Cherry Bomb
Joan Jett was sixteen when she co-founded The Runaways with Kim Fowley and drummer Sandy West. The band needed a singer. Cherie Currie came in to audition. She had prepared Suzi Quatro’s “Fever” but nobody in the room knew how to play it. Fowley told her they would write her something instead. He and Jett stepped into another room. Jett played a riff. Fowley built a chorus from it. Twenty minutes later they came back with “Cherry Bomb.” Jett said at Kim Fowley’s memorial service that it was the first song she had ever co-written with anyone. It took longer to drive to the studio than it took to write the song.
The title plays on Cherie Currie’s given name and the small explosives kids threw at things. Kim Fowley designed The Runaways to provoke. The lyrics “can’t stay at home, can’t stay in school” and “hello world, I’m your wild girl” were written for Currie to audition with but ended up representing something bigger than one person. The debut album featured Currie on lead vocals and Jett on rhythm guitar. Lita Ford played lead guitar and Sandy West played drums. Jackie Fox was the band’s bassist but did not play on the record. Fowley brought in Nigel Harrison, who would later join Blondie, as the uncredited session bassist. Fox appears on the cover and in the album credits. The band recorded in March 1976 at Fidelity Recorders in Studio City, California. Mercury Records released the album that June and the single reached number 106 on the Billboard Bubbling Under chart in August. In 1976, nobody quite knew what to make of five teenagers who looked like The Runaways and sounded like The Runaways.
The song keeps showing up. Richard Linklater used it in Dazed and Confused in 1993. In 2014, Marvel used it in Guardians of the Galaxy. Director James Gunn had the cast walking down the hall to the actual track playing on set. In 2015, Joan Jett was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She performed “Cherry Bomb” at the ceremony with Dave Grohl. The Runaways broke up in 1979 after four albums. The band lasted four years. The song has been going for fifty.