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New & Cool: Nothing Pretty About The Donnas' Punk
Band of young female punks turns '90s rock on its head with KISS-style antics and Ramones-like sound
Addicted To Noise's Colin Devenish reports:
SAN FRANCISCO -- Teen-age punksters the Donnas seem to move easily in and out of the then and now.
Then -- say the early 1960s, when girl groups first climbed the charts -- female musicians played in bands wearing matching outfits and singing songs about their boyfriends coming back.
Now -- the Donnas step on stage with their matching T-shirts, each in her own pair of tight pants and Chuck Taylor's, and sing about what they're going to do to their boyfriends when they get back. Singer Donna A. delivers libido-driven lyrics such as "Yeah, I wanna touch ya/ Yeah, I wanna grab ya."
Then -- the legendary TV personality Ed Sullivan would have squirmed out of his tired, old slacks, if he'd had them on his popular show.
Now -- Lookout! Records is planning to release their album American Teenage Rock 'N' Roll Machine at the end of January, just as most of the band members begin their second semester in college.
"I hate school," Donna R. said after a recent gig at the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco. "I don't wanna go back. Fuck school. There aren't any careers I want to be besides a rock star."
Still, the young quartet, made up of three college students and a recent dropout, are in a decidedly enviable position. After all, the 18-year-old band members spend much of their time away from their scholastics writing witty, pop-punk songs such as their new one, "Rock 'N' Roll Machine".
And to hear them tell it, none has more pressing worries than where and when they'll do laundry on their 44-day, 42-show tour in support of their debut, which kicks off Feb. 13 and finds them playing behind headliners Groovie Ghoulies. Donna C. is aiming high with her hopes for the album and tour. "My goal is to get so well-off I don't have to go back to school," she said after the Bottom of the Hill show. "I mean what do you do, get out of school and then get a job?" It's a sentiment quickly echoed by the rest of the band members.
It's this kind of carefree attitude that transfers well to the stage. At a typical performance, Donna R. snaps off raucous guitar licks worthy of her guitar hero -- KISS spaceman Ace Frehley -- seemingly with the same attention she gives to the gum she's chewing. Donna F.'s face is obscured under a flailing sea of brown hair as she thumps her bass strings. Meanwhile, Donna C. is almost buried behind her drum kit, surfacing from time-to-time to smash the cymbals with a vengeance.
And then there's Donna A., who hops from foot to foot as she delivers more saucy lyrics from "You Make Me Hot", such as "You can't run/ you can't hide/ I just want to get you tonight" in a cheerful, girlish tone.
The Donnas' live act is full of the kind of rock stage-posturing that spawned movies such as the rock 'n' roll parody Spinal Tap. Donnas F. and R. routinely wield their respective weapons, dueling face-to-face and back-to-back. And the quartet closed their Bottom of the Hill gig with a fist-pumping cheer they didn't learn in high school, "Ra, ra, ra, shish boom bah, I wanna fuck you in the back of my car."
Having been together since the eighth grade, the fearless foursome -- who typically wear T-shirts emblazoned with their respective Donna names on stage -- just graduated in June from Palo Alto High School in Northern California, and are on a mission to sell their brand of juvenile-delinquent rock and revive a punk-rock attitude they say is lost on their generation.
While their music may sing the praises of a youth misspent, they are far from your average delinquents. Bassist Donna F. and guitarist Donna R., for instance, matriculated at the University of California at Santa Cruz, while singer Donna A. is enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley. Skinstress Donna C. was poised and ready to head to New York University, before her fellow Donnas wrangled her into staying on the Left Coast in the best interest of the band. She has since signed up for and dropped out of a night class at a local community college and now has a job.
The band's heroes, make-up-clad glam-rock sensations KISS, cornered the market on these types of rock antics 20 years ago. And their punk predecessors, the Ramones, kept rock 'n' roll radio hummin' with songs full of "wannas" and "gottas" during the '70s and '80s.
But the Donnas clearly are blazing their own musical path. They're passionate about infamously outrageous '80s metal-band W.A.S.P. and blasČ about a recent trek to Japan. "We didn't really get paid for doing it, but at the end the guy gave us 50 bucks. We went for the experience and the food and the candy," said Donna C. of their 10-day stint in Yokohama and Tokyo.
And despite not treading a whole lot of new ground, the Donnas come off as the tape-delayed female answer to these rock gods of yore by resurrecting and reviving rock gimmicks that people never stopped wanting to like. "I don't really care for any of the bands on MTV," Donna F. said. "I feel weird saying it, but it feels like there's nothing really coming out these days."