[Narrator] Previously on Women Who Rock...
[Mavis Staples] People started saying
the Staple Singers are singing the devil's music.
[Merry Clayton] It was rock 'n' roll,
and it would lead you down a path
that was not very savory.
[Tori Amos] Nina Simone's voice
was a challenge to wake up.
"Mississippi Goddamn," Wow.
♪ Yeah!
[singing bass line to "I'll Take You There"]
[Nona Hendryx] We had coiffed hair and tiaras.
That was about a fantasy.
[Chaka Khan] In that day,
it wasn't unusual for a band
to be discovered at a club,
and to sign a record deal on the spot.
[electric guitar strum]
[amplifier feedback]
[electric guitar strum]
Growing up, when I discovered
these incredible women making rock music,
I mean, that's, like-- that's the dream.
People would be like, "Whoa,
look at that little gal with that big guitar,"
like a novelty.
[Benatar] I wanted to break the boys' club.
I wanted to break down that bullshit.
[Khan] I said, "Let me tell you something.
I'm going to be a star with or without you."
[Jett] Growing up, I thought,
"There's gotta be other girls
that wanna play rock 'n' roll.
I can't be the only one."
[Twain] There's something very liberating
about being able to take on a rock 'n' roll attitude
and not have to abandon your femininity at the same time.
[Crow] There were lots of obstacles along the way for me,
but I knew the only person that could drive my ship
that I felt I could trust was me.
[Staples] I'm not a diva.
I love people. I'm a people person.
I'm just Mavis.
Just Mavis.
Yep.
♪♪♪
["Barracuda" playing]
[singing guitar riff from "Barracuda"]
Dun-dun... whoop!
["Barracuda" continues]
♪♪♪
-♪ So this ain't the end... -When I hear "Barracuda,"
I feel like a barracuda.
Like... [laughs]
I remember being in seventh grade
with my best friend,
and we would play the intro to "Barracuda."
I mean, we played it poorly, of course.
♪ Back over time we were all trying for free ♪
Singing "Barracuda" was... [laughs]
I would say a very liberating experience.
[Nancy Wilson] When a voice like Ann Wilson's voice
is right out front,
she's just got this gift
that you have to notice it.
♪ You gonna burn, burn, burn, burn, burn to the wick ♪
[Natalie Merchant] They frightened me.
It's like, "There are bad girls."
That's what I... [laughs]
They were powerful,
but it was like a witches' coven.
♪♪♪
-All right! -[crowd cheering]
There was a situation at a party
where some sleazy record guys came up to Ann,
and said, "Hey, how's your lover?"
She's like, "Well, my boyfriend, Mike, he's fine."
He said, "No, I mean your sister.
How's your lover?"
And so the insinuation
was that we were sister-lovers, right?
She was so livid about that.
She stomped off,
and went and wrote the words to "Barracuda" that same night.
We knew it needed to have an angry groove
because it's an angry song
about slimeballs, really,
and, uh...
it's a good song.
[chuckles]
♪♪♪
In the early '60s,
I was about nine at the time,
the culture had shifted so much,
mainly from the Beatles.
There was so much rich soil
to plant your seed in musically
that we were so lucky to grow up with,
but seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show
was like the lunar landing.
[fans screaming]
The Beatles ignited the flame in me and my sister Ann,
and the culture, and the world
in just an explosive inspiration.
We just wanted to be the Beatles.
We didn't want to be girls trying to be the Beatles.
We just wanted to be the Beatles...
and being that young,
we didn't have any concept
that it wasn't natural just to go and get guitars
and be kids with a band.
[Ann Wilson] We were raised by a mother
who never laid down the rules
of what girls are supposed to be.
She just said, "Be yourself."
So it was all news to me
that there was this dictate from the world of rock men,
that this is what the image of a rock woman had to be.
Ultimately...
can I say "fuckable"?
Not necessarily in charge,
so that came as a real shock to me.
[Nancy Wilson] Women in popular music culture
at the time seemed ornamental to me,
like the front woman
who had to be really dolled up
and have the feminine charm
more than any kind of aggressive
or, you know, bold statement.
So, demure, you know?
It was much later
that we already had kind of broken those rules
about what girls are supposed to do
or not supposed to really get away with.
We already got away with it
before we had the conscious decision
of doing it against the gender lines.
We were just kind of free with it.
We just did it.
In the mid-late 70s,
the music business
was definitely a male-dominated industry,
a lot of real kind of slimeballs,
more normally in the business part.
You know, they'd be really kind of sexually inappropriate,
but I think even more in that era,
that it was more kind of expected in the business of it,
and here's these, you know,
little, vulnerable, fresh-faced,
apple-cheeked girls from Seattle.
♪♪♪
In the early 70s, we lived in Canada,
and we cut our teeth in Vancouver.
We were a working band.
We really worked hard to learn the craft,
be diligent,
like, practice...
And then we would get in a van,
one van with the whole band,
and trek across the Canadian tundra,
you know, to some other cabaret.
We got kicked out of one place
because Ann commented about the dinner club food
tasted like Sterno...
[laughs] and so we got kicked out.
