You can't always control the situations you find yourself in, but you can control how you react to them. This is a lesson that Runaways frontwoman, singer and rock & roll icon Cherie Currie learned the hard way.
After a chance meeting with vocalist/guitarist Joan Jett and demented pop n' rock Svengali Kim Fowley (a producer whose credits at the time included the novelty hit "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa"), Currie found herself at the eye of the storm that was The Runaways at age fifteen. The year was 1975, and the male-dominated industry was keen to dismiss the fledgling Los Angeles-based all-girl quintet (which, during Currie's tenure with the group, featured Lita Ford on lead guitar, Jackie Fox on bass, and the late Sandy West on drums).
Under the guidance (or, it could be argued, misguidance) of Fowley, who was a formidable taskmaster, the girls relentlessly rehearsed until they were a beyond tight unit and a force to be reckoned with. Creatively and musically, Fowley's berating and bullying - his primary motivational tactics - paid off. Over the course of the next two very hectic years The Runaways would leave an indelible mark on the music industry, smashing the misconceptions of those who ever doubted that women could rock.
Though Jett thrived on the challenges laid down by Fowley, his abrasive divide and conquer management style took an emotional toll on the more vulnerable Currie, who had never sung before and was the product of a recently very broken home. Ultimately the band was torn apart by the festering resentment fostered by Fowley; the tragedy of The Runaways' considerable legacy being that they stopped far short of their true potential.
Post-Runaways Currie's career was like a leaf blowing in the wind, succumbing to forces beyond her influence. Fowley shaped her first unfulfilling solo album, and pressure exacted by her father turned the second into an ill-fated family affair, with Currie's unseasoned twin sister Marie sharing vocal duties - and creative input.
While recording this second album, Currie also bagged her first acting role, starring opposite Jodie Foster in a film called Foxes. Though not a huge commercial success, Foxes, Foster - and Currie - received very favorable reviews. However accomplishment in this one area was not enough to save Currie from herself. Mourning the loss of her rock & roll dreams, Currie, who had been a casual cocaine user, sought solace in drink and highs from freebase.
Her addiction killed her career and threatened to do the same to her being. After hitting rock bottom, Currie fought to get her life back on track. Having learned how to make healthier choices on her road to recovery, Currie turned addiction on its head and became a drug counselor. Continuing the healing process, she subsequently wrote a book about her experiences with The Runaways, and her journey to the edge and back. Published in 1989, Neon Angel was considered to be an instant classic in the rock biography genre.
Over two decades later, the book serves as the backbone to the highly anticipated biopic about The Runaways, which stars Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie. However the film is far from the final word on Currie's story. The original version of Neon Angel was published by a family-orientated company looking for a vehicle to launch a new young adult literary division. Though well received, the nature of the teen orientated book meant Currie had to skip several key chapters in her own story. As a companion to The Runaways film Currie is therefore releasing a more definitive, completely revised and re-written version of Neon Angel. In it, among other things, she talks for the first time about a childhood rape and a harrowing knifepoint kidnap ordeal that happened several years later.
Currie has taken on many roles during her dramatic and varied life - trailblazing woman of rock, actress, drug addict, drug counselor, author, chainsaw artist, wife and mother - but perhaps the most important of all is that of survivor. SuicideGirls caught up with Currie at a recent film junket for a one-on-one chat about The Runaways, redemption, and forgiveness.
Nicole Powers: So this is the end of a 21-year journey for the book.
Cherie Currie: You know it is. It really is. Wow! I never thought of it that way.
NP: It's like your baby's come of age.
CC: True. I mean you're really right. That's incredible that you would say that. I mean the first book, I have to credit Neal Shusterman for that book. I was in my mid-twenties, I still hadn't quite come to grips with a lot of things that had happened in my life, and I had a lot of fear. Neal was such a brilliant writer. I mean I gave my two cents, changed a couple of things here and there, but basically nothing. This book is a totally different thing. I just had gotten to a point in my life where I've just forgiven myself, and I have no fear. I took a lot of blame for things I didn't need to. I guess I thought I needed to be forgiven. Well those times have come and gone. Now I just want to be honest.
NP: It's interesting that you talk about forgiveness, because in a way The Runaways back in the day was a cautionary tale of what happens to a band when you let anger fester.
CC: True.
