and not just stunning. It is a fragile beauty I ache over rather than lust after.
“In San Diego, the males in the audience were jacking off against the stage,” says Kenny Ortega, choreographer for the Tubes and now The Runaways. “All these kids were just berserk, clawing and leaping over each other to get at the girls. I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s no telling what this band can do.” Ortega calls an end to the break and asks that they run through their anthem, “Cherry Bomb”. As the drums and bass pound out the introduction, Cherie prances to center stage like Olivia Newton-John with a Mick Jagger gonad transplant. “I’ll give you something/To live for/Have ya/Grab ya/ Till you’re sore.” Suddenly I am overcome with the urge to jack off against the stage, get my teeth kicked out by a vicious roadie, claw my way through a thousand demented teenagers puking cheap wine and luded out of their cerebral cortexes, just so I could touch the platform boots of these 16 year old girls. They thunder a direct sexual challenge, almost too threatening, like the Stones or Alice Cooper in the beginning. None of this how-could-you-leave-me-my-life-has-turned-to-s***; none of this I’m-a-Cosmo-girl-and-if-I-paint-my-nipples-pink-the-boss-might-be-fooled-into-marrying-a-mouseburger-like-me s***. It’s what the sexual revolution should have been… it’s the polymorphous perverse… it’s love at first sight! It’s the end of my writing career if they don’t become a big deal!
And beyond Cherie, the frial and temperamental Venus now shaking her butt and pointing around the room at a couple dozen slavering men, there are four other focal points: Joan, with her lacerating sense of rhythm, smart enough to write great lyrics and young enough to believe they mean something. Jackie the Jewish princess with her 170 IQ lurking in a perfect Surfer Girl bod: LIta Ford on lead, the earth mother manipulating that guitar into her groin with sinister abandon: and Sandy West, with arms like an Olympic swimmer, laying down the heavy Primal Thump in the grand tradition of John Bonham.
Roger McGuinn has wandered in from another studio where he has been rehearsing his new band on “Eight Miles High” and Mr Tamborine Man”. I ask him if he feels old looking at this new generation of rockers. “They’re just carrying on the tradition,” he says, “They have a ways to go instrumentally, but I think they’re great. For the first time I understand what a woman must feel when she looks at an all male band, “Hello daddy/Hello Mom/I’m a chchchch cherry bomb.” Wow!
“Handling Cherie Currie’s ego is like having a dog urinate in your face,” says Kim Fowley, 37, veteran of 17 years in the recording industry with 48 gold records to his credit, founding member of the Hollywood Argyles and co-lead singer on the immortal “Alley Oop”, lyricist on innumerable songs by The Byrds and Kiss and Deep Purple and The Runaways etc, producer of The Runaways, owner of lots of stuff that has nothing to do with music, eater of TV dinners in front of journalists who love to portray him as a wonderfully eccentric millionaire, knower of almost everyone famous or powerful in Los Angeles. “The first time Cherie Currie or Scott Anderson (their manager) got out of line, I should have gone down there on a Jewish level and kicked ass.”
Fowley blamed his current estrangement from The Runaways, who were brought together largely through his searching out and auditioning dozens of girls, on a simple lack of ambition. “I have this tremendous talent, but it was like putting an Einstien brain in a cantaloupe. They didn’t give me all the pieces. I’m like a million other guys with no drive to make it. I hate rock n roll. I hate Hollywood. I hate the whole process of rape that is making it in showbiz. I’m a quiet, sensitive type who can appreciate Mahler and Beethoven.
“I was going to form a band of dwarves, but their hands were too small. Then I thought maybe amputees, but they couldn’t hold their instruments. The all female band is an historical development stemming from the girls growing up with no alternatives outside of being idiots, from girls blowing up buildings and trying to assassinate presidents, from girls who sit at concerts with a****** boyfriends who worship the bands from a Popular Mechanics evaluation of their amplifiers. With The Runaways, the boys would have something to masturbate too, and the girls a new sensibility to listen to. The popular male groups are too old to respond to the inhuman treatment of teenagers by dying parents in their golden prisons of the invisible suburban ghettos.”