We were fired on the spot,
and so we set fire
to the dressing room and left.
[laughs]
But then we got a call from Rod Stewart
that his opener in Montreal had to drop out,
so we got that job the next day.
We went across Canada on the train,
and played for Rod Stewart
after being kicked out of the dinner club. [laughs]
There were a million thrills to be had
on those big stages.
Like the first time we opened for Rod Stewart,
it was like, "Wow!"
The people lit their lighters,
and they knew the song.
We were like, "Wow!"
It's like a constellation of little flames
in this huge room and this big stage,
and it was super magical
by way of the introduction onto the big stage.
[crowd cheering]
It was a much bigger deal than I anticipated.
Suddenly were bigger and bigger stages,
and then stadiums and festivals,
and a sea of people as far as your eyes could see,
with relay towers beyond that.
It blew up pretty-- pretty big, you know.
At this point, there's no negative nervousness,
but there is a... there's a real anxiousness
to get out there and do it, you know?
[Ann Wilson] If you really want to do it up,
and be as big as you can,
you must tour. You must.
You have to let them see that you're real.
You know, you have to touch them.
[announcer] Please welcome Heart!
♪♪♪
[Nancy Wilson] We were so unafraid
to be brand-new and different.
You know, into our 20s,
we started to go, "Whoa,
there's nothing out there like us,
and that's a good thing."
It set us apart,
and we were not shy with it.
We were just going to flex it, you know, and be loud.
[chuckles]
I think it's being inspired
by all the muses that are available.
At the time,
there weren't very many bands with girls in,
like Heart, or Fleetwood Mac,
and, you know, Stevie, we hung out with her a lot.
We partied with her. [laughs]
Maybe too much.
[Sheila E] Stevie is incredible.
The dynamic of how she writes
and what she thinks about,
and her passion for what she says,
and who she is as an artist,
to be true to who she is as a woman.
Some of the things that she says and writes about
is pretty deep.
Man, you must have been in a place
to really write something like this.
I guess, in a sense, it's somewhat of a therapy.
[Fleetwood Mac performing "Dreams"]
♪ It's only me
♪ Who wants to wrap around your dreams... ♪
[Sheryl Crow] Stevie Nicks, to me,
she sort of encapsulated
this ethereal, mystical being,
and yet was writing this incredible poetry,
and rocking.
She was this sort of larger than life persona.
Fleetwood Mac is probably, like,
within my top three favorite bands ever of all time.
I love Christine McVie as well.
Like, I love Christine's songs,
but Stevie is one of those artists
that has the invisible energy.
It's just like she's a fucking magical witch.
Like, that's all I can say about her,
is she is an actual magical gold dust woman.
♪ ...thunder only happens when it's raining ♪
♪ Players only love you when they're playing... ♪
We had so much excitement for their songs,
and know them inside out,
you know, and upside down.
♪♪♪
[Sheryl Crow] The Wilson Sisters of Heart,
they were women who carved the way
for a lot of us.
You know, they were great poets,
and they were great performers.
[Nona Hendryx] Ann Wilson, Nancy Wilson,
both women, they are beacons in music
and what you can do.
I always saw them as two women
who just would destroy a stage.
[Sheryl Crow] Nancy's a great musician.
Only a few women that I can think of
when I was a kid coming up
stood out in front and played the guitar
like one of the guys,
and she was one of them.
For us girls that were wanting to be out front,
and who wanted to rock,
she was an illustration of how to do that.
How to be beautiful, how to continue
to maintain your femininity
and who you are, and yet, you know,
rock 'n' roll on an electric guitar.
[Nancy Wilson] For me,
the guitar is kind of everything.
I feel like I go through an array of personalities
during a song.
I could happy-go-lucky,
bounce around like Paul McCartney over here,
and then I could, like,
dig in to the guitar like Jimmy Page
on this other song.
I've never felt gender-specific about playing,
or being a rock person.
I can be as strong as a male with my playing,
or as delicate as someone like Joni.
[Joni Mitchell playing guitar]
Well, Joni Mitchell is gifted beyond explanation.
I was a Joni fan from the very first Joni album
when I was in high school.
Her songs just made me cry, you know.
I was just like [imitates sobbing], you know?
That's just-- that's me.
Joni made magic,
magic places.
I didn't have to leave
to go to California.
She took me to California.
She took me everywhere,
and it was lush and beautiful,
and the chord structure was like from angels.
♪ Blue...
[crowd applauding]
[holding note]
♪ Songs are like tattoos...
Joni Mitchell was my queen.
She wasn't loud,
but her voice soared through.
Every woman has their revelation, you know,
their epiphany when they hear Blue.
♪ ...or let me sail away...
[Nancy Wilson] I saw Joni Mitchell
at the Paramount Theater
doing the Bluetour.
She did the dulcimer.
She played the piano.
She played acoustic.
Just her, [chuckles], only her,
and it was just way beyond anything I'd expected
for a rock show to be like.
♪ Here is a song from me
[Joni Mitchell] A woman came up to me in a bar
and she said to me,
"Before Prozac, there was Joni Mitchell."
