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FOREWORD

They looked like they belonged together and they had… that rare chemistry of a band, that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, but all the parts are exciting.

—PETER PHILBIN, A&R EXECUTIVE FOR COLUMBIA RECORDS, ON THE BANGLES¹

From inception, the women who would become the Bangles were ambitious, focused, and intentional—their hard work and determination resulting in sales of millions of records across the globe before becoming the first entirely female band to have five top-ten hits. They toured the world, had number one records, and were collaborating with the biggest artists of the day. The foursome was the result of an entire generation of women musicians who weren’t satisfied with being screaming fans; they envisioned themselves as being worthy of rock star adoration, though there was almost a complete absence of any real female role models. From angelic harmonizing to headlining huge concerts, the Bangles seemed unstoppable—until tensions within the group, artistic differences, and the pressures of sudden celebrity tore them apart less than a decade after first getting together.

With unprecedented access to Susanna Hoffs, Debbi Peterson, Vicki Peterson, and their inner circles,i this is, for the first time, in their own words, the story of a band breaking through invisible barriers and globally institutionalized misogyny, of a group of women who came together in a moment when being a female musician seemed almost unthinkable, burning a bright beacon for generations to follow.

This is the Bangles.

Footnote

i Michael Steele declined to be involved in this project.

¹

PREFACE

As a child growing up in the 1980s, seeing and hearing the Bangles was a revelation. The band was so much more than the pop stars I idolized as a kid; they were women who blazed a trail for what could be.

A key part of the Bangle origin story is the sheer focused chutzpah of the Peterson sisters, Debbi and Vicki, and Susanna Hoffs to form a band. Back in 2019, I decided to utilize the same tactic in a bid for the seemingly impossible: I wanted to write the story of the Bangles, focused specifically on their early years, the context they came from, and the reality of being an all-female group who achieved chart success in a male-dominated world.

For me as a young fan at that time, the band was all about power, talent, and prospect. Countless young women took direct inspiration from the Bangles, with everyone from L7 to Veruca Salt and the Donnas citing the foursome as lighting the way for their own artistry. The media was similarly fixated, but in a different manner: article after article focused on the band’s gender and appearance, not their ability. A cursory dig into the press from the height of their popularity was shocking in its tone, with many pieces openly questioning if the women were playing their own instruments, a seeming impossibility for many a journalist to fathom. It was admittedly strange reviewing the same magazines, videos, and interviews that had informed my own values and world as an adolescent with adult eyes. Having now worked in and around the music business for over three decades, I was still gobsmacked at what I found on the internet, deep in the British Library archives, and in the memories of those who were around the band at the time.

The contrast is so striking between how I experienced the group—as a young girl hungrily looking for role models of strong women—and how the Bangles were written about and treated by the very industry that helped propel them to international celebrity. The male-centric music business was not easy to break into because of what Vicki once described as “things we can’t help, like being female.”¹

Rock and roll has arguably been defined since its inception as “music played by men, especially white men, with guitars.”² Runaways biographer Evelyn McDonnell calls this phenomenon “manhandling,” a term she has coined to describe the “ideological” problem that systemically eradicates women from pop history, a distressing “way of seeing and presenting the world that is based on projections of power and control, not on reality.”³ The scariest part of manhandling may be its pervasiveness, so ingrained into our own belief systems and daily lives as to often go utterly unnoticed and be expected. For example, a piece in the UK music magazine Mojo labels the Bangles egregiously as “LA pop starlets,” ⁴ eradicating their years of sweat equity in various dubious Southern California venues and on the club circuit. From general belittling in articles printed in cultural tomes of the time to radio station playlists, being a female artist has historically been to be “other.” McDonnell points to the “standard practice on classic rock radio, where women are relegated to token spots… and are never played back-to-back.”⁵ “We’re already playing Sheryl Crow, so we can’t play you,” was a reply received by Lisa Loeb when she asked why her song was not added to FM rotations.⁶ This reprieve is echoed by Liz Phair, who remarks, “We’re [women] pitted against each other.”⁷ As Loeb points out, “If you got the slot [on the radio], then I didn’t.”⁸ Artists’ attempts to support each other were often denied, viewed as bad business decisions. “I remember talking to my agent about touring with another female, and the response was, ‘You don’t want to do that because it won’t sell tickets,’” recalls Sheryl Crow.⁹

