I hadn’t really planned on turning this “Friday Evening Videos” thing into a regular feature, but I find I’m having fun with it — tapping into my adolescent fantasies of being the next Johnny Fever perhaps — so I think I’m going to run with it for a while.
This week, I’ve got something a little different to show you, and it requires more background than usual. It’s a music video, yes, but it’s also a promotional piece for the upcoming feature film The Runaways.

I was only vaguely aware of the real-life Runaways until about six months ago; I knew they were the band that Lita Ford and Joan Jett had belonged to in their younger days, and I had an impression that they were teenage girls performing in lingerie, but that was about it. Then I started hearing about this new biopic (SamuraiFrog is doing his part to spread the word), and, around that same time, I spotted a greatest-hits collection at my local library. I gave the disc a spin for curiosity’s sake, and I liked most of what I heard.

If you don’t know, The Runaways were a short-lived, all-female rock band formed in the mid-1970s. They were indeed teenagers at the time, and their lyrics and visual style all played off the dark fantasy of underage, oversexed young girls giving the finger to the world and proving that they were every bit as debauched as their male counterparts. (I have no idea if they were really like that, or if it was all a carefully manufactured marketing gimmick. If they were a more recent band, I’d say it was an act — I tend to be pretty cynical about media these days — but back in the free-for-all, sexual-revolution ’70s, who knows?) In those days, female musicians tended to be a lot more demure, a lot more mellow musically speaking, and a lot more into victimhood — think of Carly Simon, Roberta Flack, Karen Carpenter — so a group of trash-talking, hard-rocking chicks was a genuine revolution. The Runaways are often credited as an influence on later all-girl bands such as The Go-Gos, The Bangles, and The Donnas, and I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that Madonna took a lot of her trampy early look from them as well.

Musically, I found the stuff on their hits collection a little primitive, the sort of borderline-competent playing and simplistic lyrics you’d expect to hear coming from the neighbor’s garage on a hot summer afternoon. And yet… there is something compelling about their sound (which is somewhat reminiscent of early KISS), and several of their songs are insanely catchy. I especially like the ones that reveal a bit of vulnerability and even innocence lurking under the hard edge, songs like “Wait for Me” and the heartbreaking “Waitin’ for the Night.” But of course it’s the rowdy, bad-girl stuff that they’re best known for, and in this video — all footage from the movie — we’re going to hear their signature tune, “Cherry Bomb.” As unlikely as it sounds, Dakota Fanning is playing lead singer Cherie Currie, and I believe this is really her singing; Twilight‘s Kristen Stewart plays Joan Jett:

And now just for fun, here’s the original song as performed by the real Runaways:

Compare and contrast, kids!
The Runaways opens nationwide on April 9. Honestly, this and Iron Man 2 are about the only movies I’m looking forward to at the moment. My thanks to SamuraiFrog for finding the clip…