Rock veterans from Fanny and Runaways join forces
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 2017 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 album “Fanny Walked the Earth,” released that year.
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 really hurts; people can destroy your selfesteem 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 women 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, because it’s our story. Out of the Runaways, Joan Jett has a wonderful career; Lita Ford has a wonderful career; 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 Time’s 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. It’s so important that you tell someone right when it happens,” she says. “You should never be shamed, you should never feel ashamed. It’s never your fault.” 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.”
That power serves her well as 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.”