Post by jackiefox on Oct 21, 2010 23:02:46 GMT -5
October 21, 2010
Neon Angel Errata
Quite a number of people have emailed to ask me whether Cherie Currie's version of events as set forth in her book “Neon Angel: A Portrait of a Runaway” is accurate. I haven't read the entire book, but I have skimmed the parts that relate to my time in the band, the only ones on which I can comment. For the record, I think that Tony O'Neill did a great writing job. The fact checking on the book seems, however, to have been non-existent, much of the dialogue, as one might expect from a book written so far after the events in question, is made up and, as Cherie has admitted many times, her memory on the events of that time is not the best. In setting forth some of the inaccuracies in the book, I’ve tried to stay as unemotional as possible and ignore most of the cheap shots, although I have to admit, it can be difficult. I do believe, however, that the negative attitude Cherie expresses towards me in the book has less to do with how Cherie felt at the time of the events and more to do with The Runaways movie, which was in development at the time Cherie was working on the book. Cherie was quite upset with Lita and me for not wanting to be involved with the film, which is certainly her right; however, whatever the reason for the errors in the book, I feel like I need to correct the record on some of them which involve me:
p. 82: Cherie states that she would come to regret fighting for me to be in the band, a statement which seems to me to ignore the fact that she and I were friends both during the band and for a good chunk of our adult life afterwards. We attended each other's weddings in the early 90’s and I performed with Sandy and Cherie at several gigs in the mid 90’s. Whatever regrets she had about my being in the band, I believe that to a large extent they are a fairly recent development.
p. 83: Cherie's retelling of my audition for the band is inaccurate. My original audition (on guitar) took place when the band was still a three-piece and Sue Thomas (who would go on to change her name in The Runaways to Mickey Steele and later on to Michael Steele) was the singer. This was well before either Lita or Cherie had joined. When Kim invited me back to audition on bass, about three weeks after Cherie had joined the band, I got in.
Page 122: Lita never threatened to beat me up.
Page 125: There is no such place as the Celebrity Theater in Cleveland. The club we played at there was the Agora. The hotel we stayed in was Swingo’s Celebrity Keg and Quarter. This error isn’t a big deal, except that this information is widely available on the Internet and easily fact checked. That no one bothered is indicative of the overall rush to get this book out without checking the veracity of what was in it.
Page 141: Cherie states that money was my obsession and that I complained about Kim having the money to fly to Pittsburgh or Atlanta to “bitch” at us. We never played Pittsburgh or Atlanta and this is one of the conversations in the book that never took place. Also, I was hardly obsessed with money and for quite a long time believed Kim when he said that we had not recouped our record company advance. We had never charted very high on the Billboard charts and there was no reason to think that we were making money. Toward the end of my time in the band, I did try to get us new management and a new producer, but even then that had as much to do with wanting Kim out of our lives as it did with money.
Pages 158 & 182: This is where I can’t stay unemotional because Cherie has just made up utter crap about my mother and it really angers me. When we found out we were going to be doing a tour of Europe, we were told that because all of us except Lita were under the age of 18 we would have to have a guardian. Kim said he was going to hire us a chaperone. I thought a chaperone would cramp our style and suggested that a parent might not be so strict with us. That probably sounds funny, but you have to remember that our parents were the ones who let us join the band and go on tour in the first place. The two parents that everyone in the band thought were cool were Joan's mother and my mother. Ultimately we decided on my mother because she was a nurse and we thought that would go over better with whatever authorities were making us have a guardian in the first place. My mother was not, however, in charge of handing out prescriptions to the band and she never gave anyone any drugs, legal or otherwise. My mother spent a lot of time with the members of the band, helping them out when they had problems, and appearing in court with Joan after Joan, Sandy and Cherie were arrested. (Sandy and Cherie were minors and the charges against them were dropped; Joan had to appear in court and ended up having to pay a fine). To suggest that my mother was anything other than a responsible adult or that she was complicit in any way in the band’s drug use is mind-boggling.
Page 165: This quote about my saying I feel like I'm on the last plane out of Burma cracks me up every time I read it. When Cherie’s first version of her book came out I had to look up what it meant -- I sure wouldn't have said it at the age of 16. I'm guessing that Cherie's first co-author thought of this as an example to show that I was smart. But like most of the dialogue in the book that Cherie attributes to me, it's made up. This particular bit of dialogue just happens to be flattering.
