Ep. 7 - Women Who Rocked the 70s

[Music] Hello everyone. This is Amy. Welcome back to "For the Records of 70s." This is the place where we take a deep dive into the intersection of the music, the culture, and the politics of the 1970s. Today, I want to talk a little bit about some rock and roll. Rock and roll underwent an evolution in the 1970s. In fact, we end the 70s with branches of the rock and roll tree and a culture war between the fans of the various branches. Heavy metal, southern rock, punk rock, arena rock. What is true of all of these branches and that big rock and roll tree is that rock and roll was a man's world. The music industry was a patriarchal society and women who tried to make their way in it or did make their way in it were unique. They were so unique that in many ways they were considered to be a novelty. It is still difficult to simply discuss their musical achievements and their failures without discussing their gender. I can, of course, I would like to, but that would be a denial of the very point of this podcast. This is a place where we take a deep dive into the intersection of the music, politics, and culture of the 70s and folks. We cannot do that and pretend that misogyny was not part of rock and roll story. The music that was created by the women that I will discuss was important. So was the climate in which they created it. In some cases, one informed the other. 1970 marked the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment which gave women in all states the right to vote, although we realize that this primarily referred to white women. But still, it was there on paper. It was six years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which in addition to making racial segregation illegal, it banned employment discrimination based on gender. It should come, as no surprise, that including women in the Civil Rights Act was a move by its opponents to try to prevent the acts from passing. After all, who would want to have women have equal employment opportunities? That's crazy. Let's put that in the bill. Surely it will not pass. It passed. Oops, I guess that backbired. On August 26th of 1970, 50,000 women marched down Fifth Avenue in New York in the midst of rush hour. It was supposed to be a nationwide strike for equality, although there are no numbers about how many women actually did strike. We do know that there were many demonstrations all across the nation. Sit ins, teachings, marches, and they were all intended to draw attention to a, the power of women as a collective unit, and b, just how far the nation had not come in gender equality. Just about every major industry in the country was dominated by men. Women were denied jobs, told outright. It was because they were women. My friends, music was no exception to this. For a woman to play in a man's world, it almost demanded that she be like one of the men, maybe even outdo the men at behavior that was perceived as masculine. Paul Rothschild was a music producer who worked with Janice Joplin on her final album, Pearl, which was released in 1971. Here is a quote from Paul Rothschild. How can I say this without sounding sexist? I'm just going to stop right here. If your sentence begins this way, you probably cannot avoid sounding sexist that I digress. Janice was one of the guys. When I was with her, there was no sense of she's female I'm male. Her male balance was as strong as my female balance. We both acknowledged that place. Here is what Joe McDonald said. He was the lead singer for Country Joe and the Fish, and he had a relationship with Janice for a while. He said this. Sexism killed her. People kept saying that she was just one of the guys. That's a real sexist bullshit trip because that was fucking her head around. She was one of the women. She was a strong, groovy woman. Smart, you know, but she got fucked around. McDonald's point, of course, was that he believed that Janice thought that she needed to compete. She needed to outcast, out drink, out sing the men. So she did. She exuded this live in the moment philosophy. I mean, if you got a cap for one day, man, I mean, say, maybe you want a cap for 365 days, right? You ain't got it for 365 days. You got it for one day, man. Well, I'll tell you that one day, man, better be your life, man. Because, you know, you can say, oh, man, you can cry about the other 365, man. But you're going to lose that one day, man. And that's all you got. You've got to call that love, man. That's what it is, man. If you got it today, you don't wear it tomorrow, man. Because you don't need it. Because as a matter of fact, as we discovered on the train, tomorrow never happens, man. It's all the same fucking day, man. Janice was a product of the psychedelic rock scene of the 1960s in San Francisco. But like many rock and rollers of that time, her roots were in the blues. She was like Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones. It wasn't always easy to see where the blues ended and the rock began. She had a new band in 1970 and she seemed happy about the direction that her music was taking, even if the critics were not so sure. Her show on June 12, 1970 in Louisville, Kentucky. Louisville is a conservative southern town and they welcomed Janice to Freedom Hall, which is one of those cavernous, multi-purpose buildings that has a whole lot more suited to hosting Louisville Cardinal basketball games and to concerts because the acoustics are terrible. According to David Dalton, who wrote about the show for Rolling Stone, Janice looked out on the crowd and she didn't see what she might call her people in the front row. And she said, "Shit, man, why do those country club chicks in their panty girdles always have to be sitting in the front rows? They are probably so tight they couldn't move if they wanted to." So things got off to kind of a slow start and when someone in the crowd yelled out a request, try a little bit harder. Janice yelled back, "Hey, I'm doing my part." And she was. It wasn't just this review. Reading through various reviews of her shows of that year, and I watched quite a bit of video of Janice too, you could see she was into it. She was always into it. She had renamed, she named her new band the Full Tilt Boogie and the band that, this is the band that backed her on Pearl. They all put everything they had into her performances. This wasn't like a drug-dazed Johnny Cash who didn't know where he was at any moment on stage when he was under the influence of Amphetamines. She was present and she was happy and she was happy with the transition that her music was taking her, even though it was taking her away from the psychedelic rock and more toward the bluesy rock. So the band is playing and Janice leads into try just a little bit harder with this intro. No doubt playing up that Texas accent. She said, "Honey, if you've ever had your eye on a piece of talent and that chick down the road had been getting all the action, then you know what you got to do." And then the band busts into try and as Janice gets into it, so does the Louisville crowd. Janice jumps off the stage and starts to dance with a young guy near the front and now the crowd is going bonkers and there's a whole lot of dancing and pushing toward the stage. As the crowd pushes toward the stage, the security guards push back. Janice fell down to one of the security guards. "I permit them to dance." She said this to this kind of big guy who apparently got pretty mad about that and she said, "In fact, I demand it." He was not happy, but the band keeps working through summertime, cosmic blues and move over. And by the time that Janice gets to piece of my heart, security had the house lights turned up. I guess they thought that the lights being on would make everybody chill out, but that did the opposite because now it made it obvious to those in the back that everybody else was dancing. So they better get to dancing too. A good time was had by all except perhaps by the security guards. Here's that song that got the country club chicks in their panty girdles up and moving. Try just a little bit harder. Try, try, try, try, try, just a little bit harder. So I can love, love, love me until my step. What I wanna try, just a little bit harder. So I wanna lose, lose, lose, lose, healer. It's in nobody's hand. Hey, what I don't care, I don't know what's gonna take me. But you've been to dream, I don't want no one don't let a water. Get into dream, I don't want nobody to play. Yeah, I'm gonna try. Just a little bit harder. Try, just a little bit harder. Recorded in June 1969 and released on "I Got Them Old Cosmic Blues Again Mama" in September 1969. The blues that Janice sang about was a blues of disappointment and not the traditional blues of black. That black blues artist sang about. In a song like this, try, it is about Janice trying harder. And with the piece of my heart, it is about some guy taking a part of her. Janice had a lot of male fans and there's some irony there that she was entertaining them by pouring everything she had into singing about her disappointment in them. Or perhaps her perception that she was disappointing them. What might have happened for women in rock and roll had she not died within four months of that show? What would rock and roll in general have been like if Janice Joplin had lived in was now a 70-something matriarch of rock? My suspicion is that at the very least, women in rock might not have been such a novelty. What we lost with Janice was not just the musical voice, but her voice as a person. I don't think that any woman stepped in and filled either void. If anyone could have possibly taken hold of the reins, dropped by Janice's death, it was Grace Slick. She was one of Janice's peers and she was a rock goddess, but the 70s seemed to just swallow Grace Slick, or maybe it was the alcohol in the drugs. She went from providing the lead vocals of two of the most iconic psychedelic rock songs of the late 60s with Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit, which she also wrote, and somebody to love. Then she went to essentially being kicked out of the revamped version of the band that she formed with Paul Cantner, Jefferson Starship, and the 70s. I love Jefferson Starship's 70s music. Miracles count on me. I love that. But Marty Ballon was the best thing about the band in the 70s. Grace essentially harmonized and added in some good "oh babies" on that deceptively raunchy part of Miracles. As for the 80s starship, well, thank goodness that the 80s are a bit beyond our purview here because Sarah, we built the city. No thank you. Grace never lost her edge and her outspoken personality, but she was not exactly a musical force of the 1970s. When I take a look at some of the female artists of the 70s, especially those who went on later to have success, and I look at where some of the problems began, it seemed as if some of it was with the record labels themselves. The record companies didn't know exactly how to market what they had. This was especially true for Bonnie Raite because Bonnie Raite was blues. Record companies had no idea how to market blues artists in the 1970s. So for Bonnie Raite, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and one of the greatest slide guitar players ever, and who is at her very core a blues artist, well, no company record company is going to A, the desire or B, the clue to know what to do with her. So Bonnie Raite was out there doing her very best Janice Joplin impression when it came to competing with the men in this self-destructive behavior while making mind-blowing music. Bonnie Raite was playing with some of the all-time blues legends while she was still in her 20s, Sippy Wallace, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker, her record label, Warner Records, did not do a very good job of promoting her. Her first album, Bonnie Raite, was what she called straight blues, and it's definitely blues. But more than the stones or the almond