The Runaways have rightly earned their spot in rock-and-roll history. As one of the first
all-female rock bands, they proved to the world that women could rock as hard as men
could. While they may have made music history, it came at personal cost. Here is their story.
It's hard to believe when listening to their music, but all of The Runaways were only 15
or 16 when they started the band in the mid-1970s. They were one of the first all-female rock
bands and a highly provocative one at that time. The group may have sounded very adult
and sang some fairly racy lyrics about lust, drugs, and drinking, but they were still young
kids. The '70s was also a time when anything went in rock and roll — and not necessarily
for the best.
According to NPR, this time in musical history was when young performers could be far more
easily exploited and exposed to much older men's predations. Even The Runaways' lead
singer, Cherie Currie, admitted in an interview with Spin that their unsupervised rock-and-roll
lifestyle and mostly absent and permissive parents would not have gone over well in today's
world. Currie told the outlet,
"I don't think the Runaways could have happened under those circumstances. And our band was
a milestone."
Kim Fowley was a renowned music producer and promoter in the 70s, specializing in the glam-rock
scene. He is credited with recruiting the members of The Runaways and becoming their
manager, while helping the group rise to fame. But Fowley had a cruel streak. According to
The Huffington Post, Fowley was notorious for preying on young, vulnerable girls, hence
his interest in an all-girl rock band.
"Cherie Currie. Is that your real name? Well, Cherie Currie, do you sing or play a musical
instrument?"
He deliberately marketed The Runaways as "hard-rock jailbait," encouraging them and teaching them
to look and act as sexy as possible on stage — despite the girls being as young as 15.
In an attempt to prepare the band for facing rough crowds, Fowley also thought it would
be a great idea to throw blunt objects at the girls while they were rehearsing. He would
frequently scream at them, verbally abuse them, and force them to work grueling hours.
Even more insultingly, The Runaways discovered that their management was ripping them off.
As Currie explained in later interviews, the band would often perform concerts to sold-out
crowds and only get paid $20. Eventually, The Runaways fired Kim Fowley as their manager.
All of the members of The Runaways dove head-first into the heady rock-and-roll lifestyle — the
late-nights, the parties, the fans, and of course, the drugs. In an interview with The
Guardian, Cherie Currie shared that the band had extremely easy access to drugs. People
would just give them to the girls. As Currie noted in her interview,
"Our management, our booking agent — they were all feeding us drugs. The thing was,
back in the 70s, if you didn't do drugs, there was something wrong with you."
Currie said it started with quaaludes, and she later graduated to cocaine. By the time
she was 17, Currie was completely burned out on drugs. She admitted that she continued
to struggle with drug addiction long after she left the band. Currie was ultimately able
to get her life together and took a job as a tech in the drug and psych wards at Coldwater
Canyon Hospital. Eventually, she became a drug and alcohol counselor.
"I became a drug counselor for drug addicted teens, right after that."
Eventually, The Runaways started experiencing turnover. In 1977, both Cherie Currie and
Jackie Fox left the band. After two years, Currie was burned out from drugs, and flat-out
exhausted from the fast-paced rock-and-roll life. Fox was likewise weary from the rockstar
lifestyle. Both Currie and Fox had also hit their limit in dealing with Fowley's regular
abuse. They were done.
But the remaining Runaways weren't ready to be done with the band. Without Currie or Fox,
the band had two choices — break up or find replacements. They opted for the latter. Vicki
Blue took over as their bassist. Currie, the band's former primary vocalist, proved much
harder to replace. After all, it was her face that fans looked for. In the end, guitarist
Joan Jett took over as the lead vocalist for the band.
In an interview with New Musical Express, Jett admitted that she knew that she wasn't
the frontwoman Currie was, but at the time, she wasn't ready to let the band go. Jett
recalled in the interview:
"I knew I wasn't Cherie. I knew I wasn't a blonde bombshell. I knew I wasn't the one
people wanted to look at. And that's a weird feeling. I'm getting emotional; I don't know
why. What else could I do? Either end it or plow ahead and not worry."
Not long after leaving The Runaways, Cherie Currie was the victim of a horrific kidnapping
and assault when she was only 17. According to The Guardian, the man responsible was a
stalker, as well as an obsessed fan who had previously killed six other women in Texas.
Apparently, the kidnapper was driving a limousine and urged the young Currie to go for a ride.
An admitted people-pleaser, Currie agreed to join him, probably not thinking about what
might happen given all the risky behavior she had previously engaged in while touring
with The Runaways. However, the man ended up driving her to an abandoned house where
he imprisoned and assaulted her. Luckily, Currie was able to escape her kidnapper when
she managed to get a hold of a knife and stabbed him.
"And, so I saw that knife and I just had to get to that knife."
In an interview with Democrat & Chronicle, Currie acknowledged just how lucky she was
to be alive after her ordeal, telling the outlet,
"[I]t was a terrible thing that had happened, but I survived, I was blessed. I survived
when I shouldn't have. This man had told me he had killed six women."