Fowley’s stepgrandfather, Rudolph Friml, wrote “Indian Love Call” for Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald. His father, Douglas Fowley, played Doc Holiday on the old Wyatt Earp TV show and was the moustachioed bad guy in over two hundred B pictures. Tall and gaunt, son Kim definitely looks like the son of a professional villain, but you tend to forget his bizarre appearance under the sheer force of his words, which flow as fast as he can free associate. His small apartment is decorated with a few gold records on the wall and some nondescript furniture that fits in with his self-proclaimed image as the ascetic genius of rock n roll.
“It’s all over now,” he says. “They were a conceptual rock project that failed. It’s all mechanical anyway. The only guy who’s honest is the guy who sings in the shower. Everyone else is a prostitute.”
“You’re puncturing my mythology.” I object, “I’ve sent he band and I was blown away. I’m in love with all five of them.”
“How dare you call this mythology! This is business! Recognize a pop architect. You were sucked in. I filled a hole in your life. I knew guys like you would think this way about the Runaways.”
“You are so eloquent talking about the whole rotten scene of being an adolescent in America,” I continue. “Don’t you empathize at all?”
“I’m like the man who manufactures aspirin. I don’t empathize with all those headaches; I just want to sell aspirin. Cherie’s lack of greatness is interfering with the product. Old people have worse problems and you don’t see me forming a band of senior citizens, do you? Cherie’s lack of rock n roll authority is horrifying. She comes fromm an MOR environment.”
The phone rings and Fowley answers immediately, “Hello, I’m totally depressed. I feel like Ingmar Bergman on a clody day in Stockholm. Who is this?.... No I cut my hair. I now look like an English homosexual. Shall I fly you out here from Chicago? I’d f**k you and you’d come and you’d cry and you’d probably fall in love with me. My girlfriend is acting up and so is the one who wants to take her place…. Heavy single action in Massachusetts, huh? ‘Cherry Bomb’ went from 29 to 16 San Diego?... Yeah, thanks… That was Mercury records in Chicago. The band ought to be in Boston right now trying to break that single. Instead, they are diddling around here with rehearsals. I have no control. Legally, I’m their producer and publisher and I’ve been shoved out of everything else. It ended the day Cherie called me on the phone and told me I couldn’t teach her jack s***. If she wants to rebel let her go back to social studies class. Let her join the millions of other teenagers who have no future. She took what she wanted and discarded the other elements of instruction.”
I say that rock n roll has always seemed to me the essence of democracy, that anyone with the hormones to play three power chords in a garage band could be a star. “She did not follow the script. This is a movie, and there’s nothing democratic about it. As Elia Kazan was to James Dean, I am to The Runaways.”
Fowley takes an ashtray and dumps the contents on Cherie’s picture on the album cover. “She’s a 16 year old girl,” I say.
“I don’t care if she’s 75, she can still be a creep. The best thing that could happen to this band would be if Cherie hung herself froma shower rod and put herself in the tradition of Marilyn Monroe and Patty Hearst. I am a con artist who wanted to pull the ultimate scam. They are a******s who didn’t understand the hustle. They were going to be my last group. The dream is dead.”
As I rise to leave, he asks, “How legendary am I back in New York?”
Leona Curry, 78 year old grandmother of the Cherry Bomb, opens the door after two or three rings on the bell. She apologizes for not answering it sooner – since the car accident shattered her hip a year ago, she hasn’t been able to move around as fast as she’d like. She shuffles slowly on her cane into the living room. Copies of National Star and Readers Digest dot the coffee table…. And there’s this picture of Cherie standing next to a horse. “No, that’s Marie,” says Leona. “The only way you can tell them apart is that Marie is slightly taller.” She shuffles to an overstuffed armchair and with considerable effort pulls a box from underneath that is filled with scrapbooks and old photographs. She is particularly proud of an 8x10 showing two identical blonde tots in sailor suits, one playing a ukulele and the other wearing a sombrero. “Cherie was the more sky,” she says. “She would get scared in her high chair, and Marie could intimidate her almost from the beginning. I think the band is giving her more confidence.”
