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COVER STORY: The Donnas
What Do the Donnas Wanna Do With Their Lives? They Wanna Rock!
by Michael Ansaldo
It's Friday, the first of seven consecutive days of rain. Although
the downpour has let up for the time being, it has left the corner of 924 Gilman St. a
dank and miserable thoroughfare for the two lines of people snaking up the road in either
direction from the club entrance. Tonight is the first of three shows commemorating
Lookout! Records' 10th anniversary, a weekend-long celebration with performances by the
best of the label's roster, and inclement weather is no match for this crowd's enthusiasm.
Inside, it's a sweat box. The club is nearly filled to it's 600-person capacity, but
outside there's still a steady caravan of cars dropping off passengers. This is the
largest crowd the venue has hosted since Lookout! artists Operation Ivy played their final
show here in May of 1989.
When the Bay Area's reigning rock 'n' roll teen queens take the stage, each in a pastel
T-shirt with the name Donna and an initial ironed on the front--vocalist Donna A.,
guitarist Donna R., bassist Donna F. and drummer Donna C.--it is difficult to gauge
whether it is a punk-rock poker face or just the sheer volume of people that keeps the
crowd motionless. For their part, the Donnas do little to acknowledge the audience,
launching headlong into a relentless 30-minute set of garage rock with no in-between-song
banter.
Midway back from the stage there are two fans giving the Donnas rapt attention. One of the
women is clutching a rolled-up poster and dancing wildly, while the other peers over the
shoulders of the men in front of her, trying to get an unobstructed view. They are not
assuaged when, finally unable to resist the rhythm, a cluster of kids in front of them
starts slam dancing. Nor do they pause when the first woman's daughter rockets the band
into the party anthem "Rock 'n' Roll Machine" with a pounding snare drum and the
second woman's daughter, in a voice that is one part tender, three parts tough, sneers an
indictment of parental discretion: "Where you gonna go? What you gonna do?/I ain't
even going steady/Don't do this, don't do that/I'll grow up when I'm ready."
Two days before the show, 18-year-old Donna A. (aka Brett Anderson) is kickin' it at her
parents' Palo Alto home. She recently finished her first semester at U.C. Berkeley.
Despite the Donnas' well-documented disdain for school on their just released second album
American Teenage Rock 'n' Roll Machine, everyone in the band has shown some desire to
continue their education. Donnas R. and F. (18-year-old Allison Robertson and 19-year-old
Maya Ford, respectively), finished their first semester at U.C. Santa Cruz, and Donna C.
(19-year-old Torry Castellano), plans to attend New York Universtiy.
Anderson's freshman course list was typically humanities heavy, with two dance classes, an
English class and a linguistics class ("I'm very, very far from [declaring] a
major," she says laughing). She swears she'll never live in the dorms again after
having roomed with a young woman who played cymbals in the Cal band. "She used to
practice [in our dorm room] too," she tells me over the phone. "I don't
understand what she had to practice for."
Her future campus living arrangements may be a moot point, however. She and her two
collegiate bandmates have decided to take their second semester off in order to tour
behind the new album. "For all intents and purposes, it's supposed to be
temporary," Anderson says, "but when I signed the [form] to say I was canceling
[my enrollment] it kind of felt like it might be a little longer."
To their credit, the Donnas managed to balance the world of academia and the more alluring
one of rock 'n' roll for five years, ever since the four classmates started their first
band Ragady Anne in the eighth grade at Jordan Middle School. Despite their limited
experience, the band churned out loud-and-fast covers by their favorite bands, trading on
their idea of what a rock group should be.
"That's why I thought Ragady Anne were so fantastic," says Earthwise
Productions' Mark Weiss, a Palo Alto promoter who gave the band an early gig. "They
were really good, and yet I wasn't sure if they knew what they were doing. They were kind
of trying to act like adults, or trying to act like rock stars, trying to act like people
they saw on MTV. They weren't faking anything; they were just being themselves. They were
unconscious of how good they were and how cool it was. It was rare to see such young
people kicking ass like that."
Weiss wasn't the only one moved by their raw energy. Darin Raffaelli had just gotten
comfortable with the idea of pulling the plug on his Radio X records when he saw Ragady
Anne perform. "I had given up on the idea of putting out any more records, but when I
saw them I approached them and asked them if they wanted to [put a record out]," says
the 32-year-old over the phone from his office in Half Moon Bay. "I had written songs
for bands before, and I asked them if they wanted to record some songs that I had written
and they said yeah. At the time they hadn't put out any records and the idea was really
exciting to them."
The resulting High School Yum Yum single, released under the name "The Donnas,"
sported a pair of Raffaelli-penned bubble-punk tunes--"A Boy Like You" and
"Let's Rab!"--perfectly suited to the then-15- and 16-year-olds. A second
single, "Let's Go Mano!," followed a similar formula. Although the Donnas were
putting their own spin on the songs, this wasn't exactly their sound.
"I think [my songs] were a little too bubblegum for them," Raffaelli says.
"They wanted more of a heavy sound."
In fact, their love for bands like Metallica, Kiss and Motley Crue was so strong that they
maintained a whole separate band as an outlet for it. The harder-rocking Electrocutes
featured the same lineup, but the members went by their own names and denied any
affiliation with their alter egos. In a Palo Alto Weekly interview with the Electrocutes
last year, they fueled the mythical rivalry by talking a little trash about the
"goody-goody" Donnas. Still, it was the Donnas who were making records, and, now
collaborating on the songwriting with Raffaelli, they put out one more single and their
self-titled debut album (which Lookout! will be reissuing later this year).