Page 171: This is another made-up conversation. When we got stopped by Scotland Yard I never said anything about walkie-talkies being illegal in the U.K. or anything about them at all. I had no idea why we had been stopped at Dover and only found out after Joan, Sandy, and Cherie were arrested. Scotland Yard’s search of the car those three were in had turned up hotel hairdryers and room keys. My mother, Lita and I were in the other car and the police found nothing suspicious in our luggage so we were let go. Someone later explained to us that there had been a series of hotel room thefts throughout the country but that the rooms had not been broken into. Being in possession of room keys put Joan, Sandy and Cherie under suspicion.
To understand how we got stopped in the first place, you have to remember that U.S. dryers don’t work in the U.K. and in 1976 portable hairdryers were not that cheap. Nor were they routinely provided in hotel rooms back then. But the hotel we’d been staying at in London, a place called "The White House," had a number of dryers at the front desk that you could borrow by leaving your name and a 5 pound deposit. Cherie, not Sandy, had taken a dryer with her when we checked out and the hotel, of course, had her name. Someone notified Scotland Yard and we were stopped at Dover.
As a side note, there was some suspicion, as I recall, that it had not been the hotel, but rather someone on our end of things who had tipped off Scotland Yard in order to provide an excuse for canceling our tour dates on the Continent, which apparently weren’t selling that well. The arrest also gave us tons of publicity, which might have seemed more appealing to someone than paying for a poorly attended tour of Europe. I have to say, though, that this seems a bit far-fetched, as no one could have foreseen the dryer situation. But, then again, while selling info to the tabloids wasn't the business that it has since become, we did have at least one roadie who sold information about us and he was on our tour of the U.K. with us.
Page 193: I wasn't in the studio the day the band recorded Midnight Music. I was in the hospital with pneumonia. I overdubbed my bass parts a couple of days later.
Page 210: Although I didn’t really want to be in the band anymore at this point, my relationships with the band were fine before we left for Japan, or at least as fine as they had always been. I was friends with Lita, most of the time I was friends with Cherie , and I got along well with Joan. Sandy was the only one I wasn’t close to, but I still generally got along with her. When Cherie says I would have nothing to do with the rest of the band when it came to letting loose and having fun, she's right if what she means is that I didn't do drugs with them. But to say that because I didn't do drugs with the rest of the band I wasn't getting along with them simply isn’t true.
Page 216: My bass didn't break at rehearsal. During rehearsal I discovered that the stand that I had been given in Tokyo wasn’t sturdy enough for a bass guitar and I asked for a proper bass stand. I was told there would be one by show time.
We carried our instruments with us from backstage that night when we went on so I didn’t discover that the wobbly guitar stand had not been replaced when I put my bass on it after the show. But it seemed to be holding so I went backstage with the rest of the band to wait for the crowd to demand an encore. I didn't put my bass on the stand incorrectly – I’m not even sure how you would do that. When I walked back out on stage, our roadie handed me my backup bass. When I asked why he said that my other bass was out of tune. I had no idea that anything had happened to it. I certainly didn't go berserk on stage and I never accused Cherie of kicking it over on purpose.
I have no idea when the rest of the band found out about my bass breaking, but it was before we went back to our hotel rooms, by which time everyone except me knew. One of the crew finally called and told me the bass had broken. I'm not going to recount the full incident that ensued here, but suffice it to say that the whole thing was over quickly and was well over by the time Cherie showed up at my door. I wasn't hysterical and I wasn't “hacking” myself or all “hacked up” – in fact, when I was taken to the emergency room the cut didn’t even merit stitches. Cherie did not get the glass out of my hand and for her to say that she ended up with cuts of her own trying to do so is laughable. I was quite calm when Cherie knocked on my door and when she came I opened the door and said “I think I need some help.” The cut looked worse than it was. Cherie got on the phone and insisted to someone on the crew that I be taken to the emergency room. When we got there she did her best to get the ER doctor to put butterfly bandages on my arm. But the cut wasn't very deep so the doctors just bandaged it and gave me a sedative and sent me on my way. I didn't leave the band the next day. I finished out the entire Japanese tour except for the Tokyo music festival.
Cherie also said that I had always hated our roadie, Kent. Quite the opposite is true – I even roomed platonically with Kent sometimes on tour and unlike the rest of the band hung out with him on occasion. When the Runaways were in Chicago, Kent and I went on our night off to see Cheap Trick at a bowling alley in Waukegan, Illinois(almost to the Wisconsin border) before their first album had even been released. Apparently, however, Kent didn’t like me too much – Vicki Blue told me that he made secret recordings of me and made fun of them, and he autographed photos of me with my name for our Live in Japan album. He was never directly awful to me, however, other than some general anger toward the band, and he gave me no reason that I then knew of to resent him.
There are other errors in the book, but these are the ones that caught my attention at first glance.