I ask her opinion of their song lyrics. “I try to ignore the band’s language,” she says. “But it has to be. If they sang hymns, it wouldn’t fit their image. They get quite a kick when I tell them I wore shoes and stockings to swim when I was their age. They say, ‘I’m glad I wasn’t alive back then.’ But I figure they’d have been just like anyone else. The music itself is terrific. I just can’t imagine a girl playing the drums like Sandy.”
Cherie returns from the drug store with a package of hair dye. She kisses her grandmother hello and then sees the baby pictures. “You didn’t show him that one, did you?” she cries, referring to the sailor suit. She grabs it out of Leona’s hand and throws it behind the chair, “It’s stupitt!” “You aren’t ashamed of that photograph,” says Leona. “Because if you are, then I’m…..” She doesn’t quite get “ashamed of you” out of her mouth, Cherie has found a snapshot of herself and Marie on Santa’s knee which she holds out.
“This one’s better.” She says. The two make up and kiss again as quickly as the original flareup. She asks me if it’s OK to bleach her hair while I interview her. I don’t make any jokes as she squeezes a plastic bottle of disgusting brown gunk on her head.
“My first professional singing experience came at the age of two,” she says. “Marie and I sat on Fred MacMurray’s knee on the old ‘My Three Sons’ show and sang “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” The only thing I remember is this big dog that kept attacking me.”
She names everyone from Alice Cooper to Barry Manilow as musical interest. “Well I’m more into melody than some members of the band.” She says. “My biggest influence, though is David Bowie. I went through a period of several months after the Diamond Dogs your where I walked, talked, ate and breathed David Bowie. I had over 300 pictures of him on my bedroom wall. I acted out one of his songs in my junior high talent show. I dressed and cut my hair like him. Nobody could look me in the eye cause Bowie was spacey. One day this boy called me a freak and I went crazy. I grabbed him by the ssweater and twirled him around and threw hm about ten feet onto the sidewalk. I’d never done it before, and couldn’t do it again. It was a case of mind over matter. My friends finally had to pull me out of the Bowie thing. I was too much into him.”
Cherie’s academic career was mainly distinguished by getting thrown out of one high school and sent to another along with her sister. There were a lot of drugs involved – “everything short of shooting up” – as well as the usual ditching and smoking. Last fall, Kim Fowley discovered her sitting on a barstool in the Sugar Shack, a North Hollywood night spot for people under age 21. Her mother, recently remarried to an international businessman after a bitter divorce two years ago, offered to take her to Indonesia to live, but Cherie opted for the band. She is currently working for a general equivalency diploma so she won’t have to attend classes anymore. “The only thing I want to do is sing,” she says. “And I can’t learn about that in school.”
I return to David Bowie with some abstract questions about why her generation is fascinated with bisexuality in the same way mine was with dope (she’s 16, I’m 25). The subject makes her slightly defensive. She says The Runaways are completely heterosexual in their approach and there is nothing wrong if she wants to wink at a girl in the audience. But why did she personally lose her identity to David Bowie? Where did the superhuman strength to beat up that boy come from?
She asks me to put down my pen and tells a story that she decided to let me use only after a couple of days of consultation with her best friend, Joan. “I was raped.” She says. “It was my first experience that way. My sister dropped her boyfriend who was 21 and he tried to pay her back by hurting me. He just got crazy one night… I went to school the next day in shock. My friends finally noticed the bleeding and took me to the nurse. I was pretty badly hurt and had to go to the doctor every other day for a long time. Within two weeks I was engulfed by David Bowie. He was like God, so different. I wanted to be different. In my state of mind, I had to be. I wasn’t anti-male; I was anti-everybody.”
