For as long as there have been men, women have envisioned a space without them. In the 15th century, the French writer Christine de Pizan imagined a “City of Ladies,” a woman-only utopia where liberated women of history hung out. Skip forward several centuries to 1915 and find yourself in “Herland,” another war-free, woman-only creation, this time care of American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Just about 60 years later, artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro—alongside a group of their students—brought one vision of feminist utopia into the real world. Though it was only open for one month in 1972, Womanhouse is widely considered one of the most influential works of contemporary art: an immersive exhibition in which the artists renovated a dilapidated house in Los Angeles, lived in it, made visual art, and staged groundbreaking performance pieces.
But just a few miles away from Chicago and Schapiro’s avant-garde wonderland, in West Hollywood, lay another IRL feminist utopia called Fanny Hill. The house—a Spanish-style home that overlooked the Sunset Strip—shared a name with an oft-banned 18th-century erotic novel, and also with the 1972 album by the band Fanny: a real rock spectacle laced with tenderness, camaraderie, and impeccable riffs. The members of Fanny—sisters June and Jean Millington, Alice de Buhr, and Nickey Barclay—all lived in the house with some friends. It was a welcoming paradise: Some lived up the rock’n’roll lifestyle; one woman was raising a child. De Buhr’s mother had previously sent her to a psych ward for being gay; at Fanny Hill, her queerness wasn’t under scrutiny (and was in fact an identity she shared with her bandmate, June). But their feminist utopia was mainly grounded in music: writing, jamming, and practicing in their basement every day until they were exhausted. Friends and fellow musicians were always coming through Fanny Hill; Bonnie Raitt, for example, was a regular fixture. The hosts were even so gracious as to include men: The Band liked to jam downstairs; Joe Cocker often stopped by. “It was like we had our own sorority,” June Millington once explained. “But we had amps.”
The songs they practiced in that house combined a love of classic rock’n’roll with tight pop harmonies. Fanny howled; they grooved; they had the patience for a few pensive ballads. Throughout the ’70s, they’d record five studio albums, play shows with Jethro Tull, Steely Dan, and Chuck Berry; befriend the Beatles; and even blow the mind of David Bowie. “They were one of the finest fucking rock bands of their time,” he once told Rolling Stone. “They were extraordinary: They wrote everything, they played like motherfuckers, they were just colossal and wonderful.”
But he went on to make an important point: “Nobody’s ever mentioned them,” he said. “They’re as important as anybody else who’s ever been, ever; it just wasn’t their time.” Bowie made this pronouncement in 1999, and not much has changed since. Fanny were trailblazers: the first all-woman group to be signed to a major label and release full albums. But they aren’t in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame; they’re rarely mentioned in lists of the greatest hard-rock bands of the ’70s, or in the same breath as pioneering all-woman rock bands like the Runaways or the Bangles. In a way, Fanny Hill, their best album, predicts this possibility of erasure and pushes against it. The songs—defiant, tough, compassionate, self-assured—could only have been crafted by outliers: those who know both how the system works and what it takes to build your own fortress outside it.
Before they were the denizens of Fanny Hill, the Millington sisters were young girls growing up in the Philippines, born to a white American naval officer and a Filipina socialite. When the girls were teenagers, the family moved to California. Both sisters learned how to play the ukulele—“It was totally natural, like eating or breathing,” as June once explained it—by playing pop songs from the radio. Soon enough, they started a band: June on guitar, Jean on bass, plus a couple other Filipina-American girls they knew. They called themselves the Svelts. They toured around, covering the Beatles and the Beach Boys, plus Motown tracks that all-boy bands couldn’t handle. In 1969, after breaking up and reforming as Wild Honey—now joined by de Buhr on drums—the band went to LA with an ultimatum: They’d get a record deal or call it quits.
At an open mic at The Troubadour, they were spotted by the secretary for producer Richard Perry. He was fresh off the success of novelty act Tiny Tim and looking for another score; later, he’d go on to produce records for Barbra Streisand, Harry Nilsson, Carly Simon, Ringo Starr, and many other ’70s stars. After seeing Fanny at the Troubadour, Perry’s secretary convinced her boss to check them out. Impressed, he got them a deal with Reprise—home to stars like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Jimi Hendrix.