The Bangles are often referred to as “the girls,” both by those around them and by themselves. Throughout this book, they will be mentioned by this, as it is what was and is used within their inner circles. It is utilized by them as both an empowering pronoun and one which displays the irreverence necessitated for survival. When I asked former tour manager Chris Lamson why this title is preferred, he explained how the band is “like a girls club. They’re the girls because they were super fun, super flirty, and super friendly. They just didn’t take themselves too seriously.”¹⁰ Such levity was arguably a mechanism for both creating an illusion of unity during times of inner band turmoil as well as playing to what was “expected” of the group while far exceeding most of their peers.

There is a prevailing sense that because they are female, the Bangles were incapable of being “real” artists. Within the world of mainstream music, women often found it hard to be promoted simply on their ability. “This is where the boy’s club factor and some good old garden variety misogyny probably came into play,” Henry Rollins tells me.¹¹ “I imagine it could be incredibly insulting. I don’t think this is exclusive to Los Angeles, punk rock, or the 1980s. I think many women lineups were almost always infantilized or marketed as a ‘girly’ accessory to ‘real’ bands and again, not to be taken seriously. I don’t know what women could have done in these instances besides fume and get on with things as best they could.”¹²

The Bangles came to prominence as music videos dramatically changed how artists were experienced, promoted, and publicized, placing a higher value than ever before on appearance and personality. “I remember at one point, we had been on the road for eight or nine weeks,” Vicki says.¹³ “When we finally went home, I thought, ‘I’m so sick of looking at myself in the mirror.’ There was a real sense of pressure. Possibly for us, and other female musicians in the ’80s, we were absolutely the minority. People didn’t quite know what to do with us, especially men. Were we objects? We were complete aberrations of nature, being women on stage playing rock music.”¹⁴

The frustration of this void is illustrated in a 1989 interview with Susanna, where she is asked what the Bangles are. “We’re lumped into some kind of weird category.… People can’t really view us in the same breath as Guns N’ Roses or U2.… We’re like in the strange all-girl-band category.… People kind of lump us and then push us to the side: ‘Oh yeah, they’re an all-girl band, isn’t that cute.’”¹⁵

Ultimately, against all odds, the Bangles proved that women can do and be anything. They provided a possibility model for young people encountering an uncertain world in a precarious cultural moment, changing not just the music business but the outlooks and prospects for legions of women to follow.

The real story of the Bangles is one of every band, and this band specifically. It is the often bald reality of changing objectives, miscommunications, naivete, disappointments, and the unpredictable consequences of fame. But more importantly, it is a study in hard work, aspiration, friendship, focus, and hope.

¹⁵

INTRODUCTION

Among the assembled crowd, the mood was jubilant as the globally chart-topping Bangles prepared to do a show at one of the most unprecedented venues to date: the opening of a freeway segment in Houston, Texas, known as Beltway 8. The stretch connected the I-10 and the US 290, providing new access to the area. Regardless of the unusual choice of performance space, the free gig was expected to draw just over twenty thousand attendees. The July sun was blazing and unrelenting, the freshly laid tarmac offering no relief from the sizzling ninety-four degree heat. “It was boiling hot,” guitarist-vocalist Susanna Hoffs recounts of the day.

The band was exhausted, having been on the road virtually nonstop for the past seven years, promoting their albums with endless shows, appearances, interviews, and press junkets. The current tour, supporting their third LP, Everything, had been riddled with issues, from bad weather to band infighting.

The Houston show marked a strange choice made by the group’s recently hired management, Arnold Stiefel and Randy Phillips; yet the band, as always, were keen to fulfill all of their obligations. “It was one of the more absurdist moments of my life,” Susanna says, “but we went where we were told to go.” A makeshift “stage” had been cobbled together “very high off the ground” on the thoroughfare itself.