And Kim Fowley? “I can’t stand to be pushed around. He threw things at me, he insulted me, I’d confide in him and he’d use it against me later in an argument. Like I told him I was interested in melodic songs and he accused me of lacking rock n roll authority. But he did help me in the studio. He is very talented, I think he’s a good man who hides behind his image.”
I say that she and her grandmother have been through a lot together. “I’d give my right arm for that woman without even asking why. She practically raised me, and until the accident, she did everything with us kids. The hospital was the first time she’d eve been around old people and it depressed her so much she almost died. She kept going for us.”
For them to have endured such trials and emerged with so much energy, I tell her they must have some pretty good chromosomes in their family. “I don’t know,” she says “What does chromosome mean?”
Cruising past the Institute of Oral Love on Santa Monica Blvd in The Runaways’ VW bus, Joan Jett explains the good technique. “Sometimes the prostitutes bring out electric heaters on cold nights on the sidewalk,” she says. “We pull up next to the curb and ask their prices. Then we short out their heaters with the seltzer bottle.” The vice squad has been exceptionally active in the past week, however, and there are no prime candidates.
We pull into a supermarket parking lot so Scott Anderson can cash a check to pay for Cherie’s imminent visit to the emergency ward for an inflamed lymph node in her left thigh. A woman pulls her Volkswagen into the spot next to us after a short delay for a slow-moving Cadillac. “gd*** Jews own the world.” She sasys, stomping into the store.
Kent Smythe, a roadie, hops out of the truck and waters the interior of the biddies car. She returns in a few minutes and hisses, “Did you spi on my seat?” Her hair is dyed black and her face is covered with about a pound of pancake makeup but her age is obviously around 55.
“No. I was adjusting the wind wing,” says Kent. “Wind wing?” “You wind wing too,” he replies, “if it happened to you.” While Joan and Cherie are trying to suppress open laughter, Jackie loses it completely and shouts, “Jew hater!” “You’re gd*** right I’m a jew hater,” the woman says. Kent lifts the seltzer from below the seat and splatters her square in the face. “YOU LITTLE CUNT!” she screams, clawing through an open window at Cherie. Kent starts the truck and we drag the woman about 15 feet through the parking lot before speeding down a dark side street. There is an immediate sense of history having been made – at last, the perfect seltzer victim. The incident will go well with last New Year’s Eve, when they grabbed one of their more persistently obnoxious fans at their hotel, stripped him, tied him to a chair and set him in the street.
The mood grows more thoughtful as we approach the hospital. “I had a dream the other night,” says Joan. “I get riddled with bullets while I’m playing on stage. All this blood comes pouring out the holes in my guitar. I say, “I’m shot. I’m shot.” But everybody thinks the bleeding is part of the act. I crawl over to Sandy and tell her to go on with the show and I pass out.”
I ask if she’s had any other good dreams. “Not like that one,” she says. “When I was little I used to be afraid of baseball mitts.”
”I dreamed I saw Kiss in the nude,” offers Jackie.
Joan Jett’s half of the tiny bedroom is covered with Suzi Quatro posters with some rock memorabilia scattered around, like David Johanssen’s beer bottle which she stole off the stage when the New York Dolls played LA. Her little sister’s half is decorated with animal pictures. Joan’s scrapbook is filled with Runaways reviews and autographs ranging from John Denver (“Yucchh!) to Keith Moon. There are also some scrawled notes from Cherie written when she was delirious in the hospital. They promise undying love and devotion for Joan’s staying at her bedside. I try to play her something from The Ramones album to get her opinion of their East Coast equivalent but the dimestore stereo from which she learned to play guitar picks up only one track.
“We’d probably be in juvenile hall right now if it weren’t for the band,” she says. “I had nothing to look forward to – just finish high school and go to work in a movie theatre or something. I need excitement in my life. I was already doing weird stuff and getting in trouble for it.”