Best,
Jackie
Neon Angel Errata
Quite a number of people have emailed to ask me whether Cherie Currie's version of events as set forth in her book “Neon Angel: A Portrait of a Runaway” is accurate. I haven't read the entire book, but I have skimmed the parts that relate to my time in the band, the only ones on which I can comment. For the record, I think that Tony O'Neill did a great writing job. The fact checking on the book seems, however, to have been non-existent, much of the dialogue, as one might expect from a book written so far after the events in question, is made up and, as Cherie has admitted many times, her memory on the events of that time is not the best. In setting forth some of the inaccuracies in the book, I’ve tried to stay as unemotional as possible and ignore most of the cheap shots, although I have to admit, it can be difficult. I do believe, however, that the negative attitude Cherie expresses towards me in the book has less to do with how Cherie felt at the time of the events and more to do with The Runaways movie, which was in development at the time Cherie was working on the book. Cherie was quite upset with Lita and me for not wanting to be involved with the film, which is certainly her right; however, whatever the reason for the errors in the book, I feel like I need to correct the record on some of them which involve me:
p. 82: Cherie states that she would come to regret fighting for me to be in the band, a statement which seems to me to ignore the fact that she and I were friends both during the band and for a good chunk of our adult life afterwards. We attended each other's weddings in the early 90’s and I performed with Sandy and Cherie at several gigs in the mid 90’s. Whatever regrets she had about my being in the band, I believe that to a large extent they are a fairly recent development.
p. 83: Cherie's retelling of my audition for the band is inaccurate. My original audition (on guitar) took place when the band was still a three-piece and Sue Thomas (who would go on to change her name in The Runaways to Mickey Steele and later on to Michael Steele) was the singer. This was well before either Lita or Cherie had joined. When Kim invited me back to audition on bass, about three weeks after Cherie had joined the band, I got in.
Page 122: Lita never threatened to beat me up.
Page 125: There is no such place as the Celebrity Theater in Cleveland. The club we played at there was the Agora. The hotel we stayed in was Swingo’s Celebrity Keg and Quarter. This error isn’t a big deal, except that this information is widely available on the Internet and easily fact checked. That no one bothered is indicative of the overall rush to get this book out without checking the veracity of what was in it.
Page 141: Cherie states that money was my obsession and that I complained about Kim having the money to fly to Pittsburgh or Atlanta to “bitch” at us. We never played Pittsburgh or Atlanta and this is one of the conversations in the book that never took place. Also, I was hardly obsessed with money and for quite a long time believed Kim when he said that we had not recouped our record company advance. We had never charted very high on the Billboard charts and there was no reason to think that we were making money. Toward the end of my time in the band, I did try to get us new management and a new producer, but even then that had as much to do with wanting Kim out of our lives as it did with money.
Pages 158 & 182: This is where I can’t stay unemotional because Cherie has just made up utter crap about my mother and it really angers me. When we found out we were going to be doing a tour of Europe, we were told that because all of us except Lita were under the age of 18 we would have to have a guardian. Kim said he was going to hire us a chaperone. I thought a chaperone would cramp our style and suggested that a parent might not be so strict with us. That probably sounds funny, but you have to remember that our parents were the ones who let us join the band and go on tour in the first place. The two parents that everyone in the band thought were cool were Joan's mother and my mother. Ultimately we decided on my mother because she was a nurse and we thought that would go over better with whatever authorities were making us have a guardian in the first place. My mother was not, however, in charge of handing out prescriptions to the band and she never gave anyone any drugs, legal or otherwise. My mother spent a lot of time with the members of the band, helping them out when they had problems, and appearing in court with Joan after Joan, Sandy and Cherie were arrested. (Sandy and Cherie were minors and the charges against them were dropped; Joan had to appear in court and ended up having to pay a fine). To suggest that my mother was anything other than a responsible adult or that she was complicit in any way in the band’s drug use is mind-boggling.
Page 165: This quote about my saying I feel like I'm on the last plane out of Burma cracks me up every time I read it. When Cherie’s first version of her book came out I had to look up what it meant -- I sure wouldn't have said it at the age of 16. I'm guessing that Cherie's first co-author thought of this as an example to show that I was smart. But like most of the dialogue in the book that Cherie attributes to me, it's made up. This particular bit of dialogue just happens to be flattering.
