I grabbed hold of the microphone and did my best to channel David Bowie.
Hello Daddy, hello Mom!
I’m your ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb!
Hello world! I’m your wild girl!
I’m your ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb!
When the song was done, nobody said anything to me . . . the music stopped, and Kim nodded, looking thoughtful. Then they put their instruments down and shuffled out of the garage into the living room so they could go deliberate. I could hear them all in there, arguing with each other. Complaining. I clamped my hands over my ears, determined not to hear what was going on. Painful minutes passed. With each second that dragged on, my anxiety grew.
This was going on for far too long for it to be good news. They were probably trying to figure out the nicest way to say, “Thanks, but no thanks. Now buzz off back to wherever it is that you came from!”
I still believed somewhere in the back of my mind that picking “Fever” had killed any chance I might have had. They probably thought that I was a total fucking geek. Lita’s words echoed in my head: “Middle-of-the-road, pansy-ass shit!” I looked back down to my watch. Twenty minutes had passed! They were probably sitting in there making fun of me. Doing impressions of my singing for each other’s amusement. For the nine-hundredth time that afternoon, I cursed myself for not picking “Can the Can.”
Suddenly the door opened, and Joan walked into the garage. Behind her were Kim and the rest of the band. Joan’s eyes were totally unreadable. The rest of them just stood around with their arms folded, staring at me. I looked to Sandy’s face, and I swear her look said, “You sucked.” I turned to Kim, and imagined him saying, “You have the look, kid, but you don’t got the talent. Now get outta here.” I couldn’t even bring myself to look at Kari, or Lita, who I was already convinced hated my guts.
“Okay, dogs,” Kim said, clapping his hands together. “Looks like it’s make-or-break time for our little Cherie Bomb. Let’s go down the line. Joan?”
“I liked it.”
“Sandy?”
“Great. You were great!”
“Lita?”
Lita looked at me and snorted. She shrugged her shoulders. “Yeah,” she said finally, “I guess.”
“Kari?”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” Kim said with a theatrical sigh, “welcome to the doghouse, Cherie. You have been given a chance to be part of history. Now don’t fuck it up!”
They all just stood there. I was stunned, unable to speak. Joan was the first one to come over to me. She smiled.
“Congratulations,” Joan Jett said. “Welcome to the Runaways.”
Chapter 7
“Welcome to the Runaways”
Before I even knew what was happening, Sandy West had picked me up and literally thrown me over a parked car. Sandy was my friend and I loved her, but she could have a temper and she definitely had the muscles to back it up. Off in the distance, I could hear Kim Fowley screaming, “You fucking dog! If that dog puke talks back to me ONE MORE TIME, it’s over! In fact, it’s all over for all you fucking dog cunts! You seem to forget who the main dog is here!”
“Shut up, Cherie!” Sandy screamed in my face. “Goddammit, can’t you just keep your fucking mouth shut? You’re going to ruin this for everyone! You know what Kim’s like!”
Yeah, I knew what Kim was like, all right. This incident took place only weeks into my stint as the Runaways’ lead singer. Ever since I’d joined the band, my day-to-day existence had suddenly become all about Kim Fowley: his demands, his threats, his expectations, his insults, and his promises. My life was suddenly all about rehearsals, and full of talk about potential record deals; and Kim Fowley was ruthless at the helm like some kind of demented ship’s captain. Despite the fact that Kim was loud, and as rude as hell to all of us, something he was doing seemed to be working: there was a definite feeling within the band that something big was about to happen.
But, goddammit, he was a nasty bastard. That’s what led to the blowup between Sandy and me. Sandy’s strong arms suddenly hurling me through the air did shock me enough to calm me down a little. A moment ago I’d been ready to snap. It was a typical rehearsal, and Kim had been his usual abusive self, screaming and hurling insults at us, and I had just had enough.
“Listen, man,” I’d said. “Don’t fucking talk to me like that! I’m not your fucking dog, okay? Don’t call me names anymore!”
