The Bangles' memoir retraces the band's steps of walking like Egyptians, meeting Prince and making history
Long before their chart domination, global popularity and, ultimately, their implosion, the Bangles began with an ad on a big board in the Sunset Boulevard shopfront of Musicians Contact Service. Sisters Debbi and Vicki Peterson had been in various bands since their early teens, playing the Troubadour while still in high school. After placing an ad for a female musician, because an all-female lineup had been the sisters' plan from the moment they picked up a guitar and drumsticks, a fortuitous call from singer-guitarist Susanna Hoffs gelled the foundations of the Bangles. Their first jam session in Hoffs' parents' Brentwood garage involved bonding over Jefferson Airplane, Arthur Lee and the Beatles. Another ad in L.A. stalwart the Recycler attracted 18-year-old Annette Zilinskas. Though she'd never played bass, and the ad called for a bassist, Zilinskas enthusiastically agreed to learn.
They cut their first recorded single in 1981 at Radio Tokyo in Venice as the Bangs, then convinced KROQ to give it a spin. Their star was on the rise, aligning with the simultaneous rise of another all-female L.A. band, the Go-Go's. Comparisons were the bane of their early career.
Eventually Micki Steele joined on bass for the Bangles' first album, 'All Over the Place' (1984). When second album 'Different Light' came out in 1986, the band bore emotional scars of a demanding, contentious recording process under producer David Kahne. It was the beginning of their major chart success, and also their fracturing as a unit. Third album 'Everything' (1988) was a true showcase of the band's songwriting prowess and diverse influences as they took greater control over their production. Changes in management, being pitted against each other by media, and the pressure cooker of fast fame led to a breakup in 1998, before a reformation and two further albums, 'Doll Revolution' in 2003 and 'Sweetheart of the Sun' in 2011. The history of the band, in their own voices, is told in a new, official biography, 'Eternal Flame' by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike.
Hoffs and the Peterson sisters spoke with The Times to recall key events in the Bangles' history and how the band shaped their lives.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
When Jennifer approached you about a memoir of the Bangles, were you immediately on board or did you have questions and concerns?
Susanna: Jennifer initially touched base with Vicki, then the first time we spoke we hit it off immediately. She's fun, and she gets an obsessional joy in these stories. And we all agreed, the three of us. Michael Steele has sort of stepped away, so she wasn't a participant in the biography. I thought that if there was going to be a biography about the Bangles, it would be best to fact-check it or at least contribute my side of the story. It's quite a Rashomon story, where everyone has a differing point of view, and it is interesting that there are different points of views going beyond even the three Bangles who participated.
There are quite a few unreliable narrators, 40 years beyond the '80s. I won't lie, some of the things that were said were painful. [In regard to descriptions of Hoffs' childhood home in Brentwood], the Petersons had a perception of my life that doesn't align with my recollection of my childhood in some cases.
You responded to an ad for a female musician to join a band and the book describes instant chemistry between you, Vicki and Debbi. Is that how you remember it?
Susanna: I'll always be amazed how the band found each other through that ad in the newspaper. I was trolling the Recycler magazine to try to find bandmates. After graduating from UC Berkeley, I moved into this dilapidated garage in my parents' house because I didn't have a job, apart from a minimum wage job that wasn't going to pay for an apartment. So I lived very happily in that garage. When I first met Vicky and Debbi, I was living in that little converted garage, and I had a mattress on the floor. And that day into the night, they came over and we jammed and we played 'White Rabbit' [by Jefferson Airplane] at their suggestion, which was genius. Thank you, Vicki and Debbi, because I loved that song. One of the things that glued the three of us was our mutual love of 1960s music. So, there was this crazy feeling in the room that day about our love of '60s music. I always thought of it as being like I got engaged to Vicki and Debbi, having known them for two hours. And I always thought we could have gone off to like a wedding chapel in Vegas that night and said 'I do' to each other because that was how fast it was, that was how intense our bonding was that night. I'm so grateful for it, and the Bangles.
