The Runaways - classic or dud?

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)

There's a Fowley interview done for Ugly Things magazine where he definitely frames things in terms of the sexual revolution. I won't quote from it - it's online.

I can definitely see Fowley framing (and excusing) things in that fashion. Just not sure how credible a reading it is.

I don't think the issue is whether it's credible, it's that the wide availability of contraception and the whole idea of women's liberation gave a lot of creeps a cover story. C'mon baby, loosen up, get in touch with your body, blah blah blah. The sexual revolution was real and necessary, but just destigmatizing extramarital sex without altering massive existing power differentials meant that lots of bad things were going to be justified (however dishonestly) in the name of freedom.

C'mon baby, loosen up, get in touch with your body, blah blah blah

"... why are you being so uptight and bourgeois?"

There's a whole chapter about this in Jonathon Green's "Days in the Life", about the UK underground in the 60s/70s.

real short hop from that to "you look tense, lemme rub your back"

I read a story a few years ago, maybe by Rob Lowe (?) about how being a teen in the 70's in LA was like being a pack of stray dogs (at least for some kids of wealthy families) - parents so burned out, disillusioned & self medicating to the point where they are completely checked out & the kids become free range mini adults because there's zero supervision & so much more trouble that you could get into in LA in those days, because of that permissiveness hangover

You mean, "the good ol' days"?

Basically the parents of the free range "what's the worst that can happen?" parents.

ie Robert Downey Sr.

parents so burned out, disillusioned & self medicating

altho really isn't LA still like this

It's the plot of Less Than Zero, right?

Foxes obvs!

lol

Foxes is such a weird movie

LA is still "like this" in terms of neglectful burnt out parents and children with too much money, but between uber and rehab society has definitely created some buffers since the 70s

yeah i didnt mean it was unique to LA,just that it was more heightened bcz of the 60's freelove burnout

real short hop from that to "you look tense, lemme rub your back"

― La Lechera, Monday, July 13, 2015 8:38 PM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^ a favorite line of creeps who want to creepily creep their hands up against the side of your boobs as recently as the early '00s (the last time I was single).

"I don't think the issue is whether it's credible, it's that the wide availability of contraception and the whole idea of women's liberation gave a lot of creeps a cover story."

Right and I'm not sure I find this terribly credible. I think Fowley's perceived industry influence was the "cover story" (as it is for most "creeps" of this type before and after).

When I said that, in that interview, he frames things in terms of the sexual revolution, I didn't mean that he was explaining himself in terms of the revolution's rhetoric. I simply meant that he speaks of the period favorably for some of those reasons.

Carl thx for bringing the clarity :)

re: "sexual revolution" vs "hollywood", this isn't a binary - power and cultural trends can both be exploited