When you were screaming at Kim, he would always look like he was holding back a laugh. His eyes would look right at you and his face would twitch from a smile to a pucker. It was infuriating. When I was done, Kim smiled and waved his hand dismissively.
“Go and sing,” he said in a voice dark with sarcasm. “That’s what you’re here to do. Why don’t you leave the thinking to me, sweetheart?”
We stared at each other for a moment as the rest of the band looked on with detached interest. Lita had a smile flickering on her lips. After all, she didn’t like me much and she thought that Kim was an asshole, too, so this was prime entertainment for her whatever way it turned out. It was the first time I had tried to assert myself with Kim since joining the band.
My heart was pounding, anger coursing through me. But Kim just nodded again, signaling for me to go back over to the microphone and continue singing. “Go on,” he said. I gave him one last look, thought, “Fuck it,” and turned to walk back to my spot.
Then I heard him mutter, “Good dog.”
Motherfucker!
In the ensuing fight, I called him a lousy bastard cocksucker and he lost it with me, and started threatening to drop the entire band and find some other girls. “Younger, prettier, more talented girls who would appreciate all he was doing for them!” as he put it. That’s when we all spilled out of the rehearsal room yelling at each other, and Sandy threw me over the hood of a parked car to silence me.
I looked up at her looming over me. I could see in her eyes that she really didn’t want to hurt me. Since I’d joined the Runaways, Sandy and Joan had been the two people closest to me, and I knew that the band meant everything to them. As soon as I hit the ground, Sandy was the first one there to help me up. She pulled me aside and whispered, “I’m sorry, Cherie. Look—this band means everything to me. When I heard Kim say he’d pull the plug, I just freaked . . . Man, are you okay?” She turned me around and brushed the dirt off my butt.
“I’m okay,” I said, starting to laugh a little at the ridiculousness of it all. “I understand.”
“Okay, cool . . .” She smiled at me with those beautiful, piercing blue eyes of hers. In a few moments everything would be forgotten, and the rehearsal went on as if nothing had happened.
As I was fast learning, this was just another day in the life of the Runaways.
Joining the Runaways was a little like the scene at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy is picked up by the tornado, spun around, and dropped in the topsy-turvy world of Oz. From the moment I joined the band, my life changed. My life didn’t change for the better necessarily. But it did change.
The first step was completing the lineup. Joan, Sandy, Lita, and I started auditioning bass players. I didn’t know a lot about music back then, and I didn’t understand why we even needed a bass player. I thought that things sounded just fine the way they were. But no, Kim was back to scoping the under-twenty-one clubs looking for talent, and one of the prospects, a recommendation from Rodney Bingenheimer, was a quiet, bookish girl with the unfortunate name of Jackie Fuchs. Jackie was very different from the rest of us. For one, she was real girly, and reminded me a little of Marie because her nails and hair were always perfect. The rest of us were a little tougher, a little less concerned with stuff like that.
I thought that the contrast was interesting, but the rest of the girls didn’t think so. Also, she really couldn’t play well. Lita, Sandy, and Joan were very serious about their instruments. Lita could play complex Deep Purple riffs with ease, and sometimes I tho
ught that she and Sandy would have been happier playing in a metal band rather than with the Runaways. So when Jackie auditioned and played her bass badly, looking girlish and pretty, they were just about ready to physically throw her out of the room. It was me who made a case for her. I kind of felt bad for Jackie. She seemed sweet, and a little lost. I felt that she would be a good contrast to the rest of the band, and I figured that her bass playing would improve as things progressed. It was a decision I would definitely come to regret.
“Come on!” I said. “Why not give her a chance?”
I got my way for two reasons. One was that even though Jackie couldn’t play so well, she was still better than any of the other girls who auditioned. And then there was Kim, who was eager to get the band moving. Every time things took too long, he was quick to remind us that “This is costing me fucking money! I gotta pay for this trailer, and unless you dogs start earning your way soon, I’m gonna have to put you back on the streets, where you belong!”
