DISGRACELAND - The Runaways: Exploited by the Music Industry, Escape, and Excellent Rock ‘N’ Roll

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

This is the story of five teenage girls who used rock ‘n roll to escape their lives, their names, and their futures—only to find themselves trapped in a nightmare of fame, exploitation, and identi...ty turned inside-out. From the Sunset Strip to a jail cell in England, from David Bowie fantasies to Kim Fowley’s real-life horrors, this is how the Runaways reinvented what rebellion could be—and paid the ultimate price in the process. This episode contains themes that may be disturbing to some listeners, including sexual assault and suicide. If you’re thinking about suicide, or are worried about a friend or loved one, call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠⁠⁠⁠disgracelandpod.com/membership⁠⁠⁠⁠. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠⁠⁠⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠X⁠⁠⁠⁠ (formerly Twitter)  ⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠ To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:01 This is exactly right. Double Elvis. This episode contains content that may be disturbing to some listeners. Please check the show notes for more information. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. This is a story about transformation, about what happens when you don't just play rock and roll, when you use it to become someone new,
Starting point is 00:00:44 someone louder than someone impossible to ignore. It's a story about five teams, teenage girls who turned identity into a weapon, who took rock and roll rebellion and pushed it past the point of no return. It's also a story about escape. Escape from the valley. Escape from your parents. Escape from polite society. And it's a story about the price of that escape, about the predators who circled, and about the exploitation disguised as mentorship, and about how in the most messed up, twist of all, transformation was both the trap and the key. This is a story about the runaways. And so naturally, it's a story about great music.
Starting point is 00:01:27 Unlike that clip I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called The Kids Are Not All Right, MK, one. I played you that loop because I can afford the rights to December 1963, oh what a night, by the four seasons. And why would I play you that specific slice of falsetto disco cheese, could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on March 16, 1976. And that was the day that teenagers Joan Jett, Sheree Curry, Lita Ford, Jackie Fox, and Sandy West,
Starting point is 00:02:06 released their debut album as The Runaways. And nothing in their lives or in the world of rock and roll would ever be the same again. On this episode, Rebellion, Escape, Predators, Exploitation, and the White Hot Cherry Bomb that was The Runaways. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is this Graceland. 13-year-old Kerry Krauss wanted to be someone else. She didn't want this shitty apartment, the latest in a series of shitty apartments, and she didn't want the stepdad with the bad temper either. She didn't want the view of the ocean and the horizon.
Starting point is 00:03:15 all this vastness and nowhere to go. Views like these inspired awe in some people, but to carry, being here, being in Long Beach, California, it was suffocating. Nothing but the repressions of polite society bearing down on her. She needed an out. But first, she turned inward, writing songs inspired by David Bowie,
Starting point is 00:03:38 not only her idol, but the template for who she now wanted to become. Bowie was once someone else, someone completely different. And one day he just up and left the man known as David Jones behind, and he escaped David Jones, and now he was the star man, he was Ziggy, he was Aladdin Seine. David Bowie gave you permission to escape. Escape from the world you lived in, but more importantly,
Starting point is 00:04:03 escape from whoever the world wanted you to be. So Carrie altered the spelling of her first name from C-A-R-R-I-E to K-A-R-I, Carrie Krause became Carrie Chrome. And then Carrie Chrome escaped for real. She stood on the side of the road and stuck out her thumb, hitched a ride and went inland, where she took a long hit off the joint that was being passed around and slung her head back,
Starting point is 00:04:31 watching the pink and red and orange neon lights bleed into the night sky. 1975, Hollywood. Down on Sunset Boulevard, latchkey kids from the suburbs were gravizing, to Rodney's English disco, ground zero for all things glam and glitter, and best of all, transgressive. Gary Chrome climbed out of the car, slammed the door shut, and watched as the strangers who'd given her a lift drove off into the distance. She had no idea how'd she get back home, but who cared? She wasn't going back there, not in any
Starting point is 00:05:08 meaningful way, at least. This was the place. These were her people. The girls who looked like the boys and the boys who looked like the girls, the rooster hair, the rhinestones, the sequins and platform heels, all of its soundtrack, not by Captain Nanteneal or the fucking Eagles band, but by the New York dolls, T-Rex, a suite, and that permanent badass of leather-clad rock and roll, Susie Quatro. Carrie took it all in. For the first time in a long time, she felt at ease. But it wasn't enough to simply be there in the crowd.
