By Eric S. Caruncho, Staff Writer
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

Editor’s note: And while you’re at it, check this out: What didn’t see print in the SIM, May 11, 2008 issue because of limited space.

WHILE going through my e-mail, I noticed one forwarded by a fellow “Jingle” magazine alumnus, which announced that June Millington would be conducting a workshop on “the global Pinoy musician” sponsored by the Lunduyan ng Sining, a local women’s NGO.

The phrase “blast from the past” is overused, but in this case, appropriate because I knew who June Millington was.

I remember a Time article that came out sometime in the very early 1970s — possibly before martial law — which featured two rock bands: Joy of Cooking and Fanny. It was the very first time the general public heard about the phenomenon of “women in rock.” There were of course female singers — Janis Joplin had only recently died of a heroin overdose — but women musicians playing their own instruments and composing their own songs and competing on equal footing with the likes of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones? It had never happened before.

Joy of Cooking was led by two women but had male members. But Fanny was really an all-female band. Fanny had been signed to a major label (Reprise Records) and released an album first (Fanny, in 1970). More importantly, it had been started by two Filipino-American sisters, June and Jean Millington, who had grown up in Manila.

Now, we Filipinos pride ourselves on our supposedly native musical talent. Pinoy breasts swell with pride whenever one of our own makes it on the world stage: witness Lea Salonga in “Miss Saigon,” and more recently Charisse, Madonna Decena, and Arnel Pineda.

Strangely, the local press didn’t catch on to Fanny, despite it having two certifiably brown members. There were a few articles in music magazines, and local rock radio did play some of their songs on the air, but the local record subsidiary never even released their albums here. They did release a single, the A-side of which was a rock ballad titled “Beside Myself,” on which Jean Millington sang and June Millington played a memorable guitar solo.

I was frantically sorting through my old vinyl looking for that 45, and an import copy of “Fanny Hill,” the band’s third (and many say, best) album from 1973, the night I was supposed to interview June Millington. I had gotten in touch with the good people at Lunduyan ng Sining (keep on rocking, girls!) and they had informed me that she was going to be playing at Kublai’s on Katipunan Ave.

When I got there June was going through her sound check, playing a nice ESP guitar through a Fender amp. She still had the long, untamed hair she had in Fanny, only now it was stark white. She was with her uncle and aunt, also visiting from the States, from whom I learned that her mother was a Limjoco from Lian, Batangas, and that her father had been the US Navy’s flag officer after the war.

Presently, June finished her sound check. I found out that this was her first time back since she left for the US in 1961, at age 13. Kublai’s was starting to fill up with girls (me, her uncle and the sound technician seemed to be the only men in the room) and she marveled at how everybody was on their mobile phones texting. June was very open and refreshingly frank in sharing her vast and unique experience in the music business.

I asked her, as one of the pioneers of women in rock, how much had changed for women in what is still largely a male arena. Following are some excerpts from our interview (see also my article in the May 11 issue of SIM).

On her work:

That’s why I am part of the Institute for the Musical Arts (an NGO for female musicians she co-founded based in Massachusetts), because we want to change the infrastructure. The fact is, if you make it as an artist and you’re a woman, you still have to deal with a lot of issues, issues of body image and that’s a problem. It’s causing a lot of girls to have serious mental problems. I don’t mean that facetiously — it’s true. And so they develop these phobias, no matter how good they are, and it’s hard because there are a lot of talented girls. You have to change the infrastructure in order to change that. You can be attractive, you can be talented but still there’s that one way they want you to look. It’s a huge problem.

Men have space provided for them to be in positions of power whereas women aren’t. It’s just expected. Just being a man you’re in a position of power. Whereas as a woman, you’re talked down to. Guys can walk onstage and they can look homeless, but a woman can’t.

Fortunately we (Fanny) handled that ourselves for a while. We took make up lessons, we learned certain things that had to do with being an entertainer. You can’t really resist certain things if you’re in the entertainment industry. You really do have to think of yourself as a commodity, you have to think of how you look onstage and be professional, and your sound and all that.

On being Pinoy:

Most people didn’t know where the Philippines was. Whether or not we were Filipino was beside the point. Ringo Starr, when we recorded at Apple Studios and they said these girls are going to record, said ‘Oh, the oriental girls.’ He wasn’t being racist about it. I like Ringo. That was just his context, “the oriental girls.”

On learning the ropes:

We felt like we were musicians from the time we were playing ukuleles. It was just a matter of how to access what was popular, how to catch the wave to use the California parlance. Part of it was luck, the fact that we were in California, and I was very shy but very aggressive about getting information from the guys my age who knew. And then we started to play with really big bands so I could ask these guys who were totally amazing. And don’t forget our recording techniques got better and better because we had great producers and we worked at amazing studios. When we were recording at Apple you can bet I asked a lot of questions about how the Beatles got their sound and how George Harrison (did), you know, that kind of stuff. They were very nice to me so I learned a lot and you can’t recreate that. I was really lucky in that I was able to interface with a lot of great recording engineers and they liked it that a girl was asking them.

On ‘women In rock’:

It’s complete bullshit. They don’t even know what they’re talking about. It’s all corporate marketing. They give women the title women in rock (when they) don’t even play. It’s all become corporate marketing. And it’s gone way off the scale, it has nothing to do with reality anymore. This is what we do — we analyze, we teach, we have women working with us who are in positions of power — one of the women who teaches in our recording camps runs George Lucas’ Skywalker Studios. We have our fingers in the industry and we are consciously trying to make things change and part of it is the fact that we have a history behind us, the fact that Jean and I were Fanny, we’re in the history books, people learn about us in college, in social studies, in feminist classes. We fit into every niche because we’re women, we’re half-Filipino, we’re this and that.

On the rock’n'roll lifestyle

Sex and drugs? No. We were very disciplined. Come on, we experimented, but we never got completely out of control. We were disciplined because it was really what we wanted to do before we got to LA, and we knew how hard we had to work. Why squander it? We were just a very hardworking band. If we weren’t performing we were rehearsing, or we were in the studio. That’s all we did, 24/7. It was full time.

On playing guitar:

I would go see other bands and talk to the guitarist, playing with them and figuring out new sounds or guitar positions. I never let any grass grow under my feet, I can tell you that.

No. There were no role models. They just didn’t exist. We created it. Jimi Hendrix and Wes Montgomery would be way up on the top of my list. I listened to everything.

It’s not just the fact that I played lead guitar but we also hung out in LA with all the greats, so I understand what it means to create an electric guitar tone. It’s an art form, and the guys that I hung out with were the best. We all did it together. I wasn’t separate from them, and they loved having a girl who was just as interested in guitar and the techniques of guitar and the actual equipment. I worked as hard on my guitar sound as on my guitar chops. People who understand guitar know that about me, they appreciate my tone and miss it. It’s nice to hear that because I worked as hard on that as on my guitar technique.

June and Jean Millington still play together in a band called the Slammin’ Babes. Check out the Fanny fan site at www.fannyrocks.com.

Read the Sunday Inquirer Magazine’s May 11 issue.

Share This