CHAPTER 4

QUEENS OF NOISE

We’re the queens of noise, Come and get it boys. —“QUEENS OF NOISE” (WRITTEN BY BILLY BIZEAU)

“AREN’T YOU HOMESICK?” CHERIE ASKED ME AS WE DROVE THROUGH THE Midwest to our next gig.

“Of course I am,” I told her. “But when I get home, I want to be somebody.”

I understood the road was part of the deal, but I’m not saying I liked it. That first tour was rough on all of us, but especially Cherie. Cherie had never been outside of California before, and now we were crisscrossing the United States. Our itinerary saw us drive from LA to Ohio to Illinois and then back to Ohio, New York to Missouri, then back to Illinois and Michigan, then back to Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas, then back to New York, then Illinois, and end in Wisconsin. If that doesn’t sound like a drag to you, get out a map and run that route with your finger. Now picture doing it in a cramped station wagon with a driver on uppers, in the heat of the summer, with little to no sleep, and only stopping to pee, eat, or play a gig. Everywhere we went it felt like we had to prove ourselves again and again. Nobody had seen an all-girl rock band before. We knew that they were coming out because they had heard the buzz and they wanted to see if we could live up to it.

The most important gig was at CBGB in New York City: we were opening for the Ramones. Sure, we had proved ourselves to the LA fans, but we were hometown girls in LA. This was New York City. This was CBGB, the rock-and-roll institution in the city that has always defined what was cool. I knew that this was the real test. CBGB truly was one of America’s all-time rock-and-roll shitholes: a place that was full of fans, media, sweat, cockroaches, sex, drugs, puke, graffiti, and great rock and roll. Man, if those walls could talk. The ceiling was so low you could hit it with the headstock of your guitar while standing onstage. The plumbing ran across the entire length of the ceiling through the outside, so you could actually hang on it or swing from the pipes. You could never really get a good sound in CBGB, no matter what you played through, because it was shaped like a shoebox. It was a place that you would just get in, play, vomit, get the T-shirt, and get the fuck out of as soon as possible. Still, to play there is a great honor and everyone who ever got on that stage should consider themselves lucky. It was a piece of rock and roll—or should I say raunch and roll—history. The next day all of New York City would read about it, and if New York said you were cool, you were cool. The Runaways had the honor of playing there three different times, and every time we packed it and we rocked it hard!

When we were driving up to the entrance to the club, we looked out the windows and saw that the line went down the block. We knew that most of the people waiting were never going to get in. I started to get really pumped up. As soon as I stepped out of the car a bum puked at my feet. Welcome to New York Fucking City, I thought. The reviews from that show were mixed. The male reviewers mostly praised us, while it seemed the female reviewers didn’t know what to make of us yet. One female reviewer said we were “girls trying to act like boys.” She got it wrong. We were girls trying to be better than the boys. And I was determined to let everyone know it.

One night, after a show in Chicago, we stayed at the Lake Shore Holiday Inn across from Lake Michigan. After the gig, I decided to go to bed for a change instead of going out. I was rooming with Sandy, who had left to go to the bar for a couple of drinks. When she returned to the room, she quickly climbed into bed and fell asleep.

A few minutes later, a noise woke me up. I opened my eyes, thinking it was Sandy, but Sandy was passed out cold in the next bed. That’s when I realized there was a guy standing in our room! He had tripped over my suitcase, which was in the middle of the hotel room floor. I didn’t panic, but rolled over to act like I was just tossing and turning. He came over to my bedside table, which I was facing, and he went through my purse. He was no more than two feet away from me. I watched him with my eyes half open as he took all the cash I had out of my wallet.

I let him take whatever he wanted from our room. I was afraid he was going to rape us or try to kill us.

After he walked out of the room, I woke Sandy up and told her what had happened. I don’t know how this guy got into the room. Maybe Sandy didn’t close the door right. She said she was drunk, so maybe she forgot to lock it. Maybe the intruder was one of the people who worked in the hotel. He probably saw Sandy was drunk in the bar and followed her back to her room. Who knows? All I know is we were scared and we called the police right away. We looked around the room to see what else he took and that’s when I realized he stole all the jewelry I had left on the bathroom sink, including the owl ring that Ritchie Blackmore had given me. I was devastated. “Shit! My ring!” I yelled. “The bastard!” Well, at least he didn’t shoot us. When the police came, they took down as much info as possible and then said, “Sorry, girls, we most likely won’t find your jewelry, but can we have your autographs?” Autographs? Were these cops for real?