As the attendees celebrated the chance to see their heroines in the flesh, the whole overpass started swaying under the weight of the carousing fans. The new freeway had been designed to hold the heavy, steady, moving weight of automobiles, not the up and down motion of tens of thousands of people simultaneously. Unbeknownst to the band, the cobbled together performance platform upon which they played began to break into pieces, making an already questionable choice of venues a possible death trap. “The lights above our heads were swinging and apparently the speaker cabinets were coming apart,” drummer-vocalist Debbi Peterson says. “The structural engineer who built the toll way was worried. But you know, gotta get that extra buck no matter how much it endangers the band.”

The new construction threatening to collapse under inexorable conditions was a fitting analogy for the precarious emotional and professional commitments keeping the band together. While playing “Crash and Burn,” the audience, which had swelled to over seventy-five thousand, began to dance with abandon. “It felt like an earthquake,” Debbi recalls, “the stage started bouncing up and down.” Susanna concurs, saying, “All of a sudden, the whole toll bridge span started vibrating, almost in waves.” The band did not know what was happening; though aware that something was desperately wrong, the shared inherent value of commitment to the group at any cost superseded personal safety. At first, Debbi thought older sister, guitarist-vocalist Vicki “was just stamping her feet really hard.” Yet soon after the initial shift, Susanna left the stage. “I just thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to get off, it’s going to collapse,’” she remembers. Bass player and vocalist Michael Steele soon followed, leaving the two Petersons on the improvised stage. “The Petersons went on playing, like the band on the Titanic,” Susanna says. “I just thought, I need to get off of this thing before it sinks. It spoke to something about the dynamic in the band. Debbi and Vicki, they were going to go down fighting, no matter the circumstances.”

PART I

BEGINNINGS

1.

Los Angeles is one of the largest counties in the United States, composed of 4,084 square miles. “It’s so spread out and there are so many different communities within the community,” says native Los Angeleno Debbi Peterson.¹ The third of four children, Debbi, and older sisters Pam and Vicki and younger brother Dave, grew up in Northridge, a neighborhood of San Fernando Valley, one of the many regions within the greater municipality of LA, an area referred to by locals simply as “the Valley.”

“The Valley was a safe place back then,” Debbi recalls of the town. “Endless shopping malls,” adds musician Annette Zilinskas. “They were the cultural hubs of the Valley experience: movie theatres, miniature golf, a roller-skating rink.” She goes on to elaborate, “There wasn’t a lot to do. I liked it because it was just easy to get around, it’s all a grid. It was suburbia.”² The Petersons’ residence was a spacious five-bedroom house with a pool smack dab in the middle of the bucolic setting. “It couldn’t have been any more American middle class,” says second oldest Peterson sibling, Vicki.³

Music was inherently important to their parents, Milt and Jeanne. “My parents were music lovers—they told us stories of their early dates sitting in my dad’s house listening to jazz and comedy albums together,” Vicki recalls.⁴ Being the son of a carpenter, audiophile Milt built custom fifteen-inch woofers into the living room wall of the family home. When he could grab the rare moments of solitary relaxation, Milt would be found on the couch with a pair of headphones, reprieve provided by classical music. “We had a big stereo in the living room,” remembers youngest child, Dave. “My sisters would go out there and they’d blast tunes. I loved the records they would play, especially [oldest sister] Pam. She had a good LP collection. I was a pop music connoisseur when I was six.”⁵

The interweaving of family, belonging, and music became an integral value to Vicki, with performance coming naturally. She pinpoints this love of being in front of an audience coming to fruition during family Sunday night parties. As Milt had to commute seventy miles every day to his aerospace engineering job at TRW in Redondo Beach, dinners as an entire family were rare. Even more infrequent were rainy Sundays in the placid Northridge atmosphere. Inclement weather would be the only reason the Peterson kids would be spared from Milt’s regular chore rota, especially when it came to yard work. “We were always pulling weeds or hand digging trenches for my dad’s irrigation system,” Vicki tells me with a smile. “I don’t even mind pulling weeds. What was annoying is that he would give us each a shopping bag to fill up. Once it was stuffed to the top, we would get a quarter. For a little kid, that’s giant! I would hand him my full bag of weeds and he would take his huge Dad foot and go [makes a squashing down movement]! Big money dreams shattered.”⁶

