The all-female band Fanny made history
In spring 2015, documentary filmmaker Bobbi Jo Hart was clicking around the Taylor Guitars website, looking for a new instrument for her 10-year-old daughter, when she came across a short profile of June Millington, the singer and lead guitarist for the pioneering 1970s all-female rock group Fanny.
Hart, now 56 and living in Montreal, grew up in a hippie household in California “with piles of LPS all over the place”: David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, and on and on. But she had never even heard of Fanny, despite the fact that it was the first all-female rock band to release an album on a major label.
Fanny put out a total of five albums between 1970 and 1974, one of which was produced by Todd Rundgren. The band scored two Top 40 hits — the swinging, soulful “Charity Ball” and the doowop-flavored “Butter Boy” — and played in the United States and abroad with Slade, Jethro Tull, Humble Pie, the Kinks and Chicago. The group backed Barbra Streisand in the studio and performed on “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour” and “American Bandstand.”
In 1999, Bowie hailed Fanny as one of the finest rock bands of its time in Rolling Stone. He also lamented that “nobody’s ever mentioned them.”
Kathy Valentine, the bassist of the Go-go’s, an all-female band with hits in the ’80s, wished more people had spread the word about Fanny. “If their visibility had been higher,” she said in an interview, “we would have seen a lot more women in the rock landscape.” Valentine didn’t hear about Fanny until 1982, she said, by which time the Go-go’s were making their second album.
When Hart first learned about Fanny online, she had a visceral reaction. “It really pissed me off,” she said. “It was just another example of amazing women that we don’t know about.” Hart reached out to former band members about the possibility of a documentary but determined that at the time, the Fanny story didn’t have the “forward-momentum narrative” she was looking for.
Then, in January 2017, Hart attended the Women’s March in Washington. She was watching Madonna speak on the Jumbotron when she spotted a woman with “flaming gray hair” onstage, filming the proceedings on her iphone. It was June Millington. The sighting spurred Hart to call Millington, who had some news: Three members of Fanny — Millington; her younger sister, bassist and singer Jean (Millington) Adamian; and drummer and singer Brie Darling, a fellow Filipina American — were about to make a new album on an indie label. The moment for a film had arrived.
The resulting documentary, “Fanny: The Right to Rock,” opened in New York on May 27 and, on Aug. 2, will be available via video on demand. (It will come to PBS in 2023.) The movie documents the making of that album, recorded under the name Fanny Walked the Earth and released in 2018, and features interviews with five members from the original group’s frequently shifting lineup. (Reclusive keyboardist Nickey Barclay, who has said she hated her time in the band, notably did not participate. She also declined to speak for this article.) Valentine, Bonnie Raitt and Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott are among the talking heads.
The documentary lovingly recounts the history of Fanny, beginning with sisters June and Jean Millington, who were born in the Philippines to a white American naval officer father and a Filipina socialite mother. In 1961, the Millington family moved overseas to Sacramento, Calif., where the sisters, as early adolescents, had a difficult time fitting in. Racism was a constant part of life. (In the film, Jean Millington recalls the father of a boyfriend of hers telling his son, “I’ll buy you a Mustang if you stop seeing that half-breed girl.” The boyfriend opted for the car.)
The sisters found solace in music, forming an allgirl band in high school called the Svelts, which played the radio hits of the day. The Svelts morphed into Wild Honey, a Motown cover group that decamped to Los Angeles in 1969 to make it big. Wild Honey signed with Warner Bros. Records’s Reprise label later that year. Not long after, the band, looking for a new name with a female identity, chose Fanny, which in the United States is slang for bottom.
“We thought it was a double entendre that would work,” said June Millington, 74. It wasn’t until the band members toured overseas that they discovered that in Britain, fanny is slang for female genitals.
Early on, the band lived in Fanny Hill, a house in West Hollywood that Millington, in the film, calls “a sorority with electrical guitars.” Joe Cocker and Rick Danko, a singer for the Band, hung out there, and the group Little Feat would come over and jam; Raitt was a houseguest for a time. A libertine, clothing-optional spirit prevailed. “It was a wonderful, creative environment,” said Darling, who is 72 and lives in Los Angeles. “It wasn’t people just getting high” and having sex.
The film highlights the fact that two of Fanny’s members — June Millington and drummer Alice de Buhr — are lesbians, something that the band never dared speak about publicly in those days. “People would ask us, ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ ” recalled de Buhr, now 72 and residing in Tucson, Ariz. “And I’d say, ‘I’m taken.’ I hated not being able to say, ‘Well, I’m in love with a woman.’ ”
Predictably, Fanny was subjected to a great deal of sexism, often being treated as a novelty act. “Most of society didn’t see girls with a guitar between their legs,” said Patti Quatro, 74, who replaced Millington as lead guitarist in 1974. (Quatro, of Austin, Texas, is an older sister of Suzi Quatro.)
June Millington exited Fanny in late 1973 in part because of a near “nervous breakdown,” she said in a video interview. “I’m glad I left, because I knew that my life was on the line on some major level.” She was sitting in front of a crackling fire at her home on the campus of the Institute for the Musical Arts, a nonprofit recording and retreat facility she co-founded with her longtime partner, Ann Hackler, in Goshen, Mass. On the mantel were various Buddhist objects — Millington is a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism — and a framed photo of Jimi Hendrix.
“The straw that broke the camel’s back,” Millington said, was the record company’s insistence that Fanny, whose members favored ’70s California chic, dress up in glammy, more revealing outfits onstage. (“My top was $45 worth of American coins, looped together, that just pinched my nipples,” de Buhr said.) Millington saw it as a sign that Reprise had lost faith in the band. “I took it as an insult,” she said.
A new version of Fanny — featuring Adamian, Barclay, Darling and Quatro — signed with Casablanca Records and released a final album, “Rock and
Roll Survivors,” in 1974. That record featured the single “Butter Boy,” which Adamian, 73, said was inspired by — but not about, as has been widely reported — her then-boyfriend,