Lita Ford: People Just Saw the Runaways as ‘Tit–s and A–‘

By editorial board on September 19, 2023

Lita Ford has looked back at her early days with the Runaways, noting that the all-female band had to push past sexist prejudices to make a name for themselves.

Lita Rossana Ford (born 19 September 1958) is an English-born guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter. She was the lead guitarist for the all-female rock band the Runaways in the late 1970s, and then embarked on a successful glam metal solo career that hit its peak in the late 1980s. The 1989 single "Close My Eyes Forever", a duet with Ozzy Osbourne, remains Ford's most successful song, reaching No. 8 on the US Billboard Chart.

“We were before our time, for sure,” Ford explained during an appearance on The Kenny Aronoff Sessions podcast. “There were no women in the audience at all. There were most definitely no kids in the audience. When we played the festivals, it was pretty much a big sea of denim and leather. And we were young, and people looked at us like tits and ass. But then when they heard us play, it just did something to them and they got excited. We were just before our time.”

Lita Ford Remembers How Groupies Behaved in '80s and reveals her drug-fueled trysts with rock’s biggest names in tell-all book.

I remember there was this girl in a bathroom stall giving blowjobs. Word got out to the band and crew, and there was this line of guys waiting to get a blowjob. That kind of thing happened all the time.

"I remember L.A. Guns had orgies when they toured. You'd go on their bus and everybody would be naked. People were having sex right and left. It was very... inspiring. (Reb Beach)

I used to see Poison pulling girls out of the audience, and they'd have so many girls backstage. They were like freaking cattle!

"Girls were ripping their clothes off and throwing themselves at these guys. There was sex everywhere. I mean, I got it, but it did get a little too much. I just wanted to say to the girls, 'Don't act so stupid.'"

Once, Lita says, when, after removing her pants, she had black and blue marks along her legs. While “John (Entwistle) was looking at me like I was into sadomaso­chism or something,” the bruises had come from horseback riding, and ultimately gave Entwistle no pause about spending the night.in

Decades on from her hey-day with pioneering all-girl band The Runainways, now-60-year-old Ford has given a salacious throwback in a new tell-all book Living Like A Runaway. The memoirs detail some of her wildest and most bizarre encounters on the road. (Sources – Living Like A Runaway – New York Post -Daily Mail).

After a night out at the club Traxx — with Ford’s best friend Toni and keyboardist Aldo Nova also in tow — Ford brought the crew back to her room at the Broadway Plaza Hotel.

Ford and Bon Jovi were making out in one bed and Sambora and Toni on another, as Nova “watched, sipping his red wine, as we tried to fit him in, too.” All the wine got to Bon Jovi, who “began puking in the corner, right on the bedroom carpet.” At that point, Toni felt generous. “Toni hopped off Richie,” Ford writes, “as if to say, ‘Here, Lita. Try mine.’ So I got in bed with Richie.” The room then turned into a scene from “Caligula.”

On tour in Japan, Ford wound up in the hospital after waking up with a stranger in a bed full of blood; she still does not know exactly what happened that night, which left her with 14 stitches.

In 1980 when she and Van Halen were drinking vodka and trying on each other’s clothes in her living room. Ford had a T-shirt that read, in part, “Beat me. Bite me. Whip me. F–k me,” among other such sentiments. They were fooling around on the floor when she felt someone kicking her ankle, and found Mark, a large man she had recently broken up with, staring down at them. He had “climbed up the balconies and came through the sliding-glass door.”

Van Halen, drunk, freaked out. He “backed his way toward the bathroom and said, ‘Well, if you’re going to kill me, just bury me with my guitar.’ Then he slammed shut the bathroom door and locked it.”

Ford got Mark to leave, but when she checked the bathroom, Van Halen was gone, despite the only exit being one “tiny, tiny window” over the shower.

He had, in fact, “managed to squeeze his body through that window, scraping up his entire stomach, [and]dropped down four stories.”

But before even reaching success, Ford explains, the band had a major fall-out.Ford  joined the Runaways along with bandmates who included rhythm guitarist Joan Larkin, who changed her name to Joan Jett.

ford

“I had a sudden realization that everyone in the band except for one was a lesbian – and left fearing that ‘one of the girls might make a move on me’. The Runaways were opening for bands like Rush and Cheap Trick and embracing antics out of the ’70s rocker playbook.

 

 

 

 

 

DISCLAIMER: the images used by Videomuzic are for the purpose of criticism and exercise of the right to report news, in low quality, in compliance with the provisions of the law on copyright, used exclusively for the information content.
DISCLAIMER: Videomuzic usa le immagini per finalità di critica ed esercizio del diritto di cronaca in modalità degradata conforme alle prescrizioni della legge sul diritto d'autore utilizzate ad esclusivo corredo dei contenuti informativi.
Copyright © 2022 Videomuzic | Rome. ITA | Pictures, videos remain the property of the copyright owner, Any copyright owner who wants removed should contact us..
linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram