A decade of the Donnas

If I was a music biz spin-doctor, the Donnas is the band I would have invented. Just think about it: rock is all the rage right now. The Strokes, the White Stripes, the Hives--any band with loud guitars, messy hair and "the" in their name is worth the weight of their amplifier stacks in gold.

Now imagine if one such rock band were composed not of grungy rich kids or pasty Scandinavians, but of four foxy ladies. Oh, and the ladies aren't just foxy, but tough and sassy too, like the girls in high school that hung out in the smoking area and flipped cop cars the bird.

Pen them some songs with suggestive titles like "40 Boys in 40 Nights" and "Take Me to the Backseat" and voila--can't you just smell the royalty checks?

Looking at a photo of the young, hot and dangerous rockers known as the Donnas, you would think they were just such a music industry concoction. But the Donnas are no prefab band cooked up to cash in on the rock revival. When they take the stage of Tokyo's Astro Hall next week, it will be 10 years to the day that they began their career of hard rock and hard knocks.

Their story begins in Palo Alto, Calif., a small city in Silicon Valley. Junior high students Allison Robertson (guitar), Maya Ford (bass) and Torry Castellano (drums)--all friends since elementary school--recruited Brett Anderson (vocals) to form a rock band called Screen. They practiced Shonen Knife and L7 covers in Castellano's garage, where boys stopped by to laugh at them. Screen's first concert was at their Grade 8 talent show, where boys told them to go home and play with their dolls.

They changed their name from Screen to Ragady Anne and then to the Electrocutes, releasing records and getting pestered by boys along the way.

A record label owner named Darrin Raffaelli saw an Electrocutes performance and promptly asked the girls to record some songs for him. The catch was he wasn't interested in the Electrocutes' fast and chaotic punk songs. He wanted them to record some tunes he had written for a proposed all-female rock group, whose very look and sound he had already envisaged. They agreed to Raffanelli's plan, thinking of it is a fun little project they would ride out for a bit.

The changes they made under Raffanelli's guidance, however, marked the birth of the Donnas as they are now known. They adopted stage names, each girl choosing to be called "Donna" (a la punk legends the Ramones, each of whom took on the surname "Ramone"). They changed their look to one of a girls' reform-school gang (a la '70s rock group the Runaways, led by a young and feisty Joan Jett).

Finally, they established their signature bubblegum punk sound by essentially combining the full-throttle surf punk of the Ramones with the streetwise rock 'n' roll of the Runaways.

Before long, the Electrocutes were a thing of the past and the four girls grew cozily into their Donna domain.

After releasing a few singles and their debut full-length on Raffaelli's Super*Teem label, they moved onto the prolific Lookout! Records, spawning ground for bands like Green Day and Rancid. With indie music giant Lookout! in their corner, they churned out a string of albums (a reissue of their debut, American Teenage Rock'n'Roll Machine, Get Skintight, and The Donnas Turn 21) that got them noticed in a big way--for better or worse.

Rolling Stone, MTV and Spin all came knocking on their door, giving them great exposure while testing their patience with vexing interviews and embarrassing photo shoots (members still recoil when asked about a fashion spread they did for Interview magazine).

Their records sales shot up, as did the trash talking and rumor mongering behind their backs. Their fan base increased, but so did the number of creepy old men skulking about their live shows. The Donnas had become a modern rock sensation, quickly having to learn to take the rough with the smooth.

Last year, they inked a deal with Atlantic Records and released Spend the Night, an album that many critics are calling their best yet.

Often, when bands graduate from the underground scene to the major label leagues, they soften their sound to appease a wider audience. The Donnas, however, have stuck solidly with their bad-girl sound since record number one. If anything, they have only lost their pop punk-edge and replaced it with a meatier, gutsier hard rock bite.

A listen to Spend the Night will bring to mind party rock bands like Cheap Trick, Motley Crue and KISS. The guitar licks are gnarly, the bass lines firm, and drum beats are laced with the plunk plunk plunk of a cowbell.

If their lyrics about the hedonistic rock lifestyle are true to tale though, they may burn out before the next 10 years roll around.