Think about rock and roll pioneers and you’re likely to come up with names like Sam Phillips or Chuck Berry or maybe Buddy Holly. Any real student of rock history, though, knows that there are plenty of torchbearers out there whose names aren’t quite as familiar. We had the good fortune to speak to one of them when we hooked up with June Millington.

Teenagers in the 1960s, June and her sister Jean formed the all-girl Fanny, a band that enjoyed a meteoric rise from playing at high school events in 1966 to touring Europe in 1973. With fans including Leon Russell and Frank Zappa, these girls were respected musicians and paved the way for future female rockers.

We were interested to know what that experience was like, how it informed June’s second act and what she’s doing today.



Some of our readers may not know that Fanny was the first or was it the second all-girl rock band to sign with a major label back in 1969. Goldie and the Gingerbreads were first in 1963.
We were the first to achieve international success.

You and your sister Jean were really the nucleus of the band. I’ve read that you were born in the Philippines to an American father and his Filipino wife and that you started playing music as a way of assimilating into that whole crazy California pop scene in the early 60s.
Our dad was a Lieutenant Commander in the US Navy who was in the Pacific Theater during WWII. He met my mom on a blind date in Manila after the war. I was born there in 1948. We moved to Sacramento in 1963 when I was in junior high school.

Girls back then were more interested in being the guitar player’s girlfriend than the guitar player but you and your sister Jean played electric guitar and bass guitar. How did you learn to play?
Believe it or not, we were doing folk music because we had ukuleles. My mom got me a handmade mother-of-pearl inlaid guitar made in the southern Philippines a few weeks before we moved. We were doing things like “Follow the Drinking Gourd”, “Yellow Bird”, even “Calendar Girl” by Neil Sedaka. We listened to the radio incessantly.



Probably the first time I heard creative rock and roll music that I understood was The Shirelle’s version of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” I remember hearing that sound come out of the transistor radio in Sacramento and being completely transfixed.

The music that was coming up from Southern California – the Beach Boys, for instance - was just huge for us. We played these hits off the radio on our acoustic guitars. We hung around with some boys in a surf band when out of the blue, a girl from another high school called. She heard that we sang and we’d already met a couple of other girls at some hootenannies. That’s how we started a band - three girls on acoustic guitars and a drummer

We borrowed the guys’ equipment and played between their sets at high school functions. Eventually, we ended up auditioning for the same gig. We got the gig, so then we had to get serious and get our own equipment.

My mom went out and co-signed a loan at a music store for Jean and I to buy electric instruments and a PA system. In 1965, that was probably around $500 – a tremendous amount of money at that time.

What kind of material were you doing?
Covers. Like “Heat Wave”, “Walkin’ the Dog”, “Long Tall Sally”... great stuff, solid grooves. Ruby & The Romantics tunes.



I think the Beau Brummels’ “Laugh Laugh” was the first song Jean learned on bass. Some of the bands whose material we covered, we ended up gigging with early on. Paul Revere and the Raiders. The Safaris. The Psychotic Five.

Before you were Fanny, the band was The Svelts and then Wild Honey. We’re talking 1968, 1969, right? Did you have a manager?
The Svelts in late '64 morphed into Wild Honey in '68. We had a succession of personnel changes but that's the band that signed with Reprise.

We had a few managers along the way, but it was the Blue Peacock Company in Los Angeles that really propelled us into a different level (along with Reprise of course and Richard Perry). Everyone considered us a novelty at first, but we got past that by being good.

You were gigging mostly around the West Coast because that’s where you lived.
How did you break out of the small-club circuit?
Reprise/Blue Peacock nurtured us for a year - when the first album came out the promo arm swung into action and we went into bigger and bigger gigs pretty easily. Everyone wanted to meet us, especially other bands.

What was your set-up? What kind of mics were you using?
I started with an ES335 (stereo) but ended up mostly using a '57 Les Paul, which I still have and a Les Paul Junior for slide.

I played through a Fender Twin amp (I went through a Traynor period as well) and - this is important - a real, live, Leslie speaker which I could switch to. It was a special model made by the techs and very few people did this at the time.

As far as mics go, when I look at a photo of us playing at the Whiskey – I think I can pick out an SM57. I definitely remember using Shure mics over everything else.

Let’s talk about Reprise Records, which some of us will remember as a Warner imprint. You recorded four albums with them between 1970 and 1973.
We were "discovered" by Richard Perry's secretary when we played an open hoot night at the Troubadour.



We went over to Wally Heider Studios and were supposed to play for fifteen minutes but ended up playing for him for over two hours. He prevailed upon Mo Austin to sign us, sight unseen. He’s just had a hit with Tiny Tim so we were viewed as kind of a novelty act. They were probably hoping to get one or two hits out of us.