On these extremely rare, blustering weekends, the family would commune indoors, “stop everything and have a family party.”⁷ The accoutrements of the afternoons featured a fire in the underused hearth and the delicacy of “potato chips and onion dip,” both notable as “very big important things which did not happen on other days.”⁸ More important to Vicki than the flicking flames or the titillating nosh was the opportunity to perform, her family the captive audience. “I would put on plays. Debbi was a willing participant. We would get our little brother Dave involved.” Pam, being the oldest sibling, “kind of scorned it all,” though occasionally could be coerced into partaking. “There would be commercial breaks,” Vicki says, “and if it was during Christmastime, I would dance to The Nutcracker.” “We were both just naturally drawn to performing,” Vicki says of herself and Debbi.

Milt and Jeanne sensed that a cultural shift would be marked with the February 1964 appearance of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Not wanting their two oldest children to miss out on what could be a turning point in pop history, Pam and Vicki were both allowed to stay up late and watch the performance. “I think they actually got me out of bed,” Vicki tells me, “which was absolutely okay because I was a nocturnal nightmare kid who would never go to sleep when I was supposed to.”⁹ More than half a century on, the evocation of the evening is tangible in Vicki’s recollection. “I remember sitting on the vinyl floor with my sister, watching them on the black-and-white TV in our family room, this insane thing happening in front of me. I don’t think I had yet heard of them at all.” She smiles. “That was it for me, a life-long Beatles fan instantly born. The joy and energy of the music… [it was] strange but exciting. [I felt like] nothing was going to be the same. In a lot of ways, it wasn’t.”¹⁰

She concludes, “I was five.”¹¹

The annual Peterson pilgrimage from Southern California to Michigan also marked a key moment in musical awareness for the young girl. Every year, all six family members “plus suitcases, books, and toys” piled into a “very sleek” 1964 Buick LeSabre station wagoni and drove from California to Benton Harbor, Michigan, where Jeanne’s parents and brother still lived.¹² Refreshment was provided by the “cooler full of orange juice and milk” and accompanying “bags of groceries.” “Our breakfasts and lunches were eaten in a park or on the side of the road, never in diners,” Vicki says. “I’m sure it was an absolute nightmare for our poor mom, four kids to keep occupied in an enclosed vehicle for five days, but I loved it.”¹³

In retrospect, Vicki contemplates how much she enjoyed the road trips, the endless hours “of being in a packed vehicle with many other bodies” possibly training her for later life as a touring musician. The radio also was a constant companion, “always tuned to a pop station,”¹⁴ underpinning a growing love with the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the Mamas & the Papas.

One summer, upon arriving at her grandmother’s house, Vicki found her uncle John in attendance, with a Beatles single in hand. “It was one of the early releases, with the A-side being ‘Love Me Do’ and the B-side ‘P.S. I Love You,’” she remembers. It was the first time she had heard the group on wax. The girl was equally blown away with the recorded rendition of the performance as she had been with their appearance on Ed Sullivan. “I was fascinated with the sounds coming through the grill cloth of the speaker. I made him play it seven times in a row. He was the young, cool uncle, maybe eighteen, and he indulged me.”¹⁵

Back at home, sister Pam was also a “guiding light” in the household, providing a template of connoisseurship for her three younger siblings to follow. “Pam was a full-on Beatlemaniac,” Vicki confides.¹⁶ “She got all the records.”¹⁷

