Heh a while ago I was listening to Magic Man on the radio, with my wife in the car - and the next item up was the news, featuring some story about some girl being lured by an Internet perv. :smack:
Well, technically they aren’t a girl rock band and never were. The singer and one of the guitarists are female. It’s essentially their band, but during the years no better than half of the band were female.
Having said that, Nancy Wilson is a fantastic guitar player and songwriter. She is indeed legendary.
Insamuch as there can be a female Led Zeppelin, I think Heart would be the closest contender. Is there anyone else that you’d nominate? Note I don’t mean just “a really awesome band with girls in it,” I mean a girl band that actually sounds kind of like Led Zeppelin.
I don’t think Hole has a single song that approaches the awesomeness that is Crazy On You. I’ve never heard of the Runaways, so I can’t comment on that.
I mostly agree that they’re a fine band – right up until they released that dreadful bit of glurge “All I Want to Do Is Make Love to You”. After that song they were dead to me.
Way back in the late '70s, I was personally thanked by Nancy Wilson for buying a ticket to one of their concerts. She happened to be sitting in the ticket office when I walked up and laid my money down. “Thanks”, she said.
What, you were maybe expecting something a little more interesting?
The Runaways were Joan Jett’s and Lita Ford’s first band. And they are truly the most badass girl rock band ever. Especially since they were actually all girls. You can’t compare them to Led Zeppelin, 'cause the style was quite different.
It was their band only in the sense that they were in it. It would not exist except for Kim Fowley. The Wikipedia article in takes issue with the idea that Fowley created the band, but I was a regular reader of Creem, Trouser Press, Crawdaddy and Circus at the time and they definitely were the product of a producer, every bit as much as Bow Wow Wow was created by Malcolm McLaren. Later they learned to play, and like the Monkees, write songs. If Fowley had not put them together, maybe Jett and Ford might have had careers, maybe not.
Heart was always a band, though they did get put through the record company bullshit mill, especially over Ann’s fluctuating weight. Saw her a few years back with Alan Parson, Todd Rundgren, John Entwhistle, and David Pack doing a Beatles Tribute called “A Walk Down Abbey Road” and she was awesome.