brothers, I'm not sure about that. Here is a finest love and man written and performed by Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or Bonnie Raite, on her self-titled debut album, released in November 1971. [Music] [Music] [Music] Bonnie Raite, 21 years old when she recorded that, is that more blues than the almond brothers? If it is, it's not more blues by a lot. Bonnie did not get any real radio play at all until she did a cover of Del Shannon's Runaway in 1977. Her life and presumably her career was made much more complicated by her alcohol abuse. Bonnie said, "I wanted to be the female version of muddy waters. There was a real man's about drinking and doing blues. Those blues guys had been professional drinkers for years, and I wanted to prove that I could hold my liquor with them. I bought into that whole lifestyle. I thought Keith Richards was really cool, that he was really dangerous. I read that, and I read that Bonnie thought that this is how it was done. This is what I have to do to be the artist that gets respect, but what it got her was dropped by Warner Records. Bonnie Raite did not go mainstream until the 1980s were practically over when she released Nick of Time in 1989. By then she was with Capitol Records, she was nearly 40, and she was the story of the underdog claiming the big prize. If anyone out there is doing a '90s music podcast for the love of all things musically holy, will you please do something about Nick of Time? Not long before I recorded this, Stevie Nicks was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for the second time. She was inducted with Fleetwood Mac in 1998, and then 21 years later as a solo artist. She is the first woman to be honored twice. 22 men have had that honor. She said something interesting in her induction speech. Actually she said a lot of interesting things in her induction speech. But one of the things that she said that stood out to me is that she wanted to make a Tom Petty album. At least that's what she said when she became a solo artist. She wanted to do what she called straight up rock and roll. You could make the argument that Fleetwood Mac isn't exactly rock. Well it is. It's that 70s kind of softer rock. She wanted to do something a little harder than that. Now Stevie and Lindsey Buckingham were part of that whole San Francisco scene that Janice Joplin was part of. Stevie learned from watching Janice and Grace Slick and Buffalo Springfield, a literal rock and roll school. But when she and Lindsey joined Fleetwood Mac Fleetwood Mac was most definitely a blues band. Now she and Lindsey will turn the direction of Fleetwood Mac around into what we generally think of Fleetwood Mac today a hit making machine. She also wondered if Christine McVee would be okay with having another woman in the band and was grateful to find out that she was okay with that. The idea that two women would be in this rock supergroup and sing lead vocals and write these incredible songs is something that I think we all take for granted because Fleetwood Mac is a great singer. would Mac music is still everywhere. It's like it never went away, so we never had a chance to miss it. We shouldn't really take Fleetwood Mac for granted though. A quick perusal of the top selling albums for each year of the 1970s shows us that there was only one year where the top selling album had female artists in it. That was 1977 when Fleetwood Mac released Rumors. Now we know that Rumors is chock full of relationship drama because the band was chock full of relationship drama, not the least of which was Stevie and Lindsey Buckingham. But Rumors won the Grammy for album of the year in 1978 and to date has sold roughly 40 million copies. Stevie Nicks wrote this song which was on Rumors and became the first and unbelievably the only number one single that Fleetwood Mac ever had. This is Dreams from 1977. [Music] [Music] I often wonder how Stevie and Lindsey stood next to each other and sang these songs. Players only love you when they're playing and then Lindsey Buckingham writes, "Go your own way for her." I guess that's what it means to be a professional musician to be able to put those things aside when you need to. Stevie said not long ago. When I first listened to the Fleetwood Mac recording of Dreams, I said to myself, "There's that little girl that was singing along to the Supremes. All the amazing black musical groups who were top 40 when I was in the fourth grade, Carol and Jerry, Barry Man and Cynthia Wilde. Those are all the songs that I learned to sing to. I wanted to be part of that. I'm 70 now so I've been working on this for like 60 years, which is pretty crazy. Considering the sexism that many women have had to put up within the music industry, Stevie said that she thought she had it pretty easy. She can remember one time very early in her career when a guy in the crowd made some lute remarks to her and the legendary concert promoter Bill Graham told him to essentially get the fuck out and that was that. She also said that she and Christine McBear vowed to each other the day that Stevie joined the band that they would not allow themselves to be treated as less than. She said that they said to each other, we will never be treated like second-class citizens. We will never be not allowed to hang out in a room full of intelligent, crazy rock and roll stars because we are just as crazy and just as intelligent as they are. We just made that promise to each other that we would do everything we could for women that we would fight for everything that we wanted and get it. That our songs and our music would be equally as good as the men surrounding us. And it was. This would be a good time to point out that Christine McBear wrote and sang the lead vocal on the very first single that the revamped Fleetwood Mac released from the 1975 album that's come to be called the White Album. And it was their first top 20 hit in the United States. Like so many of the band songs, it is about a relationship