The Runaways - classic or dud?

Xp to VG: I def never thought you were being kneejerk at all; dismissing Jett and Currie as evil seemed more knwejerk to me. It seems to me like every position you've taken has been very thoughtful and I was only trying to continue in that same vein of thoughtfulness

aw thx

In other news...that Ann Powers piece is really something

What seem to have been accepted so much that its been lost sight of..

That if any of the band had acted or done something, that meant the Runaways end right there.

None of the band wanted that to happen.Yes, eventually, they got it together to leave him and continue, but the damage was still there.

But, effectively, they had no choice.

That Ann Powers piece is great.

Yeah, the comments are especially bad, though.

mention of Lori Maddox reminded me how weird it is that some of the women in that scene came away with nothing but good vibes - like, she's never spoken of her relationship with Jimmy Page in anything other than positive terms (at least as far as I can tell)

And sometimes the men involved are so blatantly transgressive that they become pariahs: when thirtysomething metalhead Ted Nugent became the legal guardian of his teenage lover in the 1970s, all the while recording songs like "Jailbait," it added to his reputation as a truly unstable character.

Holy shit I didn't know this. Also not enough of a pariah, clearly.

yeah god as if you need more reason to be grossed out by the Nuge, there it is

oh there are so many reasons

http://www.feelnumb.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/stevenjulia13dx.jpg
she's 13 it's cool, bbs.

his bringing up the kitty genovese case was a bad look. that whole 38-witnesses-who-did-nothing story has been pretty roundly debunked. editor/fact checker should have caught that.

🗻
she's 13 it's cool, bbs.

16 and his ward, but what's the difference really? What a fucked up time this was:

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/the-light-of-the-world-the-steve-tyler-and-julia-holcomb-story

Bonus points for a bizarre and unexpected Bill Cosby appearance in her story.

is that ann powers piece really good? I can't get past the first paragraph's shoehorned song references.

Last week, a story about Jackie Fuchs, centered around her account of being raped by the late music entrepreneur Kim Fowley in a motel room full of people on New Year's Eve in 1975, challenged the very idea that rock and roll is something worth loving. Fuchs's account hit the music world like a bomb that obliterated all taste of cherry from our mouths,

I mean, those bolded bits above belong in Rolling Worst Music Writing thread imo

I don't know about the phrasing, but this story definitely made me rethink a lot of the rock&roll mythology / self image of rock&roll

the cherry bomb pun seems unfortunate

Not sure why Iggy, Bowie, Johnny Thunders never get mentioned, is it because critics like them?

She said she named the examples listed off the top of her head without doing research so maybe Iggy, Bowie, and Johnny Thunders weren't located at the top of her head.

Also yes probably that's why they don't get mentioned.

i was reading the holcomb story and getting increasingly surprised by how it turned into a paean to pro-life + then i looked at the url

Ann Powers piece *is really good, god though someone should have subbed that first paragraph

I think the Ann Powers article does a good job of putting Kim Fowler in the larger context of rock and roll at the time, but I think you need to look at an even bigger context and look at it in the context of how women were treated generally in the US at the time. Like, women legally couldn't get credit cards without a husband to co-sign for them until 1974 (so the year before the Runaways were formed). States could make it illegal for unmarried women to get birth control until 1972. Women could legally be excluded from juries solely on the basis of them being women until 1975. It was legal to fire, refuse to hire, or generally discriminate pregnant women in the realm of employment until 1978. So adult women were basically treated like children, which is something you can definitely see in advertising of the time as well. And when you blur the line between women and girls, you get shit like this:

http://s-ak.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/web03/2010/10/18/6/enhanced-buzz-10341-1287396425-2.jpg

Which is a point Cherkis made - that it was more acceptable for adult men to prey on young women in the 70s, but I attribute that to adult women being viewed as children, and if all women are basically children, what does it matter how old she really is?

So depressingly true

Good context. Can I just say though, my wife really does drive like that. I wore the finish off the oh shit bar in her last car. I'm making a note about those tires.

...

good pt carl

sorry, it was an ill-considered joke. Must have been channeling my father-in-law or something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_tom65LKiE

Age: 14.

Brooke's exploitation began much younger - it's insane that she's a naked sex object in "Pretty Baby". you know, a nostalgic, romantic bildungsroman about a 12yo prostitute (written by a woman!) that I'm appalled even got made. baffled that it was even legal at the time.

if this is turning into a discussion about exploitation can it be moved elsewhere? i mean generally i am pointing the finger at the concept of objectification, and even listing examples of severe objectification as exploitation seems...exploitative under the circumstances.

speaking of, this conversation has reminded me of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

fair enough

i was reading the holcomb story and getting increasingly surprised by how it turned into a paean to pro-life + then i looked at the url

I thought the same thing – but given the nature of the story, I wasn't entirely shocked it ended up there. The whole thing was depressing and manipulative.