Starting point is 00:05:46 Carrie Crome would be an active participant. She wanted to be the one to write the songs of Tomorrow. The ones local legend DJ Chuck E. Star would spin for this glamorous crowd. It was a crowd that on any given night included everyone from Robert and Bonzo of Led Zeppelin to Ray and Dave of the kinks to the once boy king himself, Elvis Presley. Who knows? She could run into Iggy Pop or Elton John, slipped from a page of her lyrics, maybe even run into Bowie himself. But it wasn't Bowie.
Starting point is 00:06:16 or Iggy or Elton that Carrie Crone met when she went to Hollywood. Instead, she was introduced to another songwriter and music producer, a man named Kim Fowley. Folly's resume was scattershot, but impressive. He'd written for Warren Zyvon, Alice Cooper, and The Birds, and produced songs by Gene Vincent and Jonathan Richmond. But what really mattered to Carrie was that he seemed genuinely interested in her songs. He said she had real talent and that with his guidance,
Starting point is 00:06:48 she could be somebody, somebody else. And so, on her 14th birthday, Carrie Chrome signed a contract with the 36-year-old Kim Fowley to write songs for his production company. The $100 a month that she got paid simply to do what she loved was empowering. So was the fact that Fowley loved her next idea,
Starting point is 00:07:09 which was to put together an all-girl rock band to play her songs. But we're kicking. Carrie saw autonomy, self-reliance, and girl power. Kim Folly saw something more sinister. The band he would assemble would be marketed not just as girls, but as underage girls. Their lead singer, Cherie Curry,
Starting point is 00:07:29 a blonde valley girl would be their rock and roll Lolita, just like Sue Lyons in that Stanley Kubrick movie. Along with Joan Jett and Lita Ford on guitar, Sandy West on drums, and Jackie Fox on bass, all of them, 15 or 16 years old at the time. The band that Kim Fawley soon christened, the runaways, weren't just avatars of teenage rebellion and juvenile delinquency. They were jail-baited.
Starting point is 00:07:56 Okay, so listen up. Before we continue with this story, I need to set the table for just how fucked up this era of rock and roll was. We've talked about this in some detail before, but it needs to be said again. Kim Fowley wasn't the only one here being a total creep. was the same time that Jimmy Page and David Bowie and so many other powerful musicians were sleeping with underage girls. This is when Ringo Starr had a number one hit song called You're 16,
Starting point is 00:08:25 which has the refrain, You're 16, You're Beautiful, and You're Mine. This is when a journalist in a cover story for the Rock Magazine, Crawdadi, wrote this about watching The Runaways perform, and I quote, suddenly, I am overcome with the urge to jack off against the stage and get my teeth kicked out by a vicious roadie, clawed my way through a thousand demented teenagers puking cheap wine and looted out of their cerebral cortexes just so I could touch the platform boots of these 16-year-old girls, unquote. This journalist, by the way, Charles M. Young. He was 25 years old when he wrote this, and he went on to become the editor at Rolling Stone. Now, as totally gross as that is, it was 16-year-old Cherie Curry, the runaway's lead singer,
Starting point is 00:09:14 who had the idea to buy a revealing corset that she saw in a shop window on Sunset Boulevard and use it as a stage prop. Every show when it came time to perform her signature song, Cherry Bomb, which Joan Jett and Kim Fowley reportedly wrote for her in 30 minutes, she would change out of her silver-lumet jumpsuit and into the corset. In her mind, she was the one in power, not the skeevy journalist dry-humping the stage or the manager orchestrating some dirty old man fantasy. In her mind, she was simply doing what her hero was.