The first opportunity Vicki had to hold an instrument in her own hands required transgression into her father’s sacred space. “When I was very little, I became aware that my father had a guitar in the closet of his den. It was a beautiful old Silvertone Jazz archtop guitar, a sort of tobacco color, with F-hole cutouts. We were not allowed in the den unsupervised. It was my father’s private territory,” Vicki confides.¹⁸ However, her attraction to the forbidden overcame her. “One day, I snuck into the closet and positioned myself behind the guitar to try it out. It seemed huge in my hands, and the action was set up so high—I remember the strings being a full inch from the fret board. I’m sure they weren’t, but that’s how it seemed. I literally ended up putting Band-Aids on my fingers because I figured they would provide some padding.”¹⁹

When Santa brought Vicki a plastic guitar from Sears that Christmas, the kindergartener realized two things. First, that her covert visits to her father’s lair were not so secret; and second, though pleased to now have her own instrument, what she held in her hands was not a “real” guitar. An upgrade came four years later, when at age nine she received “an actual wood ‘folksinger’ with a rope strap,” another purchase from the illustrious Sears.²⁰

It took a third grade talent show, though, for the Peterson parents to fully appreciate the determination and chutzpah their second born had in regard to her blossoming musicianship. “I came home from school and told my mom, ‘I’m gonna be in the talent show.’ She said, ‘That’s great. What are you gonna do?’ I said, ‘I’m going to sing an original song and play guitar.’ My mom looks at me like, ‘You don’t play guitar?’ I said, ‘I have two weeks. How hard can it be?’ I was determined.”²¹ A last-minute change saw Vicki do an a cappella number instead of unplugged original; however, the grinding work ethic and never-give-up attitude had begun to be set in place. “That was the start of my personal identification,” she now says of that initial show. “To be able to play was my goal.”²² By fourth grade, Vicki had talked Milt and Jeanne into buying her an even better instrument. “It was a Japanese Electro guitar,” Vicki remembers.²³ “It had the silver case identical to George Harrison’s in A Hard Day’s Night. I kept it through all my teenage years.”²⁴

Music played a part in forging early friendships as well as forming a sense of self. Toni Kasza met the Petersons when she and Vicki were just six years old in Northridge. “If I went to her house for a sleepover or she came to mine, the guitar came with us,” Toni says.²⁵ At just ten years old, Vicki shared a song she had written with her friend. “I felt like nobody actually wrote songs because music came from the church or were folk songs sprung from the campfire—they had just been around forever. It wasn’t something possible for one of us to do.”²⁶ This was an early example, Toni says, of “Vicki always being just a step ahead of the curve, of doing something everyone else thought impossible.”²⁷

Religion also was intertwined with early performances as the girls attended Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic school through eighth grade. “The church had an unbelievable focus on music,” Toni recalls.²⁸ “They would bring in famed conductors and organists… there were a lot of activities in there.”²⁹

The neighborhood around Our Lady was very insular. “Everyone knew each other; we definitely all grew up with like-minded families,” Toni recounts, the church at the center of the community. ³⁰ “It was very wholesome. There was an emphasis on volunteerism, on being kind: you treat people the way you want to be treated. Nobody’s parents were divorced.”³¹ It was “really Catholic,” Toni says, so the four kids in Vicki’s clan was “not considered a big family.”³²

As she started tenth grade, Vicki found herself uprooted from her life in Northridge as the Petersons moved across Los Angeles County to the aspirational region of Palos Verdes. Gone was the five-bedroom house with a den and swimming pool; Vicki was now bunking in the same room as her sister in a condominium complex. In an effort to assimilate to her surroundings, the sophomore joined the drill team at her new high school. It was there that she first met Julie Cameron. “The drill team at her old school was a big deal,” Julie says.³³ “The drill team at my school was rather for the nerds; it wasn’t the cool thing to do.”³⁴ Regardless of the disparities, Vicki continued to build a friendship with Julie.

