As I’ve been getting more into bandom, I still think one of the bands with the most tragic lore was The Runaways. They were just a bunch of high school girls who wanted to play in a band thrust into a brutally unwelcoming scene around people who either didn’t want them there or wanted to take advantage of them.
While abuse and sexism was and continues to be pervasive in the music industry, the fact that it was the 1970s made it much worse. Women in rock was considered a huge novelty. Drugs were everywhere. The girls barely had any necessary supervision in the form of trusted adults looking out for them. It was basically the Wild West out there.
I was always uncomfortable with the fact their producer Kim Fowley had a 15-16 year old Cherie go up on stage dressed in lingerie while the other girls were wearing regular clothes. I am aware that one of the reasons he recruited Cherie was because he thought the band would be more marketable with a blonde as the frontwoman. However, he was making it so obvious he wanted her to be eye candy jailbait for grown men to ogle at. Or the fact quite a few of their songs (including Cherry Bomb) feature moaning in them. It’s not the moaning itself that bothers me, it’s the fact it’s coming from an underage girl trying to act sexy, and that a grownass man instructed her to do that in the first place.
Also, Joan, Cherie, Lita, and Sandy were never able to do a full reunion together. Sandy’s passing in 2006 especially was the nail in the coffin.
The silver lining to this is that they paved the way for future women in rock. And that most of the members found their own form of success later in life.
