We are in 1970. Four young women in bell-bottom jeans, seen from the back, stuck together one for all and all for one, occupy a third of the immense rectangular panel of Sunset Boulevard, twice as noticeable as that of the Elton John’s new album. They seem to look at Los Angeles as Balzac’s Rastignac looks at Paris. Confident. Together. Their heads—we only see the long hair—exceed the billboard. On their left, the name of the group: Fanny. To their right, in much smaller form, are the news: their two evenings in November are announced as the headliners of the Whisky. The famous Whiskey-A-Gogo, minus the gogo: we are in 1970. An important detail completes the picture: “ […] on Reprise records and tapes. »
The image is perfect, the meaning obvious: they are coming. Better, they arrived, since Reprise Records belongs to the multinational of the Warner disc, that their first album carried out by very important Richard Perry is well in view at Tower Records, that the rock press devotes full pages to them. The Millington sisters — guitarist June and bassist Joan — keyboardist Nickey Barclay and their drummer Alice de Buhr contemplate the future, which can only be bright down on the Sunset Strip. Glory is at the end, of course. Necessarily?
But who is Fanny?
It wasn’t all that simple, you guessed it, since most people have never heard of Fanny. So what happened that we don’t know anything about this group of seasoned musicians, formidable on stage, strong in hard rock, capable of convincing fans of Deep in the dense and intense first part? Purple, Humble Pie and Joe Cocker? This is the extraordinary, dramatic and exemplary story told by Californian-born and adopted Montrealer Bobbi Jo Hart in her documentary Fanny: The Right to Rock (Fanny. Pioneers of Rock). An almost family business, run with the help of Hart within their small company, Adobe Productions. “It’s a bit of our luck and our difficulty,” explains the filmmaker on the phone. We would never have been able to take the time we needed to properly follow these women, otherwise. »
It is the story of the happiness of making music in a group and of achieving excellence, the story of tensions, dissatisfactions and excesses of all kinds, the story of the alternation of dazzling and dark sides of popular music industry. The usual routine, what. No. Not when racism and misogyny are added, not when prohibitions remain for rock musicians, even in the midst of the women’s liberation movement. Pregnant ? Mother ? The culprit is excluded from the group. Lesbians in a very straight world, where groupies and rock star penis casts are celebrated? Unacceptable.
Enough to be, if not openly ostracized, at the very least hampered in their rise by promotion teams incapable of properly promoting this group which is both very “normally” hard-rock and very “abnormally” different. “The record company didn’t know how to sell us,” summarizes Alice de Buhr. The filmmaker adds: “They were really good musicians, that’s all, it’s not complicated, but we perceived them as an anomaly…”
Joan, June and Brie Brandt, who held the drums at the time of their first group at the Beatles (The Svelts), are of mixed origin: the sisters are Filipino-American, Brie is Filipino-European. They are just more cool, and their richer music, but they are denigrated at every turn. Do they really play their instruments, we inquire in the press? The comments of John Sebastian, Earl Slick, and especially the late David Bowie, who was their biggest fan, are enlightening. Musicians love them, fans love them. Critics laugh at them. The rock’n’roll attitude by Fanny irritates “because they are women”, we understand, the amazing guitar solos of a grimacing and trance-like June seem “borrowed”.
A rock magazine defends them: “If this image bothers you, you are a chauvinist! In a fairer world, June Millington would have been a guitar hero, like an Alvin Lee or a Ritchie Blackmore. The group’s appearances on television, from Dick Cavett Show to the British Old Gray Whistle Test, demonstrate this eloquently. “I went out and got everything I could to really see them play. live, rejoices the filmmaker. They are impressive. »
The first ending
What’s more, the group refuses to compromise, has nothing to do with the catchy refrains that the record company demands: but they are women, and what is a source of dignity in groups underground is perceived by them as a whim. Fanny will not exist, or very little, in the rankings. After four albums and six years of effort, the group had endured enough: Fanny let go in 1975. Just before a title from their last album, Butter Boy, climbs into the top 30 from the magazine Billboard.
The filmmaker arrived in the portrait five years ago, when a return of the group – which became cult thanks to reissues – was organized and a new album was being recorded. “I think I knew them at just the right time. These are musicians almost septuagenarians that we find, closer than ever, still rock’n’roll, delighted to play together again. Pleasure that we share a little more at each stage of their history, well nourished by personal archives and period documents.
The tragedy of life
We are heading towards the triumph of a happy tour which will be the end of the film, when we learn that Joan Millington, on her way to Los Angeles, is struck by a stroke which paralyzes her on one side. A terrible feeling of injustice invades the spectator and the protagonists. It’s too much in the course of a single group. It goes beyond bad luck and coincidences. Musician mother thrown away like a mess! Métis musicians victims of all prejudices. Success wasted because an unclassifiable group in the world of rock. Missed opportunities, dramas, nothing is spared them.
At the very least they found in Bobbi Jo Hart a woman like them, an irreducible ally. “I decided to delay the film for a year. Time to see what was to come. I wasn’t going to leave them like that…” The closeness of the filmmaker makes it possible to measure the disarray of these women, but also their unfailing solidarity, and the eternally rock’n’roll attitude which pushes them to continue: you have to see Joan in a physio session, certainly painful, but as funny and determined as in the early days of the Svelts. You have to see her participate in a tribute evening, with the group and her son on bass. “It’s a family, says Bobbi Jo Hart simply, and what happens in people’s lives happens between them. Shit happens. We continue. I wanted to tell their story, I want us to rediscover their music, I hope there will be more girl groups in this industry which hasn’t evolved that much, but above all I wanted to show women who have made it through life, stronger when they are together. »