NP: And it's taken a lot of time for you to forgive yourself, never mind other people, but you seem to be much happier for it.
CC: Oh, absolutely. You know the second book was very healing for me. Not only that, I remembered things that I had pushed away or locked away. Once I just let go of that fear and just forgave myself for a lot of the things I had done, that was my prize. It was almost like someone unlocked that door and just allowed me to see things from a totally different perspective. I just accepted so many things that I just refused to accept before, that I thought I could control or change. You know we have that idea as young people that, first of all, we're invincible, and second of all, that we can manipulate and change situations. It's not true. We can't. But acceptance was the key for me with this.
NP: Specifically, what were the hardest things for you to come to terms with? And what areas did you take the blame for?
CC: Just all I put my family through, my second [post-Runaways] record with my sister Marie, what I put my sister through. I ended up candy-coating everybody else's lives as well. It didn't matter if it was family or people in the business, I mean some of these stories, I had to say, "Look, this happened, and it wasn't my fault. Not this time. It's their fucking fault! This person did this. This person, not me." It was something I needed to do. I needed to tell some of these stories that I couldn't tell in this other book.
NP: Well some of new material in the new book, such as the rape at the hands of your sister's ex-boyfriend when you were a teenager, were stories that you didn't even want to tell your mom -- never mind your readers.
CC: Yeah, I had to break that to my mom, a couple of things that she was unaware of. Because she'd left, gone to Indonesia. And, back then, good god, I don't know about you, but man I cared what people thought.
NP: Teenagers do feel that so intensely. It's one of the most freeing things to learn to get over that, to not care what others think, to be able to dance through life as if no one is watching you.
CC: Exactly. And do you know what? Your individuality comes out so much when you lose that. I'm not [saying you] don't give a damn. You just accept who you are, and you embrace who you are rather than trying to fit into somebody else's idea of who you should be.
NP: The Runaways was such a tough experience for you because you cared so much what others - Kim in particular - thought. The film is therefore an interesting study on how two people can go through similar situations, and can react and be affected by them very differently. It's something that Kristen spoke about earlier too. She said when she asked Joan how she dealt with Kim when he was verbally berating her, Joan had told her: "You'd laugh at him. You'd love the guy. He's hilarious. You aspired to be as crazy and freaky as him." Joan was able to essentially laugh the abuse off and use humor as a defense mechanism, but you were in a much more vulnerable place, so a lot of that verbal abuse got internalized with you.
CC: Well I was more insecure than Joan.
NP: That's understandable, Joan had been playing guitar for a while...
CC: I used to turn around -- and this just came to me - I used to turn around and say, "You guys can hide behind those instruments. I have nothing in front of me." But also I'd grown up with an identical twin sister who was the prettier one, the more popular one, so it was more important to me with Kim. I looked on him almost as a father figure in a way, and when he would do some of those things it would literally just crush me. You know Joan, Sandy West, they could separate themselves, but I took everything to heart. I was very vulnerable.
NP: I guess at that point Joan knew she was a kick-ass guitar player, but you'd only just started singing...
CC: Well I watched Joan go through her growth. I think the only two that were not insecure would have been Jackie [Fox] and Sandy. Sandy, she was great, she pounded those drums like nobody's business, and Lita was just angry. I don't know if those emotions that they were showing were for-real all the time or just a way to hide.
NP: I'm sure it was a front. Kids that age are rarely that secure.
CC: I really don't know. But you know I watched Joan really come into [being] a really great performer and singer/songwriter for sure. I just didn't believe in myself as much as she did. I just didn't. I really didn't think my voice was very good. Now I hear that it was very deep and very unique. But I really didn't think of myself ever as a good singer. And then I would have Lita continuously telling me how bad I was. She'd listen to Ann Wilson of Heart and turn around and say, "Why can't you sing like that?" It was rough.
NP: How bad did the infighting get?
CC: It wasn't pretty. Lita was the only one that threatened me physically. I just wasn't a fighter, really I wasn't. That very last day in the band, when she kicked the door to my dressing room, just scared me to death. But it was the emotional abuse that went on from Kim, and [the band] just started losing communication with each other. When you're a bunch of young girls, and you're just growing into an adult body, there's all these insecurities - you can't expect anything different. And you're thrown out on the road with no supervision, none, for months. I'm amazed we stuck together for as long as we did.
