From the Vaults: Lita Ford
The dawn of the 1980s had to be a revelation for Lita Ford. She was 22 years old, an outstanding but newly unemployed guitar player living back home with her parents in Long Beach, California. She had seen all the ‘lead singer drama’ she could tolerate before her old band, The Runaways, imploded. Lita wanted none of that with her new band so she formulated a new plan. She rented a warehouse, set up a PA system and a stack of Marshall amps and proceeded to teach herself how to play guitar and sing at the same time. The only problem was money – she had to find a job to pay for the tools she needed to forge the next stage of her music career. The plan to work to pay the bills and woodshed to kick start her career was a far cry from the previous six years of her life.
Lita’s first job as a fitness instructor didn’t work out. Lita was cut loose for being rude to a customer. Job number two wasn’t glamorous – she ended up selling men’s cologne at a Broadway Store (which later became Nordstroms) at a mall across the street from her folks home. She put her hair up, wore glasses, and worked largely incognito for six months. If someone said, “Gee, you look familiar,” she would change the subject. Nobody suspected they were in the presence of an anomaly – a female rock ‘n’ roll pioneer. It was there that she met Ray Marzano. When he mentioned he was looking for a guitarist for the band he was putting together, she took off her glasses and introduced the real Lita Ford to him. Marzono promptly invited Ford to join him at his rehearsal facility in North Hollywood. Ray put her in contact with a young drummer named Dusty Watson and with Marzano on bass, they began honing the power trio sound Ford had in her head long before she became a Runaway.
The band began playing a few gigs with Ray still on bass when Lita was approached by Neil Merryweather. He was an older guy who had written a few albums and by his own admission, he said ‘he had been around the block’. Ford said, “He looked like he could use some help himself, but I took him up on his offer when he said that maybe he could help me.” Neil’s first task was to craft some ‘heavy metal looking’ stage costumes. They weren’t common for rock bands then but eventually everyone from Cher to Lady Gaga would be sporting similar threads.
When they began writing a few songs, Lita discovered Merryweather was also an outstanding bass player. In her biography Living Like a Runaway (Dey St. 2016), Ford recalled, “[With Neil on bass] the trio fit with my vision of keeping the Out for Blood album (her first solo effort) free from overproduction. I wanted people to hear the individual instruments – the guitar most of all!” To put this in perspective, we need to back up a bit and how the daughter of an English soldier and an Italian hospital aide worker ended up in California to begin with.
During the World War Two Battle of Anzio, Ford’s father, Harry Lenard Ford lost his middle and ring finger – they were blown off when he tried to deflect a stick grenade. Len met his future wife, Isabella Benvenuto, when she worked as a volunteer at the hospital where she helped care for him. Len loved Italy and the people there and learned to speak the language fluently. The couple wed on January 19, 1945 and moved to England shortly after their honeymoon. In England, the family was blessed with a son who unfortunately died at nine months of age from pneumonia. Two years later, Lita was born (September 19, 1958) and her first memories are based there. Growing up a beach girl in Mediterranean Italy, Isa Ford was not happy with the weather in England so the family decided to relocate to the states. They first landed in Boston but the winters there were not to their liking. Len had come from a large family so Boston was home to one sister. Their next destination was Dallas where another sister lived. Lita’s mother finally convinced Len that California was where they needed to be. They settled in Long Beach and he went to work for the Ford Motor Company.
Early on, Lita knew she wanted to play the guitar. At age ten, her mother bought her a nylon string acoustic which eventually was replaced with a steel string model. Lita was into the electric sounds she heard on the radio and resolved she would have to get a job so she could buy an electric guitar. After her cousin Paul took her to see Black Sabbath at the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium, the then thirteen-year old Lita knew exactly what she wanted to do. To say she lived life in the fast lane at such an early age is an understatement. She talked her parents into letting her attend the rough and tumble school on the other side of town where she soon found musical accomplices. They regularly ditched school to go somewhere and jam.
She and a girlfriend lied about spending the weekend at each other’s homes and thumbed a ride from the nearby bus station to the massive California Jam concert being held at the Ontario, CA speedway. This 1974 show featured all the bands that Lita wanted to emulate: Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Black Oak Arkansas, among others. The free and easy existence also led to complications – like a pregnancy at age sixteen. Knowing she was not ready to be a mother, she struck out on her own to find a clinic to ‘take care of the problem’ – and she resolved that if she was planning to become a rock and roller, she needed to be a lot more careful. Her parents were none the wiser about their daughter’s wilder ways but they still supported her musical ambitions.
