STILL ROCKING
They blazed trails for female musicians in the 1970s. Now they’ve made an album
They were rock ’n’ roll heroines who blazed parallel trails in an era where female musicians were practically an oxymoron. But somehow they didn’t meet until more than 40 years into their respective careers. ¶ Singer-drummer Brie Darling of Fanny and Runaways singer Cherie Currie were both in all-female bands, musical anomalies often enduring similar struggles and triumphs. But it wasn’t until last year that another member of Fanny, Patti Quatro, sister and onetime bandmate of iconic bassist Suzi Quatro, introduced the two when Darling was seeking backing vocalists for her 2018 album “Fanny Walked the Earth.” ¶ Darling was immediately taken by Currie’s “energy and charisma.” If the mutual admiration and excitement was there, the trust wasn’t immediate. “This business can destroy your self-esteem and trust in yourself,” Currie says. “We hear this stuff all the time; [women] always think, ‘What’s the motive? What’s the agenda?’ ” ¶ The skepticism was warranted; both began playing music in their teens, the Runaways especially guided and misguided by older men with sometimes prurient interests who treated the group as a novelty. Both Fanny
and the Runaways paved the way for scores of artists, female and male too, without achieving either mass success or acceptance among fellow musicians or critics.
Yet Currie, now 59, and Darling, 69, remained in touch after the project wrapped, bonding over shared career disappointments and future hopes; they eventually decided to combine forces. “This Is Our Time,” a song off their forthcoming debut album, “The Motivator,” provides their rallying cry: “It’s hard to get to the places we’ve never been, but it ain’t over yet / We never thought of giving up; standing up, fighting for what should have been.”
“It can be looked at as a feminist anthem,” Darling says. “But it can be looked at as a personal anthem. It’s our story. Out of the Runaways, Joan Jett and Lita Ford had wonderful careers; Cherie needs the same opportunity. Cherie and I are looking at each other, going, ‘Come on, girl. Let’s do it together. We can speak for women, we can speak for ourselves.’ ”
The #MeToo and Times Up movements have sparked widespread, often galvanizing change, but in this venture, Darling and Currie forgo dwelling on past wounds or joining existing crusades. “We really feel like we’re starting our own movement,” says Currie: “‘It ain’t over till it’s over.’ People who think that their lives are washed up, you’re just not, not until you take that last breath. Anything can happen.”
Post-Runaways, when she was still a teenager, Currie was the victim of a brutal rape, assault and kidnapping, which she chronicled in her 1989 autobiography, “Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway” (reissued in 2010). “I didn’t think I was going to live through it.” Her assailant received only a yearlong sentence, but in the decades since, she says, “I helped a lot of rape survivors and the rape survivors have helped me as well.” She adds, “Surviving something like that gives you a whole lot of power.”
That power serves her well as a songwriter and, now yet again, a musical pioneer — code for being a woman of a certain age. “Just because we’re the ages we are, if somebody wants to put a stigma on that, screw them,” says Darling. “We didn’t run out of enthusiasm. We didn’t run out of our voices. We didn’t run out of anything. We’re still here, we’re still valid.”
In the Runaways, Currie was known for skintight jumpsuits and a white satin corset onstage; these days, she favors Southwestern chic — tight jeans, big belt buckles, chunky turquoise jewelry. Her medium-length hair is still blond, if tempered from her platinum youth. Darling dresses in colorful clothes she laughingly terms “ridiculous,” wears bright lipstick, and her hair is white on top with the bottom fringed in black. Currie is cool, resolute and outdoorsy, while Darling, who has three grandchildren (their dad is Mötley Crüe’s Nikki Sixx), is vivacious and endeavors to do some form of art daily, including decorating dramatic desserts that landed her on the Food Network’s “Cake Wars.”
The lack of a shared history isn’t so surprising: If today’s rock world remains heavy on testosterone, in the ’70s, Currie and Darling were almost unimaginably isolated, with only Suzi Quatro and a precious few others to look to for inspiration. Singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins were adulated; women playing instruments in sexualized rock ’n’ roll bands were not. The Runaways, punky and rebellious, faced, at best, objectification and derision. In “Neon Angel,” there are passages about the cruel putdowns of producer-svengali Kim Fowley, who played a formative role in Currie’s music and life. Her memoir was turned into the 2010 movie “The Runaways,” with Dakota Fanning as Currie.
The Runaways were exemplified by their 1976 song “Cherry Bomb,” a teasing come-on of burgeoning sexuality as performed by then-teenage girls. It remains a cult classic, used in TV shows, video games and films, including a crucial sequence in the 2014 blockbuster “Guardians of the Galaxy.”
Lzzy Hale, singer of the Grammy-winning hard-rock band Halestorm, credits the Runaways for breaking down doors. “They were the first of their kind; they showed every girl that it was possible to be a rock star. They proved that you can leave your mark on your own terms.”
Fanny, tamer in look and sound than the Runaways, was one of the first all-female bands on a major label, signing with Reprise in 1969. The group disbanded in 1975, just as its biggest hit, “Butter Boy,” landed at No. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100. In the ensuing years, Darling, a multi-instrumentalist, played with artists from Robert Palmer to Natalie Cole.
Darling and Currie bring their hard-won perspectives to their new project. “The Motivator” features socially conscious classic rock covers, along with three intensely personal originals. Darling and Currie often share lead vocals, or one will take the lead on mostly well-known gems from artists including John Lennon, the Hollies, the Rolling Stones and T. Rex.
The album’s creation was without ego or push-pull. “I grew up with it, and I don’t stand for that,” says Currie. “I’m into lifting people up, not putting people down.” While the original tune “Too Bruised” is about the end of a romance, its lyrics about letting go and moving on are applicable elsewhere. “The only way I can really verbalize the metamorphosis that took place over the last six months [working with Darling] is that I had to let go entirely,” Currie says. “Be forgiving of all of it, like I was when I moved Kim Fowley into my house when he was dying. [Fowley died in January 2015.] I really hated that man. He cheated me and stole from me and all this [other stuff]. But I was happy that I took him in. It was a way to forgive.”
Before Currie met Darling, she was ready to leave the music business entirely. She had put her San Fernando Valley house on the market and was in escrow on land in Tehachapi, Calif., that she planned to build on. But Darling and “The Motivator” forged renewed hope for her career. “I’m looking to the future and really enjoying this project so much; that’s a first for me.”
The newly minted partners will tour and promote “The Motivator” and in concert will play songs from the Runaways, Fanny and their album. (They will perform at the Grammy Museum in L.A. on Thursday, the day before the album’s release.) And as if to prove that she’s the same thrill-seeker she was as a feathered-hair teen in the ’70s, Currie plans to incorporate one of her passions into the live shows: Since 2002, she’s been a wood-carving artist, using a chain saw to create three-dimensional art out of large pieces of timber.
The duo are looking forward to the camaraderie of gigging. “I love being a band member, a team player. It doesn’t always work that way,” acknowledges Darling.
For her part, Currie is cautious but optimistic about her next career chapter, one she thought would never happen. “I cannot let the same mistakes happen again. When I take off flying from this planet, I want to say I learned.”