[laughs]
You know, so...
because people generally don't read that much
in this culture,
there was a lot of self-exploration,
and there were some truths
that I discovered along the way.
Wherever I could take it
from my own personal travail
to the universal,
anything good that helped me,
I would try to slot into the song, you know,
philisoph-- to give it some nutrition.
♪♪♪
[Aimee Mann] She had a really sophisticated approach to music,
and her lyrics were really incredible.
Now people realize what a genius she was,
and, you know, a real savant,
an absolute creative genius.
I remember there were times when I was on a tour bus.
The bus is roaring through the night like a demon.
I have all the windows open,
Joni blasting in the back of the bus.
♪♪♪
You know, I'm pissed at the world,
and I was, like, thinking about doing
terrible things to myself,
and then Joni saved me.
Her lyrics would bring me back to square one,
because she talks about everything so freely.
Look, she's the first artist that sent me to a dictionary.
I had to look up words in her lyrics.
I love her for that,
and we were friends because we told the truth.
[laughs]
You know?
I'm thankful for that.
She's influenced me immensely throughout my career.
There were so few women
who could break through
the many cultural and psychological barriers
that keep us from respecting women, you know.
They were always incidental to the real thing
that was always men.
[Natalie Merchant] Women in the '70s
started asserting their power through music...
and taking more control over their careers,
whether it was Joni Mitchell or Patti Smith.
And that's something that so many women of my generation
just grew up with,
the privilege of women's voices being heard,
and the female perspective being expressed,
because we benefited from that second-wave feminism,
the women's liberation movement.
[crowd shouting and chanting]
[Shirley Chisholm] You women better wake up
if you want to help to change America around.
The only thing that you have is your integrity,
and the principles, and the convictions
of what we are fighting for in America.
The times reflected the music that completely followed,
you know, the political landscape.
[Ann Powers] We have a new generation,
a new wave.
It made space for women
to directly and overtly challenge gender roles.
No, thank you.
[Ruth Bader Ginsberg] Some fear
the Equal Rights Amendment,
because no one can fully forecast
the development of constitutional principle.
Fear must not deter us now,
for the Equal Rights Amendment
represents the highest American ideal:
recognition of the value of each individual.
Now, in the 1970s,
each woman as well as each man.
[Holly George-Warren] I think a lot of women
who were true musicians and true artists,
also it liberated them
to go out there and start bands, and start writing songs,
and, you know, you get these incredible artists
that came from this great wave.
We're very privileged
to have as our guest on the show today,
and we thank Gloria and Ms.magazine
for doing this
to arrange for the appearance of Carole King.
Here is Carole. It wasn't easy luring you
from that ranch in Idaho.
No. [laughs]
It took something really special like this, though,
because when I first heard
about the women that were going to be on this show,
all of them are women
for whom I have a great deal of respect
because they're committed to something they believe in,
and have put themselves out on the line,
standing up, voicing their opinions,
and it hasn't always been easy, I know that.
But I really respect them for that,
and I wanted to be in this company
because I try to be that myself.
♪♪♪
♪ Looking out
♪ On the morning rain...
[Sheryl Crow] I think my earliest influence
is probably Carole King.
When I was a really young girl,
we had Tapestry,
and I think that was the first time
I kind of found my identity.
[Norah Jones] I got really obsessed with Carole King
and the Tapestryalbum.
I mean, I had known "Natural Woman"
from my childhood listening to Aretha,
and so then when I found out that she wrote that song,
and she wrote all these great songs,
I was a fan.
♪ You make me feel...
Carole King, one of the greatest songwriters ever,
and a beautiful person.
One of the greatest songwriters I can think of.
♪ ...natural woman
♪ A natural woman
[Sheryl Crow] I think one of the things about Carole King
that I love is that you could feel
her heart in these songs.
She played the piano,
and she wrote heartfelt songs, but they were still edgy,
and of the moment,
songs that felt very yearning to me,
felt like she was able to sort of capture
what it felt like to be a woman.
You have the singer-songwriter movement
that was Carole King and Joni Mitchell,
among others, but definitely leading the way.
♪♪♪
[Chaka Khan] There was a time in music
when there were barely any women at all.
Uh, Sly and the Family Stone were out there.
There were women like Bonnie Raitt,
who stood there and played a guitar,
and was a badass and paved the way.
It was these women that were proving that idea wrong,
that not just men could play guitar.
They were women that gave me permission
to do the same.
[Susanna Hoffs] Joni,
and Linda Ronstadt, and Bonnie Raitt.
I just basically learned singing and playing guitar
through playing those albums over and over and over again
to the point that it drove my family crazy,
but I didn't care,
because it was kind of like a drug.
I was addicted to it.
Women were mostly singers,
but there had been a marvelous group
named Fanny.
♪ Ooh, baby
♪ I can make you come
[Tina Weymouth] Fanny was just really original,
but they didn't have a mainstream success.
[Kate Pierson] They were the first women band in the '70s
that were... played their own instruments,
wrote their own songs.
♪ Ooh, you're the one
♪ Oh, yeah, babe
♪ You're the one
♪♪♪
But even back in the punk days,
there weren't a lot of women
playing their own instruments.
