“One of the most important bands in American rock has been buried without a trace.” That title card, credited to no less than David Bowie, opens the documentary Fanny: The Right to Rock, and it’s a hard claim to follow. But director Bobbi Jo Hart tells a compelling and unfamiliar personal story, with engaging personalities and the enticing whiff of the forgotten band. But much as producer Richard Perry toned down the band’s vital live sound in the studio, this loving profile doesn’t completely sell their music.
Fanny is framed with shots of three surviving members, sisters June and Jean Millington and Brie Darling, riding down a remote highway in a vintage convertible. There’s a clear resonance with Thelma and Louise, and you half expect the women to reenact that film’s self-destructive conclusion and drive off a cliff; instead, while the road remains steady, their career went off a metaphorical precipice.
In clips of a 1971 gig on the German music show “Beat-Club,” even the band’s tune-up delivers a punch. But their path to fame was not smooth. The children of a Filipina mother and an American Marine, Fanny co-founders June and Jean Millington were born in the Philippines before their family moved to the U.S., and established roots in Sacramento, California. The sisters began playing music as children in the Philippines, but in the States met a fair amount of resistance — the adult Millingtons, as well as early band member Brie Darling, all recount the bigotry and sexism they had to deal with when they started playing, but their high school band the Svelts was popular enough to go on a successful regional tour.
When drummer Darling became pregnant, she dropped out of the band to be replaced by Alice de Buhr, who — along with keyboardist Nickey Barclay — formed the core line-up. The band got their big break after moving to Los Angeles, where a gig at the Troubadour got them in the sights of producer Richard Perry, who would handle the band’s first three albums. But as June Millington remembers, Perry (who’s also interviewed) seemed more interested in Fanny as a gimmick; whenever Millington would crank up her amp to the desired distortion levels, Perry would dial them back down. This explains why the band’s studio recordings don’t have the power of the live footage available, which approaches a level of intensity that would have made the Stooges proud.
Fanny would manage a few Top 40 hits (peaking with the cringey “Butter Boy”), but never broke out, and June Millington admits that “We didn’t write really great pop songs — that wasn’t the kind of band we were.” Their demographic was outside the mainstream: they had a convincing hard rock sound, but how much of that audience in the early ‘70s had time for an all-female, lesbian and partly Filipina American band? (One wishes there had been a sidebar on other Filipino American bands on the music circuit in the era, but perhaps that’s a subject for another film.)
Still, Fanny left an impression on young women looking to rock, like The Go-Go’s Kathy Valentine and The B-52s’ Kate Pierson. After years of inactivity, Fanny reunited for the 2018 album Fanny Walked the Earth, and thanks to more simpatico production, that material sounds more lively than their initial run of albums, leaning into their heavy instincts and even sounding a little like AC/DC.
As attentive viewers eventually learn, the Bowie quote that opens the film was subtly altered; late in The Right to Rock, a screenshot of the Rolling Stone feature that originally ran the quote appears, and apparently even Bowie’s homage was qualified: “One of the most important female bands in American rock has been buried without trace.” (emphasis ours). But, as the quote goes on, Bowie was right: “They’re as important as anybody else who’s even been, ever; it just wasn’t their time.” It’s too bad Bowie, who briefly dated June Millington, didn’t produce the band; that would have been something. Fanny: The Right to Rock is a chronicle as frustrating as it is inspiring.
Photo courtesy of Film Movement
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