For their debut album, the band rechristened themselves Fanny. “We loved the idea that it could be an anatomical part of your body,” June once said of the name, “and the name of your favorite great-aunt from Iowa.” They also added another member: Barclay, on keys, who also wrote about half the songs on their debut. Fanny introduced the four women as skilled musicians (evidenced by June’s masterful 12-string playing on “Come and Hold Me,” or Jean’s melodic bassline on “Bitter Wine”) with great taste (take, for example, their jammy cover of Cream’s “Badge”) and an eye towards the social issues (as on the authority-skeptical “Conversation with a Cop”). Less than a year later, they followed it with 1971’s Charity Ball—the title track earned them their first top 40 hit.
Fanny was particularly well-received in the United Kingdom, despite—or maybe because of—their name representing a different anatomical part of one’s body overseas. For their next record, they booked some shows in England and booked some time at Apple Studios, the famed studio built by and for the Beatles. Fanny’s next record would be engineered by the Beatles’ engineer, Geoff Emerick.
Capturing the intensity of Fanny’s live shows in the studio had always been a struggle for the band, but Fanny Hill comes closest. The opening track, a cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Ain't That Peculiar,” is all bluesy swagger, June’s slide guitar whipping through like a roller coaster careening around its tracks. The mix of fury and defiance in June and Barclay’s voices on “Borrowed Time” and “Blind Alley” could give Robert Plant a run for his money; on the latter, June plays a scorched-earth guitar solo and de Buhr drums like she’s settling a score with every patronizing dude she’s ever met. To beef up the energy, they introduced new instruments to the mix: saxophone, trumpet, trombone. String players from the London Philharmonic show up on “Hey Bulldog,” and their presence is perhaps the second-most interesting addition to the Beatles cover: Fanny felt the song was too short, and got the guys’ permission to write an additional verse to add to their heavier, grittier version.
In many ways, Fanny’s sound fit perfectly into the early-’70s rock template. Like so many bands who’d come after them, they worshipped the Beatles—evident not just in the “Hey Bulldog” cover, but in the staccato chords of “Knock on My Door” and Jean’s McCartney-inspired basslines. Their hardest-rocking moments were offset by a groovy, Motown-influenced rhythm section and ballads blanketed with a warm layer of pop harmonies. But the perspective of Fanny’s songs went beyond their contemporaries, contemplating topics their male peers didn’t—or couldn’t—touch: The maternal “Think About the Children” compels the listener to consider the future of humanity, to think about “your children’s children/And not just yourself”; “You’ve Got a Home” is a tender ode from a single mother to her child. “Someday I’ll have to tell you/The reason we live alone,” she sings sweetly on the chorus, “You may not have a father but you’ve got a home.” They were fired up for social change on “Blind Alley” and rolling their eyes at wannabe rockstars on “Borrowed Time.” Fanny’s songs didn’t explicitly call for a feminist revolution, but they had an implicit outsider’s perspective, seeking solidarity and empowerment in their own realm.
But being pioneers was a crushingly lonely experience. Every interview commenced with a dumbfounded question about how it felt to be women playing instruments. One telling profile of the band from 1974 starts by saying, “Let’s be sexist for a coupla paragraphs”—then delivers on that promise. Once, before a show in England, the club owner showed the band around: “He said, ‘Here’s the room for the girls,’” June once explained, “and, pointing the other way, said, ‘Here’s the room for the band.’” The label was constantly asking them to dress sexier, or to style their hair a certain way. They had to work constantly to win over the crowds at their shows, who Barclay described as “people who came to jeer at the freak show” (and who often left, she said, “as glowing-eyed converts”).
And even praise for the band came laced with condescension: A 1971 New York Times review of a live performance, for example, called the band “extremely good” and “a pleasure to see”—but spent most of its ink wondering if the performance was, as the headline put it, a “Challenge to Male Ego.” June claims Perry, the producer, continually turned down her amps in the studio—a practice that only stopped when the band recorded Fanny Hill with Emerick, who cranked June’s volume after she asked him how he got George Harrison’s guitar to sound so good. How exhausting it must have been to confront the fact that your producer’s vision of your band couldn’t accommodate the full strength of shredding—or that you could only get it on tape by complementing a male engineer’s previous work with a male guitarist.
