Fever (18 page)

From the heart of the seventies, which were defined variously as years of sixties aftermath, of singer-songwriter naïveté, and of bloated hard-rock commercialism, came a series of women who cut-and-pasted previous feminine models like so many magazine clips. And yet even most rock glamour queens transcended what Hollywood sold as cutting edge. The call girl in 1971's
Klute
gets touted as an early source for this sensibility, especially given Jane Fonda's dead-calm performance. But
Klute
looks extremely dated now, to the point where all of Fonda's therapy sessions (Xeroxed in 1995's
Leaving Las Vegas
) and the jingoistic happy ending make it more about the redemptive power of love than about independence.

Modern feminism's raw streak can be traced to the punk ferment in New York City, where acts like the Ramones and Television took shape. Poet, performance artist, and Mapplethorpe friend Patti Smith formed a band with critic Lenny Kaye and became an instant gender sensation: her 1976 debut record,
Horses,
presented a woman as tough and unforgiving as Keith Richards, a white dame willing to go a few rounds with Mick herself. It wasn't so much that Smith had ideas to burn and a persona that seemed made-to-order (like Raitt, she fronted an all-male band with symbolic testes). Rather, Smith had completely new ideas about the role a woman might play in rock. Abrupt, nervy, and dead serious, Smith's ideas flirted with the avant-garde while keeping a steady eye on mainstream rock: you could tell she wasn't just in this for herself, and she punctured the idea of “women in rock” by making you forget about gender. Her stance didn't depend entirely on gender to compel; Smith fronting an all-female band would have diluted her message.

Smith covered the Byrds' “So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star” and made the ambition as feminine as it ever was masculine, and finally beside the point. She copped a coauthor credit on “Because the Night” with Bruce Springsteen and got away clean with the best cover of a Springsteen song (votes for the Mavericks' “All That Heaven Will Allow” will be counted). The ground she staked for women was every bit as dangerous and looming as that which the Rolling Stones had staked for men—and the androgynous overtones made her as attractive and scary to men as the Stones had been to women. Like Jagger and Richards, she was not a looker in the classic sense, but her pose and demeanor played up the macho-sexy side of women that seemed to embarrass other feminists. At the same time, with her skintight T-shirts and junkie physique, she also made butch seem vaguely coy.

Then a bombshell named Deborah Harry fronted a garage band called Blondie, and female beauty put another act across where it otherwise might not have succeeded—and with a twist. Deborah Harry combined broad movie-star cheeks with a detached punk attitude that made her records both seductive and aloof. There was no tenderness about Blondie's pitch; it was hook-oriented dance music with a new-wave Marilyn Monroe at the helm, and the act edged into greatness as Harry toyed with her sex-kitten persona. Naturally she was girlfriend to the ugliest guy in the band, guitarist and songwriter Chris Stein. But her wily vocal inflections behind such songs as “Heart of Glass,” “One Way or Another,” and “Call Me” made her dry charisma that much more difficult to pin down. She may have been a looker, but her looks encompassed an astute self-awareness of glamour's burdens—Harry played against the very idea of the dumb blonde so smugly, and with such aplomb, that her posing began at irony and got even more interesting from there.

Blondie's girl-group connections are worth detailing. Their first producers were Marty Thau and one Richard Gottehrer, who had written “My Boyfriend's Back” for the Angels back in 1963. Gottehrer's idea of launching a girl-led band seventies-style was to have them record “X Offender” for their first album (
Blondie,
1976), which included a teaser spoken intro that recalled Gottehrer's earlier hit with sardonic flair (the Angels record began with “He went away, and you hung around and bothered me every night/I wouldn't go out with you, you said things that weren't very nice…”; Deborah Harry said: “I saw you standing on the corner, you looked so big and fine/I really wanted to go out with you, so when you smiled … I laid my heart on the line…”).