Starting point is 00:09:44 David Bowie had done before her. And if Cherie was Bowie, then Joan was Susie Quadro, and Jackie was Jean Simmons of Kiss, and Lita was Deep Purple's Richie Blackmore, and Sandy was Queen's Roger Taylor. This is how they saw themselves, as equals to the rock stars who inspired them. From the jump, the runaways had the attitude, the drive, and the chops to keep up with their idols. And with Kim Fowley's industry contacts, many doors were being open for them. Before too long, Cheap Trick and Tom Peggy, were opening for them.
Starting point is 00:10:17 But it was what was happening behind closed doors that was truly horrifying. In her memoir, Sharii Curry writes that Kim Fowley once had sex with a visibly intoxicated adult woman in front of the entire band so that they could learn, in his words, quote, the right way to fuck, unquote. Jackie Fox later alleged that Fowley drugged and raped her in front of a crowd of people, immediately following the runaway's debut show on New Year's Eve, in 1975, and Carrie Crone was only 14 when she said Folly masturbated on her. While Jackie tamped down feelings of shame and disgust and shock over what happened to her,
Starting point is 00:10:59 Carrie was not so equipped to compartmentalize, and she spiraled, watching her teenage dream unraveled before her eyes. She'd been taken advantage of, sexually assaulted, watched it happened to others too, and now Kim Fowley was taking credit for the songs Carrie had written and was even denying her royalties. So Carrie split, dropped out of school, became addicted to drugs, and like her hero David Bowie, became someone else for the second time in her young life.
Starting point is 00:11:28 But this time, her life wasn't art, her life imitated art. Soon, Carrie Crone was living on streets, crashing on couches, and Carrie was no longer one of the runaways. Instead, she was simply a runaway. And when her friends and the band, soon found themselves in real trouble far from home with no one else to turn to,
Starting point is 00:11:50 Kim Fowley kept betraying them, and they kept looking for new ways to escape. September, 1976, England. Joan Jett was pissed. This time, not at Kim Fowley, but at another man who'd better down. Robert Plant. Led Zeppelin's lead singer was as enamored with the runaways as the next jailbait chasing horn dog. In fact, Kim Fowley even got Robert. Plant, his own runaways t-shirt to wear. The girls all wore shirts that had their names printed
Starting point is 00:12:49 below the band's name, but for Robert Plant, below the runaway's logo, his red, Robert Loves Kim. That's not what Joan Jett was pissed off about, though. Give Robert Plant a t-shirt. Who cares? Give him a thousand t-shirts. Whatever would help the runaway's incredible self-titled debut album climb higher than number 194 on the Billboard album chart, which is where it had stalled since its release a few months prior. So far, it wasn't working. UK fans were way more into the record than people back in the States, and even England's own version of the so-called manufactured band controlled by a Svengali, the sex pistols took notice. Sid Vicious, for one, did more than notice.
Starting point is 00:13:29 He put his hands all over Joan's body, despite her protests. Next thing Sid knew, Sandy West was grabbing him by the lapels and tossing him into the Tim's. The runaways was all Sandy knew. It was the only stable thing that she had in her life. So if some safety pin wearing punk rocker was going to threaten that, Sandy would do what she had to in order to protect it. But I digress.
Starting point is 00:13:55 So back to the story, there was Joan Jett, along with the rest of the band, standing at a dock in Dover, waiting for the ferry to take them to Paris, where their manager, Scott Anderson, told them that the show that night was already sold out. And this is where Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin comes in. Back in Los Angeles at one of their shows at the Starwood, Robert had shown up in the runaway's dressing room. With his locks of Greek god hair and equally godlike smile, the girls were all over.
