FEATURE The Untold Saga of Fanny By Eric S. Caruncho Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 05:36:00 05/11/2008
MANILA, Philippines - “We were it for quite a while,” says June Millington. “The first to get known, first to get a record deal, and first to go around the world.”
With her shock of long unruly white hair, floral print blouse and white pedal pushers, Millington looks like your vivacious old auntie, now pushing the far side of 50 but still full of vim and vigor. But then she takes her turquoise ESP guitar, plugs into a Fender Deluxe Reverb amp and this fat electric tone comes out of the speakers.
Right then and there, all preconceptions go out the window. This tita can rock.
It’s hard to imagine, from this vantage point in time, when women weren’t in rock. Bands with female members no longer merit a second look, and the chick bass player is practically a modern rock cliché. Even female drummers are no longer unheard of.
But then, we still feel we have to refer to a testosterone-challenged rock group by the quaint label “all-girl band,” and every year, rock magazines still feel compelled to pay tribute to “women in rock,” as if that was still a big deal.
Perhaps it is. The fact is, there have only been a handful of all-female rock groups that were any good, and the first was Fanny. Don’t feel too bad if the name doesn’t immediately ring any bells.
“One of the most important female bands in American rock has been buried without a trace. And that is Fanny,” complained David Bowie—yes, that David Bowie—in Rolling Stone magazine as late as 1999.
“They were one of the finest f*cking rock bands of their time, in about 1973,” continues the Thin White Duke. “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.”
Fanny should be of particular interest to Filipino music lovers because their story begins in Manila, with the birth of the Millington sisters: June in 1948 and Jean one year later in 1949. Their father was a US Navy officer with the Liberation forces, who married their mother—a Limjoco from Lian, Batangas—shortly after the war.
The Millington sisters grew up in various places around Manila. June remembers living in San Juan, in Wack-Wack, near the old American School in Manila, and on N. Domingo Street. She also remembers Matabungkay Beach, where she and her sister used to go swimming. Most of all she remembers listening to music on the radio and picking it up, first on ukulele and later on guitar.
“It was just a natural thing,” she recalls. “We were clearly meant to do it. Then we were really lucky we moved to Sacramento in 1961, just when things were exploding.”
June was 13 and Jean 12 when they left for the States. “I played ukulele (in Manila) and we would learn songs off the radio and that was really good training,” she continues. “When we got to the US, it was a whole new world because we were listening to the Marvelettes, the Shirelles; we were listening to the Beach Boys, and the Beatles when they broke out; and after the Beatles was flower power. We lived an hour away from San Francisco and it was perfect.”
June was 17 and Jean 16 when they started playing gigs, first as the Svelts and later as Wild Honey, both all-female outfits. At the same time they were soaking up all the good music that was coming out of L.A. and San Francisco. “I saw Janis Joplin many times,” recalls Millington. “I would go to the Fillmore and the first gig I saw was Albert King and Jimi Hendrix, on the same stage the same night.”
Most girls wanted to date rock musicians--but June wanted to be one. The problem was, there were no precedents. The so-called “girl groups” of the Sixties were singers, but their music was created by male producers. There were folkies like Joan Baez and singers like Janis Joplin--but female rock musicians? There were no role models. The Millingtons had to create their own.
“Girls didn’t feel they had the right to pick up an electric guitar—that was the problem,” says Millington. “It’s not that they weren’t into Jimi Hendrix. The thought just wouldn’t have struck them to go out and buy a guitar and an amplifier and try to figure out how to get those sounds. I remember in high school standing in front of the Grateful Dead and watching Jerry Garcia and I remember the thought going through my mind, ‘How can I play like that?’ It really scared me because I couldn’t figure it out. But we kept doing more gigs and I’d meet enough nice guys who would show me things, and if I learned one little thing I would go home and I would really practice and so that’s what it took. We had to work so much harder than everybody else because girls weren’t given the right to do that. It’s harsh but it’s true.”
The Millingtons were motivated. In 1969 they left for Hollywood, determined to make it in the music business. They settled near the Sunset Strip, where bands such as the Doors, the Byrds and Love had their start. Things started happening for them right away. A music producer named Richard Perry saw them, liked them, and called the president of Warner Brothers who signed them right away to Reprise Records. Now a four piece with Jean on bass, Alice de Buhr on drums and new member Nickey Barclay (fresh from Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen) on keyboards, the band set about thinking of a new name.
A persistent rumor credits George Harrison with giving them the name Fanny ("fanny” being American slang for a woman’s behind and British slang for vagina). But Millington says the choice was theirs, and far more innocent. They wanted a short, feminine name and Fanny fit. In any case, their label made the most of the double-entendre with slogans such as “Fanny: The End of an Era” and “Get Behind Fanny.”
“We worked very, very hard and we persevered,” recalls Millington. “We never got discouraged and we never stopped. We got good, and whenever we were in front of an audience, they started out skeptical, but within five or ten minutes they’d fall in love with us and that was really great.”
Fanny’s eponymous debut was released in 1970. The initial reaction was one of skepticism. Nobody had seen an all-female band before, where the members played their own instruments and wrote their own songs. June, especially, was considered an oddity--a woman playing lead guitar.