Blondie's update on the girl-group ideal was telling. The woman in the song was victimized (“You read me my rights and then you said/Let's go and nothing more”), but she was more than willing—victimization had its own kinky overtones (“You had to admit you wanted the love of a sex offender”). Of course, this was tricky material, and it backfired on feminists something fierce in the 1980s with Madonna. But this bombshell was no dumb blonde. Deborah Harry's name could be found on a lot of the songwriting credits (everybody in the band wrote). Songs like “In the Flesh” and “Man Overboard” had obvious girl-group and doo-wop overtones, from the playful backup vocals to the dated guitar solos, but Harry's mock banal deliveries gave them a modernist tint. The cover of the Shangri-Las' “Out in the Streets” (by Ellie Greenwich) clinched the connection. Another cover, of a song Buddy Holly made famous, “I'm Gonna Love You Too,” had a pro forma seventies' sheen. “Rip Her to Shreds” was a cunning self-portrait, a putdown of a tough broad, “Miss Groupie Supreme … acting like a soap opera queen” and looking “like she washes with Comet,” with a chorus that could have been female Dylan: “Yeah, she's so dull, come on, rip her to shreds.” If Blondie's thrash wasn't everything it could have been (the band was composed of good players, but their studio work was stiff), the ingenuity of the ideas kept reviving your attention. This band relied on layers of meaning instead of pure horsepower.

On one level, Harry's impassivity commented on her own glamour: she had looks to kill for, and she could have cared less. On another level, she played the submissive ingénue to fulfill every macho desire with a commanding ambivalence that gave her star power. When she sang “(I'm Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear,” you couldn't be sure whether she was hustling you or giving you a treacly kiss-off. Even “Picture This,” a daringly sincere ode to Sire's kingpin Seymour Stein (which included the fabulous line “I will give you my finest hour/The one I spent watching you shower”), seemed ironic for its everyday candor. “Dreaming” will go down as Blondie's great effort, a merging of fantasy and cynicism so sharp that they wind up having it both ways. “Dreaming is free” may be the ultimate fantasy, pop radio's dirty open secret, but the subtext is “So what?” In many ways, Harry was the mirror opposite of Patti Smith, which means she resembled a female version of a rock pretty boy like Roger Daltrey, a classy dame who hung out with mechanics, a woman whose dignity was not compromised by grit or irony (intentional or not). Sexually, Harry put out in song, and doing so shamelessly helped her transcend sex as a subject; this made her looks secondary to her ideas, even as they helped put these ideas over to a much larger audience.

*   *   *

Chasing this debate about looks and substance, Chrissie Hynde fused the best elements of her seventies counterparts and plunged straight into eighties adulthood; her moxie took her well past her middle-aged triumphs. Hynde stormed stages on the assumption that a female front person in rock already existed (which it barely did), and she churned out hits like a pool shark. Measuring up to even Patti Smith's considerable reach and range, Chrissie Hynde's Pretenders were suddenly Top 40 in the summer of 1980. She persists as one of rock's most independent women despite her liaisons with the Kinks' Ray Davies and Simple Minds' Jim Kerr, the two men who fathered her children.

Hynde was an Ohio native who fled to London in 1974 to work as a sarcastic rock critic and chase down her idol, Ray Davies. In the beginning, it was easy to dismiss her coquettish smash “Brass in Pocket” as pop gentility. Davies was never a ladies' man, so Hynde's fascination with his writing is telling: her ideal man was more imaginative than suave. Her first success with the Pretenders came with a Davies song, “Stop Your Sobbing,” produced by Nick Lowe. Any student of rock history had to admire her stance: slamming a previously macho incantation back on men as comeuppance. “Stop Your Sobbing” had enough come-hither innuendo to make Hynde's pitch alluring, yet was just acrid enough to keep men guessing: was she on to something about male defensiveness? Was rock machismo this tired, this easy to puncture? Apparently it was.
Pretenders II
contained another Davies song, “I Go to Sleep,” and Hynde's presence on the Kinks tour during the summer of 1981 led to widespread rumors about
her
conquest.

She never married Davies, but they had a child, Natalie, in 1983, and Hynde wrote the guilt-giddy “The Adultress” about wrecking his marriage. She quickly had enough hits to position herself as a premiere guitar-rock figure, alongside eighties juggernauts the Police and Dire Straits. The Pretenders built their sound around a nostalgic musical premise—guitars ruled, hooks were sacrosanct, and synthesizers were wank—but that didn't make their act any less modern or disruptive. Hynde set about smashing all notions of what women in rock could do or be, and with her expat sarcasm and knowing vocal tremolo, she made more than a few female rock denizens sound like hacks.