NP: What's your relationship with Kim like now? 'Cause obviously he's part of the film project and he's here today.
CC: Wow. It just shows that my planets seem to be aligned pretty well these days. I'd seen Kim a couple of years ago at a party. I'd always been pretty angry with him. It wasn't just because of The Runaways. After I had left The Runaways, I went on and did a record with my sister at Capitol. Kim ended up bootlegging that record and was selling it and making a lot more money than I ever did - and I had nothing to do with Kim at the time.
When I became a mom, and I saw him at the premiere for The Mayor of Sunset Strip, I approached him and I said, "You're no longer stealing from me, you're stealing from my son now so this is going to stop." I was really angry. Then when I saw him at this other event, the anger was just gone. I think I just came to grips with the fact that we all have skeletons in our closet. We all have regret. We've all done things that we wish we could have done differently, all of us. So who am I to hold that kind of animosity towards someone? I had to come to grips with my own animosity, the self-loathing for the things I had done, destroying my career, really putting my family in a horrible situation. Once I forgave myself it was real easy to forgive everyone else. The timing was great, and I do appreciate Kim for what he did, very much so. He did some pretty bad things, and he's the one that's got to live with that not me, so all in all it's good.
NP: What sticks out in your mind as the worst thing Kim did?
CC: Well the movie doesn't even touch [on it]. In my book there's one chapter called "Kim Fowley's Sex Education Class," and trust me, he doesn't look that good in 100-year old underwear let's just say...[He was] like a human praying mantis in dirty, holey underwear - not nice - not for my virgin eyes anyway.
NP: The solo photo session with the Japanese photographer was the final straw that broke The Runaways back. Can you talk about that?
CC: That was a classic Kim Fowley set up. I mean, honest to goodness, I was very protective of The Runaways. I turned down the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine two weeks before I left the band. I begged them in tears, "Please do not put me on the cover of this magazine because it'll be the end of my band." I was getting too much publicity being the frontwoman of that band. It was not something I wanted. And then Kim calls me and says, "Oh, you've got a photo session today." And then he assures me that all the other girls had a photo session as well, that they just wanted to shoot us individually. I understood that. It had happened before. I had no idea that I was the only one. Had I known that that session would have never taken place.
NP: In the book you talk about your relationship with Joan, which seemed to be incredibly positive despite the air of acrimony that surrounded the band. I wish the movie had given a greater sense of this.
CC: Well the film could only be 90 minutes long. There were so many things that had to be left out. Two years of experiences cannot be put into an hour and a half. There was a whole lot to tell in a really short amount of time, and they chose their situations in the film the way they chose them. I wish there could have been some [more] of these great moments that Joan and I had. We roomed together all the time and we saw the lights of all the cities. We'd never been away from home. But they had a story to tell in a very short amount of time.
NP: The kissing scenes between Dakota and Kristin - that's very, very hot!
CC: True.
NP: You allude to it in the book, saying the moments you shared with Joan were "some of the most satisfying moments" of your young adult life and that they "quake" you to this day. But you don't go into detail. Was it as hot in real life as it is in the film?
CC: I just think it was pretty hot in that film, don't you?
NP: Yeah, absolutely.
CC: I think it depicted it pretty well, absolutely. We had fun. We had fun and it was a blast.
NP: In the book there's a couple of other intimate relationships that you talk about. One with a "cheese ball" teenybopper pop star Kim essentially pimped you out to, and another with a "Latin singer," whom you fell in love with during The Runaways tour of Japan. That's going to prompt some interesting speculation as people try to figure out their identities.
CC: Yes. I really wanted to name names, but I couldn't.
NP: After The Runaways you starred alongside Jodie Foster in a film called Foxes, which got great notices. How did this second career as an actress come about?
CC: Well my mother was a great actress. She did a lot of movies with Roy Rogers. I was approached after doing a show by the William Morris Agency... Foxes was the second [audition] I went out on. So it just happened. Everything in my life just seems to just happen, which is good. I enjoyed it, but I just really screwed it up. I screwed it up with drugs. I don't regret any of it though, because look where I'm sitting now. I mean how could I regret any of it?
Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway (IT Books / Harper Collins) by Cherie Currie with Tony O'Neill, featuring a forward by Joan Jett, is available at Amazon.com and all fine book stores. The Runaways movie hits theaters on limited release March 19, and is slated to go on wide release April 9. For more info on Cherie Currie go to CherieCurrie.com/.