♪♪♪
[Natalie Merchant] This idea of women being part of the band
with an instrument
on equal footing with the men in the band,
that was Tina Weymouth,
and that was really powerful.
[Tina Weymouth] 19-early 70s,
New York was broke,
so we lived in very poor circumstances
in a loft on Christie Street.
It was three and a half blocks from CBGBs.
I had a day job.
I worked on 57th Street at Henri Bendel.
I walked down to 48th Street,
put some money down on a bass guitar,
and I brought it home, and I still have it,
a wonderful 1963 Fender bass guitar.
♪♪♪
I was with Chris Frantz, who played drums,
and David Byrne,
who played guitar, and sang a little.
We had a great time just developing.
Our whole band was learning together.
We would rehearse
every single day,
seven days a week,
and within five and a half months
of me getting that guitar,
we were playing at CBGBs.
CBGBs was this wonderful place to hang out
and watch Television,
Patti Smith,
Blondie.
It was a really interesting time in the '70s,
because the big rock gods, you know,
Zeppelin, and The Who, and the Rolling Stones touring,
there was suddenly like an underground punk scene,
and it was Television, and Blondie, and Patti.
♪♪♪
[Holly George-Warren] Patti Smith,
I had never seen anyone like that before on stage, ever.
She was so androgynous.
She was a whirling dervish.
She was a poet.
She was rock incarnate.
[Joan Jett] Patti Smith is considered
that sort of subculture,
but she was a little bit different kind of music to me.
It was more cerebral.
Yeah, there was something I could relate to in it.
The androgyny of it I could really relate to.
[Ann Powers] She wasn't conforming to anybody's idea
of a feminine ideal.
She went beyond gender.
She went right through it, and changed everything.
♪ Come on, now Try and understand ♪
♪ The way I feel when I'm in your hands ♪
[Debora Iyall] Listening to Patti Smith,
live especially,
made that poetry,
and that part of me that was just loving words,
and it was very transporting,
transcendental.
♪ Because the night belongs to love ♪
♪ Because the night belongs to lovers ♪
♪ Because the night...
Patti Smith, just--
she is like a sorceress when she performs.
Oh, my God, it was just so mind-blowing.
We went backstage, and she was still on.
She was still, like, doing poetry.
Patti Smith threw up on me one night
in the back room at CBGBs.
That's my fondest memory of Patti.
She was just in the doorway, and she saw me,
and there was nobody else in the room
she recognized, I guess,
and she came over to me and went, "Wayne! Argh!"
and just threw up all over me,
and I am so sorry
that I threw away her puke,
because I could have kept those puke-stained clothes,
and they could have been put in some kind of Hall of Fame.
"Clothes Patti Smith puked on."
[Aimee Mann] That was still the time
where kind of as a woman,
you were expected to be ladylike,
and so she just really had,
like, a straight-out kind of rock presence
that was very androgynous,
and that was very appealing to, like, you know,
"Oh, here's somebody who is not
in the same box as everybody else."
[Kate Pierson] You know,
we thought Patti was the punk priestess,
and Debbie,
she's just, like, so beautiful,
so she was the punk princess,
'Cause she added this glamour to punk.
♪♪♪
♪ Face to face
♪ Sadly solitude
[Aimee Mann] Blondie was one of those bands
that I first started listening to
when I was first discovering punk and New Wave.
Deborah Harry had a real "fuck you" confidence
that I was very inspired by.
♪ Rapture
[St. Vincent] Blondie is that, like, perfect example
that I truly don't think has come around again.
As far as I'm concerned, like,
Debbie Harry invented cool.
♪ Go out to the parking lot
She had that very unique look
that matched the vocal,
kind of quirky, kind of offbeat.
♪ And you don't stop
♪ You keep on eating cars
♪ Then when there's no more cars ♪
[Ann Powers] Debbie Harry of Blondie,
such a revolutionary,
completely playing the beauty queen to the hilt,
and then ripping her dress, ripping her stockings,
ripping that whole image apart.
[Joan Jett] I was lucky enough
to be good friends with the band,
and they would come to L.A.,
and they'd stay for a while.
They'd stay for a couple of weeks or a month,
and so we'd get to really hang out.
Debbie Harry,
she had been doing it longer than I had,
and it was just, like,
I looked up to her in that way
that you could talk about what you go through.
♪♪♪
[Jayne County] I mean, Blondie, I think
out of all the New York bands, Blondie made it
the most commercial of any of them.
From Blondie, would you welcome
Debbie Harry and Chris Stein.
[audience applauding]
But your hits, Debbie,
seem to give permission for all girls to have hits.
You must have had a struggle to get going.
Well, yeah, of course,
you know, it's always a struggle.
- [Merv Griffin] Yeah. - It was also
a timely thing for me, too,
because with all the sort of acceptance,
and, you know, sort of the ERA,
and all those things were sort of happening at once,
and I was just doing it simultaneously,
so I guess it's very logical.
[Kate Pierson] During that time, you know,
all other bands were going to see other bands,
so Talking Heads and Blondie came to see us,
and then we got to see Patti Smith.