Although Cherie Currie quit The Runaways in 1977, she was still under contract to Kim
Fowley and was obligated to work with him for one more album. She ended up making her
first solo album, Beauty's Only Skin Deep. In an interview with OC Weekly, Currie said
that the album was slapped together within two weeks and referred to her solo debut as,
quote, "the worst album that was recorded in history."
Mercury Records didn't even release the album in the United States, only in France and Japan.
But after that, Currie was no longer forced to work with Fowley. Later, in 1980, Cherie
and her twin, sister, Marie, made a record together, Messin' With The Boys, which Currie
has also referred to as, quote, "a mistake." In an interview, Currie recalled what it was
like working with her sister on the album:
"My sister thought she wanted to be in the music business, but when she was in it, she
didn't want it anymore. When she walked away from the record deal and then they dropped
me, she went off in her married life and had kids."
For Cherie, however, walking away like her sister did was simply not an option. In the
same interview, Currie revealed her depressed state of mind in the aftermath of making Messin'
With The Boys:
"I could hardly live with what I had done, and I let the drugs take over. I was very
upset that I let myself do that record. At that time, I thought it had ruined my career
and my drug addiction got worse and worse."
The Runaways' lead guitarist, Lita Ford, wasn't without her own personal problems, either.
At one point, she was married to Nitro lead vocalist, Jim Gillette. The couple married
in 1994 after knowing each other for two weeks. Ford and Gillette later had a highly contentious
divorce in 2011, with Gillette getting full custody of their two sons. Although Gillette
publicly stated that Ford was allowed supervised visitation, Ford apparently didn't see her
sons again for almost a decade.
When asked in interviews about the custody arrangement and subsequent absence from her
children's lives, Ford responded,
"By the time our divorce was final and everything was said and done, it was such a joke that
it didn't matter what I got on paper. There was no way I was gonna be in those boys' lives.
They were such a mess by the time I left and my ex-husband left that it just didn't matter."
The boys were around 17 and 21 when Ford finally saw them again in person. Evidently, the meeting
did not go particularly well, and Ford's sons continue to avoid seeing her. Ford claims
her ex-husband turned her sons against her and responded in 2015 by creating a Parental
Alienation Awareness Facebook page.
Sadly, The Runaways' drummer, Sandy West, died at the early age of 47 in 2006. She had
been suffering from lung cancer. According to The Hollywood Reporter, West passed away
in hospice care in San Dimas, California. A California girl at heart, West grew up in
Huntington Beach and split time between her main hobbies, skiing and surfing. It wasn't
until her grandfather gifted the young West with her first drum set that she discovered
her raw gift as a formidable musician.
In her post-Runaways' life, West never achieved the same level of fame that her former bandmates
had, but she never lost her passion for drumming. Even as she went on to work in construction,
West continued to play in her own band, The Sandy West Band, and would occasionally perform
with former Runaways bandmate, Cherie Currie.
In an official statement, Joan Jett came out and expressed her sadness over her old friend's
passing, writing,
"We shared the dream of girls playing rock and roll. Sandy was an exuberant and powerful
drummer. I am overcome from the loss of my friend. I always told her we changed the world."
Cherie Currie also put out a statement shortly after West's death. Currie's statement had
this heartwarming remembrance of her former bandmate:
"Sandy West loved her fans, her friends and family almost to a fault. It will never be
the same for me again to step on a stage, because Sandy West was the best and I will
miss her forever."
As for Kim Fowley, The Runaways' disturbed, abusive manager, he continued to live on and
died of bladder cancer at the age of 75. Most peculiarly, it was none other than Cherie
Currie who helped care for Fowley in his final days. It comes as a shock to any outsider,
particularly when The Runaways themselves have openly talked about how horribly Fowley
abused them. Currie even once compared their relationship with Fowley to, quote, "battered
wife syndrome."
However, Currie admitted in an interview with Spin that Fowley did eventually apologize
for his treatment of her and her fellow Runaways:
"[Kim Fowley] apologized to me on the phone a year ago [in 2009], saying if he had to
do it over again he wouldn't have treated us that way. He didn't know how to handle
15-year-old girls. In his own crazy way, he loved us."
An apology doesn't seem as though it should make up for years of abuse. But for Currie,
it was enough. In a 2016 interview with The Guardian, shortly after her former manager's
death, Currie explained that it felt better to forgive Fowley than hold onto her anger.
They even collaborated one more time for Currie's 2015 solo album, Reverie. While remembering
Fowley in her interview with The Guardian, Currie had this to say:
"People can change. They can. Without [Kim], Joan never would have happened, Lita and myself,
so I owe him a great deal and I was very honoured to take care of him towards the end of his
life. I would have done it again and again, and I'm sorry that I lost him."
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