“There was more pressure on me because I was the lead guitar and they’d never seen that before,” she recalls. “It was never done. And I just hated the questions. It was the same everywhere we went in the world and I was just going out of my mind. ‘How does it feel to be a girl and play guitar?’ That was considered a serious question. How can I answer that? I’m a girl and I’m playing guitar!”
Millington worked on her tone and technique, with a little help from friends like Lowell George of Little Feat, and pretty soon she got the attention of the Bible of guitar geekdom, “Guitar Player” magazine. And although they never seemed to get past the gender thing, audiences were eventually won over by the music.
“We were a hard-working band,” she says. “We were very disciplined. If we weren’t performing, we were rehearsing, or we were in the studio. That’s all we did 24-7, and it would have been very hard if Jean and I weren’t sisters, if we hadn’t been family.”
With the backing of their label, Fanny was on the way up. They played at the legendary Whisky A Go Go, backed Barbra Streisand on her album, appeared on “The Sonny and Cher Show” and recorded at the Beatles’ Apple Studios, where Ringo Starr knew them as “the oriental girls.” The double exoticism of “oriental girls with guitars” no doubt played a part in getting them attention, but it was their musicianship that won them respect from fellow musicians and a fan base.
“David (Bowie) was just one of a lot of people we hung out with who respected us and vice versa,” recalls Millington. “Elton John, Bernie Taupin, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Chicago, the Who, the Band… they loved us because we were good. If we hadn’t been good it would have been a problem. But in some cases we were better than they were. In some cases they stole our ideas and our sound.”
One British critic likened their hard-rocking live sound to that of the Rolling Stones--high praise indeed. Fanny released their second album “Charity Ball” in 1972, and followed it quickly with “Fanny Hill”—considered by many as their best work—in 1973.
But by this time, June Millington was caving in under the pressure, and in 1973 she left the band. “I can tell you that the pressures got to me because I didn’t have anyone to talk to,” she says.
The rest of the band soldiered on for two more albums with a replacement for June, Suzi Quatro’s sister Patti. They released “Mother’s Pride,” produced by Todd Rundgren, in 1974 and their final album, “Rock and Roll Survivors” in 1975. They even managed to crack the singles chart, but by then, internal pressures had effectively ended Fanny. June and Jean made a go of it for a while with a band called the LA All-Stars. Then Jean married Earl Slick, David Bowie’s guitarist, and that was the last anybody heard from the Millington sisters for a while.
By the time the Runaways with Joan Jett, then later the Go-Gos, broke on the music scene in the late 1970s, Fanny’s trailblazing efforts had been largely forgotten, their albums long out of print. Punk rock is credited with giving women equal space within which to create their own music, and Siouxsie Sioux and the Slits were considered pioneers in women’s rock, but about Fanny there was a deafening silence, except for the occasional lament from fans like Bowie.
Someone must have been listening, however. In 2002, Warner’s Rhino Handmade label issued a limited-edition four-CD box set containing Fanny’s recorded output called “First Time In A Long Time: The Reprise Recordings,” available only by internet order. Then in 2007, after more than three decades, June, Jean and Alice performed for one night as Fanny when ROCKRGRL Magazine honored them with the Women of Valor award at the Berklee College of Music.
The Millington sisters continue to play together in a band called the Slammin’ Babes, even though they now live on opposite coasts, June in Massachusetts and Jean in California. Ironically, more people than ever before are learning about Fanny, thanks to the band’s website, www.fannyrocks.com.
“Ever since Rhino released the four-CD set and in the advent of the internet, I get e-mail every week either from people who are rediscovering us or just discovering us, and in those cases they are turning their children on to us and listening to us together, which I find really fascinating,” says Millington.
Since 1986, June Millington has also been working toward empowering women musicians through the Institute for the Musical Arts (IMA), an NGO she co-founded. Through workshops and courses, Millington hopes that IMA can help young female musicians navigate the treacherous shoals of the music industry.
“The fact is, if you make it as an artist and you’re a girl or a woman, you still have to deal with a lot of issues, issues of body image, and that’s a problem,” says Millington, who was in Manila recently for the first time since she left in 1961, to give a talk on “the Global Pinoy Musician” for Lunduyan ng Sining, a local NGO supporting women in the arts.
“Part of what IMA does is mentor young women,” she explains. “The girls in our camps have a hard time separating themselves and their desires from the fact that once you step into that arena, you are actually a commodity. There is a sickness in the industry. Women have a lot to contribute musically, but they aren’t allowed to do that because they have to focus so much on image. They’re being pushed into fat farms, and they’re not fat—they’re attractive young women. What does that say to a 17-year-old who still has her body fat? They’re telling them there’s something wrong with how they naturally are and they’re becoming really neurotic. Thank God they have us to talk to because I’ve been there. We want to empower girls and women and have an impact on the infrastructure so we can change it somehow, to literally provide an antidote.”
June Millington is currently working on her autobiography, which should make fascinating reading. “I was there at the beginning of women in rock, so my experience is vast and iconic,” she says. “I have professors writing to me all the time, or women asking me questions because they’re writing their master’s dissertation on me! It’s kind of a unique position.”
Copyright 2008 Philippine Daily Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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