Talking Heads is not that much like Television,
and Television isn't that much like Patti Smith,
or Siouxsie and the Banshees, or The Pretenders.
[Macy Gray] I remember The Pretenders.
I remember I was a big Chrissie Hynde fan,
because she was like Billie Holiday,
like, she didn't have this big, you know, church voice,
but she had a style, you know,
that was super cool.
And I could always understand what she was saying.
[Ann Powers] Chrissie Hynde,
I remember very well
when I saw the cover
of the first Pretenders album,
and here was this woman in girl-group eyeliner,
and a rock 'n' roll rooster haircut
like the guys in the Stones had,
wearing a leather jacket,
and just looking so tough,
and then I heard her voice,
and the tenderness,
the compassion,
the vulnerability in that voice
that then would switch over to absolute ballsiness,
but that's Chrissie, you know.
Chrissie was everything at once.
[Kate Pierson] Everyone was unique,
that's what was great about that scene.
[Tina Weymouth] It was a fabulous thing for us
to open up this whole new little culture...
this diverse mix
of women working with men.
It was good and positive,
not just for music and the arts,
but it was good for everybody.
[The B-52s performing intro to "Rock Lobster"]
♪ Bah-loo-bah-lah
Aah!
♪ Bah-loo-bah-lah
♪ Aah!
♪ We were at a party
♪ Aah!
♪ His earlobe fell in the deep
♪ Aah!
♪ Someone reached in and grabbed it ♪
♪ Aah!
♪ It was a rock lobster
♪ Ah, ah, ah, ah!
♪ Rock lobster!
♪ Ah, ah, ah, ah!
[Tina Weymouth] I loved it that Kate could just sing,
and create these amazingly wonderful
driving bass riffs
all on a keyboard,
and all while dancing
with hair piled up to here.
It was so brilliant.
♪♪♪
Our image is something people talk about all the time,
like, "How did you get your image? Who does your look?"
and it's formed in a natural way.
♪♪♪
We just went to thrift stores and found crazy stuff,
but we were very influenced by Fellini movies,
and we had these old Voguemagazines,
and they were so surreal,
like, the fashion was so...
really, just bold and out there.
That image,
we kind of wanted to turn it on its wig head in a way,
you know, just kind of reveal the artifice of it all.
Like the Fellini, it's just so over-the-top
that it's kind of not sexy,
but we didn't really try to be--
look punk, particularly.
We just sort of formed this look
by grabbing stuff in the thrift store
and putting it together.
It was not a glamour thing at all.
The women of punk,
they all had a real impact on me.
It was such a great scene
to see women unleashing this power.
Now you had someone like Poly Styrene
of X-ray Spex, you know,
who's saying, "I am not an object.
You cannot reduce me,"
And that to me was the glory of punk.
[playing note on saxophone]
The X-Ray Spex played a very important part
in the UK punk scene.
[Joan Jett] Oh, my God, Poly Styrene, X-Ray Spex,
they were definitely really aggressive, you know.
They were taking it in a political direction,
and I really appreciated that.
[Debora Iyall] Poly Styrene was amazing.
I remember just staring at the test tubes on their records,
with their outfits, very sort of '60s mod,
you know, fashion, and yet her voice was piercing,
and strong, and angry,
and the message, "Oh Bondage! Up Yours!"
Oh, I needed to hear that.
[flatly] Little girls should be seen and not heard.
[screams] Oh, Bondage!
Up yours!
One, two, three, four!
♪♪♪
The fact that Poly Styrene was biracial,
in punk in the '70s,
Poly Styrene has been kind of like this patron saint
for a lot of women of color in punk.
[Kathleen Hanna] Poly Styrene, she was doing,
like, feminist anti-capitalism in punk
in such an interesting, funny, nuanced way
before anyone, really.
♪♪♪
[Poly Styrene] Things I write most about
are plastic things and artificial things.
You could say that they're social comments,
but they're slightly different
to what anybody else is writing.
♪♪♪
[Alice Bag] When punk came around,
it was like somebody just decided
they were going to strip it all down,
and it was all about the energy, the message,
the connection to the audience.
[Susanna Hoffs] You didn't even need a record company.
You didn't even need anything
but the passion,
and the commitment, and the drive,
and the vision of what you wanted to say.
It was kind of idea-based.
I felt like the punk community was very open to everybody.
I realized I can redefine what it means to be a Chicana.
I can be a Chicana punk.
You didn't have to wait for anybody to lead.
You could lead,
and there were women doing every possible role.
Like, "Yeah!
Listen to me, have something to say."
[Kira Roessler] It was very underground,
and anything that's underground
sort of is rebelling against, you know, these structures.
[Alice Bag] If you didn't come in
with the attitude of, like,
"I'm a trained musician, and you're not,"
or you didn't try to, like, dictate what we should be doing,
then you were going to be accepted,
especially if you were pushing the boundaries.
[crowd applauds]
I did decide to try to have my own band,
so I started practicing bass guitar.
There were several female bass players--
Alley Cats, Eyes--
so you would see these girls actually doing it,
and it seemed like in early punk rock,
there just wasn't the reaction to the women.
