In a recent interview with The Hook Rocks! podcast, Lita Ford talked about her experience in the 1980s, and standing out in the male-dominated hair metal scene. She said it doesn’t mean anything to be a man in the industry and explained her role in the industry:
“It was a lot of games. And men are just men. And they’re not anything indestructible. It doesn’t mean anything. And a lot of the situations were they couldn’t put two and two together. And it wasn’t just men. It was a lot of people. But then, on the other hand, they couldn’t put together the fact that, ‘Oh, she’s a female and she’s playing guitar. Huh? How does that work?’ Well, to me, it never really registered. I just thought, ‘Well, I just wanna play guitar.’ And it never dawned on me, really, that ‘you’re a female.’ ‘Oh.’ Well, nobody told me. I mean, I knew, but I never really put two and two together and thought, ‘Well, I can’t do this because I’m a female.’ It never really made sense to me.”
She also mentioned that a lot of the good musicians were men and most of those people helped her to get to her current status in the industry:
“A lot of the best musicians, a lot of them were men, and I have to say that a lot of them helped me to achieve certain rock celebrity status and just hanging out with the best of the best musicians… They didn’t look at it, like, ‘Oh, she’s a girl. No, she can’t do this.’ They didn’t look at it like that. They were different.”
She also named a few rockers that helped her:
“Like Dee Snider, for instance. Dee was such a huge support for Lita. And we opened for Twisted Sister many times, and Dee would always go out and rile the audience and get them pumped for our show coming on. If we were doing a festival or if we performed before them, he would always come out and rile them, even in the early ’80s. He was just all about it. And people like Ritchie Blackmore —he never judged me because I was a female. And a lot of these great musicians are really nonjudgmental people. It’s all about the performance. And so that’s what you’ve gotta separate — the losers from the leaders, so to speak.”
Ford Was ‘Oblivious’
Many female rockers have faced misogyny during their careers. In This Moment’s Maria Brink and Butcher Babies’ Heidi Shepherd has been one of them too. The singers voiced their concerns about this over the years not once but many times.
Similarly, Ford shared her mind about the misogyny in the music industry before too. In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2016, the rocker was asked how she reflected on the period she faced misogyny. Ford explained:
“I was pretty oblivious to the fact that I didn’t have a penis between my legs. It never dawned on me. All I knew is that I had fingers and I had the lust for hard rock. I wanted to play it and that’s what I went by. I never thought, ‘Oh, I’m not a dude and chicks don’t do this.’ A lot of people in the industry thought it was wrong and didn’t want to accept the fact they were producing a female artist. Even some of my bandmates I had trouble with. They would think, ‘If she can do it then I can do it.’ They’d come back a few years later and say, ‘Do you still need a guitarist?’”