She pulls out a pair of seven inch platforms from under the bed. They have Suzi Quatro written in big letters between the sole and heel. She used to wear them to Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Discotheque, the only place in LA where you could listen to white rock n roll without interruption from the disco sound (Rodney’s has been closed now for over a yaer). It was there she met Kari Krome, 14 year old lyricist on “Thunder” and “Secrets” on The Runaways album, who had in turn met Kim Fowley at an Alice Cooper party. Fowley told Kari to find someone who could play like she wrote and there was Joan, the original Runaway, soul of the band in the same way Keith Richard is to The Stones. Tell her, “Hey, you know you’re really good?” and she answers with utter sincerity, “I don’t know, I’m modest.”
Having moved 14 times, Joan has been pretty much a loner, with her only current close friends being the girls in the band. Her mother and father separated a year ago. “I play rhythm guitar because I get off on the power. We’re singing about stuff that nobody else is and it’s very important. There is no difference in our stage stance and what we do in our private lives.” I press her about her own sexual aggressiveness but she blushes and refuses to answer.
“I know Kim is in it only for the mney, but why is he trying to destroy something befire it makes the money? He probably told you about bleeding like a dog for the band. I;m really confused. It gets Cherie very depressed to have her producer bad-rapping her. We’ve all had arguments, but for some reason things seem to stick in her mind.”
Did she want to die before she got old? “I never thought I’d live very long. David Bowie said some rock star would get shot on stage, and you can always get hit in the had with a bottle.”
And The Stones? “I think they’re embarrassing. You’d think they would know when to quit. They were good once, but now they suck.”
She introduces me to her 14 year old brother who is covered in freckles. “Yeah they’re beginning to turn into zits now,” he says.
If rock n roll is a response to inhuman treatment of teenagers by dying parents in invisible suburban ghettos – as Kim Fowley maintains – then the Sugar Shack sounds the funeral dirge. In Sugar-land, death comes swiftly on the 22nd birthday, and the survivors celebrate their fast waning lives with wild abandon; here, age happens only to other people. In North Hollywood, they chug-a-lug Quaaludes and do the time warp shuffle in the Sugar Shack. “There is no place like this place, anywhere near this place, so tis must be the place,” reads a sign over the soda bar.
Defying the jaws of death on a press pass (being four years beyond the age limit). I walk with Joan past a couple of burly guards who check ID’s and weed out those who are too obviously stoned. Physically the place looks like any other medium sized disco except for the complete absence of anyone old or ugly. Joan;s face, usually filled with adolescent rage and wonder, becomes almost Madonna-like amidst the blaring records and flashing lights. The DJ puts on “Cherry Bomb” in her honor and the dancers all ape Cherie’s stage moves. A few kids recognize Joan: she is relieved when they go away. I ask her if she would like to dance but she says she never dances, only watches. I return to the parking lot for some air.
Sudeenly a familiar face passes by, “Cherie!” I call. This is odd, I think. We just left her home, sick. With an unmistakable look of fear, the girl turns, waves, and disappears into the club. It is Marie.
“I actually get a laugh out of being mistaken for her,: she says later in the parking lot. “But I was attacked three times by men who thought I was Cherie when they played at the Starwood. Now they have to assign me a body guard.”
Asked about the rape, Marie says, “In a sense, the experience was good for her. She came out of it a much stronger person. She never stood up for her rights before. Now she can fight.”
A police car passes and asks some other kids to move on. “Hey! Are we stars on American Bandstand or what?” says Marie’s 19 year old boyfriend Emmanuel. “Yeah, we’re dance couple number one.” He continues, indicating an expensively dressed girl named Perla next to him. All three are drunk.
“They treat us like s*** on that show,” Perla says. “They make us spit out our gum in a paper cup before we go on and all they feed us is Kentucky Fried Chicken. One of the dancers who wants to be a journalist puts out this newspaper called American Bulls***. He said Emmanuel had the flashiest socks.”
Emmanuel lifts his leg and shows his giller socks, “I always wear ‘em,” he says. A girl who is bearly four feet tall and afflicted with cerebral palsy hobbles up, whispers something in his ear and disappears into the night. “ She was saying she likes us on the last show. She does that every week. Real weirdo.” It turns out Marie and Emmanuel plan to get married just as soon as she reaches the age of legal consent. “These two are gonna last ‘cause they’re in love” says Perla. “Friends tend to falke off with time. Here, it’s like that Paul McCartney song about the two old people who are still sitting together on the porch after all these years. I love people who are together.”
