Lita Ford started her professional career at 16 years old with ’70s rock band The Runaways alongside fellow guitarist Joan Jett.
However, when the band parted ways in ’79 – and after years of not being taken as seriously as their male peers – Ford went through a period of “seclusion for a few years.” She traded her Gibson SG for the cosmetics counter of a department store.
However, she was anything but resentful. “It was kind of fun,” she told Guitar World in 1985. “I used to go all dressed in black leather, and I used to wear my Runaways tour jacket. Everybody there thought I was in a gang… But I got bored and couldn’t really handle it after a while, so I split and started practicing.”
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She eventually found herself putting together another band – but only after an intervention by Eddie Van Halen.
“[He] had come over and yelled at me for not doing anything, and my friend Ray Marzano got me into rehearsing every night. I went looking for a male singer, but I couldn’t find anybody that was really different.”
She scoured the scene for female singers. But she didn’t manage to find the right person, either – or, as she put it, “I couldn’t find anybody that really had the balls to sing what I wanted to write. They all sang sort of lightweight stuff. So I decided to do it myself.”
It was an arduous task for Ford, who didn’t consider herself a singer. Ever the perfectionist, she wasn’t at all happy with her debut album, Out for Blood, released in 1983. “It was poorly produced,” she said. “The performance was real good, but it wasn’t properly produced, so you don’t come across well because of the production.”
Ford wasn’t discouraged and kept going, cementing herself as a guitar icon along the way.
“This is what I am. I live up to me. I don’t do anything that isn’t real. I’m not a bullshitter, and I can’t lie or be phony about anything. I would never get on that stage and play anything that I didn’t like or didn’t believe was really me… So when I write these songs, this is really me.”
