In 1967 during the summer of love, anything seemed possible…civil rights issues were being addressed…the war in Vietnam could be stopped…drugs and free love were in the air…and women were being liberated…
Amongst all this was Jimi Hendrix who became a fan of an all-female rock band from San Francisco called “the ace of cups”…
Wait a second…an all-girl rock band?...who wrote their own songs?...who had a chick out front that could shred like a man?...and a girl playing drums?...
Even in 1967, that was radical…Hendrix was so impressed by their chops that he invited them to open a couple of his shows…it really did seem like a defining moment…
But then the old sexist attitudes took over…women groups did not—could not—rock…it was common sense…self-evident…everyone knew that…
The ace of cups gave it a good shot, but by 1972, they’d broken up…and until punk rock came around a few years later, the idea of a female-fronted rock band was considered silly…
But punk brought in new egalitarian values…and fans embraced groups fronted by, led by and occasionally consisting entirely of women…
Deborah harry and blondie…Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders…The Slits…Patti Smith…Siouxsie and the Banshees…Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics…
These amazing women did all sorts of good for women’s role in rock…and by the time generation x and the 90s started to happen, the idea of bands where the leader and most (or all) its members had extra x chromosomes wasn’t weird at all…finally…
But there was still work to be done…and all through the alt-rock 90s, we were influenced and inspired and entertained by some of the greatest female musicians in rock, period, full stop…this is part 2 of our series on the alternative rock of the 1990s…
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