Author: Urban Bolta
Artist: Runaways, The
Label: Mercury Records
Release: 1976
Length: 34:02
Rating: 3.5/5
Rock history recognizes The Runaways as the first all-female rock’n’roll band. Despite their short run, they successfully showed America and the world that the gentler sex can hold its own in the heavier corners of music too. If women in 70s rock showed up only as lighter folk/rock figures like Joan Baez, The Runaways were definitely the girls who gave a rock world full of strutting macho egos an adrenaline-fueled rock’n’roll kick straight to the groin.
A hugely important piece of The Runaways story was Kim Fowley, at the time a well-known music producer, songwriter and musician. Fowley introduced drummer Sandy West and guitarist Joan Jett, the band’s two central figures. With Fowley as their godfather-slash-conductor, the two girls found the rest of the lineup in the months after forming, and the story could begin. The teenagers, gathered from all corners, were completely green musically, and that’s where Fowley came in. He saw an intriguing musical niche in these cute girls playing raw rock’n’roll, so he raised them like the apple of his eye, helped build their whole image and introduced them to the music-biz movers and shakers. When they started writing their own material, he supplied the lyrics and, in the early phase, co-wrote the songs too, so it’s no surprise he’s listed as co-writer on about half the tracks on the band’s debut “The Runaways”.
The girls were barely 16 to 17 when the debut came out, so the lyrics are packed with teenage-rebel themes: sex, hooliganism, crime and breaking the rules, which let the band smash even more stereotypes about the typical middle-class American teenage girl. The Runaways dropped these wild lyrics into a basic rock’n’roll sound, cranked to the very limits of listenability. A bouncy punk-rock rhythm section is spiced up by the guitar duo of Joan Jett / Lita Ford, and the resulting heap of seriously elementary rock hits its peaks in punchy, at times melodic choruses.
The album opens with the energetic Cherry Bomb, a notorious hit with a memorable stuttering chorus and heavy sexual connotations. This simple punk-rock march with a sweet message was the girls’ springboard for promoting the band around the world in the months after release, and in Japan it even became a huge hit. Blatant eroticism pops up again in You Drive Me Wild, for which writer Joan Jett looked for inspiration in the blues of the Mississippi Delta. In the middle stretch, the album loses some of the intensity of its sonic assault on your ears, but the bouncy take on the Velvet Underground tune Rock & Roll is interesting, proving that the range of musicians who influenced The Runaways was very wide. Frontwoman Cherrie Curie handled her vocal role deftly, especially considering that, having joined the band late, she’d been hoping for somewhat gentler rhythms and at first didn’t feel at home in the bouncy punk’n’roll. The melodic-leaning singer slipped skillfully into the roles she played: in American Nights she turns into a party girl, and in Lovers into a saucy tease. After a string of galloping, short and very simple songs, the album closes with Dead End Justice, a seven-minute epic with psychedelic-punk roots, where even guitarist Lita Ford, later a successful solo artist, gets some room to play around.
Musically, the debut “The Runaways” offers a solid stroll through punk-rock rhythms, but what makes it a big deal in the rock world is less its musical content than the fact that these seemingly innocent teenagers proved that the world of heavy, adrenaline-driven rhythms is not a men-only mission. Mentor and producer Kim Fowley cashed in well on his connections and found the girls a spot at the major label Mercury, which helped the album land among the 200 best-selling records on its home turf in America on release. For a quintet of totally green musicians, that was without a doubt a nice success.
Lineup
Cherie Currie – vocals
Joan Jett – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Lita Ford – guitar, backing vocals
Jackie Fox – bass guitar, backing vocals
Sandy West – drums, backing vocals
Production
Kim Fowley
Track list
1. Cherry Bomb (2:18)
2. You Drive Me Wild (3:22)
3. Is It Day or Night? (2:45)
4. Thunder (2:31)
5. Rock & Roll (3:17)
6. Lovers (2:09)
7. American Nights (3:15)
8. Blackmail (2:41)
9. Secrets (2:43)
10. Dead End Justice (7:01)