Sandy West grew up in the golden suburban ghetto of Huntington Beach where mile-long brick walls shield everyone’s back yard from passing cars on the main street. The beach is just a couple of miles away, but everyone seems to have a pool in the backyard. She’d never seen a Quaalude until she came to Hollywood and joined The Runaways. Her six sisters and parents were all classically oriented, but in the fourth grade she dropped the violin for a higher calling – the drums – and her interests have not strayed since. She beat out all the boy drummers in her high school band.
“I didn’t get intot he social cliques much in school,” she says. “I hated gossiping about people. Drumming isn’t a hobby with me: I think about it all the time. The only other academic subject I could stand was Phys Ed.”
With her Samurai distaste for the trivial, Sandy seems quite uncomfortable talking about herself. She is relieved when her parents walk in the bedroom.
“To me, it’s a lot of noise,” says her father. “I don’t know anything about hard rock.”
“We’ve backed her in what she wanted to do,” says her mother. “It’s what she wanted. I wanted her to play the flute myself. We have a violin and a cello and a viola in the family. We’d have had a quartet.
On August 5, 1975, Sandy accompanied some friends to Hollywood where they sat around the parking lot at the Rainbow and looked for celebrities. One of her friends say, “Isn’t that Kim Fowley who writes for Alice Cooper?” Kim said he was Fowley’s twin borther but he and Sandy eventually got to talking and it came out that she was 16 and played the drums. A few days later, Joan Jett took about five buses to Huntington Beach. “The first song we played was “All Shook Up” by Suzi Quatro. I was amazed,” says Sandy. “Joan had perfect rhythm right from the start and she’d only played along with records to that time. We called up Kim and played for him over the phone. He got all excited and shouted that there must be more of us out there.”
“I think about f**king a lot when I play my guitar,” says Lita Ford, elder stateswoman of The Runaways at age 17, in a loud enough voice that most of the people in the retaurrant can overhear. “I like to do both and they’re related in a way. Well, I guess it depends on how you f**k. I like a guy who f**ks with class – you know, real slow so it lasts a long time. He should have classy clothes, classy shoes, classy house, classy limousine instead of a Volkswagen – but it’s got to look dirty, like Steven Tyler (Lead singer of Aerosmith). He’s got nasty class.”
Lita developed the good rock n roll spirit in junior high when she would walk up to her teachers and curse them out. “My father had to bring me bras in school. They would hold me in the vice principals office until he showed up because I was a distraction. I threw rocks at the PE teacher who was a real cunt. She had this attitude of I’m-your-teacher that really pissed me off. She was Mexican and….” Lita lowers her voice for the only time in the whole conversation, “…I hate….”
Her first musical interest was The Monkees, whom she abandoned when Led Zeppelin I blew her away. She played in a couple of bands in high school and now cites Richie Blackmore as her strongest musical influence and says he’s her boyfriend. Her musical hard edge provides a balance to Joan and Cherie, who still sing more out of the adolescent experience. “At the Starwood, some guy threw a lit cigarette at me,” she says. “A couple of our roadies took him outside and punched him out – that’s rock and roll.”
“The first time I saw Kim, I thought, ‘Oh my God!” The way he described himself on he phone, I figured he was going to look like Robert Plant. ‘You don’t have to f**k me to be in this band,’ he said. Then I met him and he was standing in this dirty tshirt with one sleeve up and one sleeve down. He started calling me dogmeat immediately, which pissed me off. He has this thing about dogs: dog pus, dog grease, doggery, dog puck, go f**k a dog in the ass – he says them all. I finally learned to ignore his slobbiness and appreaciate his dogginess. He has an answer for everything, so I just don’t argue with him anymore. Cherie never learned to shut up.