Vicki: I spoke to Susanna for the first time when she was calling in response to an ad our former lead guitar player had put in the paper. Debbi and I had been playing together since high school. Our bass player had married and moved on, and we let our lead guitar player go, and it was just the two of us. When Susanna called, it felt serendipitous. We were both unmoored, devastated by the recent assassination of John Lennon. We spoke for 45 minutes on the phone and just connected. Debbi and I got in our station wagon, drove to Susanna's house and played together. We immediately connected emotionally and musically. I said to Debbi, 'Whoa, I think we found her!'
In past interviews you've said it was the relentless touring that led to the end of the band. Tell me about the beginning of the end as you recall it.
Susanna: There are so many eras of the Bangles. Bands are like families, and even more so since we had the sibling dynamic of Vicki and Debbi already, and there was a slight sense of movable factions. At first, Vicki and I were a writing team, and later on Michael started to contribute amazing songs. We were trying to live as a family on the road, so there was the wear and tear of the road along with having little autonomy as young women inching towards the end of our 20s. It was such a pressure cooker in so many ways. We were bound to the idea of being a unit, but there were a lot of men in suits telling us what to do, and it was confusing to navigate that.
I had a good relationship with [producer] David Kahne at Columbia when we got started, but I think Vicki and Debbi had a more fraught relationship with him. Towards the end of the '80s, there was a definite feeling that we needed space and for the third album ['Everything,' 1988], we all went off and we weren't writing with each other much at that point. Together with the producer and voices of the record label, it was art by committee. There was a lot of voices, discourse and trying to make it work, and I think we did.
How did working with David Kahne affect your relationships with each other and how do you feel about that first album today?
Vicki: That first album was a struggle in a lot of ways, but listening to it now, it sounds like us. David Kahne was a staff producer at Columbia, and we didn't feel we could fire him since we were new to the label. He didn't have a lot of faith in what we could do, so that impacted our confidence. I remember thinking, 'I don't know how anyone makes more than one record.' Ironically, we went on to work with him again.
Debbi: We had our set together and our sound the way we wanted it from playing around clubs. Having someone come in and say, 'No, you should do this,' felt like we were being molded into something I didn't feel we were as a band. We were rough around the edges, punky, and I liked that.
Of all the albums and songs the Bangles have released, which stand out to you as work you're proud of and that stand the test of time?
Susanna: I'd start with 'Hero Takes a Fall,' which my son Jackson heard at Whole Foods in Chicago the other day. That song was on the first Columbia record. Vicki and I wrote it, and that was so fun. We had books of poetry, and that concept came from all our flipping through books and getting inspiration. That song was a game-changer, it triggered Prince's interest in the Bangles. He saw the video that we filmed in San Francisco, and it led to this wonderful feeling that an artist as wonderful as Prince was interested in us. We were at shows and he'd come out of the wings, playing his guitar and blowing everyone's minds, including mine.
Then there's 'Manic Monday.' That turned out to be an amazing moment when that became a hit.
Vicki: We were thrilled and honored that Prince wanted to give us two songs. He was a prolific writer and he parceled out songs to people that he cared about or was working with. I thought 'Manic Monday' was something we could do, and it was close enough to who we were. It was approachable, and people still reference it all the time.
'Walk Like an Egyptian' was a late addition to 'Different Light' (1986). How do you feel about it?
Susanna: I loved 'Walk Like an Egyptian.' That was a really quirky song. I remember going to the Columbia offices and David [Kahne] played me the Marti Jones version of it to get my take on it. We'd done most of the record, and he said, 'on a lark, what if we did 'Walk Like an Egyptian'?' It was such an odd, idiosyncratic work and it really worked for the Bangles.
It was basically a No. 1 song from 1986 to 1987.
Vicki: My memory is that it was late in the process and Kahne brought it into rehearsal. I remember thinking it was a cool groove, but the weirdest song I'd ever heard. Marti Jones was on the original, and so I thought, 'I don't know why we're doing this,' but I was up for it.
You re-formed the band 20 years ago for the fourth album and have performed since. Is it an avenue you want to put energy toward, still, and what has it meant to your life and identity to be a Bangle?
Vicki: We haven't performed together as a band since 2019. Even in the late '80s we never officially broke up.
Debbi: It was a hiatus.
Vicki: The Bangles is always a part of our lives, our individual and collective identities.
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