British native Amanda Podany, née Hills, was also a new arrival to Palos Verdes, having started ninth grade at Rolling Hills High School in 1972. Like the Petersons, the Hills placed a similar importance on music. “My parents played records all the time in the house when I was a kid,” Amanda says.³⁵ The Fab Four were a popular choice in the Hills household. “At age three, my mom remembers me singing along to ‘She Loves You,’” Amanda laughs.³⁶ “It was a very music-filled childhood.”³⁷

Within weeks of starting school in 1973, Amanda found herself at the local outlet of Shakey’s Pizza lunching with Vicki and members of the drill team, or as she called them, “the Rah’s.”³⁸ Several months after the fated Shakey’s meal, Vicki invited Julie and Amanda over to the Petersons’ condominium for a slumber party to celebrate her sixteenth birthday. “We discovered that she had an electric guitar, which I thought was the coolest thing on the planet,” Amanda says.³⁹ Vicki’s already blossoming prowess on the instrument also impressed, with talk turning to the idea of forming their own band. A week later, the girls decided to give the notion a trial run. Vicki got out the family cassette recorder, Julie had brought her guitar over to the party, and Amanda had come equipped with a British recorder. It was decided that the trio would have a go at Paul McCartney’s “I Am Your Singer” while accompanying themselves on their respective instruments. Amanda met Debbi, Vicki’s younger sister, who joined in on the vocals.ii “I have no idea why we picked that song,” Amanda laughs.⁴⁰ “We all just sat around the tape player and played and sang. We thought, ‘This is great.’” ⁴¹ Upon rewinding the tape and listening back, the girls were horrified to admit that what they had created was terrible. Despite not nailing their first attempt at cover song greatness, the fire had been lit to start their own group. “I didn’t know how to play at all,” Amanda says.⁴² “From that moment on, it was my goal. I was fourteen at the time.”⁴³ Spurred on by her new friends, Amanda began listening intently to the basslines provided by McCartney. Looking at her own potential group, Amanda saw an opportunity. “I hadn’t realized the parts of a band until we started playing,” Amanda admits.⁴⁴ “I didn’t know bass guitar existed.”⁴⁵ “If we were going to have a band, I was going to be the bass player,” she smiles.⁴⁶

Through 1974, Amanda pursued the bass as she and Vicki simultaneously started writing songs together, aspiring to be the female Simon and Garfunkel. Early tunes included “Can’t Buy Me Tequila,” “Standing at the Station,” “The Fog Song,” and the ironically titled “Park It Under a No Parking Sign.” In June, less than six months after the despairing attempt at capturing McCartney magic, Amanda, Julie, and Vicki had their first public performance. Looking to expand her instrument repertoire, Vicki had undertaken lessons on the keys, overseen by local instructor Mrs. Harrison. “She somehow talked her teacher into letting our band play at the piano recital,” laughs Amanda. “We were three guitars. I would just play the basslines on the guitar. It was just Julie and Vicki and me. We were so excited to just have an audience.”⁴⁷

While the friends tried to find their footing, Vicki continued to look for other avenues that would allow her to perform. Having left the drill team after tenth grade, she tried out and made her high school cheerleading squad. A self-confessed “rebel cheerleader,” Vicki found that her love for being in front of a crowd conflicted with the elected position of being on the team. “I remember Vicki feeling mixed about [how cheerleaders are perceived] because we were not popular. We just didn’t want to go along with what was expected of girls,” Amanda recollects.⁴⁸ “She wanted to be a cheerleader because she really loved the performance part of it; but she didn’t want to do the whole ‘be popular’ thing. It’s just there was a feeling that she didn’t quite match what was to be expected of a cheerleader.”⁴⁹

Vicki adds, “I was accepted by the cheerleaders and dance squad, I just didn’t go to those parties. Also big at this time was the a cappella singing group that Amanda and I were both a part of. It was one of my favorite things about high school! We did Christmas performances with the Madrigals, singing at senior centers and shopping malls. They were our first ‘tours’!!” ⁵⁰

In a 1984 LA Weekly piece, Vicki recalls her experience donning the pom-poms, illustrating how it helped set the foundation for her love of being in front of varied crowds:

Yes, I’ll admit it now—I was a cheerleader (rah, rah), which is way out there beyond the valley of the super uncool, I know. But in high school the biggest audience is found at the football games, and uncured ham I am.

