'Retto Ruminations
By: Amy Sciarretto
Last updated March 11th , 2010

Right now I'm reading a lot about music. It almost sounds oxymoronic. To read about music, when music is what you listen to. But music, like many of the arts, is something that touches all of your senses. Now, I am not going to muse on the Kindle, and how it is going ruin literature and the literary process of digesting reading materials. I do love the bookshelves that runs width wise under my low windows of my condo, which is filled with books I've read over the years, from the black metal chronicle Lords of Chaos to That Takes Ovaries to Watchmen to Helter Skelter to How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, the latter of which is Jenna Jameson's biography. I think that when folks come into my humble abode, they can look at the spines of my books and see what I feed my brain with. It's like judging a person by the covers of the books that they read, without the whole judging thing. 

I just polished off Cherie Currie's Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway on a round trip flight to Los Angeles last weekend. For me, this was a page turner that I could not put down. I fully immersed myself into the world of Currie, Joan Jett, Sandy West, Jackie Fox and Lita Ford. This book may not have achieved "must read" status for all of you or even all of the rock press, but it sure is of that status for me. I am even going to a screening of The Runaways, the upcoming biopic of the Queens of Noise, this week. And not because I want to see feathered haired Dakota Fanning (playing Currie) and the mullet-sporting Kristen Stewart (playing Jett, one of my favorite rock goddesses, ever! She made me want to play the guitar!!) make out. I want to see the story unfold on the screen and how girls, who are the age of The Runaways when they broke, act, dress, speak and rock the fuck out! 

But Currie's book is part of the source material of the film and in her autobiography, she gives a sneak peak into her life before the band, in the band and after she bolted. What I love about this book is that it sheds light on an era gone by, one that was not documented on the web, in the blogosphere or online, simply because the world wide web did not exist in the 1970s, when The Runaways were making a glorious racket. We have to rely on Currie's account to re-create the time gone by and I found myself feeling like I was riding sidecar with her. Currie isn't shy about telling her readers about her battles with drugs and her relationship with her twin sister and how she and Lita Ford weren't exactly fond of one another. I wish I could have witnessed their snitty battles in the flesh. That was the most exciting thing to read about, since Currie put me in the moment. I found myself asking, "Why is Lita such a bitch to Cherie?" And then stopping and wondering, maybe Cherie was being sensitive to Lita's drive and desire to rock for the rest of her life. It made me think and made me want to know more.

I do wish that Currie had given me (and everyone else who has read the book) more detail and insight into her relationship with Jett. It's long been rumored that Currie and Jett may have had a deeper, sexual relationship during their tenure in the band, which was promoted by despicable Sevengali/manager Kim Fowley as jailbait teen rock. All we have is Currie's perspective, perception and memory of her time in The Runaways and that's what makes the book such an enthralling read. She's colloquial. She comes off as honest. She doesn't make excuses for her bad behavior and even if she did, what choice would we have? We don't have digital documentation of The Runaways as it happened, so the book serves the purpose of putting us in the moment, window dressed in Currie's decent, easy to follow prose. Many of us were too young to experience The Queens of Noise in their heyday; I actually discovered them when I was in single digits in age – just six- because my older brother loved them and whatever he listened to, I sat on his lap and listened to and absorbed and digested. He made me a music fan in my most formative years and The Runaways were one of the first bands that he exposed me to (alongside KISS, AC/DC, Aldo Nova, Judas Priest and many others) and my love for Jett continued well into my teen years and into my ‘30s. This book made me feel like I "got" the Queens of Noise a little bit better, even if Currie did gloss over the rumored relationship with Jett. That's the only flaw of the book. Otherwise, I was totally engrossed and couldn't put the tome down.  I remember seeing pictures and video of Currie, dressed in corset, garters and fishnets, singing "Ch-ch-ch-cherry Bomb" and thinking that is what "sexy" must be and I always thought she was aloof and alpha female. Of course, at that young tender age, I didn't know what alpha female was as a term, but I knew the concept. It's instinctual, with women. I also thought she didn't love being a rock ‘n roll sexpot, since she left the band. I thought she gave up, didn't love music or rocking out with her sisters on the stage, something that I had fantasized about. You know, typical "grass is always greener" stuff. She had what I wanted and left it, so I assumed she didn't want it. But once I read the book, I understood that life in The Runaways wasn't peaches and cream as a worshipped Queen of Noise!

I am also just cracking the spine on Ozzy Osbourne's autobiography, I Am Ozzy. I know more about Ozzy, because I love metal and he is much more exposed and chronicled in the various media outlets of this generation. Ozzy is not nearly as much of an enigma or a celebrated, long gone icon or band, like The Runaways are. I look forward to delving into the book and seeing if Ozzy slices open his chest and lets the contents spill out, or if I feel like it's just another episode of The Osbournes. It's an era of over-exposure and I want to see how this autobiography offers me a glimpse of what I don't or didn't already know.

I also devoured Crazy Heart, the book about grizzled country singer Bad Blake, which was a fiction novel that was turned into a film and won Jeff Bridges a much-deserved Oscar. It made me feel like it was written by a country music veteran with music industry inside information, with its vivid prose.

I'll be dissecting these two works in my next two columns. 

In the meantime, I encourage you to pick up a copy of Currie's Neon Angel. For a multitude of reasons, the least of which being the fact that you are a fan of her former band. If you like the band, great. If not, check it anyway. You can live vicariously through her, and see and feel what it was like to be a teenage rock ‘n roll grrl. ~ Amy Sciarretto

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