In 1975, Hollywood beckoned when Lita received a call from a twenty something sleaze bag named Kim Fowley. Fowley had many connections in the biz and he was looking for a bass player for an all girl band called The Runaways. He described them as, “A band of rebellious jailbait girls” he was putting together. He humbly (yes, I am being sarcastic here) told her, “I’m a mastermind producer / songwriter and I can make you into one of the biggest rock and roll stars in the world.” She told him she was actually a guitar player and he said, “Well, we need one of those, too.” Kim invited her to a rehearsal space in West Hollywood at the corner of San Vicente and Santa Monica Boulevard above a defunct drug store. There she was introduced to the drummer (Sandy West) and second guitar player (Joan Jett). They had not adopted their familiar West and Jett stage names yet, but it was a start – Lita decided to remain ‘Lita Ford’..
In need of a vocalist, Fowley trolled the clubs until he found sixteen year old Cherie Currie. Her main qualification was that she was cute with platinum blond hair and fit the image Fowley thought would get the most attention. Cherie wanted to audition by singing Suzie Quartro’s Fever but Lita refused. Joan and Kim adjourned to another room and returned twenty five minutes later with what would become the band’s signature song, Cherry Bomb (Fowley liked it because it sounded like Cherie’s name). The next couple of years would find them grinding on the circuit, first on the West Coast, and then all over the map. Tours of Europe, Japan, and the United States had them opening for major acts like The Tubes and The Ramones. They went to Japan unaware that ‘Runaway Mania’ was at a fever pitch. The ‘sleaze bag’ part of Kim Fowley left them in the dark as to how popular they were and he fleeced every penny he could from this popularity before they parted ways.
The Runaways were NOT the Monkees – they were an all girl band who could play. They were pioneers because in the late 1970s, there were not many all girl bands to emulate (or female rock stars to look up to for that matter). They attracted attention, especially from mostly male audiences, but the grind of touring began to take its toll. The first to bolt was bass player Jackie Fox. She left before their final Japanese shows at the famed Budokan Hall. Jett was forced to switch over to bass and the results were documented on the Live in Japan album. They recruited a new bassist when they got back to the States but the interband tension was beginning to mount. Currie’s habit of always being late ended when Ford took her to task. The singer was upset by the friction so she also exited the band. Jett had been taking more vocals on their recent albums (another source of tension with Currie) so she became the new front woman. By the time the band called it a day, they had made some noise in the music biz but thanks to Fowley, they really had nothing to show for it, money-wise. This is how Lita Ford ended up working at a shopping mall big box store. A sad tale, perhaps, but a necessary one in terms of her taking the next steps in her career.
Growing up with rock ‘n’ roll dreams, it never occurred to Ford that she would be entering a male dominated field. No one told her ‘girls don’t do this’ and being the determined soul she was, it would not have mattered. If guys can live the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, why couldn’t she?
As she made her way through the cloverleaf of opportunities that would see her solo career take off, Lita Ford rarely met a famous guitar player she wouldn’t have a fling with. She contracted her only case of STD from Johnny Ramone. Ritchie Blackmore gifted her an owl ring (who knew he was into owls?) that was later stolen from her hotel room while she was on tour. Glenn Tipton from Judas Priest, Nikki Sixx from Motley Crue, Eddie Van Halen (before he met the love of his life Valerie Bertanelli), and Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath were also notches in her belt. Suffice to say, if the rock ‘n’ roll guys could live and love how they wanted, so could she.
Lita Ford’s solo career got a jolt on the charts when her radio friendly album Lita produced the singles Kiss Me Deadly and Close My Eyes Forever in 1988. The latter was a duet with Ozzy Osbourne and it became her highest charting hit, reaching No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100. Having reached the pinnacle of her career up to then, Ford stepped back from the business between 1996 and 2007 to concentrate on raising her two young boys. Rocco and James were the product of her second marriage to Nitro vocalist Jim Gillette whom she married just two weeks after they had met (her first husband was guitarist Chris Holmes from W.A.S.P.).
