Meet Fanny, the Best '70s All-Female Band You Probably Haven't Heard Of

Some of the most influential female rock stars of the 1970s nearly faded away into the deep archives of music history — until now. Fanny was the first all-female rock band to release an album on a major label. In fact, by 1974 they had released five albums, paving the way for other female musicians who’ve gone on to become household names, like the Go-Go’s and the B-52s. But unlike those bands, Fanny featured musicians who proudly identified as Filipina American and lesbian — fighting not only a male-dominated record industry, but one where racism and homophobia have been deeply entrenched.

In a 1999 interview, David Bowie told Rolling Stone, “One of the most important female bands in American rock has been buried without a trace.” He went on to say, “Revivify Fanny. And I will feel that my work is done.”

Recently, Fanny put out a reunion album, Fanny Walked the Earth, and they’re the subject of a documentary called Fanny: The Right to Rock, which is airing at the nation’s largest Asian American film festival, CAAMFest, in San Francisco this month. The documentary will also be streaming on PBS stations in May.

California Report Magazine host Sasha Khokha interviewed Fanny’s lead guitarist, June Millington, about the band’s legacy. Excerpts of their conversation have been edited for length and clarity.

On the origins of Fanny

I firmly believe that Filipinos are incredibly musical. So when we were growing up in the Philippines, someone showed me how to play a couple of bars on the ukulele, and Jean (June’s sister and bandmate) and I just picked it up right away and started to play songs off the radio. And that’s how we really trained ourselves.

Our dad was a graduate of Annapolis. He was white; he was American. And our mom was a Filipino, flat out, you know, culturally. So we are half-and-half. And it’s always been kind of hard, especially since growing up in the Philippines in the ’50s, nobody could really articulate what was uncomfortable or didn’t quite fit. But we knew we didn’t completely fit in the Philippines because we were half American. And then we get here and we’re half Filipina. There’s a crack there in the middle and we fell between that crack. But I felt so filled and really accepted by music in a way that I didn’t feel that I was accepted by the world.

On why they call themselves Fanny

I heard of a band called Daisy Chain, and I noticed that there was a girl’s name in it, and immediately I felt like I was in a room full of friends. I had company, right? And I said, “Hey, why don’t we think of a girl’s name?”

It was a double entendre, of course, even here in the U.S. And we’re kidded a lot about what it means in England, but we didn’t know that. And to tell you the truth, Fanny was my avatar. She was my front person. I hid behind her. Nobody knew that I was so shy. How was [I] going to play that lead guitar, that loud lead guitar, you know? And so I hid behind her and totally shredded. That really worked for me, I have to say. I knew that my Aunt Fanny [or] my Grandma Fanny was the one who was in front of me while I just got louder.

On making it big in Los Angeles

In fall of ‘68, we played an open house night at the Troubadour. And I remember the guy who ran the club. He was just, you know, like a lot of guys at the time, condescending, very condescending and supercilious. And let me tell you, that night is actually the best audience reaction I’ve ever had in my entire career because people not only clapped and jumped up and went crazy, they stood on the tables. They just went insane. All of a sudden that entire club knew we were good. And Norma Kemper, who worked for Richard Perry at Reprise, I think he had sent her out as sort of a scout. Nobody really knew anything, but she called them up and raved. And so we met him at a studio on Selma in Hollywood, played for him the next day or two days later, and he went crazy, too. So from that point on, things moved really fast.

Bonnie Raitt came into town. I had met her before and she wanted to stay with us. And that’s how she started to play electric guitar. So, you know, very quickly, the networking and the fact that everyone knew that there were these chicks who could play, who lived on Marmont Lane. We played day and night. I mean, all sorts of people came over to jam.

On being women in the male-dominated music industry

There was honestly no space in anyone’s brains to even imagine that they would see an all-girl band in front of them. No space whatsoever. We might as well [have] said we were going to walk on the moon. So, you know, aside from all the resistance, what we actually had to do was put a picture frame out in the air and walk into that frame so that people could see that it was happening. I can’t tell you how important that is because now you see all-girl bands, you see women playing, it’s a lot more common. But back then, I’m telling you, they couldn’t imagine it. So we had to fill that frame. And that was a big job.

When “Charity Ball” [the band’s first Top 40 hit] came out, the reviews that we got were so mixed. The condescension and the resistance was … [They wouldn’t] just say, “These girls are kicking ass, are really good. You’ve got to listen to them. They’re going to make it big.” They would always give these sort of second guesses, you know, like, maybe they had guys playing with them in the studio. There was just a lot of disparagement. And so we noticed that just as much.

On the pressure they felt from the label

We were selling 60,000 about per album, which is now really good. But, you know, they were losing confidence in us. And that is too bad because I was so tired by that time. I remember we were on the road all the time or writing or recording. You know, we didn’t really have that much time to ourselves. So I was really tired. I felt really beat up. And when they asked us to wear those [skimpy] outfits, I mean, I didn’t like it at all.

When you look at the first album cover, that’s our own clothes. We were savvy chicks, man, you know, we knew how to shop and how to dress. But Warner Brothers and their wisdom, they just decided to circumvent that. And, you know, aside from all along with all the disparaging comments that we got from the press, that was just a little too much for me. That’s partly the reason why I left.

On recording a new album nearly 50 years later

It felt kind of effortless because, you know, every time we got together, we would have a lot of fun. We would jam and we would write songs. We really felt like we were 16, 17 again, except with more chops and a lot more knowledge. So that made it a lot easier. You know, we got the job done and we knew we could, [which] was really incredible.

We discussed with great pleasure knowing that people were going to hear this album [and] they would not know what age we were necessarily. And we really relished that idea. Yeah, we’re just gonna rock it. We’re going to shred, we’re going to do our thing. And the age doesn’t matter, you know? The age was not a huge component because it was always who we were, that was who we were with the ferocity of going for it. You ever hear Jean’s ferocious bass playing? I mean, she’s one of the best bass players this world has ever produced. And she just comes right at you. We just came at you. We didn’t want to give you time to think or barely breathe. We just wanted you [to] be in our space. And I believe that’s what we did then. And that’s what we’re doing now.

Fanny performs a free concert on Saturday, May 20, at the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival in San Francisco. Details here.