As the first song on the debut album by The Runaways, “Cherry Bomb” jumps right out of the grooves. The bass-heavy rhythm chugs along as the lyrics come at you in a total assault. The wall of drums and guitars evoke the power coming from five young ladies ready to take on the world. Cherie Currie is on vocals, Joan Jett and Lita Ford are on guitar, Sandy West is on drums, and Jackie Fox is on bass. (Nigel Harrison played bass on the recording, but don’t let that fact get in the way of the big picture.)
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Can’t stay at home, can’t stay in school
Old folks say, “You poor little fool”
Down the streets, I’m the girl next door
I’m the fox you’ve been waiting for
How The Runaways Came Together
These underage girls had been wrangled by producer Kim Fowley, the, shall we say, colorful character who had hustled in more ways than one on the streets of Los Angeles. The origins of The Runaways started with the pairing of Jett and West. The duo got together and clicked immediately. Fowley spotted Fox dancing at Rodney Bingenheimer’s club and brought her into the fold. Ford met Fowley and auditioned on bass. During a break, she pulled out the electric guitar and played “Highway Star” by Deep Purple. West and Ford bonded immediately. Jett could see there was a spark. However, Fowley was too abrasive and ran Ford off at first; she was soon convinced to return. Fowley and Jett discovered Currie at The Sugar Shack. Her first order of business was to learn a Suzi Quatro song.
Currie remembered in the 2004 documentary Edgeplay, “Out of all the songs on the Your Mama Won’t Like Me album, I pick ‘Fever’ for Christ sakes. I was terrified. I mean, I had sang ‘Fever’ till it was coming out my ass. So Joan walks over, and she goes, ‘So, what song did you learn?’ Of course, I say, ‘Fever.’ She just turns and looks at the girls and says, ‘Fever?’ She picks ‘Fever?’ So, anyway, since no one knew how to play ‘Fever,’ Joan and Kim wrote ‘Cherry Bomb’ on the spot for me to audition to, and that was it. I was in the band.”
Stone Age love and strange sounds, too
Come on, baby, let me get to you
Bad nights causing teenage blues
Get down, ladies, you’ve got nothin’ to lose
Fowley explained in the same film, “‘Cherry Bomb’ was a song written as an audition piece for Chrrie Currie. It was a play on the words of her name, Cherie. And “cherry bomb,” in my mind, meant a teenage firecracker that’s popular at the Fourth of July. And if you had a human firecracker up there who was blond and kind of Bardot-esque on a Sue Lyon/Lolita level, it could work.”
“We were gonna go on tour with the Ramones,” Ford remembered in Edgeplay, “so we were really into that chunky kinda… Sabbath does the same thing… So we just added all of that into ‘Cherry Bomb,’ and Cherie was able to knock it out of the park.”
Fowley pushed the band, sometimes with questionable practices: “We had heckler’s drill with garbage and toilet paper, and trash cans that would go flying across the rehearsal room. Because maybe one day, it would happen in Belgium or Arkansas or some place. So they’d be prepared for it. And they were very good at dodging all that stuff, and they kept playing through all of it.”
The Solo
Lita Ford told the Professor of Rock show in 2020, “Solos are something you wanna build. The ‘Cherry Bomb’ solo is quite short … [and] works for the song. … I always looked for crunch. And back then, they didn’t have the JCM800s. They started [being made by Gibson] in the early ’80s. What I was trying to do, I was trying to get gain out of a Marshall, so I would cross the channels on a four-channel Marshall, and that’s how I got my gain. I never used any pedals. I never used any effects unless it was through the board and the engineer would dial something in. I would always try and get that gain. And now, today, I’ve got so much goddamn gain that people are trying to roll it off, and I get angry… It took me decades to get that gain.”
Hey, street boy, want some style?
Your dead-end dreams don’t make you smile
I’ll give you something to live for
Have you and grab you until you’re sore
The Corset
Currie made quite an impression with the stagewear she chose. “We were playing the Starwood, which was right on Crescent Heights and Santa Monica Boulevard, and we had just come out from the soundcheck,” she said on the Waste Some Time with Jason Green show. “It was probably late afternoon, and I just looked across Santa Monica, and there was this tiny little boutique. There was that single corset on a mannequin in the window, and I just was drawn to it.
“I walked across the street, I kind of pressed my face and looked at it, and I walked in, and I said, ‘Can I try that on?’ I put it on, and just again, that voice, you know, was saying, ‘You have to wear this for ‘Cherry Bomb.’ I knew in my gut that the girls would not like that at all, but I bought it, and I went home… And, of course, the girls were pretty upset about it, but again, it was only for three minutes. People seem to think I wore that thing for the entire show; it was for one song only. But, it did do what I knew it would do, and that was to draw attention to a great song.”
Hello, daddy, hello, mom
I’m your ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb
Hello world, I’m your wild girl
I’m your ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