There wasn't one.
It was not like, "Wow, that girl can play bass."
It was just like, "Oh, I like that band,"
or, "I don't like that band."
Black Flag had many incarnations.
They started very early, and so we all knew each other,
and so Henry Rollins calls me, and he says,
"Do you want to play with Black Flag?
You should jam with Bill and Greg."
So we jammed,
and at the end of that jam, they said,
"Do you want to play in Black Flag?"
and I just joined my favorite band, literally.
They taught me a level of commitment and effort
that was going to be, you know,
more than you can physically do every day,
and it's going to, like,
literally pull your whole soul along.
There's no downtime.
There's no, you know, vacation.
We slept on people's floors, or in the van.
There was no hotels on tour, ever.
After I was sure we were done playing,
I would often have to ice my hand in the ice bucket,
and you'd often see, you know,
I'm just in pain,
and that's part of this idea
of having to give up everything.
All I do is Black Flag,
because that's all you can do
when you're in Black Flag.
What Black Flag wants to do
is we're just going to shove you up against the wall
with the music,
so I feel invincible during the show.
Like, during the show,
we're just going, "Argh!" to you.
The music is insanely, you know, loud, and big, and strong.
Nothing can take us during that time.
The great thing about being on stage
is the feeling that you have really lost yourself,
and that it doesn't matter.
You know, that you're just completely confident,
and you can feel you're being held
by the audience that's listening to you.
[Kira Roessler] Music before, the women were pretty,
and they sang pretty,
and so the girls that were very girly-girl
were very hard for me to identify with.
In music, you didn't see that many tough girls,
and when you started to see that,
someone like Suzi Quatro or Joan Jett, and these people
who are, you know, encompassing a different kind of woman,
I think that's when it connected to me.
Well, I got an electric guitar for Christmas.
I asked my parents for a guitar for Christmas,
and they got it for me. They actually got it for me.
I just remember making a lot of noise the first day,
bending the E-string--
"Arr! Arr! Arr!" driving my father crazy.
I had a guitar teacher,
and I was this exuberant 13-year old,
going, "Teach me how to play rock 'n' roll!
Teach me how to play rock 'n' roll, like, now!"
And then he said,
"Girls don't play rock 'n' roll,"
and then tried to teach me "On Top of Old Smokey."
Now, all these years later,
I'm hoping he meant, "You need to learn the basics,"
but that wasn't what I wanted to hear.
I wanted to be holding a guitar,
and owning it the way the Rolling Stones do,
and Mick Jagger sitting on the big inflated dick.
Then I thought,
"Well, there's got to be other girls in L.A.
that, you know, think like me,
and want to play rock 'n' roll.
I can't be the only one."
So I started going to this club,
Rodney's English Disco,
and it was a place
where they played all, like, the English glitter-glam music
that American kids never heard.
So, yeah, I started to find like-minded people,
and eventually I met Sandy West,
who was our-- The Runaways' drummer.
I was 16 at that time,
and Sandy was 15,
but we hit it off.
I took four buses to her house.
I set up in her rec room with her drums,
and we were deadly serious.
[The Runaways performing "Cherry Bomb"]
♪♪♪
♪ Can't stay at home Can't stay at school ♪
[Fefe Dobson] I love Joan Jett.
She's just so ballsy.
It's kind of like that energy
where you just want to jump on a table and get crazy.
♪ I'm the fox you've been waiting for! ♪
♪ Hello, Daddy Hello, Mom ♪
♪ I'm your ch-ch-ch cherry bomb! ♪
[Joan Jett] "Cherry Bomb,"
that was a song that was written for Cherie Currie.
For her audition, she came, I think,
with a Barry Manilow song or something,
and it was, like... [chuckles]
The look on Lita's face was priceless.
And I had my pad out,
and I had my guitar,
and I was playing a riff,
and it just, you know,
kind of came out stream of consciousness.
And then we went back and said, "Sing this,"
and we taught it to her,
and it became a song, and she became the singer.
♪ Cherry bomb!
[voice echoing] ♪ Cherry bomb!
The Runaways' success,
we didn't seem to have much in the States.
A lot of things that I thought would be pretty easy...
wasn't,
and it wasn't because we weren't talented.
It was just...
"No, you can't.
You're not allowed,"
and that just... killed me.
It really killed me.
And it was very, very frustrating,
very emotional,
still to this day.
♪♪♪
I was a girl that loved playing rock 'n' roll.
I wanted to put into some kind of words
that, you know, teenage girls aren't all sugar and spice,
but I wanted people to notice that we were girls
and doing this.
But I wanted to be a musician who happened to be a girl,
not girl musicians.
[The Go-Go's performing "Our Lips Are Sealed"]
♪♪♪
♪ Can you hear them?
♪ They talk about us
♪ Telling lies
♪ Well, that's no surprise
[Susanna Hoffs] For other women who might
want to make a band together,
the Go-Go's were front and center to that.
I found them inspirational.
[Kate Pierson] I just loved The Go-Go's,
that they all, you know, were this girl group.
wrote their own songs,
played their own instruments.