Okay, so this is a night game away and we were out there in our tricky little Rolling Hills blue-and-gold uniforms doing all these incredibly soulful dance steps but feeling pretty goddamn Wonder Bread all the same. Somewhere in the middle of the second quarter the lights went out—couldn’t see a thing. I went up to the mike, which for some strange and suspicious reason was still working, and started this groove-rap cheer we did (crowd control, they call it) and everyone in the stands picked up the rhythm and echoed everything I shouted/sang at them—just a lot of voices shouting in total darkness.

The moment was a revelation. The next day, Vicki recounts, friends said to her, “You can fuckin’ sing rock & roll.”⁵¹

As the summer of 1975 started, Amanda, Julie, and Vicki decided to give the band idea another go at a conveniently close venue that allowed them to be in front of an audience again. “Julie’s mom had a flower show at her house where she sold blooms that she had grown. We played at that,” Amanda recalls. The trio appeared as Shantih, a moniker acquired via Amanda’s passing infatuation with T. S. Eliot. As they started their senior year of high school, the decision was made to “get serious” about being a band. They had an arsenal of tunes penned by the two best friends and they practiced relentlessly for hours on end.

The chance to perform in front of an audience of any size was always quickly snapped up, with any venue fair game. Even Julie’s folks finally begrudgingly admitted to the inherent talent of the three girls. “My parents have a picture of us sitting on the stairs of my childhood home. My mom was having a party and the three of us provided background music. At the end of it, my dad came up and said, ‘I didn’t think you were that bad. That was pretty good.’”⁵²

However, there was one problem: the lack of a drummer was becoming acute. “When we started, we were going to be a girl band,” says Amanda. “By senior year, it was the three of us [Julie, Vicki, and I]. None of us was a drummer and none of us wanted to be the drummer.”⁵³ With no possibilities for filling the vacancy in sight, the teens accepted that they may have to let go of their all-girl idea and make do with a male addition.

Around this time, Vicki’s boyfriend, Joel Ciniero, stepped into the group. Though not a drummer, Joel took over lead guitar, freeing up Vicki to do rhythm. The addition of Vicki’s beau was not “a decision,” Amanda says. “It was just he could play guitar so there he was.” Things went smoothly at first, with everyone getting along. However, the couple “did a lot of breaking up and getting back together again.” “Every time they broke up, he left the band; every time they got back together, he joined the band; he came and went,” Amanda says. “I don’t think [we] thought that he was a permanent member because we had always had the all-girl thought in our minds, but he was there and he took it seriously.”⁵⁴

In March of 1976, the new foursome configuration premiered in public for the first time. Though lacking a drummer, attendees of the Rolling Hills High Hootenanny—the school’s talent show—were treated to the group covering the Beatles “Norwegian Wood” and Carly Simon’s “Legend in Your Own Time.” Three months later, even though everyone graduated from high school, they stayed dedicated to prioritizing the band.

A new determination to fill the drummer spot saw them advertising in every possible location for talent, including a nearby grocery store. “I remember we put up a sign in the local Safeway saying, ‘Are you a drummer?’ ‘Are you a girl, we want you for our band?’” Amanda remembers. Though the ideal was to have a female in the role, the friends thought it was “pretty unlikely.” The girls had big dreams, already envisioning themselves as trailblazers. “Right from the beginning, we were ridiculously ambitious,” Amanda laughs. “We would talk about how cool it would be for a girl band to get really famous. It was the three of us and then some other unknown girls in the future who would join us.”⁵⁵

Footnotes

i The white Buick would be passed from kid to kid in the Peterson family, with each one in turn having ownership at some point. “We all drove it,” says Vicki. “It was the car that stayed in the family until it finally died after my brother had a turn with it. I drove it and Debbi drove it. It was the vehicle that Debbi and I dragged our equipment around in when we were rehearsing and when we were driving all over Los Angeles County playing clubs in the late ’70s and early ’80s.”

ii Perhaps a temporary casualty of an unsuccessful first go, “Debbi never played with us again until 1977 when she actually joined the band,” notes Amanda.

⁵⁵