Everything with Kim was about money. That was his entire focus—the deal. The record deal was the payoff that Kim was totally obsessed with. He never talked about the money we would make on the record. Instead he kept the focus on us all being stars, legends. If Jackie asked about what kind of money we stood to make, he shut her down with a withering look, before informing her drily that she should worry about her bass playing and leave the finances to him. Also, when we were writing songs, Kim was always involved. I was innocent enough back then to think that this was just because he cared about the songs, but it didn’t take me long to realize that Kim was sharp enough to know that the real money was in the publishing and he wanted his name attached to as many of the songs as possible.
Also, the fact that Jackie was cute and young didn’t count against her with Kim. So when I spoke up for her, Kim initially weighed in on my side. Still, with Joan, Sandy, and Lita putting their collective foot down, Kim told Jackie that she was out of luck. A few weeks later, he came to us with the news that after her unsuccessful first audition, Jackie had supposedly formed her own all-girl band. The way he said it made it perfectly clear that he admired her tenacity and he was going to ask her to come back. Just like that, Jackie was in the band. All that needed to go was her “unattractive” last name—so Jackie Fox was officially the fifth member of the Runaways.
With the lineup completed, rehearsals got under way. The trailer we rehearsed in was tiny and dirty. It was a little mobile trailer on wheels out by Cahuenga and Barham, stuck away in the back of a minimall with a freeway roaring past it. It was the least glamorous, most disgusting rehearsal space you could imagine. I guess that when we weren’t rehearsing in there, somebody kept a dog inside it, because whenever we’d show up for practice, the place was always full of fresh dog shit. We’d have to step our way around it to set up our instruments. They’d clean it up sometimes, but the place was carpeted, so shit was stuck to the carpet fibers, making sure that the place always stank to high heaven. There were some foldout chairs, and soundproofing on the walls, and that was it.
We had a roadie, an older hippy-looking guy with long brown hair and a beard. He used to pick up Jackie, Joan, and me up in his VW bus to bring us over to rehearsal after school and on weekends. He was a nice guy, but oh boy, did he stink. He soon earned the nickname “Stinky” with the band. He obviously had never used deodorant a day in his life. In the back of the bus there were no seats; instead there was a bed that we would sit on. I guess the bus was his home away from home. I don’t know where Kim got him from, but he was the kind of guy who was born to roadie for a rock-and-roll band. Joan and I would be sitting in the back while he blasted Jefferson Airplane on his tape deck, a loose joint dangling from somewhere in his beard. We’d be holding Joan’s leather jacket up to our noses to try to block out his toxic body odor. Joan would make faces at me, and I would literally be crying with laughter at the ridiculousness of the situation. I wasn’t sure what I had expected from being in a band, but this certainly wasn’t it.
“Gosh, man,” Joan said one day when she couldn’t take it any longer. “You know . . . maybe you should use deodorant or something.”
I looked at Joan and almost cracked a rib from laughing so hard. I figured that maybe he’d be offended. But instead, he said very breezily, “No, man . . . I don’t believe in deodorant. Did you know that deodorant causes cancer, man? Anyway, the smell of the human body is beautiful. It’s a turn-on.”
Well, that was it. I was gagging and giggling at the same time. He did carry all of the instruments, though, and help set them up, so we couldn’t complain too much.
The rehearsals were long, and we worked hard. It was a trip, because we were doing something that no other kid in my school was doing. I was sure that even David Bowie had to put up with crappy rehearsal spaces, and dog shit, and screaming managers in the early days. School started to feel like a distraction, and I found myself daydreaming about record deals and concerts packed with screaming fans during the stifling hours I spent in my classrooms.
After the incident where Sandy threw me over the car, I learned to keep my mouth shut, and I even got used to Kim’s shouting and screaming. In a strange way, I started to like him. Maybe it was because I didn’t have a strong parental figure at home, but when he’d curse me out for not singing a line right, I would genuinely feel awful, and always make sure that I did better the next time. What hurt more than the verbal abuse was the feeling that I had let Kim down. I was suddenly a little girl again, trying to make the only adult in the room proud of me.
