A LITA BIT CLOSER TO THE TOP!

A LITA BIT CLOSER TO THE TOP!

FEATURES

by Laura Fissinger

What a time to be a gal, hey? One in space, one in the presidential race, and one who plays metal guitar fast and mean enough to make big boys in black leather pull their chest hair in desperation. Yessir, fellas, you can take those zucchinis out of your pants now: Lita Ford is proving that genitals don’t play rock guitar.

Also true that good rock guitar playing doesn’t promise a good career; Ford, 25, is sweating out that part of the problem now. Dancin’ On The Edge is her second solo album, and it’s going to be a fistfight to get it up in the high spots on the charts where the elite of heavy metal polish their leather and count their money. Especially with Lita’s infamous past like a (different kind of) rock hanging around her neck.

Unless you’re Japanese or European you may not know a lot about the Runaways, even though they did the nasty and necessary work of being among the first women doing hard rock. As the legend goes, Ford, Joan Jett and drummer Sandy West found each other through an El Lay rock fanzine called Backdoor Man. Somewhere around that same time they also found Kim Fowley, a West Coast rock producer/manager/whatever, who saw the potential (!?!) in these 15-year-olds who wanted to be rock ’n’ roll stars. In an amazingly short period of time, the Runaways became the band that America loved to hate. And through four albums, give or take a few imports (from Japan and Europe, where they were stars) and complications, their reputation went from bad to worse. Remember that this was the mid-’70s, when heavy metal was going through one of its low tides (“But it never died,” says Lita. “Never could, never will.”), and punk hadn’t happened yet, and Suzi Quatro was having a hard time making a living. You get a bunch of fresh-minted jailbait who can’t play their instruments too well yet, singing teen-hump anthems that a grown man wrote for them? Ninety percent of the rock crits in America used the Runaways for target practice. I always liked heavy metal best. I knew it was different, that girls weren’t supposed to like it.” Not going by the rule book, huh? “Nobody ever told me what to listen to.” And which singers were the heroes? “Mick Jagger!!! That’s real bizarre, I think, but I just love his voice—he could sing me the yellow pages and I’d just oooohhh....”

That may have bugged Ford then, but you’d never know it from talking to her now. “I thought the press for the Runaways was fine, terrific! They cut us down, sure. But I think that any press is good press—if you mean enough to get written about, well you must be cool. I’ve never cared what people thought. Maybe that’s part of my problem.”

So the band didn’t break up because the sound of people laughing and hooting was louder than the music? “Nah. Joan and I basically broke up the band because we wanted to play different things. She wanted to play more pop and I wanted to play hard rock. It was a friendly break.” She laughs. “At least I think it was friendly. We haven’t talked since the break-up, but I do talk to other members of the band.”

For a while, though, 'Ford didn’t play much of anything. It had been five years of hard work and jet lag and God only knows what else. (Ford doesn’t talk much about her what else except to say that “my personal life is very happy right now.”) “I was tired after the Runaways. I really felt my best ever right before the split up, and I was down.

I had a lot of personal problems, my best friend was dying, all kinds of shit happened. And I didn’t know what I wanted to do for my own band. Did I want a male singer or a female singer? I’d always wanted to sing myself, but I auditioned a lot of singers. Everyone sounded like somebody else, and the women all sounded like women!”

And the last thing Lita wanted for herself or any other woman was to sound like one. Ford’s dad is an English army vet who met Lita’s mom during a World War II tour of Italy. Mom Ford loved the sun, and Dad Ford had a ton of siblings in California, so they pulled up stakes when Lita was five and landed in looneyland. The first guitar they bought Lita (age 10) had plastic strings. “Yah,” she chortles, “I guess I was a guitar prodigy.” Not only did mom and dad give her the instrument, but they also gave her the freedom of playing Rolling Stones and Ritchie Blackmore records at the, ahem, proper volume. No Joni Mitchell at the Ford house, buster. “My parents weren’t nervous about any of this at all. They’re real special, and we’re real close. They didn’t mind when I’d play along with all the records—I liked Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, and some Grand Funk. Ritchie Blackmore, he was my biggest hero. Then there was UFO when they first came out, and Michael Schenker.