After a chance meeting with vocalist/guitarist Joan Jett and demented pop n' rock Svengali Kim Fowley (a producer whose credits at the time included the novelty hit "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa"), Currie found herself at the eye of the storm that was The Runaways at age fifteen. The year was 1975, and the male-dominated industry was keen to dismiss the fledgling Los Angeles-based all-girl quintet (which, during Currie's tenure with the group, featured Lita Ford on lead guitar, Jackie Fox on bass, and the late Sandy West on drums).
Under the guidance (or, it could be argued, misguidance) of Fowley, who was a formidable taskmaster, the girls relentlessly rehearsed until they were a beyond tight unit and a force to be reckoned with. Creatively and musically, Fowley's berating and bullying - his primary motivational tactics - paid off. Over the course of the next two very hectic years The Runaways would leave an indelible mark on the music industry, smashing the misconceptions of those who ever doubted that women could rock.
Though Jett thrived on the challenges laid down by Fowley, his abrasive divide and conquer management style took an emotional toll on the more vulnerable Currie, who had never sung before and was the product of a recently very broken home. Ultimately the band was torn apart by the festering resentment fostered by Fowley; the tragedy of The Runaways' considerable legacy being that they stopped far short of their true potential.
Post-Runaways Currie's career was like a leaf blowing in the wind, succumbing to forces beyond her influence. Fowley shaped her first unfulfilling solo album, and pressure exacted by her father turned the second into an ill-fated family affair, with Currie's unseasoned twin sister Marie sharing vocal duties - and creative input.
While recording this second album, Currie also bagged her first acting role, starring opposite Jodie Foster in a film called Foxes. Though not a huge commercial success, Foxes, Foster - and Currie - received very favorable reviews. However accomplishment in this one area was not enough to save Currie from herself. Mourning the loss of her rock & roll dreams, Currie, who had been a casual cocaine user, sought solace in drink and highs from freebase.
Her addiction killed her career and threatened to do the same to her being. After hitting rock bottom, Currie fought to get her life back on track. Having learned how to make healthier choices on her road to recovery, Currie turned addiction on its head and became a drug counselor. Continuing the healing process, she subsequently wrote a book about her experiences with The Runaways, and her journey to the edge and back. Published in 1989, Neon Angel was considered to be an instant classic in the rock biography genre.
Over two decades later, the book serves as the backbone to the highly anticipated biopic about The Runaways, which stars Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie. However the film is far from the final word on Currie's story. The original version of Neon Angel was published by a family-orientated company looking for a vehicle to launch a new young adult literary division. Though well received, the nature of the teen orientated book meant Currie had to skip several key chapters in her own story. As a companion to The Runaways film Currie is therefore releasing a more definitive, completely revised and re-written version of Neon Angel. In it, among other things, she talks for the first time about a childhood rape and a harrowing knifepoint kidnap ordeal that happened several years later.
Currie has taken on many roles during her dramatic and varied life - trailblazing woman of rock, actress, drug addict, drug counselor, author, chainsaw artist, wife and mother - but perhaps the most important of all is that of survivor. SuicideGirls caught up with Currie at a recent film junket for a one-on-one chat about The Runaways, redemption, and forgiveness.
Nicole Powers: So this is the end of a 21-year journey for the book.
Cherie Currie: You know it is. It really is. Wow! I never thought of it that way.
NP: It's like your baby's come of age.
CC: True. I mean you're really right. That's incredible that you would say that. I mean the first book, I have to credit Neal Shusterman for that book. I was in my mid-twenties, I still hadn't quite come to grips with a lot of things that had happened in my life, and I had a lot of fear. Neal was such a brilliant writer. I mean I gave my two cents, changed a couple of things here and there, but basically nothing. This book is a totally different thing. I just had gotten to a point in my life where I've just forgiven myself, and I have no fear. I took a lot of blame for things I didn't need to. I guess I thought I needed to be forgiven. Well those times have come and gone. Now I just want to be honest.
NP: It's interesting that you talk about forgiveness, because in a way The Runaways back in the day was a cautionary tale of what happens to a band when you let anger fester.
CC: True.
NP: And it's taken a lot of time for you to forgive yourself, never mind other people, but you seem to be much happier for it.