By 1984, the Pretenders had lost two members to drug abuse, and Hynde was soldiering on, as if music were the only way she might see her way through.
Learning to Crawl
presented Hynde as a working mother forced to spend her evenings “Watching the Clothes Go Round” at the Laundromat. “I've got a kid, I'm thirty-three” in “Middle of the Road” became watchwords for women who still loved rock 'n' roll as they started families and tried to hang on to the music's principles: irony that wasn't too pleased with itself, a sense of humor, and playfulness that didn't threaten professionalism.

In the long tradition of women who expected more from their men than men seemed to expect of their women, Hynde carved out a classic niche for herself at a time when women's role in rock was anything but certain. With Tina Turner on the outs, careers like Bonnie Raitt's and Joni Mitchell's in turnaround, and soft-core acts like Sheena Easton (“Morning Train [Nine to Five]”) and Olivia Newton-John (“Let's Get Physical”) blowing frigid air on the dance scene, Hynde fronted an all-male outfit teasingly, like she had had every member of the band and they had all been found wanting—which was why she kicked their butts onstage. She showed up at rock festivals, like Bob Dylan's 30th Anniversary Concert (for a withering “I Shall Be Released”), kept slinging solid records (1990's
Packed!,
1994's
Last of the Independents,
1999's
Viva el Amor!,
and 2002's
Loose Screw
), and toured with varying band lineups while sustaining a consistently aggressive guitar sound. She also had the gumption to cover not one but three Jimi Hendrix songs without worrying about guitar heroics—“Room Full of Mirrors” on
Get Close,
“May This Be Love” on
Packed!,
and “Bold As Love” on the
Stone Free
Hendrix tribute—which is at least two more than most rock men have ever tried. (Rosanne Cash, incidentally, covered “Manic Depression.”)

*   *   *

Smith, Harry, Cash, and Hynde set off any number of ripple effects. California girl bands made a comeback early in the decade with the Go-Go's (and later the Bangles), with hits like “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “We Got the Beat,” which were so beatific in melody and spirit that they carried supernatural girl-group echoes. The Go-Go's spawned a solo career from lead singer Belinda Carlisle, who frittered her hits away on noxious songwriters and videos that scanned like cutting-room-floor fashion shoots. After settling down with a Reagan aide, Carlisle gave interviews about being a born-again neocon: she wasn't interested in what she could to for pop, she was more interested in what pop could do for her. For a while in the 1980s, she was Guilty Pleasure No. 1 (“Mad About You,” “Heaven Is a Place on Earth”). To help the Go-Gos stage a comeback in 2000, she answered the
Playboy
call.

The Bangles worked harder on their vocal harmonies and had great taste in covers: Big Star's “Southern Boys” and Emmit Rhodes's “Live” were insider moves that won over many a critic's skepticism (they also opened for Cyndi Lauper). It didn't hurt that their first hit, “Manic Monday,” was written specifically for them by Prince, the human jukebox who minted gold records in his Minneapolis hideaway. This was less the man-doing-the-female-band-a-favor than a songwriter who literally threw away more decent songs than most of his colleagues would ever write, giving a fan's boost to a group he “admired” (he and lead singer Susanna Hoffs were allegedly an item). Within several years, Prince songs would produce hits for Sinéad O'Connor (“Nothing Compares 2 U”) and Tom Jones (“Kiss”), making him the best-endowed material man in pop next to Bruce Springsteen (the Pointer Sisters' “Fire,” Aretha Franklin's “Pink Cadillac,” Patti Smith's “Because the Night,” Emmylou Harris's “Wreck on the Highway”). The Bangles sent “Walk Like an Egyptian” through the roof, but couldn't muster enough consistent material to upstage Hoffs's all-too-predictable jump-and-dive to Hollywood (as a luckless babe in 1987's
The Allnighter
). A 2003 reunion, anchored by a delirious cover of Elvis Costello's “Tear off Your Own Head,” failed to catch fire.

*   *   *

Susan Faludi published her bestseller
Backlash
in 1991, but you could measure feminist retreat and fragmentation as early as ten years before that. The defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment and the onset of Reaganism, with its pro-life dictums and testosterone-female decoys (First Lady Nancy Reagan, United Nations envoy Jeanne Kirkpatrick, not to mention Britain's Margaret Thatcher), all but flattened the feminist coalition. What had seemed like an explosion of raw feminist energy in the punk era, through Patti Smith, Deborah Harry, and Chrissie Hynde, hadn't produced many major, long-term women rock stars who regularly took on feminist issues.