on the rocks. And then again you can be cold as ice. I'm over my head. But it sure feels nice. You can take me anytime you like. I'll be around if you think you're mine. You'll be baby. And hold you tight. You're moving like a sucker's wheel. You're changing all the time. Sometimes I can help but be that I'm wasting all of my time. By the way, Christine McBear wrote the next top 20 single for the band too. She wrote, "Say You Love Me." So what do you do when your own record label starts rumors about your sexuality? Such was the case for Anne and Nancy Wilson, whose band Heart released the album Dreamboat Annie in September 1975. Two of the songs on Dreamboat Annie, Magic Man, and Crazy On You are part of the classic rock canon. Although their label was not so sure that the band had any other hits in them. So mushroom records, which does not exist anymore, was not above completely sexualizing Anne and Nancy, who are sisters to sell the record. The album cover shows them with bare shoulders, standing back to back, which may have been a little bit of a questionable choice for sisters. However, the label took out a full page ad in Rolling Stone magazine and under that album cover, they printed the caption, "It was only our first time." That's just gross. I mean, that's just fucked up beyond measure. Soon after that, a radio promoter asked Anne about her lover, meaning her sister, and now Anne is royally pissed. And she wrote this song in response. , "I saw you again today, I had the time of heartache, smile like a sun, kisses for love, and tell you, I love you, I love you.". Let's review those lyrics. You lie in solo in the weeds, bet you're gonna ambush me. You'd have me down, down, down to my knees. Wouldn't you, Barakuda? That's for her record label. Barakuda from the 1977 album Little Queen, which somehow never became a top 10 hit. Well, it was 1977, maybe if it had been on the Saturday night, fever soundtrack. Recently, Anne Wilson said, "Many times in our 20s, we'd go into radio stations, and they'd say, 'We love your tits.'" It was irritating. And if they touched me, that was just the most icky, nauseating feeling ever. But in the 70s, if I'd have said to my manager, whatever DJ touched my shoulder in the wrong way, who'd get fired? Me. Hearts breakthrough as a legitimate rock band coincided with this evolution of rock and roll that began to build up steam in the late 70s and totally blew up in the 1980s. Arena Rock and the power ballad that filled up those arenas with a brand new breed of rock fans, the younger women, and probably their moms too, took hold of rock. Hearts situation was not helped by some of the inner turmoil within the band, but they were also in a situation where selling records and getting on the radio, which still went hand in hand in the 80s, required a makeover. The 1985 album Heart went to number one. one and had four top 10 hits, nothing at all, these dreams, which also went to number one, what about love and never. Every one of those songs is Miles from Magic Man, Crazy On You and Barakuda. They are sentimental and they're a little sappy, but they are very, very popular and they are what gave heart mainstream success. Journey and foreigner and Aureo Speedwagon can totally relate. The end of the 1970s was also the era of punk, which definitely had a hand at putting a nail in the coffin of the more traditional rock and roll. Punk merits its own episode or two, which is coming. But for now, let me say this. Punk was a big FU to the establishment, so it makes sense that there is space for women in the genre. I mean, how anti-establishment can you get? The runaways was a band made up of teenage girls, and that band was formed in 1975. They were never very popular in the United States. They were very popular in Japan, though. But one of their band members, Joan Jett, formed her own band in 1979. That was the Black Hearts, and Joan Jett and the Black Hearts became very popular in the 1980s. Chrissy Hind formed the pretenders in the late 70s, and just as the 70s were coming to an end in November 1979, the pretenders released this single in the UK. The one of the most popular bands in the world. It's not an angry song, and it's not a song that is trying to make a lover feel better, or some sort of ode to a lover. It is about sex, but not in a way that indicates that she's going to give up any control. Chrissy did not intend this to be a feminist anthem. She intended it to be a traditional rock song. The girl thing seems to be real important for other people, but I'm mystified by it, she said. For me, brass and pocket was supposed to be real traditional, because tradition in rock is what turns me on. We want our rock singers to be confident and cocky, and brass and pocket was an act. My attempt to write a song that sounded like that. In other words, in my words, it shouldn't be a big deal that the song was sung by a woman. It shouldn't be, but it was. It is also not at all, unlike Chrissy Hine, to be very modest about her accomplishments. In a 2016 interview, she said that music reflects the time that it's being made. And of course, that is true. That is why brass and pocket matters. It is not that all was well for women in music, and it is not that misogyny was ever eliminated in any segment in society. Brass and pocket and the other music that was on the verge of being made by Joan Jet, Pat Benatar, lead afford as the 80s began. And then Melissa Etheridge and Annie Lennox and Madonna by the time the 80s ends all reflect progress, not perfection, but progress in women taking their rightful place in music. That is all for this episode. If you like what you heard, please be so kind, as to subscribe. And leave a nice review on iTunes or with your favorite podcast provider. Spotify folks, I see you out there. Thank you for finding me on Spotify. You can also find the podcast on Instagram. And if you have a suggestion for an episode, let me know. Thanks for listening, everyone. Bye! (upbeat music)