Page 171: This is another made-up conversation. When we got stopped by Scotland Yard I never said anything about walkie-talkies being illegal in the U.K. or anything about them at all. I had no idea why we had been stopped at Dover and only found out after Joan, Sandy, and Cherie were arrested. Scotland Yard’s search of the car those three were in had turned up hotel hairdryers and room keys. My mother, Lita and I were in the other car and the police found nothing suspicious in our luggage so we were let go. Someone later explained to us that there had been a series of hotel room thefts throughout the country but that the rooms had not been broken into. Being in possession of room keys put Joan, Sandy and Cherie under suspicion.
To understand how we got stopped in the first place, you have to remember that U.S. dryers don’t work in the U.K. and in 1976 portable hairdryers were not that cheap. Nor were they routinely provided in hotel rooms back then. But the hotel we’d been staying at in London, a place called "The White House," had a number of dryers at the front desk that you could borrow by leaving your name and a 5 pound deposit. Cherie, not Sandy, had taken a dryer with her when we checked out and the hotel, of course, had her name. Someone notified Scotland Yard and we were stopped at Dover.
As a side note, there was some suspicion, as I recall, that it had not been the hotel, but rather someone on our end of things who had tipped off Scotland Yard in order to provide an excuse for canceling our tour dates on the Continent, which apparently weren’t selling that well. The arrest also gave us tons of publicity, which might have seemed more appealing to someone than paying for a poorly attended tour of Europe. I have to say, though, that this seems a bit far-fetched, as no one could have foreseen the dryer situation. But, then again, while selling info to the tabloids wasn't the business that it has since become, we did have at least one roadie who sold information about us and he was on our tour of the U.K. with us.
Page 193: I wasn't in the studio the day the band recorded Midnight Music. I was in the hospital with pneumonia. I overdubbed my bass parts a couple of days later.
Page 210: Although I didn’t really want to be in the band anymore at this point, my relationships with the band were fine before we left for Japan, or at least as fine as they had always been. I was friends with Lita, most of the time I was friends with Cherie , and I got along well with Joan. Sandy was the only one I wasn’t close to, but I still generally got along with her. When Cherie says I would have nothing to do with the rest of the band when it came to letting loose and having fun, she's right if what she means is that I didn't do drugs with them. But to say that because I didn't do drugs with the rest of the band I wasn't getting along with them simply isn’t true.
Page 216: My bass didn't break at rehearsal. During rehearsal I discovered that the stand that I had been given in Tokyo wasn’t sturdy enough for a bass guitar and I asked for a proper bass stand. I was told there would be one by show time.
We carried our instruments with us from backstage that night when we went on so I didn’t discover that the wobbly guitar stand had not been replaced when I put my bass on it after the show. But it seemed to be holding so I went backstage with the rest of the band to wait for the crowd to demand an encore. I didn't put my bass on the stand incorrectly – I’m not even sure how you would do that. When I walked back out on stage, our roadie handed me my backup bass. When I asked why he said that my other bass was out of tune. I had no idea that anything had happened to it. I certainly didn't go berserk on stage and I never accused Cherie of kicking it over on purpose.
I have no idea when the rest of the band found out about my bass breaking, but it was before we went back to our hotel rooms, by which time everyone except me knew. One of the crew finally called and told me the bass had broken. I'm not going to recount the full incident that ensued here, but suffice it to say that the whole thing was over quickly and was well over by the time Cherie showed up at my door. I wasn't hysterical and I wasn't “hacking” myself or all “hacked up” – in fact, when I was taken to the emergency room the cut didn’t even merit stitches. Cherie did not get the glass out of my hand and for her to say that she ended up with cuts of her own trying to do so is laughable. I was quite calm when Cherie knocked on my door and when she came I opened the door and said “I think I need some help.” The cut looked worse than it was. Cherie got on the phone and insisted to someone on the crew that I be taken to the emergency room. When we got there she did her best to get the ER doctor to put butterfly bandages on my arm. But the cut wasn't very deep so the doctors just bandaged it and gave me a sedative and sent me on my way. I didn't leave the band the next day. I finished out the entire Japanese tour except for the Tokyo music festival.
Cherie also said that I had always hated our roadie, Kent. Quite the opposite is true – I even roomed platonically with Kent sometimes on tour and unlike the rest of the band hung out with him on occasion. When the Runaways were in Chicago, Kent and I went on our night off to see Cheap Trick at a bowling alley in Waukegan, Illinois(almost to the Wisconsin border) before their first album had even been released. Apparently, however, Kent didn’t like me too much – Vicki Blue told me that he made secret recordings of me and made fun of them, and he autographed photos of me with my name for our Live in Japan album. He was never directly awful to me, however, other than some general anger toward the band, and he gave me no reason that I then knew of to resent him.
There are other errors in the book, but these are the ones that caught my attention at first glance.
Best,
Jackie