The Runaways - classic or dud?

some dude AND get bent posting in the same thread?

The link works - it's a quirk of the ILX board software to take out the last / at the end of the link. Just copy and paste the whole line

yeah, apologies, I was a bit hasty there, sorry for assuming you're a dude -- I'm just so used to dudes talking to other dudes about how more non-dudes should talk to them and then badgering said non-dudes into talking to them

Cherie posted on FB saying she'll take a polygraph to prove she didnt stand idly by

It is heartbreaking and infuriating that the takeaway of Jackie's story is WHY DIDNT CHERIE & JOAN DO SOMEHING. How much more wrongheaded can this possibly get?

I am dumbfounded by how little empathy these ppl (whoever they are) have.

Sigh. Punch a wall. Yell. Repeat.

Wtf

The blog post by the queens of noise author was interesting and helpful. Has anyone read her book?

It is heartbreaking and infuriating that the takeaway of Jackie's story is WHY DIDNT CHERIE & JOAN DO SOMEHING. How much more wrongheaded can this possibly get?

^^^ 100 percent this.

xpost I havent but Im going to now thanks to her post

it's not so much "why didn't they do something" but more confusion at how Joan Jett has been defending and sticking up for this guy this entire time. also, he's dead now, so he can't he crucified...

no, that is what's being said. even the lost girls article throws shade at them for standing by

Yeah "why did all these bystanders standby" question is pretty central to the article.

how about we have a brief intermission

http://youtu.be/TixNXWFREvk

I love these photos

http://www.legendaryrockinterviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Runaways-Beach.jpg

http://cache4.asset-cache.net/gc/97589832-rock-band-the-runaways-pose-for-a-portrait-on-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=9QMziWNtBI6whP66vhs4oU16y81CFA%2BdPkqwESTK8MiE3LlZItV3P2yEC7EtSwEvn8Rj%2BATNANuUuJbxyYA62g%3D%3D

But mostly this

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/474x/22/5e/af/225eaff977bb045b633b8bb5eaf390f1.jpg

I kinda wonder how kim would have reacted to this had he still been alive. I sort've doubt he would've denied it.

xps from the comments on the article and those i've seen elsewhere, most people seemed to excuse Joan and Cherie for them being teenagers, afraid, not knowing what to do, possible victims of abuse themselves, and so on. by the same token, they were critical of Jett's actions as an adult

that part about Currie writing the story for her memoir - but changing the details so that Jackie was a bystander and not the rape victim, leading to Jackie having to deny the story happened at all in 2000 - is one of the weirdest, saddest details to me. and now Currie is now denying it happened too? even with the the other witnesses in the story? i don't get it.

It is heartbreaking and infuriating that the takeaway of Jackie's story is WHY DIDNT CHERIE & JOAN DO SOMEHING.

this. your posts have been great on this threas vg and much appreciated

ty

I can't really account for why this fired me up over all the other horrors in the world. I guess mainly because so much of my ideas about my self and who i want/wanted to be are tied up in this band.

Reading Jackie's story... I just have zero critical distance. Reading that article for the first time was like reading a confessional from a friend, it was a weird feeling.

I guess this one is just really personal somehow. They aren't just a band to me. This is way more. Coming here to talk right now is not just to pull apart facts and who did what when, but to console myself & try to seek a bit of empathy and likemindedness & comfort. Or something.

:)

I kinda wonder how kim would have reacted to this had he still been alive. I sort've doubt he would've denied it.

― Οὖτις, Sunday, 12 July 2015 02:08 (14 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

really?

What, if Jackie had gone to him and looked him in the eye and said.. whatever..

You sure Kim wouldn't have said "It never happened" ?

I know, deathbed confessionals, it just doesn't sound like him.

Yeah if nothing else he seems like the kind of shit that would get a kick out of gaslighting his victims

A few things occur to me about this (full disclosure: I'm a straight white guy):

Unless I'm remembering wrong, the article not only says Jett was watching idly by but also pressured others (Jackie? I'm not sure) to not pursue anything against Kim. To me, that's in some ways the more damaging accusation – probably similarly explained by her being young, confused and scared but also indicative of her being maybe a bit more concerned that Jackie could drive her gravy train off the rails than about Jackie's safety, health or well being. 