CC: Oh, absolutely. You know the second book was very healing for me. Not only that, I remembered things that I had pushed away or locked away. Once I just let go of that fear and just forgave myself for a lot of the things I had done, that was my prize. It was almost like someone unlocked that door and just allowed me to see things from a totally different perspective. I just accepted so many things that I just refused to accept before, that I thought I could control or change. You know we have that idea as young people that, first of all, we're invincible, and second of all, that we can manipulate and change situations. It's not true. We can't. But acceptance was the key for me with this.
NP: Specifically, what were the hardest things for you to come to terms with? And what areas did you take the blame for?
CC: Just all I put my family through, my second [post-Runaways] record with my sister Marie, what I put my sister through. I ended up candy-coating everybody else's lives as well. It didn't matter if it was family or people in the business, I mean some of these stories, I had to say, "Look, this happened, and it wasn't my fault. Not this time. It's their fucking fault! This person did this. This person, not me." It was something I needed to do. I needed to tell some of these stories that I couldn't tell in this other book.
NP: Well some of new material in the new book, such as the rape at the hands of your sister's ex-boyfriend when you were a teenager, were stories that you didn't even want to tell your mom -- never mind your readers.
CC: Yeah, I had to break that to my mom, a couple of things that she was unaware of. Because she'd left, gone to Indonesia. And, back then, good god, I don't know about you, but man I cared what people thought.
NP: Teenagers do feel that so intensely. It's one of the most freeing things to learn to get over that, to not care what others think, to be able to dance through life as if no one is watching you.
CC: Exactly. And do you know what? Your individuality comes out so much when you lose that. I'm not [saying you] don't give a damn. You just accept who you are, and you embrace who you are rather than trying to fit into somebody else's idea of who you should be.
NP: The Runaways was such a tough experience for you because you cared so much what others - Kim in particular - thought. The film is therefore an interesting study on how two people can go through similar situations, and can react and be affected by them very differently. It's something that Kristen spoke about earlier too. She said when she asked Joan how she dealt with Kim when he was verbally berating her, Joan had told her: "You'd laugh at him. You'd love the guy. He's hilarious. You aspired to be as crazy and freaky as him." Joan was able to essentially laugh the abuse off and use humor as a defense mechanism, but you were in a much more vulnerable place, so a lot of that verbal abuse got internalized with you.
CC: Well I was more insecure than Joan.
NP: That's understandable, Joan had been playing guitar for a while...
CC: I used to turn around -- and this just came to me - I used to turn around and say, "You guys can hide behind those instruments. I have nothing in front of me." But also I'd grown up with an identical twin sister who was the prettier one, the more popular one, so it was more important to me with Kim. I looked on him almost as a father figure in a way, and when he would do some of those things it would literally just crush me. You know Joan, Sandy West, they could separate themselves, but I took everything to heart. I was very vulnerable.
NP: I guess at that point Joan knew she was a kick-ass guitar player, but you'd only just started singing...
CC: Well I watched Joan go through her growth. I think the only two that were not insecure would have been Jackie [Fox] and Sandy. Sandy, she was great, she pounded those drums like nobody's business, and Lita was just angry. I don't know if those emotions that they were showing were for-real all the time or just a way to hide.
NP: I'm sure it was a front. Kids that age are rarely that secure.
CC: I really don't know. But you know I watched Joan really come into [being] a really great performer and singer/songwriter for sure. I just didn't believe in myself as much as she did. I just didn't. I really didn't think my voice was very good. Now I hear that it was very deep and very unique. But I really didn't think of myself ever as a good singer. And then I would have Lita continuously telling me how bad I was. She'd listen to Ann Wilson of Heart and turn around and say, "Why can't you sing like that?" It was rough.
NP: How bad did the infighting get?
CC: It wasn't pretty. Lita was the only one that threatened me physically. I just wasn't a fighter, really I wasn't. That very last day in the band, when she kicked the door to my dressing room, just scared me to death. But it was the emotional abuse that went on from Kim, and [the band] just started losing communication with each other. When you're a bunch of young girls, and you're just growing into an adult body, there's all these insecurities - you can't expect anything different. And you're thrown out on the road with no supervision, none, for months. I'm amazed we stuck together for as long as we did.
NP: What's your relationship with Kim like now? 'Cause obviously he's part of the film project and he's here today.