♪ In the jealous games people play ♪
I remember seeing The Go-Go's for the very first time
when they played in San Francisco.
Everyone just wanted to be a part of, you know,
having that much fun,
having, you know, that kind of a sing-along quality
to so many of the lyrics
just seemed like an idea whose time had come.
♪ It doesn't matter what they say ♪
♪ In the jealous games people play ♪
♪ Our lips are sealed!
I mean, The Go-Go's started out
in the punk scene in L.A.
Just wearing combat boots,
and, you know, they wore some short skirts and stuff,
but they weren't trying to be glamour dolls or anything.
When I first started buying records,
I bought Beauty and the Beat, and I was like,
"This is the coolest record.
I love all of these songs,"
because it was just that classic, like,
simple, straight to the point,
power-chordy pop punk songs,
like, these, like, melodic pop melodies
that are earworms
that you can't get out of your head.
[Jane Wiedlin] After 20 years or so
of listening to music constantly,
I mean, ever since I was four years old
and I fell in love with the Beatles,
I think it was just ingrained in me.
So I was lucky that way
that I didn't have to have formal training
to learn how to write.
[Ann Powers] We forget maybe now
just how rare all-women bands were,
even in the late '70s, early '80s.
[Aimee Mann] There was finally women out there
who were being super creative,
who were really interesting,
I don't know, were willing to try different things,
and seemed to be accepted by the scene.
♪♪♪
[interviewer] In your current album,
you are the writer, the vocalist,
the keyboard player, the producer, and the arranger.
[makes explosion sound] Yeah.
[interviewer] Now, this is very much a personal vision.
Are you afraid
that by not bouncing off too many other people,
you might lose touch with the audience?
Yes, I think that does scare me,
but it doesn't worry me at the moment
because although
I'm taking control of a lot of things,
I'm still working with other people.
You always depend on the other people in the team
that are very much part of what you're doing.
[Sheryl Crow] Kate Bush was the first woman
that I ever witnessed as being a performance artist.
She took music
and almost made it,
not a musical, but something theatrical.
Not just performed, but it was lived
and rendered for the audience to witness.
She was really projecting the whole story.
[Ann Powers] So she's out there presenting herself
as this child of, like, David Bowie and Lewis Carroll,
and surrealist art,
and all these things together,
and she's a unicorn.
[St. Vincent] She came in late '70s, early '80s,
making this incredibly out music
that just somehow,
even though it was, like, really bizarre
in the best way possible,
reached the masses.
I mean, that's like--
That's the dream.
What I think people don't really know about Kate Bush
is that she was an absolute tech nerd,
and the first major pop star
to use the Fairlight synthesizer
and have huge hits with that.
♪♪♪
[Ramona Gonzalez] The thing about synthesizers,
there was this whole history of women
who had actually been on the forefront of that,
and Wendy Carlos particularly
ushered in the synthesizer to popular music
with "Switched-On Bach."
[BBC presenter] Wendy Carlos,
in her studio in Greenwich Village,
is one of the pioneers of synthesized sound.
Her controversial versions of the classics,
created entirely electronically,
put machine-made music on the map.
♪♪♪
I think it needs a little more echo.
♪♪♪
Yeah, that's good.
[presenter] When it was first introduced,
it opened the door to a world of music synthesis.
[synthesizer emulating violins, then marimba]
Most of the time, people in the music industry,
such as managers, record label people,
who were predominantly male,
would encourage women to sing,
become a front person,
get a band to play their instruments,
and just become a front person alone.
Women were not seen as technicians.
[Nona Hendryx] The idea of a young woman,
and especially a young woman of color,
telling the guy engineers
or the guy producer what to do,
you didn't come across that.
[Sheila E] Any money that I got,
I would reinvest in myself,
so I would purchase different recording equipment,
and I taught myself how to run a studio,
how to cut tape, [laughs]
how to record,
even when it wasn't even reel-to-reel tape,
it was like cassette tapes.
[Nona Hendryx] I became obsessed
with recording technology,
and learning about electronics,
and how to make a record,
and making music from soup to nuts,
from writing the song to recording the song.
That is something that I had to push for.
It was a new day for a lot of people.
The '70s were such a crazy time for women in music
because there were so many new kinds of music
that were becoming popular,
and pretty much all of them were led by women.
♪♪♪
♪ How come he don't come
♪ And PLP with me
♪ Down at the meter no more?
[Sheryl Crow] Rickie Lee Jones was kind of a mess,
and a beautiful mess to me.
Like, she could play guitar, she could play piano,
and she wrote these very quirky songs,
and she didn't act or look like everybody else,
but you could not take your eyes off of her,
and her voice was unique,
and when she would sing,
you'd want to hear it again, and again, and again,
and she was so unique,
and that was the thing I loved about her most.
Rickie Lee, I never heard somebody tell a story
quite like that.
She knew who she was.
Rickie Lee Jones. [chuckles]
[singing along] ♪ "Chuck E.'s in love"
♪ Yeah, yeah
♪ Chuck E.'s in love
[voice fades] ♪ Chuck E's in love...
