'We'll Park At 7-11 And Look For Some Beef'

I have, over the past couple of months, gotten a lot of hits on a Runaways post I did more than two years ago (the links are still up if you want to check it out). Oddly, the referrals are almost exclusively from Google images, which made it hard for me to figure out at first. The conclusion I finally came to is that the spike in hits has more or less coincided with the attention to The Runaways, which opens nationally April 9, and people searching images for the band.

Whatever the reason for the uptick, as always, I welcome it and, as always, I hope that people visiting my blog for that particular post will look around and decide to come back.

With that, never let it be said that I’m not a whore: If one Runaways post is good, two has got to be even better.

I did some searching and found Flaming Schoolgirls, an oddly named disk that is a collection of outtakes from the Queens of Noise and Live in Japan albums. Originally available as a Japanese import, the Cherry Red label released it in the U.S. in 1980. Flaming Schoolgirls features the classic Runaways lineup of Lita Ford, Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, Jackie Fox, and Sandy West.

I picked a couple of what I think are pretty representative songs from the album: “Don’t Abuse Me,” a Joan Jett-penned song, features Cherie Currie on vocals (Joan would rerecord it later for her Bad Reputation album); Joan herself is out front on the live version of “I Love Playin’ With Fire.”

In an interesting choice, there are two Beatles covers on Flaming Schoolgirls – “Strawberry Fields” and “Here Comes the Sun.” Yeah, that’s what I thought too. But Joan’s version of “Here Comes the Sun” is really not bad and it’s a rare occasion to hear her accompanied by just piano and strings. What kept going through my mind as I listened is, Thirty years down the road, there would be kids the same age Joan was then, singing their little hearts out on American Idol, maybe trying the same song, and not even coming close to turning in as good a performance. Yet ironically, I doubt Joan could have even “made it to Hollywood.”

Don’t Abuse Me.mp3
I Love Playin’ With Fire.mp3
Here Comes the Sun (Beatles cover).mp3