Sunday, September 10, 2006
(4:05 PM) | Anonymous:
Every time she put on the radio there was nothing happening at all
Not long ago, I finally got to see Edgeplay, a documentary about The Runaways -- a band about which I knew almost exactly nothing, despite really liking their self-titled first album from 1976. Even even that, I knew about only because one song, "Cherry Bomb," is on the soundtrack to Dazed and Confused.With its entirely believable accusations by bandmembers of exploitation and almost constant psychological abuse by their manager, Edgeplay is a pretty depressing film. And nothing the manager says on his own behalf makes the charges even slightly less credible. If anything, the women seem to have pushed a lot of it out of their minds.
Unfortunately -- for copyright-control reasons that are never spelled out during the movie itself -- the soundtrack contains no original Runaways songs. At most, you get to hear the play a couple of covers, shown performed in concert. I doubt anybody who sees Edgeplay without already knowing their music would get a very good sense of them. The sound was sort of a cross between the New York Dolls and the Ramones, performed by teenage girls who looked like they belonged to a gang that would beat the hell out of you and take all of your lunch money.
They didn't have much radio presence in the U.S., that I recall, but were huge in Japan. Check out the concert footage, circa 1977, of them performing "Cherry Bomb" and covering the Velvet Underground song "Rock and Roll." This sort of thing gets yanked from YouTube at the first lawyerly peep, so who knows if the links will stay good.