Starting point is 00:14:27 Joan Jett tried to play a cool, rocking that trademark Joan Jett attitude, the swagger, the ambiguous look that said she was either about to fuck you up or rock your face off, but it was hard to play a cool, seeing as though the line for the show that night stretched down the block and around the corner. And it was hard to keep your cool,
Starting point is 00:14:43 as Joan demonstrated when some dude put his fat hands on Cherie's legs and ripped her stockings right off that night. Fat-handed dude got a face full of Joan's metallic platform boot. And now, standing on the shore in Dover, England, exhausted, ready to collapse on the incoming ferry, Joan wanted to put that metallic platform boot to the face of Robert Plant. Because a police inspector from Scotland Yard had detained Joan in the rest of the band, preventing them from going to France,
Starting point is 00:15:14 and it was Robert Plant's fault. Flanked by a couple of officers, the inspector ordered the girls to empty their bags. Hotels in England were reporting that items had gone missing from rooms that the runaways had stayed in. In British law enforcement, as it had proven so definitively years earlier in its relentless persecution of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, were eager to put these smug American rock and roll girls in their place. First, Sandy turned over her back. A hotel hairdryer came tumbling out. And then Joan turned her bag upside down and all sorts of hotel room keys rained onto the ground.
Starting point is 00:15:52 More bags were searched and more keys were found, more than 30 in total. Fucking Robert Plant. Back at the Starwood, Joan had asked him what were the best souvenirs to get while on tour. And Robert had told her all about his ritual of collecting room keys from every hotel he stayed at. And now this little piece of harmless advice had landed the runaways not just in hot water, but incredibly. in jail. Joan Jett was grabbing the bars of her cell, her knuckles white, her face red, trying to shake him loose, and screaming at the top of her lungs. She was the oldest in this group and had just turned 18, and she was getting the adult treatment. So while the rest of the band could be together
Starting point is 00:16:38 inside a holding room with bunk beds, Joan was freaking out inside a cold cramped jail cell all on her own. Not that things were going any better over in that holding room. Tensions were high. The girls had been informed that they'd have to remain behind bars for at least as long as it would take for the cops to retrieve their luggage and search it. The thing was, their luggage had already been put on that ferry over to France. So it was going to be a minute to get it back to England. And when they did, Cherie, for one, was freaking out about what they'd find inside. Because in one of those bags was her makeup case. And inside that makeup case, Shari had hidden a bunch of cocaine.
Starting point is 00:17:18 Technically, the Coke belonged to the runaway's torment. manager Scott Anderson. Scott was Jones age, 18. But those extra couple of years experience over the rest of the girls were clutch when it came to procure the necessary ingredients of the rock and roll lifestyle. If you needed your cocaine cut up in neat little lines, Scott was your guy. If you needed some prescription-grade downers, like Placidil, Scott was your guy. Booze, Scott could obviously get that for you as well. The girls were supposed to have tutors out on tour with them. This was one of the many promises that Kim Folly so willfully failed to deliver on. Instead, they had guys like Scott. And now Sheree Curry had Scott Anderson's
Starting point is 00:17:57 problem smuggled inside her luggage. Sherry was sweating like crazy, doubled over where she was sitting on the concrete floor. She felt ill thinking about what would happen if those drugs were found. She was in a foreign country, and she was only 16. The placidils were wearing off and now panic, dread and sickness deep in her stomach began to consume her. She and Scott had been engaged in a sexual relationship on the road, as well as what Shari thought was a deeply emotional relationship. Surely as a result of this, Shari assumed, Scott was prepared to do the chivalrous thing and tell the cops that if it was found, the Coke was his. But that night, when Scott paid a visit to the girls in Laka, Scott made it very clear that he intended to do no such thing. What he
Starting point is 00:18:46 intended and what Kim Fowley also intended was that Shari would take the fall and face the consequences. The night felt like an eternity. At some point, the guards took pity on Joan and moved her from her solitary jail cell to the holding room with everybody else. By the time the sun came up, the sickness in the pit of Cherie's stomach was overwhelming. They heard footsteps coming down the hall.
