The Runaways – Cherry Bomb

The Runaways’ signature song didn’t exist until a fifteen-year-old walked into the wrong audition with the wrong song.

Cherie Currie walked into a rehearsal space in 1975 with one song ready to go: Peggy Lee’s “Fever,” the slow, smoky jazz standard she knew from Suzi Quatro’s harder take on it. The band couldn’t play it. Nobody in the room knew the arrangement, and the audition stalled before it started. So manager Kim Fowley pulled sixteen-year-old Joan Jett into another room and told her to start playing a riff. Within twenty to twenty-five minutes they had a chorus, a title built on Currie’s own name, and a song to hand back to the girl waiting outside. She sang it cold. By the time she finished, she was the lead singer of The Runaways.

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The chorus Fowley started — “Hello Daddy, hello Mom” — married to the riff Jett was jamming became “Cherry Bomb,” and it was the first song Jett ever wrote with a co-writer. Fowley later explained the title plainly: it played on Currie’s name and conjured a teenage firecracker, the kind that goes off on the Fourth of July. That was the image he was selling, and Currie, in a pink corset she bought at a small lingerie shop, sold it harder than anyone expected. The band was five teenage girls in Los Angeles playing loud, aggressive rock at a moment when the industry had no category for them.

They recorded it in March 1976 at Fidelity Recorders in Studio City, with Fowley producing for maximum rawness. The credited lineup was Currie on vocals, Jett on rhythm guitar, Lita Ford on lead, Sandy West on drums, and Jackie Fox on bass — though the bass on the track was actually played, uncredited, by session musician Nigel Harrison, later of Blondie. Ford, who has said the band chased the chunky, high-gain tone of Black Sabbath, delivered a snarling solo before a key change kicks the song into a higher gear. The whole thing runs two minutes and twenty seconds and never lets up.

America shrugged. Japan lost its mind.

At home, “Cherry Bomb” barely registered. It reached number 106 on Billboard’s Bubbling Under Hot 100 in the summer of 1976, never crossing into the Hot 100 proper, and plenty of American radio wanted nothing to do with a record about teenage rebellion sung by actual teenagers. It did better abroad, reaching number 57 in Australia. The song got a small push that fall when it turned up in the TV movie Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway starring Eve Plumb. But the real explosion happened across the Pacific.

Japan went for The Runaways in a way the United States never did. By the summer of 1977 they were reportedly the fourth-biggest imported act in the country, trailing only ABBA, Kiss, and Led Zeppelin, and when they landed for their tour, fans mobbed them at the airport in scenes Jett later compared to Beatlemania. They got their own TV special, and the Live in Japan album went gold. The band had toured relentlessly to get there, opening for acts from The Ramones to Van Halen and becoming fixtures at CBGB alongside Blondie, Television, and Talking Heads. But the same corset-and-jailbait image that made “Cherry Bomb” a sensation also boxed the band in, and the pressure on Currie hastened her exit in 1977.

The song outlived the band by decades. Jett re-cut it with the Blackhearts in 1984, and she and Currie reunited to record it again in 2010 for the video game Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock. It has turned up in Dazed and Confused, Guardians of the Galaxy, and the series The Boys and Mrs. America, and VH1 ranked it number 52 on its list of the 100 Greatest Hard Rock Songs. When Jett was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, she played it with Dave Grohl. Nearly fifty years on, a chorus written in under half an hour to rescue a stalled audition still sounds like the exact moment a generation of women decided to plug in and play louder than anyone had asked them to.