We had three more shows to go, all in Wisconsin. Our last gig was in Milwaukee on August 29, 1976, a full month and a half after we left California. After playing Milwaukee, I was so excited to fly home to LA instead of having to sit in that horrible station wagon again. When we landed at LAX, my father was waiting for me. My parents were always a cornerstone in my life. No matter what, they were there for me. I had never been away from them for that long, and as soon as I saw my father I ran to him, threw my arms around him, and started to cry. He laughed. I think he was relieved to know that I still needed him. Six weeks on the road wouldn’t change that. Truly, nothing would.

KIM HAD A two-bedroom apartment a few blocks from me on Palm, right below the Sunset Strip. It was just a few blocks from mine, and Joan lived with him. He had one bedroom and she had another. It was nothing more than a roommate relationship. Kim and Joan had this arrangement that if Joan met a cute straight girl, she would get her number for Kim. It worked out just fine until Joan’s partying spun out of control.

Eventually, Kim called her mother and said, “Joan has drug issues. I can’t have her dying here. You need to deal with her.” Joan realized Kim was trying to put her back at home with her mother, so she moved out of Kim’s apartment and into a place a couple of streets over in a little greenish building off the Sunset Strip. I used to go there, but Joan never once came over to my place. She had a roommate named Lisa, a beautiful blond who would later end up with our roadie, Kent Smythe. Joan seemed to be in love with Lisa and was devastated by her relationship with Kent. I couldn’t understand being that much in love at our age, with another girl.

Shortly after Joan moved out, Kim said to me, “Hey, I have an extra bedroom. Why don’t you move in?” I left my little apartment on Larrabee and took Kim’s spare room. That was the beginning of quite an education for me. There were many times when I would come home and Kim would be fucking a girl on the dining room table. I was more discreet when I brought a guy home. I became an expert at sneaking a guy into my bedroom without Kim knowing. Not that Kim would care. But I didn’t want to subject the guy to the weirdness of Kim Fowley.

The other part of my education would happen in the mornings when I was eating my cereal and Kim would be on the phone talking business. I listened to how he worked, heard him sell these people the rap of a lifetime just as he sold me when he called me a year before. He promised them that the Runaways were the greatest thing to happen to music in a long time, that we were going to save rock and roll and would be international superstars. And because he said it over and over again, he truly believed it and he made everyone else believe it too. Then, because everyone believed it, it started to come true.

WE LEFT FOR Europe about a month after getting back from that first US tour. Jackie’s mom came along as the chaperone because British immigration required we have a parent with us since most of us were underage. We all felt comfortable around her because she would never question or reprimand us. She was sweet and easygoing, and we felt like we could say anything to her. Jackie’s mom didn’t get in anybody’s way, although she kept a close eye on everything, and there was a lot to keep an eye on in the UK because those boys went crazy as soon as the Runaways touched down.

Our photos were on the cover of British music magazines such as New Musical Express and Melody Maker. Our single “Cherry Bomb” was on Capital Radio. We played Top of the Pops. We did shows in Glasgow, Birmingham, and London. Everywhere we played was a sea of guys in denim and leather, screaming, crazy, and drunk. Every so often we’d see a girl or two. The Runaways headlined two sold-out shows at the Roundhouse in London, an old train station where rock bands had been appearing since the 1960s. In the audience were musicians from all the new punk-rock bands—Siouxsie Sioux, Billy Idol, and members of the Ramones, Blondie, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Damned, among others. In England we really started to feel we were part of a movement like never before.

The Runaways played a gig at Sheffield University during that first UK tour, and I remember it being absolutely packed with young guys. As it would turn out, Joe Elliott of Def Leppard was one of the dudes at that show; years later he came up to me and handed over a Polaroid photograph of me that his friend had taken that night. He remembered there being some sort of huge commotion in front of the stage—almost as though there was a fight going on or something. Then the crowd parted and he noticed that a guy in the front row was jerking off. “Lita, he was there having a wank in the front row! It was like a Jethro Tull album cover or something! I don’t know if that happened at all of your gigs, but it certainly happened at the gig I was at!” It definitely wasn’t the only time something like that happened at one of our shows. The guys were going nuts, turning over our cars, throwing knives and condoms onto the stage, breaking down the barricades. Sometimes they’d jerk off into a rubber, add some bizarre ingredients like cooked noodles, and throw it onstage. It was both terrifying and thrilling. But through it all, legit outlets like Sound Magazine were covering our shows and word was spreading about the crowds we were drawing, and about how we were “liberating” women in Japan. People were coming to see what the fuss was all about. They didn’t know what to expect, but a lot of them ended up thinking the same thing Joe Elliott did: Fuck, these girls can really play!