Kim had this thing about calling us dogs. We were “dog shit,” “dog puke,” “dog puck,” and “dog piss.” If we didn’t play a song right, we were as “useless as the fleas on a dog’s ass.” We were “the flies swarming around a pile of dog shit.” Shit, I was fifteen years old and I didn’t know any better—none of us did. We just figured this kind of stuff was normal when you were in a band.
Joan was the engine that drove the songwriting, and when we started playing tracks like “You Drive Me Wild” and “Thunder,” we really started to feel like the band had a special kind of chemistry. I even got to cowrite a little, throwing lyric ideas in on the songs “Secrets” and “Dead End Justice.” After I joined the band, Kari Krome started to get fazed out. I never knew the full story, but I heard that Kim cut her loose one day and I never saw or heard from her again. Incidents like that seemed designed to make us realize that we were all replaceable, so we did our best not to antagonize Kim too much.
With Kari gone, Joan became the main songwriter along with Kim. He was adamant about being involved at every level of the process, and the routine was that Joan usually came up with a song and then Kim added some lyrics to make sure that he got those future royalties. Looking back, it was obvious that Joan didn’t need Kim to help her write, but she was as young and insecure as the rest of us, and Kim really made us all feel that we needed him. After all, we were just the fortunate dogs that Kim had plucked out of the gutter to be superstars. This was Kim Fowley’s trip, and we were the lucky few that he’d chosen to come along for the ride.
Everything was written very quickly, and it worked with the spirit of the band. We were young and pissed off, and wanted everything right now, now, now! And the music reflected that. Our songs were about drinking, boys, staying out late, screaming “fuck authority.” It may have been rough around the edges, but it had a certain kind of teenage energy that you can’t fake. Even though the band started off as a concept, we quickly became a real band. I guess that’s why Kim had to assert himself so strongly in the rehearsal room, and in every aspect of our lives. He was probably scared that eventually we’d wise up and realize that WE were the Runaways, not Kim, and like Frankenstein’s monster, we’d eventually turn on the man who stitched us together.
“Okay, you dogs, listen up!” Kim said one afternoon. “We’re going to have a visitor. He is from Mercury Records. He’s an executive, and he has the power to make you famous. His name is Den
ny Rosencrantz, and you are going to play for him, and you are going to play well . . . ” He struck a pose, flicking his tongue and pulling his T-shirt sleeve up over his bony shoulder. For some reason, he thought that was seductive. But, we all thought it was just plain gross.
Denny Rosencrantz was a very Latin-looking, handsome, older guy with a goatee and a tan. Legend has it that he was looking for an all-girl rock-and-roll band because his friend Jimi Hendrix had once told him, “One day, girls are going to play guitars, and there will be girls and women in rock and roll and they’re going to be damned good.” So when the Runaways came along, he thought that Jimi’s prediction was coming true. When Kim led him into the rehearsal room, wearing his nice tailored suit, he looked a little taken aback by the pitiful surroundings. I expected Kim to introduce us, but he didn’t. Instead he stood there, the master of ceremonies, and said, “This is the Runaways. They are the future of rock and roll . . .”
Earlier that day, Joan had told me that this was Denny’s second visit to the trailer. The first time he came to see an earlier lineup of the band and had passed, resulting in Kim firing Micki Steele and starting again with Joan, Sandy, and Lita. Hearing stuff like that made me real nervous. This was definitely a make-or-break performance.
“Well,” barked Kim, “don’t just stand there looking sexy. Play, goddammit!”
Sandy counted us off, and we dove into “Cherry Bomb.” All through the performance, I looked anywhere but into the eyes of Denny Rosencrantz. When the final note rang out, we looked over to him expectantly. Denny turned to Kim and gave him a nod. He was smiling. Then he turned to us and said, “Girls—how would you like to make a record for me?”
Nobody knew what to say. A record? It felt like I had barely been in the band for two minutes, and now we had a deal with Mercury Records? I felt light-headed, euphoric. It was left to Lita to sum up the mood in the room when she said, “Fuck yeah, Mr. Rosencrantz, we wanna make a record!”
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