50 DAYS TIL BIKINI KILL IN L.A.: Chaka Khan

Chaka Khan was born Yvette Marie Stevens in Chicago in 1953. She grew up in Hyde Park. Her father was a jazz musician and her mother was a researcher at the University of Chicago, but her parents were unhappy, had fights that could get bloody, and eventually divorced, with her Dad moving to NYC. Chaka […]

51 DAYS TIL BIKINI KILL IN L.A.: Tina Weymouth

Tina Weymouth was born Martina Michèle Weymouth in 1950 in Coronado, California–the third of eight children. Her family moved a lot when she was growing up, because her father was in the navy. Tina was trained as a painter at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she met her future husband and bandmate, who […]

52 DAYS TIL BIKINI KILL IN L.A.: Debbie Harry

Deborah Ann Harry was born Angela Trimble, in 1945, to an unwed mother in Miami. She was adopted by the Harry family in Hawthorn, New Jersey, at four months old. She fell in love with New York City as a young girl, just walking around the West Village. She admired Marilyn Monroe a great deal, […]

CLEVELAND HEAT

Q (from an interviewer who doesn’t exist): HOW EXCITED ARE YOU TO WRITE ABOUT ALL THE BAD ASS LADIES OF ROCK MUSIC FROM OHIO? A: WE ARE DEVO. JK WE ARE CHRISSIE HYNDE AND THE DEAL SISTERS AND BIG MAYBELLE AND WE ALSO LOVE DEVO. IT’S ALL SO ….. PREEEEECIOUUUUSSSS.

INTERLUDES: MOTHER/DAUGHTER REVOLUTION

Oh, shit. I am tired and The Stilettos just tore the roof off of my intended Debbie Harry narrative. I am already behind, yet I still need more time to honor this music. Reminiscing on all of the most formative music to me lately got me healing some lifelong trauma. For me, and my mama. […]

53 DAYS TIL BIKINI KILL IN L.A.: Patti Smith

Patti Smith was born immediately following the Second World War, into the Chicago of 1946, but her family moved to Philadelphia by the time she was three. In 1957, when she was eleven, they moved again to rural southern New Jersey. She grew up working class–her parents worked hard, but there were a lot of […]

54 DAYS TIL BIKINI KILL IN L.A.: Donna Summer

LaDonna Gaines was born in Boston in 1948, where she is still widely celebrated as a local legend, according to my friend Theresa who I used to teach preschool with for a short time, who is from there! She–like many of the women covered in this project–came up singing in church, but according to her […]

55 DAYS TIL BIKINI KILL IN L.A.: Gloria Gaynor

Gloria Gaynor was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1949 to a family who were very poor. She came up singing gospel in church and lived in a New Jersey housing project that had one bedroom, was about five hundred square feet, and where her brother slept across two chairs set up in the kitchen! […]

56 DAYS TIL BIKINI KILL IN L.A.: Loretta Lynn

I have literally been plagued by country music all week. Beginning with my research about Dolly Parton, into my research on Loretta Lynn, and last night I loaded in a huge all-girl world tour of country artists, headlined by Maren Morris, and I will be shining a big flashlight on all of them later! I […]

57 DAYS TIL BIKINI KILL IN L.A.: Betty Davis

Betty Davis–born Betty Mabry in 1945 in Durham, North Carolina–is, to me, one of the most critical women that turns the sixties into the seventies. In the sixties, we had a lot of girl groups showcasing modesty and complacency and conformity. In fact, the only women from the sixties I wrote about here that had […]