Girls Rock! (1) The Pioneers: Sister Rosetta, Leslie Gore, Suzi Quatro, Joan Jett and more

These women didn't just play well "for a girl".  They were foundational rockers who made ground-breaking music.

Before the Beginning….

 

While faced with all of the awfulness of pre-civil rights era racism and sexism, Sister Rosetta Tharpe did have one advantage: she was positioned as a gospel singer.  In that world, women routinely held leading roles, and a dominant stage presence wasn’t frowned on, it was the norm.  Her great innovation was to merge driving gospel beats with the blues, while using the guitar as another lead voice, creating a new kind of music no one had heard before.  There was no one to tell her “girls don’t play guitar” because, frankly, no one, male or female, had ever played the way she did.  She wasn’t held up as a pioneer at the time, because no one anticipated that this new kind of music would take over the world. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeaBNAXfHfQ

 

“You Don’t Own Me”

Neither Lesley Gore nor the writers of this song could know how iconic it would become, or how ahead of its time it was. She recorded "You Don't Own Me" in 1964, and it was already a more forthright declaration of self-ownership than most of the “I Am Woman” songs that would follow. She broke ground in another way, living the last 30+ years of her life in an openly gay partnership. Sadly, it now feels as though we are going backwards. She never saw herself as a hero but I think she was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNb-8gLcXLs

The Real Suzi Q

Historically, women in music were limited to roles as vocalists (or as members of orchestras). When rock and roll exploded, it was completely dominated by men.  For more than a decade, the only women in rock were singers like Grace Slick and Janis Joplin.  So when the first women tried to break into rock as instrumentalists or band-leaders in the late 1960’s, they met a wall of resistance.

I have posted, or will post, a lot of stuff from kick-ass women rockers, like Chrissie Hynde and Patti Smith.  But there is one who predated all of them, and deserves credit for blazing the trail.  Suzi Quatro managed to kick the door down, despite concerted hostility from the music establishment.  She started raising hell in 1967, before it was even a thing.  She led her own band, wrote, sang and played the bass.  Her producers kept trying to tone her down and “cutify” her, and though she bent, she didn’t break.  The critics still ignore her, but she continues touring and raising hell, and has sold over 60 million records.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6PYlq37iHo

 

The Runaways:  School Days

The Runaways were the first all-girl rock band with real commercial success.  They only lasted four years, but they played several sold-out shows, toured with the Ramones, and blew the roof off in Japan, where they were received with Beatlemania-like excitement.  Lita Forde (lead guitar) and Joan Jett (rhythm guitar, lead vocals from 1977 on) went on to become headliners themselves.  I love their sass and open defiance, and they definitely rock. This one is from 1977, after Cherie Currie had already left (Jett took over vocals).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v-8c3T7J18

 

Suzi Quatro. Joan Jett. Lita Forde. Chrissie Hynde. Patti Smith. Tina Weymouth. Nancy Wilson. Pat Benatar. Debra Harry. They co-founded or led groundbreaking hard-rock bands, taking on roles previously reserved for men. It wasn’t easy. The music press were hostile to Quatro for being too much like a guy. Hynde survived a gang rape and refused to let that break her. Benatar, tiny and pretty, shocked people with the ferocity of her performances. Wilson became a guitar hero when popular wisdom was that women shouldn’t play electric guitar. Before starting their own eponymous bands, Jett and Forde co-led the first all-female rock group, the Runaways, coping with challenges including egregiously sexist packaging and one of their bandmates’ assault by their own manager.  Even their male bandmates took grief for being led by women.

Here is Jett’s first hit after leaving the Runaways. She and her producer, Kenny Laguna, had to publish it on their own label after every other record label had turned them down. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO6YL09T8Fw

Here is Jett doing her cover of “I Love Rock’n Roll”.  The original would have been forgotten completely; Jett’s version went to #1 in 1982, making her a global star.  She’s singing about picking up a young guy in a bar, which is already pretty radical.  Add in her look and her snarl, and it’s a game changer.  At the start of the video, you’ll hear the end of “Bad Reputation” playing in the background before she enters the joint.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPGG69wB4ys

One more by Joan Jett, and my favorite.  A lot of women sing songs about men who can’t love them back.  In this case, Jett is singing about a woman.  Just sayin’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpNw7jYkbVc

A lot of people have a bias for the popular music associated with their teens and early 20s.  I don’t. I think my generation sort of got screwed.  To paraphrase Don McLean, it felt like the music died. (Just compare the Billboard Top 40 from 1970 to that from 1968—you’ll choke.)   There have been scholarly articles about why this happened, often relating it to the exhaustion of Vietnam and the seeming death of the civil rights movement. That’s beyond my pay grade.  All I know is that with a few precious exceptions (Elton John, Pink Floyd, Linda Ronstadt anyone?) our mainstream music became empty, maudlin, or simply fraudulent. Yes, the Black music scene was on fire, but, as usual, white people stole it and turned it into something else--in this instance, Disco… The underground scene was gathering steam, but in suburban America we didn’t know that, at least I didn’t. Then, starting in 1978, along came Blondie, the Pretenders, the Talking Heads and the B-52s.  For me, it was a like a jolt from a defibrillator.  The Pretenders’ working grime and jean jackets; Debra Harry’s icy detachment (and cheekbones).  The B-52s and Talking Heads, well, they’re from another planet. More on them later.  Heart of Glass is too obvious, and besides, here’s one I like even more.  It shows off Harry’s impeccable vocals (as far as I know, she had no formal training).  It’s dark and haunting and seems so on point, perhaps even more so today. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnYU3urRj3Q

 

Pat Benatar has had her own band for much of her career, one of the first female rock stars to make it under her own name. I saw her in concert, more than 30 years ago, and she rocked me the way Tina Turner did. She often sings about painful subject matter, but she doesn’t whine about it - she puts it right in your face and makes you think about it.  This is one of her more confrontational songs, an anthem protesting child abuse.  As a Roman Catholic, she put up with a lot of shit for performing it, and didn’t let that stop her. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm4grNE9QVg

The Female answer to Deep Purple

In 1971, Deep Purple toured Japan, and in 1977 the Runaways became the first all-female rock band to follow.  Together, they triggered a seismic revolution in Japanese popular music, including an explosion of hard-rock bands.  Japanese rock quickly diverged from Western rock, becoming much more technical and composition-oriented.  Over time, another major difference emerged: A lot of the Japanese rock bands were made up of women, and today, in spite of the stereotype of Japan as a sexist culture, Japanese rock is dominated by women.

 

Here is the godmother of them all, founded in 1981 and still touring today with the original lineup.  This video was made on their 24^th anniversary, when they were all in their mid-40's.  The title of the song, translated, is “I am the Storm”.  A fitting title, and also one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ_5Gv3vFjQ

 

Coming up, a special post just on the Pretenders...