Starting point is 00:19:13 All five runaways craned their necks to get a look at who was coming to visit. It was the inspector from Scotland Yard who had originally arrested them. He had news. Their luggage had been located Sherey's heart rate spite. She waited for him to hold up her makeup bag and ask who exactly this belonged to.
Starting point is 00:19:31 But the inspector did no such thing. The luggage was clean and they were free to go. Somehow the cocaine had been overlooked. Sheree breathed a huge sigh of relief. Even though Scott and Kim Fowley had left her up to dry, she still managed to dodge a bullet. That is, until she returned home to the States, and discovered the true source of the sickness she'd been experiencing.
Starting point is 00:19:59 Sheree Carrey was 16 years old and pregnant. We'll be right back after this word, word, word. Joan Jett hammered out the opening riff for the runaway song, Born to be bad, under Gibson Melody Maker. Her bright red leather jumpsuit shimmered under the subtle stage lights, and her shock of black hair stood defiant as the song's slow start, an unabashed girl group homage, suddenly turned into loud, slashing power chords that nodded a punk rock, no doubt one of the old girl group genres many descendants.
Starting point is 00:20:46 Sandy came thundering in on the drums with Jackie and Lee the close behind on bass and guitar respectively. The stage lights exploded, and then Joan belted out the title chorus into the microphone with a sneer. The audience went nuts. Cherie was a killer frontwoman, no doubt, but Joan had that underdog gear like Pete Townsend next to Roger Daltry. Joan had the place mesmerized. And then something caught Joan's eye. First, it was just a glimmer out there in the crowd. One of the lights catching a piece of metal,
Starting point is 00:21:18 and then the metal erupted in bright red and orange, and the sound of machine gun firing drowned out the sound of the band. People in the audience hit the floor, and others ran screaming for the exit. Joan felt bullets ripped through her body. She collapsed on the stage floor, crying out in pain, looking around to see if anyone else had been hit. And then she looked over at her guitar lying next to her.
Starting point is 00:21:39 It was covered in blood, but it wasn't her blood. She opened her eyes wider to make sure she was actually seeing what she thought she was seeing. It was so clear to her now, the guitar was bleeding. The Gibson's body was riddled in bullet holes, and the blood was just oozing from it. Suddenly the pain got worse. It was like she wasn't just experiencing her own pain, but she could feel what the guitar was feeling, and it was unbearable. Joan's eyes went wider than before, and she opened her mouth to scream for help for someone when all of a sudden...
Starting point is 00:22:10 Joan shot up in bed, yelling out into the darkness. She was covered in sweat, and her heart was practically beating out of her chest. She'd had nightmares like this one before, but never this intense. And though this latest nightmare, like the rest, hadn't been real, she couldn't help but feel that something this crazy and this bloody could potentially be coming around the bend. Being a runaway had become an endurance test. As their notoriety grew, Joan and the girls were now being demeaned by what seemed to be an entire world of Kim Follies, by random older men who had no problem calling them bitches, dykes, and cunts every day,
Starting point is 00:22:53 just for being women who dared being in a band with zero swinging dicks among them. Some days it felt like the assholes outnumbered the real fans. Those same assholes spent their own damn money to buy tickets to the runaway. shows, only to heckle the girls and throw shit at them on stage. It was enough to make you want to ditch the show early, run into the dressing room, cry for hours, and wonder why the hell you were putting yourself through it all. For Joan Jett, and also for Lita Ford, the negative experiences only harden their resolve and thicken their skin. For Sandy West, there was simply no way she could give in to the alternative. Go back to a normal high schooler's routine or even worse, the life of an
Starting point is 00:23:35 ordinary young adult, go back to reality? That was a fate worse than death. But for the others, the stakes were even higher. Sheree had returned home from the runaway's 1976 European tour pregnant with Scott Anderson's child. She was 16 years old without the means of the ability to raise a baby. So she decided to get an abortion. And while that was happening, Kim Fowley kept the proverbial show on the road. He ushered the runaways into the beach, Boys' Brothers Studios in Santa Monica to record their second album, Queens of Noise, while Sheree was still recovering. Because of this, she only sang lead on half of the album's songs, while Joan sang the other half. The record was released in January of 1977. The same week the Ramones
Starting point is 00:24:27 released their sophomore album, Leave Home, and the same year that the runaways conquered Japan like they were the second coming of the Beatles. Keep in mind that this was one year before cheap trick, the band that used to open for the runaways had hit pay dirt at BudaCon. For a few weeks on the other end of the world, the runaways finally got the respect they deserved. But unlike cheap trick, all that love on tour in Japan didn't translate to a greater love than thus a bigger profile in the States. Because by the middle of 1977, there was no love lost within the ranks of the runaways. The base was beautiful. It was a white 1965, Gibson Thunderbird.