On top of the sexism, the band faced additional challenges. The media scarcely knew what to do with the Millingtons’ Filipino heritage, for starters; June has said she felt that part of their identity was, for better or worse, entirely ignored by the press. And though Fanny released their albums in a post-Stonewall environment, the band’s gay members felt pressured to remain in the closet for fear of losing their record deal or the support of their fans. There was also the fact that the women had been in a hothouse of writing, recording, and touring together throughout the turbulence of their early 20s; interpersonal conflicts abounded. They were working hard, touring constantly, writing great songs—but even after Fanny Hill, they still hadn’t really scored a hit. They knew it; the record company knew it; suddenly, money was tight and tensions were high.
Fanny’s original members made one more record together: 1973’s darker, slightly subdued Mothers Pride, produced—with mixed success, per the band’s evaluation—by Todd Rundgren. June and de Buhr left the band before its follow-up, 1974’s Rock and Roll Survivors, where the remaining members were joined by guitarist Patti Quatro—who, with her sister Suzi, founded one of the first all-woman rock bands, the Pleasure Seekers, in Detroit in 1964—and former Svelts drummer Brie Darling. That last record contained Fanny’s highest-charting hit, “Butter Boy”—inspired, in part, by Jean’s short romance with David Bowie—which hit No. 29 on the Hot 100.
And then Fanny broke up. Its members continued to make music; there were a few solo albums, a couple of bands, but nothing that reached the high of Fanny Hill. June got involved in the Women’s Music movement; these days, she and her wife run a nonprofit that teaches young women and girls about playing instruments and working in the music industry. Nearly 50 years after Fanny’s debut record was released, the Millington sisters and Darling reunited for a new album, under the name Fanny Walked the Earth (de Buhr joins for one track, too), alongside a documentary about the band. But just two months before the album’s release, Jean suffered a stroke that has massively diminished her ability to play music ever since.
There are traces of Fanny’s influence and musicianship in the generations of women rock artists who came after them: the B-52s’ Kate Pierson has said Fanny was the first band she heard where a woman played guitar; Kathy Valentine of the Go-Go’s said when she saw Barclay perform, it made her realize women could shred on keys just like any guy. So why do Fanny still feel like a footnote in rock history? It feels too simple to say that fans of Humble Pie or Led Zeppelin simply couldn’t wrap their minds around women rocking hard; Janis Joplin’s Pearl went to No. 1 the year before Fanny Hill was released, after all. Still, maybe if Fanny had been able to land one radio-friendly pop crossover hit, mainstream ’70s audiences would have come around to embrace their heavier material, too. But Fanny never quite wrote songs that reached in that direction. Conversely, maybe the fact that their songs, while impressively self-possessed, weren’t directly confrontational has kept them from being counted as forebears to the feminist punks who would come after.
I sometimes wonder if, in enthusiastically arguing for Fanny to be reclaimed as feminist icons, I fall into the same trap as the ’70s critics before me: seeing their complex, masterful music through the lens of their gender, rigidly binding their legacy to that one narrative. Or I wonder if I’m wasting my time by pointing out how underappreciated they are—does continually repeating that adjective lock Fanny into being forever understood as “unsung,” rather than building up a different, more straightforward reputation: simply a great American rock band? It’s the classic bind patriarchy puts us in: making us waste time proving or disproving or debating the relevance of an artist’s oppression to their art by talking about talking about the music.
But of course, all of it is true: Fanny deserve to be celebrated because they did what no other women had done before them; they deserve to be celebrated because they made great music; they made great music that’s inseparable from their experience as outsiders, as subjects of harassment and underestimation, as artists dreaming of something better. Even if just briefly, they made that dream real—it led them to their “sorority” in the Hollywood Hills and the album that bears its name: a radical act of sisterhood and creative freedom smuggled inside a classic rock’n’roll dream.
