Some light reading for your morning.
FANNY: PART 1
“They were one of the finest f@cking rock bands of their time. They were extraordinary: They wrote everything, they played like motherf@ckers, they were just colossal and wonderful, and nobody’s ever mentioned them. They’re as important as anybody else who’s ever been, ever; it just wasn’t their time. Revivify Fanny. And I will feel that my work is done.” -- David Bowie to Rolling Stone, 1999
“It wasn’t just the pressure. It was the psychic and emotional energy you had to expend to prove over and over that you could play as good as guys, or in a lot of cases, better.” -- June Millington to Rolling Stone, 2018
“If you close your eyes, it’s like listening to the Stones” -- British music journalist Steve Peaco*ck
Fanny was the first all-female band to release an album on a major label, in 1970. They were signed by Reprise Records because they were a curiosity, and they could have disappeared without a second thought after the initial publicity bump. But they didn't, because they turned out to be just as good as any of their hard rock peers in the early 1970s. There were many barriers in their way -- this was a band not just with women, but minority women and queer women, playing loud hard rock, a genre considered at the time to be for men only -- but Fanny surmounted them to release five albums, put four singles on the charts (two in the top 40), perform numerous TV gigs in the U.S. and Europe, and open for some of the biggest names in rock before calling it quits in 1975.
They were left out of the Wennerites' and radio programmers' "classic rock" pantheon, so it took some digging for people who weren't there at the time to discover them, but as all-female bands became less of a rarity over the years, Fanny has been given their due by their successors and some sympathetic ears in the music press. The new attention culminated in a reunion album released in 2018 and a documentary released in 2021. With this exercise, I hope to show why Fanny was one of the best hard-rock acts of its time regardless of gender, race or any other labels. They were just f@cking good, especially as a live act (I've dropped a few breadcrumbs about that in this thread so far).
Fanny's story began in 1961, when June and Jean Millington, the oldest of seven children of a Filipino mother and an American sailor father, moved from the Philippines to Sacramento, California. Feeling ostracized because they were biracial, the Millingtons began writing songs and performing, first as a folk duo, and then, in 1965, as the guitarist (June) and bassist (Jean) of The Svelts, an all-female band that at times included drummers Alice de Buhr (who had moved to Sacramento from Iowa) and Brie Berry (later Brandt, Howard, Howard-Darling and Darling), who would later play in Fanny; Berry was also from a Filipino-American family. Jean, like June, was a guitarist when the band formed, but switched to bass because they needed someone to do it, and no one else was willing.
By 1967, The Svelts were playing gigs all along the West Coast, but the shortly thereafter Millingtons took a break to attend college. De Buhr and other members continued the band and changed its name to Wild Honey. Eventually, they invited the Millingtons to rejoin when they decided to drop out of college and become full-time musicians. During this period, Wild Honey played gigs with The Turtles, The Youngbloods and Creedence Clearwater Revival. In 1969, the band relocated from Sacramento to LA in hopes of securing a record contract.
Disillusioned by "playing all nasty inappropriate little gigs, suffering all the demeaning little scams" and from being disrespected in the male-dominated scene, Wild Honey decided to disband, but not before playing one more time at an open-mic night at the Troubador. In the audience was the secretary of producer Richard Perry, who recommended them to her boss, who was looking for an all-female band to mentor. He arranged for them to come to his studio. “What did Richard see in us? He saw a bunch of good-looking girls rocking their asses off and he said: ‘This is a band that needs to be recorded,’” de Buhr told Louder in 2015.
Guitarist Addie Lee Clement, who had been with the Millingtons and de Buhr since the Svelts days, was part of the band on the fateful open-mic night, but was out of the lineup by the time the band started recording. I don't know what happened there.
Perry convinced Warner Bros. to sign the band, which they did (to their Reprise subsidiary) without hearing them -- their priority was to promote the all-female "gimmick" -- and to round out the lineup, the Millingtons and de Buhr recruited former member Brandt to be percussionist and lead singer, and Nickey Barclay, who belonged to a circuit of session musicians called the Musicians Contract Service and already had a bunch of credits to her name, to be keyboardist. (Barclay was reluctant to join because she had only ever worked with male musicians and was unsure how she would fit in with three women who had worked together for years; this ambivalence would characterize her entire tenure in the group.) Through Perry, they found themselves a manager, Roy Silver, who was a sleazebag even by music-industry standards, and who soon started dating Jean Millington, greatly complicating the band dynamic.
The band renamed themselves Fanny to denote "a female spirit." (The rumor that George Harrison picked the name is untrue.) "I loved that there was a girl’s name in it and we all started trying to think of something similar,” June told Louder in 2015. “Someone called out ‘Fanny’ and it got added to a list of wild, zany, far-out, psychedelic sixties names. A few days later I found out that our manager and producer liked that name too. And just like that we had the name of our band: Fanny.”
“We weren’t aware of the different connotations until we went over to play in Europe,” de Buhr told Louder in 2015 ("Fanny" means vajayjay in British slang). “That’s when everybody started saying: ‘Well, you know… ha-ha-ha, titter-titter.’ We said: ‘Well, sorry, that’s our name. It’s a woman’s name, it’s got nothing to do with that part of the body. So get over it, you pricks!’” (This of course did not prevent Reprise from launching marketing campaigns such as "Get Behind Fanny!")
The band was set up in a house overlooking the Sunset Strip, which the band christened Fanny Hill after the infamous novel, and which became a mecca for hippie parties and such, with the difference that it was very much a "safe space" for women. "The men would have loved that there were so many naked women walking around, but they would not have loved that they wouldn't have a chance with most of them because they were lesbians," June Millington said in the 2021 documentary "Fanny: The Right to Rock." June Millington and de Buhr are lesbians and Barclay is bisexual, but that was not publicized at the time. "While everybody knew ... you didn't talk about it," June said in 2004.
Perry dismissed Brandt from the band because he wanted a self-contained "Fab Four" with everyone singing, writing and playing instruments. June Millington: "That was kind of hard on us because that placed A LOT of mental pressure on us. It was hard enough to be the first all-girl band to make it but to have THAT as a template was crushing."