She makes note late in Living Like a Runaway that she purposely omitted many details about her husband of eighteen years and the father of her children. Suffice to say she met and married Jim Gillette in a two week spin after she bottomed out over that short span of time. Both of her parents died and then her beloved ‘wiener dog’ Porky was fatally mauled by two larger dogs. She was fed up with the music business runaround and lack of support from her label when the company changed presidents (a country music lover replaced the old rock ‘n’ roller). The new prez dropped her like a hot potato just as she had a new album ready to drop. She made a big mistake jumping into married life with a stranger and her life became a long strange trip outside of the music biz.
The family eventually moved to the tropical island paradise of Turks and Caicos where Gillette ran a small construction and real estate company. Gillette had already had them living in houses that were ‘works in progress’ in Oregon and Florida before they landed in Turks and Caicos. The ‘family’ (re: Jim) bought into the Y2K panic and after the world didn’t implode, they ate stockpiled freeze dried meals for a long time. In the tropics, he decided to build a home totally off the grid on a remote island and was pitching a reality TV show for TLC to be called The Gillettes: An Extreme American Family. Twisted Sister singer Dee Snider had known and toured with Ford in the past and was surprised when he ran into her when the Snider family were on vacation in T&C. In the forward to Living Like A Runaway, Snider noted Lita was enjoying her life of domestic bliss, but was not at all enthusiastic about living totally removed from other human interaction. He wasn’t far off the mark when the whole plot took a twist of its own in the early 2000s.
Ford returned from Los Angeles where she had been meeting with TLC suits about the proposed TV show. Upon her return, she found her husband and sons were not talking to her. Gillette had told the boys that their mother was going to do them harm and encouraged them to physically attack her. Gillette had also introduced the boys to a brutal martial arts / fighting routine at much too young an age. She later reflected on why the change occurred. Everything came to a head after she began asserting more control over the proposed TV show. These events led to a divorce after which Lita became an advocate for something known as ‘parental alienation’. Being forcefully removed from her life as a full time mother by her husband’s strange behavior, Ford decided it was time to dust off her guitar and get back into the music world.
The end result was her first true album in nearly 20 years. Released in 2012, Living Like a Runaway was put together with the help and support of guitarist Gary Hoey and lyricist Michael Dan Ehmig. Hoey had called Lita when she was in the midst of her divorce drama and invited her to come to New Hampshire to use his home recording studio anytime she wanted. It took a year to take him up on the offer, but Hoey’s wife and kids made Ford feel right at home and they wrote and recorded some amazing songs together. Lita had also worked with Ehmig off and on in the past. He was the one who inspired the name of her first album in 20 years (and in the end, the title of her book) when he described her post marriage life in a phone call: “Lita, you are living like a runaway.” Indeed, she says now that the songs on that album pretty much tell the story of her 15 years in exile from the music business.
Where is Lita Ford in 2024? Where else, but back on the road. Her current tour began at the Whisky A Go Go in West Hollywood on April 11 and will wrap up at the same venue on November 11. In between, she will be all over the map (see her website for details) and if you have a yen to see ‘The Queen of Heavy Metal’ in person, she will be opening for Foreigner in Duluth, MN on September 27, 2024. This will be Foreigner’s final tour so it is a fair bet that the bill with Lita Ford opening will be a good one.
Around 2014, Ford and Joan Jett finally got together for a face to face meeting for the first time in 30 years. They had never been best friends and overtures by Ford about a possible Runaways reunion were met with silence. The subject never came up again because drummer Sandy West died that same year. Jett did pay her former co-guitarist a semi-tribute reminding her that she still used the shark fin style picks Ford had shown her way back when.
Ford also set aside her past difficulties with both Cherie Currie and Kim Fowley. Fowley was dying from cancer when they reconnected. Curry and Ford visited him at his home and Lita put aside any angry feelings about how he had treated the band back in the day. She told him, “I don’t think I would be who I am today if it weren’t for Kim Fowley.” He may have been a sleaze-bag hustler when he put together the Runaways, but in the days when female rockers were not the norm, he started a music revolution that is still going on today. Lita Ford is a good place to start because she has certainly earned her ‘Queen’ title and influenced a lot of rockers, and not just female rockers. Her only regret is the alienation from her boys and she holds out hope they will read her book and try to reconnect in the future.
Top Piece Video: Lita Ford and Ozzy perform IF I CLOSE MY EYES FOREVER