At some point Robert Plant had told Cherie a story about collecting hotel room keys and framing them. So Cherie, Joan, and Sandy decided to collect the keys while we were in Europe. Then Cherie took a hair dryer from the hotel because the plugs were different and hers would not work in Europe. The hotel called the police about the hair dryer, and just as we were getting on a boat to cross the English Channel to head to Brussels, they stopped us.

When they searched us, they found that Sandy, Cherie, and Joan had keys from six different hotels. The police thought they were taking the keys to go back and steal out of the rooms. They were not buying the Robert Plant story, and all three girls got arrested. They did not arrest me because I had a British passport and was, and still am, a British citizen. Jackie and I waited with Scott, Kent, and the rest of the crew. They kept them overnight, but eventually released them the next day. We missed our next show, though. All this over a hair dryer and hotel room keys. I was pissed, and that one delay wasn’t the only reason why.

While we were in Europe we started to notice that Cherie, Joan, and Scott Anderson would disappear together. There were times when Jackie, Sandy, and I were getting ready to do scheduled press and TV interviews and we didn’t even know where they were. We would wind up sitting by ourselves, waiting for everyone else to show up. There was no support or meals, nor did I see any money. I was sick of it and getting pissed off.

In fact, I was so fed up, when we were back in the States, I lost it with Cherie one day. Cherie was always late for everything: interviews, photo shoots, rehearsals, sound checks. You name it, she was late for it. I was sick of waiting around for her. I pushed my way into her hotel room and I said to her, “What are you fucking doing? Why are you always late? You are probably fucking Scott.” I said it to rile her up. I went on: “You’re probably pregnant! For all I know you could be.” She didn’t say anything, but she burst into tears. I said, “Are you? You’re pregnant?” She just cried. I walked out of the hotel room and slammed the door, not sure what to do or say. I was pissed. And confused. I couldn’t even imagine how Cherie was going to deal with this kind of pressure.

According to Cherie, during the break in the tour, her father scraped together every last dime he had to give to Cherie for an abortion. Scott refused to acknowledge that he had gotten an underage girl pregnant. Cherie never spoke about it to me. She never spoke to me about anything anyway, and honestly I didn’t give a fuck because I wanted to get on with the band.

Cherie was also distracted by the relationship she had with Joan. When Cherie wasn’t with Scott, she was running around with Joan. Meanwhile I’m wondering, Doesn’t anybody want to play any fucking music? Sometimes while we were on tour I would go to the hotel exit stairwell with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label and my guitar. I would sit there and think or try to figure things out. Why didn’t we have any money? Why wouldn’t the girls listen to me when I brought it up? I would try to make sense of the other girls’ sexual identities or wonder why Cherie was always with Scott and then with Joan. I felt like those stairwells were my sanctuary. Nobody knew where I was. They could search the whole hotel and they wouldn’t find me. Who would look in the stairwell? I wasn’t in the bar. I wasn’t in the restaurant, I wasn’t in the parking lot, I wasn’t at the park across the street. I was hidden in a place where no one could find me.

WE WENT BACK in the studio almost as soon as we came home from our 1976 tour of Europe to record our second album, Queens of Noise. We had been fighting so much with Fowley, we decided to work with another producer, Earle Mankey, an engineer who worked at the Beach Boys’ Brother Studios in Santa Monica. He was also a guitarist who played on the Sparks records. He was a long-haired, hip Hollywood rocker who knew how to make an album carefully, not slapping it together like Fowley did on our first album. He was the one who came up with “Queens of Noise” from a songwriter in another band he managed called the Quick. Cherie missed a few days of the sessions, for one reason or another. When she returned, she threw a shit fit about Joan singing lead on the “Queens of Noise” track, but Joan sang it well, so we didn’t change it.

I loved being in the studio. We didn’t have to fly or stay in hotels. We could go home every night and sleep in our own beds. But best of all, we could get creative, and if we made musical mistakes, we could fix them. Sandy and I stuck together in the studio. Jackie didn’t play bass in the studio, so I jammed with Sandy a lot in between breaks. She loved it. It was something that Jackie would never do with Sandy. For the Queens of Noise album I wrote a song called “Johnny Guitar.” It wasn’t meant to be a Top 40 type of song. The producer had an idea to show off the Runaways’ musical strengths, which were Sandy on drums and me on guitar.

