Home
What's New
Band Info
Tour Dates
Albums
Songs
In the Press
Images
Fan Stuff
Links
Donna C!
Backstage
Rock n Roll
Machines
Radio!
Listen to your
favorite bands
like Kiss,
Cinderella, G'N'R
and of course
The Donnas
Out Loud
Donnas summer
by Johnny Ray Huston
I WAS SITTING at a table on the patio of Bottom of the Hill a few weeks ago when the Donnas started to play. After one song I decided to go in and look. This is what I saw: Four tough teenage girls in tight -- as in lacquered-on -- pants, each wearing a T-shirt with the name "Donna" (followed by an initial) in a cool font ironed on the front. Bassist Donna F. was hard to see, but I watched Donna R. sawing barre chords on a Les Paul. On drums, Donna C. shook her loosely pigtailed hair in sync with her beat. Front and center, Donna S. sang lyrics that brought a smile to her face -- lyrics about making out with boys and "smoking cheeba." I'll spare you the thoughtful-critic shtick. Two words summed up the Donnas: they ruled.
So does the Donnas' self-titled debut album, released this year on the Bay Area-based Super*teem! label. It unloads 14 classic punk-pop songs, 9 of them under two minutes long. Smart enough to grab madly at youth since it only comes once, the Donnas always get to the point fast. The word "wanna" is part of almost every chorus they write, and they "wanna" have fun "tonight" -- if not, they're "gonna" go "mano" (whatever that means) even sooner.
Musically, the Donnas wanna be your Joey Ramone (as if, in a real-life remake of Rock'n'Roll High School, four P.J. Soles clones formed their own rad band), and your Runaways, and your Shangri-Las. Thousands of audio also-rans owe a debt to "Beat on the Brat," "Cherry Bomb," and "Leader of the Pack," but the Donnas capture the spirit of those songs and add their own contemporary Cali vernacular. If the title refrain of "I'm Gonna Make Him Mine (Tonight)" has the catchiness of the greatest '60s girl-group hits, the blunt and funny line that follows it -- "I'm gonna get in his pants tonight" -- is pure summer lust circa 1997.
And even though it's an album track, "I'm Gonna Make Him Mine (Tonight)" is my favorite single of the year. Forget "MMMBop" -- the Donnas could kick Hanson's collective ass without breaking a sweat; they're experts at juvenile delinquency. At one point on The Donnas, a "Teenage Runaway" races from her own song into another, "Lana & Stevie," on which -- in a half-hearted concession to adult stability -- she works "at the record place." One of the album's two cheeba-smoking anthems, "Huff All Night," opens with the line "I'm gonna lock my door tonight" and ends with the blaring of police sirens.
Teen-tragedy records from past eras use similar sound effects. But on those records, girls cry over dead rebel boyfriends; on The Donnas, Donna A. is her own rebel, and she shows no remorse. Whereas the murderous narrator of the Whyte Boots' 1967 cult-catfight "Nightmare" sobs "I didn't wanna fight" on "Get Rid of That Girl," Donna A. happily chants, "I'm gonna hit her in the head / I'm gonna knock her down / I'm gonna drag her by the hair all over town." Elsewhere, forced to wait for some "Friday Fun," she draws out the final vowel sound of each line she sings, and her voice has just the right combination of excitement and boredom, melody and atonality, cuteness (a little) and toughness (a lot).
None of the Donnas are really named Donna (duh), but they are real teens -- one 17, three 18, and all four just graduated from Palo Alto High. Since they began practicing in Donna C.'s garage at the ripe old age of 13, they've honed the group-as-gang concept to a perfection that puts all adult rockers to shame. But no Kim Fowley puppetmaster is pulling their strings. The increasingly glam-oriented sound and look they unveiled at Bottom of the Hill stems from a current passion for Mtley Crže and Poison.
I lucked upon the band because they opened for Sleater-Kinney, who, as I've made obnoxiously clear, are my favorite band on the planet. Sleater-Kinney held onto their title that night. But I'll also remember May 31, 1997, as the night I first heard and saw the Donnas. In a single half-hour they leapt to number two on my personal hit parade. The only way they won't end up famous is if they decide they don't "wanna" be stars.