Starting point is 00:25:11 Just immaculate, and it sounded incredible. For Jackie Fox, the bass was more than just an instrument. It was a representation of how far she'd come. When she first joined the runaways, she could hardly play.
Starting point is 00:25:26 She was so inexperienced, in fact, that Kim Fowley brought in Nigel Harrison, Blondie's bass player, to lay down Jackie's tracks on the runaway's debut album. Jackie worked hard to get better, and now, in addition to being able to play, she knew from playing next to Joan and Lita every night how to strike the right rock and roll pose while doing so.
Starting point is 00:25:47 But where she'd once looked up to Lita Ford, these days it seemed all Lita wanted to do was push Jackie around. Maybe it was because Jackie was an easy mark. She was a nerd by trade, a straight-A student who, before joining the runaways, have been planning to skip her senior year of high school so that she could attend UCLA full-time. Whatever the reason, Jackie felt bullied from all sides. The girls in the band, Kim Fowley, their crew. She could understand the guys, but Lita? There was an unspoken rule that the girls all protected each other,
Starting point is 00:26:22 though Jackie had to admit she hadn't felt very protected. Ever since Fowley sexually assaulted her and no one in the band seemed to want to acknowledge it had happened. At least she had the base. After sound checking at one of the runaway's final shows in Japan, she went to place it on its stand on the stage and noticed that the first. the stand was unstable. She grabbed one of the guys on the crew and asked him to find her a better stand so that the base wouldn't fall over and get damaged. She knew she shouldn't have trusted anyone on that tour to help her with anything. The roadie didn't listen. No one listened. And the stand
Starting point is 00:26:59 was never replaced. And the Gibson Thunderbird tumbled over and the neck snapped. And then Jackie snapped. She went to her hotel room, her head throbbing, her pulse pounding, tears of rage and sadness and panic running down her face. She couldn't keep it all in check anymore. It was all coming to the surface. The pressure and the mental and psychological abuse. The rape. She didn't recognize herself.
Starting point is 00:27:27 She had become her worst fear. Someone else. Jackie picked up a Coke bottle and threw it against the wall. It shattered into pieces just like her thunderbird. She grabbed one of the glass shards and she jammed it into her flesh. The blood was running now. She dragged a piece of glass in a straight, jagged line, across four inches of her arm, more blood. The pain on the outside, finally a match for the pain on the inside.
Starting point is 00:27:55 The room began to spin. She must have been screaming because the door to a room suddenly flung open and Sheree busted it. And then, Jackie was in an ambulance on her way to the hospital, where she would begin a long journey back to the person that she used to be. All right, guys, I'll get back to a runaway story in just a second. but real quick, I wanted to mention that we always dig up way more in our research than we're able to include in our full episodes here. Like, for instance, this week, we uncovered this whole thing about how there is a church out there that worships Joan Jett as a god, literally, for real. It's such a
Starting point is 00:28:47 crazy story that we made this mini episode about it. And if you're a member of Disgrace and All Access, you can listen to that crazy story right now, along with all of our other weekly mini episodes that we've got out there on a ton of artists. All you got to do is go to disgracehandpod.com to find out more and become a member today. All right, back to our story. Sandy West stuck the barrel of the gun down the deadbeat's throat. And the deadbeat swallowed it, his teeth clattering around the cold hard steel. Now that she had his attention, Sandy passed along the message she'd been hired to deliver. Pay up, fuckstick, or next time this pistol will be the last thing you ever taste.