In rock 'n' roll, there is a long history of male auteurs wielding their influence over
female artists and being credited to varying degrees with their success--the Ronnettes had
Phil Spector, the Shangri-Las had Shadow Morton and the Runaways had Kim Fowley. It's been
suggested that the Donnas function as part of a similar arrangement. Many in the local
press heard the rumors. And Raffaelli heard them.
"I get less credit for bands that I've written all the songs for than with the
Donnas, who do most of the work," he says. "I probably encourage them more than
anything. It wasn't like I was telling them what to do. They had their own ideas. I think
[encouragement] is what they needed because there was a lot of talent there."
So how does he define his self-professed "murky" relationship with the band?
Coach? Manager? The fifth Donna? "I just consider myself probably their No. 1
fan."
While Anderson shrugs off the speculations with a cavalier "people can think what
they want," Robertson is clearly more affected. "When people say that we don't
write our songs or that Darin is this big Kim Fowley guy, it really upsets me," she
says. "People think some guy writes our songs and then we learn them and play them. I
think they just want it to be like that. I think people just want us to be another Spice
Girls."
Robertson's first semester at U.C. Santa Cruz, where she roomed with Ford in the campus'
infamous Porter Hall exposed her to all sorts of wicked attentions from the dorm's
art-damaged student residents ("The only nice person we met would not leave us alone.
He came over every 20 minutes," she says.) including one catty clique that formed an
"anti-Donnas club." But it didn't prepare her for the cold condescension of
public scrutiny.
"This has only been happening to us recently," she says. "I guess our songs
weren't good enough before for people to say someone was writing them for us."
Even more cutting was a recent article by pop critic Gina Arnold in the San Jose Metro,
which proposed to lift the veil on the Donnas myth, exposing them for their
"high-caste social standing" and reducing them to a "novelty band."
"It really hurt my feelings," Robertson says. "It's all false. It said we
were rich and popular in high school, which was really wrong. It says that our parents are
all wealthy, middle class and were able to afford to get us nice equipment and lessons,
and none of us has had lessons. And we had shitty equipment for about four years--I was
borrowing people's amplifiers. It just really made me mad because she was trying to say we
don't deserve to be singing about cheeba and and we don't deserve to be saying we like to
cause trouble when we're all from Palo Alto and we're all rich. She had totally the wrong
angle because she's never even called us."
I don't really consider us punk, although I don't see where else we fit in," Anderson
says. She is responding to the Donnas' recent nominations for both a Wammy and a Bammy in
the "Best Punk Band" category. She may claim not to have an alternative to the
tenuous categorization the press has imposed on the Donnas, but she actually provides the
answer exactly 20 times on the new album. The Donnas are "rock 'n' roll" in the
most primordial sense, from Anderson's plain everygirl vocals to their presentation of the
band as a gang to the immediacy of teenagers singing about hedonistic teenage concerns.
While most of their twentysomething counterparts are using pop music to sort out childhood
traumas or wax reflective on their midlife-to-midlife crises, the Donnas' American Teenage
Rock 'n' Roll Machine is pure, unbridled adolescent id. From the album's opening
lines--"Rock 'n' roll machine/I'm an American teenage raider/You better be in by 11
o'clock/But I never come in till later"--to the closing track, "Shake in the
Action," the Donnas remind us of rock 'n' roll's original artless intent, and, for 24
and a half minutes, they re-animate the whole form.
The Donnas have finally begun to assimilate the two halves of their split personality --a
process helped along by the fact that some of the songs on the new album began as
Electrocutes' numbers --bringing a gritty garage aesthetic to the sleek hard rock they
love, barbing every hook so that they never lose hold of the listener. And Robertson's
searing leads suggest that she's given Ace Frehely's solo album more than a few spins.
American Teenage Rock 'N' Roll Machine is the sound of a high school band playing in your
parents' living room during a Saturday night kegger.
True to their girl-group ancestry, the Donnas invoke plenty of teenage rebellion but catch
it up with the '90s. Donna A. doesn't sit around idly waiting for the leader of the pack
to pick her up after school; she is her own rebel. On "Looking for Blood," the
Donnas take the catty sentiment of Blondie's "Rip Her to Shreds" to a far more
literal--and lethal--conclusion: "Don't try to run, don't you try to hide/Come to me
or I'll come to you/It just takes two slashes of my switchblade, baby/Gonna make a pretty
mess of you." And gone is the adolescent romanticism of early Donnas lyrics like
"I wanna be with a boy like you." Taking its place on tracks like "Outta My
Mind" are more boldfaced overtures: "Are you ready to party with me, are you
ready to give me some sin/'Cause I've been waiting all night long, so c'mon and stick it
in."
Which raises the question of what the Donnas' parents think about the lyrics. "They
pretend not to know," Anderson says laughing nervously. "Every once in awhile
they'll be, like, 'What is that word?' It's sort of polite ignorance."
Well, without even their parents to impede their success, their remains only one possible
obstacle. What happens when time, mileage and responsibilities begin to slow the gears of
the teenage rock 'n' roll machine? "It's not about being young," Anderson says
confidently. "It's about being able to have fun, and I don't think getting older is
really going to change that."