Jackie Fox’s living room has a whole shelf full of her trophies which she is quite pleased to exhibit: The George E Hale Award for top student; Miss Drill Team 1973; Outstanding Achievement in a Foreign Language; fist place in Pop Warner basketball; first place in long jump, triple jump and high jump; first place in a variety of surfing contests. “I was troublesome in school only insofar as I could learn in two days what everybody else did in five,” she says.
Her bedroom is businesslike. A couple of small surfing posters (reminders of a time when she was know as “Malibu Barbie”) and a few pictures of Kiss are taped to the wall. She joing The Runaways last December when they were on a desperate Christmas search for a bassist, and at an audition she learned ten of their songs in half an hour. When Joan and Cherie were hanging out at the Sugar Shack, Jacie was into fake ID’s and swinging single bars. “The biggest drag is to meet some guy you like and he won’t go out with you because you’re jailbait,” she says. “They’rea ll afraid of my age. Plus they’re always from some weird country or state, or they’re married. Brian Connolly (of Sweet) bugged me a lot to go out with him until his wife showed up in town. Gene Simmons (of Kiss) came on to me at a Midnight Special taping. He put his hand on the inside of my thigh and for the rest of the night kept asking, “Are you sure you’re only 15?”
Jackie had her first man two years ago, was unfazed by her parents’ divorce, does not believe in God but if she did “He would be a big computer,” and always goes to the bathroom before she walks onstage. “Bass players tend to have that problem,” she says. “Everything vibrates and pretty soon you can’t jump up and down because you have to urinate.”
And her impression of Kim Fowley? “Kim had great expectations for Cherie, so high that when she didn’t live up to them immediately, he became frustrated. It’s ironic that she’s getting there now and he isn’t allowed into rehearsals any more.”
Word has come in during rehearsal that Mercury is going to put up $10,000 for their first national tour. Even Cherie’s inflamed lymph node cannot dampen the joy. New amplifiers, new guitars, a new Winnebago – but the first order of business is costumes. With a mixture of sexist glee and squeamish guilt, I copy down their measurements as they speak to a seamstress on the telephone. Lita: 37-26-36, Nothing like the little raw meat to spice up a story. Cherie 32-24 1/2-32. It’s an exclusive. Joan: 32-25-35. I’ll win the Pulitzer. Jackie: 36-25-37. I’m a regular Woodward and Bernstein. Sandy: ?-28 1/2-38 1/2. Hmmm, I seem to have missed her bust.
“You want to know everything!” Sandy explodes. “Our sex lives! Our parents! Our school work! What does it have to do with the music?”
So if you were selling just music, you should have stayed in the garage band. Sandy, You’re selling a sexual myth now. The public wants to know, 33 1/2? Yeah. So after a week out here, I’m an a****** again. And why not? I squandered the hormones of my youth over a typewriter instead of an electric guitar. I’m too old to get into the Sugar Shack. I’m a journalist who wanted to investigate the hype and when he discovered their real names (yes, Joan Jett is too good to be true), was so badly in love that he promised not to reveal them. Yes, you sold the sexual myth to me.
To complete my downer, I make a final phone call to Fowley. “I can buy your magazine and throw it over the pier out of sheer viciousness,” he says. “I can take anyone to court for violating my privacy. I’m more formidable than you thought. I think you had better be very accurate in what you say. Of all your interviews, I was the most honest. I’m getting vibes from you, and I don’t think you have rock n roll spirit.”
Then in one of the more abrupt changes of mood since Paul went to Damascus, he sounds almost conciliatory. “I’m glad they turned on me. It shows the spirit. If I’m training a wild dog and he bites my hand, I know that I’ve trained him well. My hand is made of iron. I hope they turn on their management and record company next. I hope they destroy hotel rooms and rape their fans. Great rock n roll comes out of torment.”
Fowley complains that none of the girls ever sent him as much as a Christmas card or a thank you note. I hang up and ask Cherie if she thinks a reconciliation is possible.
“I don’t know,” she says “What does ‘reconciliation’ mean?”
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