To try to understand how Kim was viewed, I read a bunch of the obits from January before all this came down. At the time of death his reputation was basically for being an abusive semi-genius eccentric. One piece suggested that perhaps in another era Kim would have been diagnosed with Aspergers. Another, an interview with Cherie about her reconciliation w Kim promoting the release of her first album in 30 years, quotes her saying that as time had gone by she came to excuse a lot of Kim's behavior on the grounds that he had endured a lot of abuse as a kid and that, upon reflection, "he was actually trying to protect us."

Most of which sounds ludicrous and apologist at best in the wake of the Jackie rape story. But it also helps flesh out, in addition to VG's excellent posts and commentary about the dark side of the sexual revolution, how these kinds of horrible acts of violence could not only happen but happen more or less unquestioned when virtually everyone present knew it was deeply wrong. 

It's a tragic story. A complicated one in some ways, tho in other ways not at all. I'm struck by how on one hand this is a story about dependency, innocence, abuse and celebrity entitlement in the 70s ... and how on the other it's really yet another story of violence against women that at times feel depressingly like they'll always be with us. At the same time, I can only hope that today people would not only know a situation like this was wrong but have the strength and support to stop it from happening. Or better yet, resist enabling dangerous guys like this from the get go. 

He always struck me as a Phil Spector sort. That is, a so called eccentric dogged by such infamy that he seemed capable of even the things people didn't explicitly know about.

At the same time, I can only hope that today people would not only know a situation like this was wrong but have the strength and support to stop it from happening. Or better yet, resist enabling dangerous guys like this from the get go.

i keep thinking about kesha and dr luke

He's def a Spector type albeit far less talented.

Xp

Now there's a understatement if ever there was one.

"At the same time, I can only hope that today people would not only know a situation like this was wrong but have the strength and support to stop it from happening. Or better yet, resist enabling dangerous guys like this from the get go."

R Kelly seems like the obvious example of similarly inclined person who was/is heavily enabled....

But mostly this

Cool story subsequent to that photo. From http://runawaysstories.blogspot.com/2009/08/march-23-2000-chopper-magazine-and-case_27.html (an archive of Jackie Fox's old website before it went down)

In 1976, our manager had the great idea to have Chopper Magazine do an interview and photo spread with us and put us on the cover. The photo shoot took place on a new freeway under construction in Los Angeles, on a blistering hot day. The photographer wanted the two blondes in the band on the bikes, so Sandy and Cherie sat on the choppers and also ended up alone on the cover. The picture below appeared with a number of others on the inside of the magazine along with our interview.

Cut to several months later in Connecticut, where my uncle (my father's brother) is working as a civil litigator. He has been referred a case representing couple of Hell's Angels, who have come to my uncle's posh offices in Bridgeport to meet their new lawyer. Needless to say, the sight of a couple of large, tough-looking, leather-clad bikers waiting in the lobby of a respectable East coast law firm must have been something. The bikers must have looked really tough because my uncle, no shrinking violet himself, was REALLY nervous about how they were going to react to all the lawyers in suits. To break the ice, my uncle mentioned that his niece had just appeared in Chopper Magazine. It turned out that bikers had read the issue and were impressed that their new lawyer was related to one of the teenagers that had just appeared in the cover story of their favorite magazine.

My uncle got the case, the bikers got their day in court, and The Runaways reached a whole new set of fans we might not otherwise have had.

Elvis, you always have a nugget of awesomeness that cheers me up

We neec to erect an ILX official Elvis Telecom
Library of Amazing Arcana

*need

(via Ned on twitter)

Kari Krome's statement, from Evelyn McDonnell's blog

https://populismblog.wordpress.com/2015/07/12/kari-krome-on-kim-fowley/

https://www.facebook.com/jackie.fox.5492/posts/10153467592214241

If I am disappointed in one thing, it is that the story has become about who knew what when and who did or didn’t do what. That isn’t the story at all. It would be nice if everyone who was there the night I was raped could talk about how it has affected them over the years. But if they don’t want to talk it about, I respect that. It’s taken me years to talk about it without shame. I can only imagine what it must have been like to have watched it happen.

I only wish that if my bandmates can’t remember what happened that night – or if they just remember it differently –they would stick simply to saying that. By asserting that if they’d witnessed my rape, they’d have done something about it, they perpetuate the very myth I was trying to dispel when I decided to tell my story. Being a passive bystander is not a “crime.” All of us have been passive bystanders at some point in our lives.