In 1980, the solo career finally got going for Ford, with a major assist from bassist/singer/writer/sessionman Neil Merryweather. He’d worked with people like Rick James, Dave Mason and Billy Joel; the Runaways, in fact, had recorded a couple of his tunes. As Ford’s manager, producer, bassist and songwriting partner, he guided her career awfully close to nowhere—Out For Blood came out, and nobody bled. “Neil and I aren’t working together anymore. I don’t wanna badmouth him, but we don’t talk anymore. I think the album did OK in terms of sales, but it coulda done a lot better if it had been produced better, and promoted better. But the key people just weren’t behind it. I got all kinds of great reactions in the press, though: ‘trash,’ ‘great trash,’ ‘sleazebag trash,’ ‘it was great,’ ‘it sucks’—it went from one extreme to another, with nothing much in between.” She laughs loudly again. “I thought a lot of what they said was true. I take it with a grain of salt, but I like people to give me their opinions on things, because if I am doing something that isn’t right or appealing, how else can I correct it?”

And that’s why she “kept her clothes on” for the cover of Dancin’ On The Edge. In case you didn’t see Out For Blood, it was a full body shot of the leggy Lita, in a leather/lingerie get-up, holding up half a white guitar in each hand. Out of each half spurted blood, more blood than final exams in a high school biology lab! Girls just wanna have fun, huh? “Yeah, I helped design that cover.” She snorts with amusement. “I thought it was kinda cool. I did, honest! I guess I don’t think about how conservative the average American really is. I dunno, the whole thing was supposed to be a sign of strength, but it didn’t come out like it was planned. And I guess part of the reason I did it at all is because girls aren’t supposed to.”

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Girls aren’t supposed to write songs about being the tough guy in romance, either, but that was one of Lita’s key goals when she shed Merryweather and started trying to write some winners for LP #2. “I think the main thing was that I wanted to become a better lyricist. I didn’t wanna write stuff like ‘oh, I’m sitting in the dark crying wondering where you are.’ I’d rather say ‘oh I left you sitting in the corner and now you’re wondering, but I ain’t coming back to you!’ And there’s not gonna be any ballad on the next LP, either. I’ll write a blues instead, because everyone’s got a goddam rock ballad on their record—even Judas Priest on Defenders Of The Faith!”

About the guitar Ford feels plenty confident—as well she should. Even through the production glop on Out For Blood you could hear that the girl could really play. But the libbers are right when they say that you gotta be twice as good as the guys just to be considered OK—so Lita keeps plugging. “I just wanna keep learning more stuff—more runs, different scales that I don’t know now, things that are still hard for me to play. I’m pretty satisfied with my speed. I think that’s one thing I’ve conquered. On the Runaways LPs I didn’t have any speed. On this new LP I don’t play fast all the time, but a lot of the solos have feeling, so I’ve got both worlds on the record. I never want to just pick up a guitar and play everything I know in one solo, which a lot of people have a tendency to do.”

Another thing people have a tendency to do is spend 50 million years trying to turn a heavy metal LP into high art—Ford and her new producers avoided that for Dancin’. Ford was nervous, but kept things moving fast. “We booked the studio for 10 days to do the basic tracks, did ’em all in five days. The first album had a lot more ups and downs in the making—this one was much more together. I put the guitars on last. I like to play around the vocals, rather than sing around the guitar. If there’s an empty space in there, I’ll throw in a little guitar so nothing gets boring. And we tried to leave some of the goofy stuff in, too— the little sniffle and laugh at the end of the record. Things like that leave some personality in the album, which a lot of producers don’t let their artists do.”

The only thing they’ll have to not let Lita do is burn herself out. The girl poses with guitar guts gushing on her feet—it isn’t just rock ’n’ roll music this woman lives for. It’s the tempo, the attitude, the feeling—the guts, so to speak. To hear Ford describe the next few months of her work life is spooky, because this is not just the climb up the ladder of success—she wants the goddam ladder to burn behind her. When we did this interview she’d already been to Europe once for Dancin’ On The Edge promotion, did a bunch of mag covers and interviews and TV shows—“one for 8 million people in Germany!” and then some more interviews and European dates with Twisted Sister and oh! oh! the video!!! She talks faster than she plays guitar.

“The guy who directed it (David Mallet) did Bowie’s ‘China Girl and Billy idol s ‘White Wedding’—I’d wanted to work with him and he wanted to work with me too, it turned out! So we did one for “Gotta Let Go,” where I’m this housewife and Doris Day type and these guys break in and tie up me and my husband and then I break out and it’s me in this jumpsuit with my guitar and then I beat them up and throw them out the window and my husband just stares— you gotta see it!” w