When you think of manufactured bands, it’s usually pop vocal groups put together with nothing but commercialism and the mainest of the mainstream in mind. You’re thinking about the charts, not the arts.

What you don’t think of is an all-female, raw rock & roll band with a proto-punk sound and a fully punk spirit.

Welcome to The Runaways!

Kim Fowley did a little bit of everything as part of the Los Angeles music scene in the 1960’s — managing, producing, promoting, writing, singing — anything to stay in the game. Although he worked on a couple of big hits during this time (including a #1 about a caveman), and co-wrote with some big artists, Fowley often seemed to reside on the fringes of success. In 1975, he decided to to put together an all-girl band with the intention of turning them into the female Grand Funk Railroad. But that’s not exactly what he ended up with.

A lyricist friend of Fowley’s found guitarist Joan Jett and she was the first hire after auditioning with a ukulele. Fowley met drummer Sandy West in a parking lot. Bassist Jackie Fox was discovered in a different parking lot by Rodney Bingenheimer, the musical man about town known as the “Mayor of the Sunset Strip.” Lead guitarist Lita Ford came over from another band. And lead singer Cherie Currie, the last to join, was discovered at a teen nightclub.

When Currie auditioned with the band, she chose Suzi Quatro’s version of “Fever,” a song that does not rock, and one that the rest of the group was unable, or unwilling, to play. So Fowley and Jett quickly whipped up a simple song based on Cherie’s name and the kind of teen attitude Fowley was hoping for Currie to project. Project it she could. When The Runaways went into the studio to record “Cherry Bomb,” Currie was just shy of 16 and nobody else in the band was older than 17. The band exuded teenage defiance.

Released as a single in the spring of 1976, “Cherry Bomb” just missed the US Hot 100, but the song, as well as the band’s debut album, turned The Runaways into superstars in Japan, a country that always appreciated pop-influenced hard rock and metal. In the US the band was a bit too raw for the general public. Cherie Currie left after the second album and the band broke up at the end of the 70’s over irreconcilable musical differences between Joan Jett and Lita Ford. Each would be heard from again.

So get down, ladies — you’ve got nothin’ to lose … with The Runaways.