Starting point is 00:29:28 And then the smell of rock-bottomed depravity. The deadbeat had shit his pants. The 1980s were far from glamorous for Sandy West, former drummer for the runaways. She worked construction. She tended bar. She free-based cocaine and did crystal meth. And at her lowest, she found herself taxying, which is a term that I was unfamiliar with, but according to Sandy, is the active collecting drug debts for dealers. It was this erratic and dangerous lifestyle, which led to Sandy being arrested multiple times
Starting point is 00:30:05 and eventually doing jail time. Surprisingly, perhaps most of all to Sandy, was that jail was the first place where she had felt stability in a decade or so since the band had split up. Jail to Sandy was like Jackie's Thunderbird bass or Carrie Crome's alter eco. It kept her cool and calm and out of trouble,
Starting point is 00:30:25 at least for a short while. Because just like the runaways, Sandy's time on the inside was finite, a flash in the pan. And so when she was, she got out, she went right back into the fire of an untethered life. She died of cancer in 2006 at just the age of 47. For nearly 30 years, all Sandy wanted to do was get the band back together. Back in 1977, following a mental breakdown in Japan, Jackie Fox had been replaced on bass by
Starting point is 00:30:55 Vicki Blue. Sheree quit soon after, leaving Joan to shoulder the weight and lead the runaways as a quartet. They made two more albums, but even after they fired Kim Folly, they still weren't able to come together as a cohesive unit. On New Year's Eve in 1978, the runaways played their last show. It wasn't until 2015 the year of Kim Fowley's death that Jackie Fox went public with her allegations that Fowley had raped her. And it was another eight years in 2003 when Carrie Crome sued Fowley's estate for multiple sexual assaults, she says she suffered at the Svens Gali's hands. Revelations and lawsuits such as these continue to expose the system that enabled men like
Starting point is 00:31:38 Folly to do what they did, exploit, corrupt, manipulate, and control. But the runaways were never about Kim Folly. The runaways were about escape, reinvention, about becoming who you are, for real. What Carrie understood when she changed her name, what Sheree understood when she stepped into that corset, and what Joan understood every time she was. put on that red leather jumpsuit was a rock and roll truth. You get to create your own myth. You get to turn yourself into the thing the world told you you could never be. David Bowie became Ziggy Stardust. Carrie Krauss became Carrie Chrome. And every girl who
Starting point is 00:32:22 heard the runaways play Cherry Bomb on a shitty AM radio or later saw Joan Jett sing bad reputation and heavy rotation on MTV wasn't just inspired to form a band. They were inspired to be whoever the hell they wanted to be to escape the person polite society told them they had to be and instead become the person they needed to be. The runaways didn't just kick open a door. They obliterated the idea that the door ever existed. That is rock and roll. And rock and roll is no disgrace.
Starting point is 00:32:57 I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgraceland. All right guys, thanks for listening to another episode of Discrace. Graceland, Apple podcast listeners, make sure you have auto downloads turned on. Listen, guys, I'm wondering, for the question of the week this week, obviously, runaways, great girl group, great all-girl group, I should say. We want to know here at this Graceland, which female artists do you want to hear covered in the coming episodes of this podcast? We've obviously covered a bunch. We got a bunch more slated for release this year.
Starting point is 00:33:45 But I want to know who you guys are into, who you want to learn more about, who you want us to cover. Let me know, 617-906-6638 voicemail. text hit me up with your answers. We might play them on the after party coming up right after this. Hit me up on social at Disgracelandpod. Discracelandpod at gmail.com to email me. All right.
Starting point is 00:34:04 Here comes some credits. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it.
Starting point is 00:34:22 And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelampod.com slash membership. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook at DisgracelandPod. And on YouTube at YouTube.com slash at DisgracelandPod. Rockeroma.

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