Getting High on David Bowie

The Runaways' Cherie Currie on how we found (and fell in love with) music before the internet

Photo courtesy of Brad Elterman.

In this edition of “WHAT’S IN YOUR TAPE DECK,” I talked to Cherie Currie, former lead vocalist for the Runaways and a woman that Bomp! magazine once described as “the lost daughter of Iggy Pop and Brigitte Bardot.”

Eric: So where does a teenage girl in Los Angeles in the early seventies find music that actually matters to her?

Cherie: I went to the Sugar Shack, an all-ages club in North Hollywood for teenagers. Chuck E. Starr was a deejay, and it was because of him that I first heard Suzi Quatro. The moment I heard her voice, I was like, “Oh my god!!” Nobody sang like her. Nobody has ever been able to sing like her. “Your Mama Won’t Like Me” was like a crash course in fierce womanhood.

Did you immediately go out and buy her records?

No, I was too young. I was only thirteen, fourteen. So I’d wait for my friend Paul to buy them and then I’d borrow them from him. Your Mamma Won't Like Me was one of the first records I asked him to buy.

Who was Paul?

Paul was my best friend, a gay guy who was older than me, drove a car, and was a total Bowie lookalike. He was the one that brought me my first Bowie album, Diamond Dogs. He was like, “You have to listen to this.” Just the cover alone was a magical mystery tour. I’d stare at it and be like, ‘Am I on another planet? What the fuck is even going on?’

That and the Suzie Quatro record, the black-and-white one where she has that look on her face.

It’s not clear if she’s having an orgasm or ripping someone’s still-beating heart out of his chest.

It could be either one! Or both! [Laughs.] It’s probably both.