There were a lot of disagreements during the production of Queens of Noise. Cherie and Joan in particular had arguments, mostly because Joan sang on a few of the lead tracks. I liked Joan’s voice on those songs; I thought it gave the album more diversity, but I tried to stay out of the drama. Jackie bitched and moaned because again, she did not play bass on the studio recordings. She took her frustrations out on all of us. She complained everything was making her sick, and she was becoming a hypochondriac. She needed to go home, in my opinion. So did Scott Anderson, for that matter. The fact that he was still creeping out Cherie made it very uncomfortable and it wasn’t exactly ideal for the rest of us, either.

On that album it is apparent that we were all developing our own musical styles and becoming more confident in our abilities, which was huge! We were becoming our own people instead of trying to mimic our idols, but the majority of the public was still in denial, because the Runaways were way before our time. That’s how it is when you’re the first to do something: you get shit on. Inside the music scene, though, people recognized our ability, and we were hanging out with the big dogs: Queen, Kiss, Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, Rush, Led Zeppelin. We knew them all by the time we did Queens of Noise. We were interesting, original, musically talented bad girls, and everyone wanted to meet us.

After we recorded the album, we went back on the road for another US tour that took us everywhere from New York to Michigan, Ohio to Texas. We did a couple of dates opening for Rush at big halls in the Midwest. They didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with us, though, and the feeling was mutual. We sat at a table together and took a picture for the tour. That was it. We never really spoke to each other. March 1977, we went out on another extended tour, this time as headliners.

We played the Royal Oak Theatre in Detroit with Cheap Trick. Some of the Runaways’ fans didn’t like Cheap Trick, and they started charging the stage with knives. Detroit was a rough town. Our hotel even had bulletproof windows. Detroit was also a heavy rock-and-roll town. If the fans loved you, they treated you like gods. If they didn’t, they treated you like shit. They loved us, thank God. When we got to the Agora in Cleveland, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were added to the bill. The Runaways headlined. It was a small venue and everything was so cramped. We threw both of those bands out of the tiny dressing room and made them change in a trailer in the alley behind the venue. There were no hard feelings. Cheap Trick was one of my favorite bands at the time, and it was the beginning of a career-long relationship with the guys. They’re like my big brothers.

When we got back to Los Angeles, we celebrated the official release of Queens of Noise with a sold-out concert at the Santa Monica Civic and a sold-out four-night run at the Whisky. The lines at the Whisky wrapped around the block every single night. We still hold the record for the most sold-out shows in a row there. That was when I figured out who was really the boss. We were! I was sick of our managers not paying us, playing with us, and hurting us. One of those nights I put my foot down and said, “Hey, dickheads, guess what? I’m not going onstage.”

It was really only a test to see what would happen if I didn’t do what management said. Scott Anderson started to beg me. “Oh, sweetie, honey. You can’t do this.”

“Oh, yes I can,” I snapped back.

Too bad the other girls didn’t back me on this. Instead they all looked at me like I was nuts.

“Come on, Lita. Don’t do this,” Cherie said to me.

Sandy was in shock. “What do you mean you aren’t going onstage?”

The only one who seemed to be on my side was Jackie. One time she actually tried to call an attorney to help us, but when you’re a kid, attorneys don’t always jump when you tell them to.

The managers all begged and pleaded with me. I knew right then and there what to do to have the upper hand with these guys. I still played the show, but I was happy to know that I had a foolproof plan in my back pocket.

After that, we went back to New York to play two more shows at CBGB, but this time we were veterans and New York did not intimidate us anymore. The first time we played there a lot of the reviewers weren’t so sure about us, but this time they started to praise us.

After the last CBGB show, I handcuffed Scott Anderson to his briefcase while he was asleep. Sandy was with me. We stripped off all his clothes, then took Sharpies and drew obscenities all over his ugly, naked body for what he had done to Cherie. It was unforgivable. He deserved something in return. We left him in the New York City hotel and caught a flight to the next show. He never talked about it. The Runaways were riding high. He wouldn’t dare go up against any of us.

As much success as we were having in England, Hollywood, and New York, nothing prepared us for what was about to happen in Japan.