It was the beginning of the end for Fanny as the last record released by the original band was out. Soon after this, June Millington would leave the band because of a disagreement with the record label. Soon after, Alice de Buhr would also leave the band. The rest of the band continued with replacements, making one more album, but soon realised that things weren`t the same after the breakup and disbanded.
Read on!
Leon wanted us to live in his house…We weren`t interested, needless to say
Charles Shaar Murray talking to Fanny
“LISTEN,” says Alice de Buhr somewhat plaintively, “if we spot a liquor store, can we stop the bus and get a couple more bottles of wine? I’m the boss,” she adds hopefully. “You better do what I say, driver, or you’ll get fired.” The bus keeps right on rolling in its inexorable progress towards Colchester, home of the brave and strong, and host town to a barracks whose occupants are not admitted to college dances because they always pick fights with the students.
The bus was a luxury Silverline Road Liner equipped with refrigerator, toilet, table lamps and all kinds of deluxe goodies. Today it’s taking Fanny and Company to a gig at the University of Essex. Last night it took Arsenal to a game, and they left their balls in the luggage compartment. At least, that’s what Alice says. “I play drums, I don’t talk politics. I just play my drums and drink. I’m the band wino.”
A quick crash course for the ravers: Fanny are four American ladies, who happen to be an ace rockanroll band. They are, in order of height, Alice de Buhr (drums, and the occasional rather deranged lead vocal), June Millington (lead and slide guitars, vocals), Jean Millington (bass, vocals) and Nicole Barclay (keyboards, vocals). They have made four albums, three of which are available in this country. The titles of the albums are “Fanny”, “Charity Ball,” “Fanny Hill” and the latest, greatest and grooviest of all, “Mother’s Pride.” This is their third tour of England. They’re playing a lot of gigs at a lot of places, and they’d like you to come and see them.
Journalists generally tend to gravitate towards Nickey Barclay. While all the Fanny people are very distinct personalities in their own right both on and off stage, Nickey seems to be best equipped to cope with the vagaries of folks in my profession. So anyway, before Fanny took the stage in Colchester, I interrogated Nickey as to how they had come to work with Todd Rundgren — since the last time I’d talked to them, the name of Denny Cordell had been bandied about.
“Well, we bandied him about in the studio for awhile, and that took care of that. We cut one record with him, and he sat there and he said, ‘Very good, wonderful, excellent’… I know what happened. Leon Russell wanted to co-produce it, and he wanted us to come down to his house in Tulsa, and live there and record there. Needless to say, we were not interested for a variety of reasons that need not be discussed, so we all got together in the office and said, “We wanna do this,’ and Warner Brothers said ‘Fuck you’, because they did not want to let their money into the hands of inexperienced young girls or something, even though we’d proven over here that we could do it. The only person that the four of us could agree on to produce us — that was available to produce us – was Todd, and he was into it. We’d done a few gigs with him, and he liked the idea.”
So what’s the Rundgren Method that distinguishes him from any other producer?
“Comic opera. He comes in with a false nose and glasses and pulls a moustache through one nostril. I was facing him directly through the grand piano. We’d be in there trying to do a take and he’d be sitting there twanging on his moustache coming through one nostril. He brought a whip to the studio and some pasties, and we’d be playing and he’s just leave the machine on and run into the studio cracking a whip and doing Richard Perry imitations.”
A note to the uninitaited: Richard Perry produced Fanny’s first three albums. What, then, does a Richard Perry imitation involve?
“A false nose and a pair of glasses. Let’s stop right there. We really love Richard, actually, and we’re still friends. Maybe some day we’ll work with each other again, because he’s good… I wish I could have done ‘Beside Myself’ with Richard. It’s the only track that I wanted more on. I wanted to do a whole trip with strings and everything. Todd played cauliflower on ‘Solid Gold.’ We had a lot of raw vegetables with us in the studio, and he came out at the end of the take, put his head inside the piano, and crunched as it faded. At the time it was exactly what we wanted and needed.
“Our albums always sell steadily, and more and more, but they don’t show up in the charts. It’s like it used to be for the Dead. It was very slow but people just kept buying Grateful Dead records. They never made the charts for years and years, but you didn’t un-become a Grateful Dead fan. Things seem to be happening that way for us. We’re almost at the top of the hill, and then it’s going to start snowballing. I think the next one out will do it.”
One nice thing about Fanny is that everybody seems willing to write with everybody else, and all possible songwriting combinations are used. “You can’t believe everything you read. Sometimes one of us will write a song, and just because we feel like confusing reporters, we’ll give somebody else half credit.”
Isn’t that a trifle sadistic? I ask.
“Yes, but people were trying so hard to read things into it… I’ll tell you, we didn’t used to really care about all of that but then people started saying, ‘Doesn’t this mean… and tearing lyrics apart, and laying things on me that completely freaked me out; and so I said, okay, if they’re going to play that game, then I’m going to play it too. It always cracks me up when I see something about Alice’s influence on ‘Blind Alley’, when obviously I wrote ‘Blind Alley.’ But without Alice’s drums it wouldn’t have been ‘Blind Alley.’ When we were learning the song, I said, ‘Pretend you keep falling downstairs’ and she did, so I said, ‘You’re gonna get half the money.’ But we do write together a lot. I can’t even remember who credited whom with what because one day we had all these unfinished tracks, and everybody threw words at each other, and if anybody threw more than a few words, we said, ‘Okay, you get credit.’ That’s the way it works, and we all arrange together.”
One Fanny topic that has been arousing much verbiage is their new stage outfits. From what I’d heard, the entire band wore two coins and a wrinkled peanut between them. Why the change from the fairly innocuous t-shirts and pants to these electric harem costumes?
“It happens, doesn’t it? It seemed like a natural progression. For one thing, it costs a lot of money to wear two coins and a peanut. Basically, it’s having the means to do it and having the confidence to do it. First we had to establish ourselves as a group, and prove we weren’t a gimmick. Now that we no longer have to apologise for being girls, we can dig it. We can put on a good rockanroll show, so let’s have some fun with it.
“That’s what it’s about, having fun, rock being basically a physical music — and that’s what it is, another step in the progression of putting on a better show, and being more of a group that people will want to come and see.”
Do Fanny’s new costumes lay them open to more hassling from drunks, idiots, and reporters?
“Our bodyguards can take care of that. The other night the stage was rushed in Cleethorpes. Everybody especially went after Jeanie. I thought, ‘Shit man, if this is what’s happening on our first week out then by the end of the tour we’ll need a police guard.’ It’s cool as long as they don’t tear us up, you know. June’s outfit started to fall off in Manchester the other day in the middle of an encore, and we had to jam while she ran off-stage with everything falling off her breasts. At the end she dropped her pasties, and one of the roadies gave them to a fan. That’s something, man. Slade may collect knickers, but we’re the only group that can give away pasties.”
The show wasn’t a riot, but it wasn’t really the band’s fault. For a start it was held in what looked like a biology lecture hall, loosely filled with about three hundred and fifty bored-looking students who paid little attention to the proceedings until the end, when a rousingly raunchy encore of “Charity Ball” finally got them off their asses and onto their feet. It was amazing to compare the amount of energy put out on stage with the amount being given out from the audience. In fact, at times it seemed that Fanny and the audience were in two different halls.
No matter. Fanny are going to be around for a little while, and we most strongly suggest that you drop in and see them sometime. After all, if the group population of the world were, for some obscure but valid reason, had to be reduced to but a score of acts, I’d cast my vote for Fanny to be included. They do it good.
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