Joe (In Mute Nostril Agony) Fernbacher, Creem, 3/78
These daughters of orgone madness jump from confusion to confusion in a grand teenage style, contradicting, enticing, and eventually seducing the listener with a self-assuredness that turns into outright aggression and straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll. They’re not punks by any stretch of the imagination and they’re not the delicate images most girl groups are pushed into portraying. They kick ass, know it, and like it, so what else could you ask for in a group?
On their earlier albums most of the true spirit of the group was glossed over by the bombast of lead songstress Cherie Bomb, and now that she’s left for weirder pastures the awe-inspiring talents of Joan Jett are being pushed into a leading role. Her initial venture as leader comes in Waitin’ For The Night and she doesn’t disappoint.
So their music isn’t complicated, it’s not supposed to be, just like all good rock ’n’ roll isn’t supposed to be complicated, it’s supposed to be energetic and capable of inciting a crowd of bored kids to spasms of sexual abandonment and freedom: freedom from the restrictions of passing into atrophied adulthood, freedom from all rules, and freedom from repression; if a teenager wants to be an asshole and sniff glue and run his moped into a brick wall, let ’em--at least that’s quicker than being a miserable, confused alcoholic until you hit senility and then jumping on your moped and ramming it into a brick wall. The Runaways are capable of making any male listener molest the knothole of a tree. And they know it.
The songs (most co-written with Kim “The King” Fowley) run the linear gamut of love desired, love teased, and love as destruction. The two really searing numbers are Joan Jett’s anthem to Saturday nights in America, “Wasted,” and Lita Ford’s drive-in movie epic, “Trash Can Murders,” which is not to say that the other songs are weaker, because they ain’t, it’s just these two songs transcend normal boundaries and take you (at least they took me) into realms of frenzy forgotten.
The only thing you can say for Lita Ford and her guitar is hubba-hubba and stun me baby. This lady, whose heroes are Jeff Beck and Ritchie Blackmore, is the Queen of the Power Chord and mark my words someday she’ll be doing an album with Ross the Boss of the Dictators, like Two Great Guitars where Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley lay down all the riffs of the rock ’n’ roll foundation, someday it’ll be Lita Ford and Ross the Boss teaching all the kids of the 90s all the power chords of the 70s. By the way, many people have said that the 70s have had no redeeming musical value, wrong! The 70s have given us the refinement of the power chord and that’s IMPORTANT.
Which brings us to Japan. The only nuclear country in existence, so far ahead of its time it’s almost science fiction. This island of bonzai rockers lacks all style, all class, all pretense, and possesses the most refined sense of rock ’n’ roll on this planet. While most of the kids in the States were being afraid of the bomb in the 50s (whence came rock ’n’ roll), the kids in Japan were growing up with mutated parents from the BOMB. So while the States and England were busy creating rock ’n’ roll, the sleeping (or dazed) giant of Japanese teenhood was just waiting in the wings picking out the best parts of the music and the scene and changing them to fit the “real” twentiest century attitude.
Which brings us to the Netherlands--no that’s not right--which brings us to the reason why the Runaways are one of the top attractions in Japan where they’re treated like the honest to god stars they really are ’cause in Japan the Runaways speak directly to the technology of the country.
So that’s why the complement album to the release of Waitin’ For The Night in the States is the release of the Runaways Live In Japan, and it’s one of the most essential documents of the waning 70s. On it are all the moves, all the noise, and all the confusion of the era. The band here is the original band with Cherie Bomb, but taken out of the context of L.A., even Cherie Bomb is palatable, and Lita Ford is definitely my hero, on this live record she simply stuns like nerve gas injected into the right temple.
The way they do “American Nights” with its great chorus: “American nights/You kids are so strange/American nights/You’re never gonna change” with Cherie doing her Patti Smith imitation on the word “strange,” and “I Wanna Be Where The Boys Are”--you’ll just squirm in your seat. This album is better than Beck, Bogart and Appice Live in Japan, and that’s saying something.
So come on everybody, let’s have some support for our own Queens of Noise, and maybe when they reach 18 we’ll see ’em in Penthouse. Hell, I’d rather see these lean teens than that country chub Ronstadt anyday.
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