CC: Wow. It just shows that my planets seem to be aligned pretty well these days. I'd seen Kim a couple of years ago at a party. I'd always been pretty angry with him. It wasn't just because of The Runaways. After I had left The Runaways, I went on and did a record with my sister at Capitol. Kim ended up bootlegging that record and was selling it and making a lot more money than I ever did - and I had nothing to do with Kim at the time.
When I became a mom, and I saw him at the premiere for The Mayor of Sunset Strip, I approached him and I said, "You're no longer stealing from me, you're stealing from my son now so this is going to stop." I was really angry. Then when I saw him at this other event, the anger was just gone. I think I just came to grips with the fact that we all have skeletons in our closet. We all have regret. We've all done things that we wish we could have done differently, all of us. So who am I to hold that kind of animosity towards someone? I had to come to grips with my own animosity, the self-loathing for the things I had done, destroying my career, really putting my family in a horrible situation. Once I forgave myself it was real easy to forgive everyone else. The timing was great, and I do appreciate Kim for what he did, very much so. He did some pretty bad things, and he's the one that's got to live with that not me, so all in all it's good.
NP: What sticks out in your mind as the worst thing Kim did?
CC: Well the movie doesn't even touch [on it]. In my book there's one chapter called "Kim Fowley's Sex Education Class," and trust me, he doesn't look that good in 100-year old underwear let's just say...[He was] like a human praying mantis in dirty, holey underwear - not nice - not for my virgin eyes anyway.
NP: The solo photo session with the Japanese photographer was the final straw that broke The Runaways back. Can you talk about that?
CC: That was a classic Kim Fowley set up. I mean, honest to goodness, I was very protective of The Runaways. I turned down the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine two weeks before I left the band. I begged them in tears, "Please do not put me on the cover of this magazine because it'll be the end of my band." I was getting too much publicity being the frontwoman of that band. It was not something I wanted. And then Kim calls me and says, "Oh, you've got a photo session today." And then he assures me that all the other girls had a photo session as well, that they just wanted to shoot us individually. I understood that. It had happened before. I had no idea that I was the only one. Had I known that that session would have never taken place.
NP: In the book you talk about your relationship with Joan, which seemed to be incredibly positive despite the air of acrimony that surrounded the band. I wish the movie had given a greater sense of this.
CC: Well the film could only be 90 minutes long. There were so many things that had to be left out. Two years of experiences cannot be put into an hour and a half. There was a whole lot to tell in a really short amount of time, and they chose their situations in the film the way they chose them. I wish there could have been some [more] of these great moments that Joan and I had. We roomed together all the time and we saw the lights of all the cities. We'd never been away from home. But they had a story to tell in a very short amount of time.
NP: The kissing scenes between Dakota and Kristin - that's very, very hot!
CC: True.
NP: You allude to it in the book, saying the moments you shared with Joan were "some of the most satisfying moments" of your young adult life and that they "quake" you to this day. But you don't go into detail. Was it as hot in real life as it is in the film?
CC: I just think it was pretty hot in that film, don't you?
NP: Yeah, absolutely.
CC: I think it depicted it pretty well, absolutely. We had fun. We had fun and it was a blast.
NP: In the book there's a couple of other intimate relationships that you talk about. One with a "cheese ball" teenybopper pop star Kim essentially pimped you out to, and another with a "Latin singer," whom you fell in love with during The Runaways tour of Japan. That's going to prompt some interesting speculation as people try to figure out their identities.
CC: Yes. I really wanted to name names, but I couldn't.
NP: After The Runaways you starred alongside Jodie Foster in a film called Foxes, which got great notices. How did this second career as an actress come about?
CC: Well my mother was a great actress. She did a lot of movies with Roy Rogers. I was approached after doing a show by the William Morris Agency... Foxes was the second [audition] I went out on. So it just happened. Everything in my life just seems to just happen, which is good. I enjoyed it, but I just really screwed it up. I screwed it up with drugs. I don't regret any of it though, because look where I'm sitting now. I mean how could I regret any of it?
Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway (IT Books / Harper Collins) by Cherie Currie with Tony O'Neill, featuring a forward by Joan Jett, is available at Amazon.com and all fine book stores. The Runaways movie hits theaters on limited release March 19, and is slated to go on wide release April 9. For more info on Cherie Currie go to CherieCurrie.com/.