If we have any hope at all of putting an end to incidents like these, we need to stop doubting the accusers and start holding rapists, abusers and bullies accountable. What we don’t need to do is point fingers at those who weren’t to blame for their actions.

The other 'focus' has been on how much KFowley was a "weird creeper dude" (like Savile), which seems to suggest that if they'd been more like Clark Gable, it would have been harder to believe.

I used to work for Fowley's record label in the 1990s and yeah - I'm pretty sure it was me who made the first Kim Fowley webpage. I feel like I've eaten a bucket of ashes but there's no way I'm making this about me.

Everyone knows this but SoCal in the 70s was rife with older men preying on teen girls. Don Henley was even briefly arrested for it! Page, Polanski, even a very famous and respected writer, you name it. Open season.

I was thinking about that, because I saw Almost Famous for the first time recently and was struck by how (at least a little ambiguously) romanticized and normalized that notion was

Found that post from Jackie Fox to be very heartening

Yeah, the documentary version of Almost Famous would look like Romper Room on acid.

Yeah, I mean, this scene, where she admits she's 16, is both weirdly touching but definitely uneasy. Especially since she and the band(s) have already been involved for some time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkEQ_bvbny4

I don't remember anyone making a big deal about her age in the film. That's just "how it was."

That wasn't just in LA and wasn't just in the music biz, but that's a good example of how the "sexual revolution" was primarily an opportunity for men to be skeezy fucks as opposed to women exercising agency over their own sexuality.

Almost Famous is hot garbage and its sexual politics are a big reason.

the whole concept of groupies is something people talk about like it's totally nbd. i find that type of objectification really disturbing, esp when it's presented as one of the only entry points of young women to being involved with music. like imagine being a 13 year old just getting into learning about music and finding out that people like you were primarily known as sex bunnies. it's…i don't even know what it is. i think things are quite different now, but even as late as my own adolescence, it was a common narrative. i read pamela des barres' book because i thought it would help me learn stuff but the stuff it helped me learn was not helpful.

I think AIDS and lawsuits put a slight damper on that scene, but if anything what's left over has gotten even darker, because the predatory artists have I think taken greater care to formally cover their paths, like conventional predators vs. nbd, this is how we roll romanticised rock stars. But it is horrifying, to read the salacious oral histories of Motley Crue, or Zeppelin, or whomever, for entertainment and titillation, yet realize that at the very least due to the prevalence of drugs and alcohol and general cultural look the other way-ness that what we know about is just the tip of the iceberg and that felonious behavior abounded/abounds.

Feels like this is more a by product of the Hollywood machine than the sexual revolution to me. Stories of this nature were coming out of Hollywood as early as the 30s (okay maybe not NYE rape stories, but certainly similar tales of exploitation/abuse/cover up.)

Girl 27 is a 2007 documentary film about the 1937 rape of MGM movie extra Patricia Douglas (1917-2003), the front-page news stories that followed, and the subsequent cover-up of the entire event.

As if on cue....

Hippy movement definitely allowed multifarious creeps to exploit young women, look at Manson, for one.

Feels like this is a thread derail, but creeps/cultists are always exploiting people. Manson would have likely figured out a means to find participants wherever/whenever.

don't listen to Little steven's underground garage, because it's boring and he's a supreme asshole regularly and smugly inveighing against anything outside of his rockist agenda (man, 30 years ago, your goal was to end apartheid, and now you complain that kids don't play and listen to music the right way), but I happened to stop on it accidentally, and there was Kim Fowley's show, with him talking about the youngbloods or something…maybe someone at Sirius/XM should see to it that they don't play those shows anymore…heaven knows they have 100s of hours of Giorgio Gomelsky etc etc…

Re LL's "Imagine being a 13 year old": this is played out very explicitly in, of all things, School of Rock. (I'm at the library right now, and can't check the wording of the exchange--hopefully there's nothing that can be misconstrued, as I'm breaking my own pledge to stay clear of these threads at all costs.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHtTRUC2Drs

Feels like this is more a by product of the Hollywood machine than the sexual revolution to me. Stories of this nature were coming out of Hollywood as early as the 30s (okay maybe not NYE rape stories, but certainly similar tales of exploitation/abuse/cover up.)

― One bad call from barely losing to (Alex in SF), Monday, July 13, 2015 10:33 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

maybe so: http://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/loretta-young

(buzzfeed longform, before you ask)