I had just been homeless,
and was finally getting enough money
to rent a place of my own.
So I worked for this gangster.
Rocky was his name.
"Come over here and sit on my lap."
"I don't want to sit on your lap."
"You want your job,
come over here and sit on my lap."
[groans]
Okay.
So I'd sit on his lap at the desk.
Well, he didn't fondle me or anything.
I know he wanted to,
but he stopped at that point,
and I had to suffer the humiliation
of sitting on this guy's lap.
Well, I'm supposed to be there to type.
That was my job,
so I had all the hours of the day
to use this beautiful typewriter
and write lyrics,
and the feeling of writing the lyric
with a typewriter instead of a pen
was so thrilling.
An immense amount of words could take place.
That kind of humiliation happened all the time,
and so I endured it
because I was getting a paycheck,
and had that IBM typewriter to write my lyrics on.
Well, luckily, I lived in L.A.,
where the industry was.
There were plenty of women who were never going to make it
because they'd slept with somebody already.
Just, you know, that casting couch
exists everywhere in Hollywood,
and if you're willing to pay that,
if you're willing to exchange that,
you're probably doomed,
because the people who want that from you
are low-level people.
The high-level people are busy doing their job.
Dr. John said to me,
"You're about to enter a pit of vipers." Right?
You have to resolve what you're willing to do,
and if you believe in your music,
you're not going to have to do that with anybody,
but when the test actually came
of meeting people and negotiating,
I knew exactly the way to go,
which was never to compromise
on the picture I had
of who I was and how I wanted to do things.
I knew that I was creating the picture
I would live with always,
and I had to be sure and absolute in it.
And I felt totally... [laughs] positive about it,
but that didn't mean I would get signed.
This is a time of disco.
Everybody, including Blondie,
everybody going to disco.
["I'm Every Woman" by Chaka Khan begins]
♪♪♪
[Jody Watley] "I'm Every Woman"
is one of the great women empowerment songs
of all time.
[Susanna Hoffs] This is music that you just,
you have to dance to it.
[Macy Gray] When I was coming up,
all the big stars,
they wore, like, sequined dresses,
and they were all glamorous,
and the voices were perfect,
and Chaka Khan,
she was, like, a little grimy.
Like, she got up there in her halter top.
I don't know anyone who can sing like she does,
and hit these notes the way that she does,
even as of today.
Chaka Khan's voice is the voice you hear
when a baby first cries after being born.
♪ Baby, I've got it!
♪ I'm every woman
♪ It's all in me
That is just so primal.
♪♪♪
This idea that, "I'm every woman,
and this is a point of strength,"
was really particularly powerful.
She gave people the belief
that they could be that carefree Black girl
before that was a term.
I was not ready at that time,
to be the bringer of that truth.
I wasn't ready for a long time.
Chaka Khan is really singular in this idea
that she sort of seamlessly made it
from funk to disco.
[Kate Pierson] When punk came along,
disco was waning, but still happening,
and we loved disco,
and Sister Sledge,
and, you know, all the powerful female disco singers.
It was dance music,
and punk was like, "We hate disco,"
but we loved disco.
♪♪♪
In the late '70s, it was, you know, disco mania.
The music scene was just exploding.
You had disco, and dance music,
you know, Donna Summer.
Disco relied so much
on the voices of women,
and particularly of Black women,
often in partnership with male managers or producers.
This is the first time we worked together.
We worked at together for 10 years after that,
and Arif and I used to argue a lot about the notes.
And I would say, "I'm going to sing this,
and this one here, and this one here,
and I'm going to add a third note,
and it's going to be this."
He'd say, "Wait a minute,"
and he'd go and get his music pad and say,
[imitating Arif] "But those three notes do not work."
He was Turkish.
He didn't understand
why the harmonies worked,
because they were wrong when you wrote it on paper,
and he--he--he really got upset about it.
He was like, "Wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait.
Let me work this out."
I said, "It's done. I just sang it,
so can we move on to the next one?"
♪♪♪
I love that man.
He...
He did so much for me as a human being.
I got more power doing my solo career
because it was just me.
I went to the meeting with Bob Ellis,
with the guy that was going to put MTV out there.
We went out to lunch.
[Robert Pittman] What we've introduced with MTV
is a non-narrative form.
As opposed to conventional television,
where you rely on plot and continuity,
we rely on mood and emotion.
We make you feel a certain way.
[Chaka Khan] I said, "I think it's a great idea.
I think that's the future."
[TV static hisses]
[Pat Benatar] MTV was a massive culture shift.
We had no idea what was about to happen.
When they came to us
with this idea of this music television station,
the entire band was like, "Abso-fuckin'-lutely not!
We are not doing that,"
and I said, "Okay, wait,
I know we can find a way to do this
that will, you know, just like make everything explode."
♪♪♪
And after 10 days of MTV being on the air,
I couldn't go anywhere.
[crowd cheering and screaming]
I mean, people, they were watching you sing now,
like, on television all the time.
They knew you by your lips, and your teeth.
You couldn't do stuff anymore,
not in any way, shape, or form,
ever again. It changed everything.
♪♪♪