To pull this back to rock, the internet is full of these stories. Pamela Des Barres' Lets Spend the Night Together documentary from VH-1 is on YouTube in its entirety, with bits from Lori Maddox talking about losing her virginity to Bowie at 13 or so and Cassandra Peterson (ne. Elvira) fleeing the room when Jimmy Page was trying to rape her. There's the whole saga of Sable Starr and the Stooges, a lot of which is covered in Please Kill Me.

To VG's point way upthread, once this all goes from "Hey, things sure were crazy back then" to "Dudes were raping girls and getting their parents to sign over legal custody of these girls" it begins to change how you perceive this whole era. Punk doesn't seem any more enlightened or liberated than the dinosaurs they ostensibly replaced.

what do you mean by "punk" there - I can't recall any similar stories about, say, the Clash or Blondie or Black Flag or the Go-Gos for ex.

Johnny Thunders + Iggy more than punk.

"Punk doesn't seem any more enlightened or liberated than the dinosaurs they ostensibly replaced."

There were definitely dinosaurs among the punks (or specifically people who aspired to the same sort of "rock star"-life as the dinosaurs).

I don't know about the Black Flag years specifically, but I remember one Rollins spoken-word tape where he tells this "funny story" about a girl who wouldn't do him, so he jacked off on her in her sleep.

And I haven't seen it, but according to descriptions I have read, the infamous Go-Go's tape features them penetrating a passed-out dude with a vibrator.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was more sexual violence in the punk scene.

I have been thinking a lot about Lori Maddox

I think that the problem with rock n roll success and stardom & the sexual power it affords/afforded to men is that for these v young girls there isnt always a vocabulary for it being wrong dangerous illegal and horrible bcz it falls under the umbrella of "attention" --- and there isnt a way to even talk about the dangerous illegal horrible - she begins her confessional with the words "Jimmy Page" & any wrongdoing disappears because he is a guitar god end of story

You know? Like even her own perception of him if she is a fan becomes distorted, this must be ok because the world has made him into Jimmy Fucking Page & he must be right because why else would they make him famous

idk a lot about her but I am just thinking this through in the mind of being 14

I don't know about Jimmy Page but I would have willingly gone along with Robert Plant when I was 14, and who knows whether I'd have the... whatever it requires to look back on that as an adult and call it out for the exploitation that it was.

yeah some kind of Stockholm Syndrome variant

"I wouldn't be surprised if there was more sexual violence in the punk scene."

Uh I would pretty surprised actually if there was more sexual violence (and exploitation) than in the previous era.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was more sexual violence in the punk scene.

I'm thinking back primarily to We Got the Neutron Bomb (which, btw, does include Fowley and the Runaways but does not, iirc, address Fuchs' rape) and once people like X, the Germs, Black Flag, the Weirdos, etc. were on the scene yeah it just doesn't seem like this creepy predatory sexual atmosphere permeated everything as it did a few years prior. a lot of the women are more assertive, openly hostile/aggressive in their own right, and there's a different kind of asexual/gender confusion/queer strain running through it, and the previous generation is (with a few exceptions lol Ray Manzarek) largely despised and scorned for their gross "rock star" ways.

Forgot about that Go Go's thing. That's a pretty sordid tale.

I think there was less 14 year old girl exploiting, but it would be extremely naive to paint the punk scene (any scene that is cast as primarily masculine, assertive women aside) as some kind of safe space where women were free of sexual violence.

even the Go-Gos incident cited above (I haven't seen the tape either) is kind of unprecedented/unthinkable in the previous era of just a few years prior, none of the Runaways were in a position of strength/authority that would have allowed them to sexually assault one of their roadies or male fans. (not that either scenario is a good thing! obviously) just that the politics of the scene def shifted.

xp

I don't think of the punk scene - particularly the LA and british punk scenes - as primarily masculine tho

certainly hardcore turned into that in the mid-80s but between '77-'82 or so? nah

Uh I would pretty surprised actually if there was more sexual violence (and exploitation) than in the previous era.

Not "more than", just extra unearthed.

Stuff that hasn't come to light.

like the last bazillion years of human history
i think it's safe to say that where there is objectification, there will be exploitation (and sometimes violence)
there is not a safe zone afaik, and if there is one please tell me where it is

yeah can't really argue w that

ll otm