Seventies Female Rockers Are Back -- With a New Purpose

"It's a man's man's man's world," James Brown once sang, and back in the day, it was pretty much true, at least as far as rock and roll was concerned.

But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, an all-female band called Fanny -- fronted by guitarist June Millington and her bass-playing sister, Jean, with Nickey Barclay on keyboards and Alice de Buhr on drums -- did their best to shatter the Top 40's glass ceiling. For audiences accustomed to the macho histrionics of male performers, it was a startling sight to see the delicately beautiful Millington sisters strutting their stuff, pounding out a blues-rock sound that was hard driving as Humble Pie or the MC5. Their fans included rock superstar David Bowie, who in a 1999 Rolling Stone interview recalled Fanny as "extraordinary" and complained that the band, who paved the way for women rockers from Joan Jett to P.J. Harvey, had been largely forgotten in rock history.

"It just wasn't their time," Bowie lamented, adding, "Revivify Fanny. And I will feel that my work is done."

Well, Bowie can rest easy, because, as it turns out, the Millington sisters are revivifying themselves. I recently perused the website of Kickstarter.com, a great organization that helps artists raise contributions to further their work, and came across this wonderful video put together by June Millington, who is seeking donors to cover expenses related to the release of a new CD by the sisters, Play Like A Girl.

I got in touch with June Millington, who explains that she's been pretty busy since Fanny's demise in the mid-1970s.

"I'm playing my ass off," she says with a laugh. In addition to continuing to make music with her sister and others, Millington also helps run the Institute for Musical Arts, a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to helping future female rockers.

IMA's 25-acre campus in Massachusetts, which includes both a concert space and two recording studios, hosts summer camps for teenage girls, where they can polish their guitar chops and study the intricacies of mixing a record. Teens also get a chance to learn the history of female music pioneers such as Big Mama Thornton, who first recorded Jerry Leiber's and Mike Stoller's song "Hound Dog" in 1952 and sold two million copies of the single, three years before Elvis Presley did his version.

"I talk to them about Carol Kaye, the great woman bassist, who played on the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations," Millington explains. "We want to let them know, you're not just creating this out of nowhere."

The students also get some sage tips on how to survive in the trade. "The music business is still not very friendly to women," says Millington, who is in her early sixties. "The first thing they want to look at is what you look like. We're half-Asian (the Millingtons are Filipino-American) and women, so it's always been difficult."

The increasing collapse of the music industry's traditional business model in recent years -- due to the rise of the internet, mp3s and illicit file-sharing networks -- has made it tougher for young female artists to get the sort of lucrative big label deal and high-powered promotion that Fanny and other 70s rock groups once had. But the resulting void also is creating new opportunities for artists who are savvy enough to use the internet to reach out to potential listeners -- and to find financial backers.

The Millingtons' own appeal on Kickstarter, which has raised $13,000 of the $15,000 in pledges that they need by Jan. 10 to meet their goal, is one such example. (It's sort of the cyberspace version of folk-blues immortal Leadbelly passing the hat after his performances.)

June Millington says that she and her sister, Jean, who lives in California and also has a separate career as an herbalist, are eager to get out and do a concert tour, and not just to spur sales of their CD. They're eager to prove a point, and break through an ageist barrier that in some ways is just as daunting as gender once was.

"When we were 15 or 16, our biggest goal was just to prove that girls could play like guys," June Millington recalls. "...Our goal today is to stand up in front of people when we're in our early sixties, and have them say, wow, not only can they still play, but they look good too, and they make me feel like dancing."

Here's a great article that McClatchy newspapers writer Carla Meyer did about Fanny a couple of years back, and another article about the band from Dangerousminds.net. Also, here's a vintage YouTube clip of Fanny performing "You're the One" and "Special Care" on a British TV show in 1971. You can get an out-of-print four CD box edition of Fanny's 1970s albums by clicking here.