But he got into it and we got into it. We switched managers and as a result, lost our lead guitar player, so I moved over to lead from playing rhythm guitar. Right before our first album came out, Wild Honey became Fanny.

Your third LP, “Fanny Hill” was recorded at Apple Studios in London and your fourth, the hard-rocking “Mother’s Pride” was produced by Todd Rundgren. What were those experiences like?
Apple was great. Todd was - interesting. Here’s a valuable lesson I learned from him. I’d play something in the recording studio and he’d play and lick and I’d play a lick and he’d say, “Oh, that’s Lick Number 67”, like ordering something from a Chinese take-out menu.



And it was true. I started to look at licks as either something pedestrian or a phrase in a language all my own. I share that with the girls at our Rock’n Roll Camp.

You left the band in 1973. What happened?
At some point, the pieces just don’t fit. The business and musical presentation itself was changing, too.

I know I felt it in the outfits they wanted us to wear. This was just pre-KISS and it was a colossal success for the men, but for girls - you know, that last stage was sneered at by a lot of people who didn't even know there was a wind of change in the air.

I didn’t have a life and I didn’t know how to have a life. We were rehearsing or gigging all the time. One thing that really killed me was having to answer the same question all the time...

Uh-oh. And that question was...
“How does it feel to play like a girl?” Interview after interview after interview. We were on the verge of greater success, but we never had that massive Number One hit that would have made us a household name.


I looked around and I realized that none of it made sense anymore. The only framework I had was to play guitar like a guy. And I could, but I needed to find out how to become a human being. It was exhausting to be the first female lead guitar player in rock and roll to be recognized as such. There wasn’t anyone to show me the way. And I was a young girl – twenty-five years old. There weren’t the resources that there are today.

It was hard to leave, especially since my sister was in the band. And we felt real loyalty to the female players of the future, not really knowing who they’d turn out to be.

It seems like it all came together for you in IMA – the Institute for the Musical Arts
The seeds of it really started in 1976 when I went on national tour with Cris Williamson. Women’s music was really exploding. For me, it was rock and roll in a completely different way — the music and the spirituality played out equally and that was really powerful.

An idea that came out of a meeting at the Olivia Collective in Los Angeles took root ten years later when I decided to make the vision of a permanent women’s music collective a reality. I spent the first year building a mission statement and generating enough funds to pay for lawyers to get the ball rolling. We built it from the ground up. Fundraiser after fundraiser. Five dollars. A hundred dollars. One stick at a time.

You started in California, right?
The first few years, we rented The Creamery in Bodega, California, but we were really looking to purchase property in the area. In 1999, at the very apex of the dot.com boom, real estate prices were insane and we couldn’t afford anything.

My partner was planning to attend a class reunion, so we decided to look here in Western Massachusetts. We saw this property and closed on it right before 9.11.

It’s an 1816 estate with a house and two barns. We’ve totally renovated it with a recording studio in the barn and an attached bunkhouse.



We’re not running all the programming that we did in Northern California since we’re finishing up the recording studio. Back then, though, we did two shows a month followed by an artists’ workshop. We also had a question-and-answer session following the show. We didn’t want to stage the kind of performances you’d see in a club.

What about IMA’s Rock and Roll Camp?
We have four camps in the summertime. We have campers from all over the United States and even some from Europe.

The girls are not required to play an instrument, but they are required to have a passion for music. They don’t text, they don’t post to Facebook and they don’t hang on their cell phones for ten days.

We’re teaching them to communicate in a different language. The first night, we show them how to run the PA themselves, so we’re giving them the tools and the power. After that, they start writing songs, they start taking private lessons at night. The thing is - they do it. They start hanging out in the barn together. They draw together. They show each other their poetry. They’re connecting with their own creativity.



Our agenda is huge. We’re here to support women and girls in music and music-related business.

Are you still playing with Jean?
We’re starting a new CD in just a few weeks and plan to go out and play more. We’re both looking forward to it.

She also comes out and teaches at camp.

David Bowie wanted to “revivify” Fanny. Is there any chance of that?
Not really. Alice, Jean and I did fine at the ROCKRGRL Awards at Berklee in '07 though and I'd certainly do that again. Maybe we could mix it up when Jean and I go out with his new album, and do workshops as well.

Now that would be time well spent.



Editor’s Note:
There’s a tremendous amount of material on this ground-breaking band. When she isn’t performing or teaching future girl rockers, June Millington is hard at work on an autobiography. Until it hits the bookstores, you can get the backstory and a wealth of information along with images, tunes and video on Fanny’s website.

Want more information about IMA’s Rock ‘n Roll Camp for Girls? A few slots are still available for this summer. Get the information right here.