Thursday Music

The first time Susanna Hoffs and the Peterson sisters sang together and their voices blended, the frisson was unmistakable. “We knew we had something,” Hoffs said. “We created a band in that moment.”

Hoffs, 66, beamed at the memory, sitting in her kitchen on a late January afternoon. Dressed in a sweater and slacks, the diminutive [she’s 5″2′] singer and guitarist sipped coffee, an old Margaret Keane painting hanging above her. Her airy home in Brentwood is just a few blocks from where the Bangles were born, on a cool evening in early 1981 in her parents’ garage.

“It’s an overused word, but we were organic,” the guitarist Vicki Peterson, 67, said. “We formed ourselves, played the music we loved, we really were a garage band.” But a garage band “that somehow became pop stars,” the drummer Debbi Peterson, 63, noted. Both sisters were interviewed in video conversations.

The Bangles broke big, scoring five Top 5 hits and storming MTV with inescapable songs like “Manic Monday” and “Eternal Flame.” They were one of the era’s rare all-girl groups — and became one of the most successful female bands of all time — a crew of puckish 20-somethings showcasing their collective songwriting and vocal chops.

But one of the defining bands of the 1980s also ended in spectacular fashion. Less than a decade after its birth, the group imploded in its manager’s Hollywood mansion, the sisterhood of its members lost amid a farrago of fame and mental fatigue.

That story plays out vividly in “Eternal Flame: The Authorized Biography of the Bangles” by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, out on Feb. 18. Bickerdike — the author of books about Nico and Britney Spears — fashioned a history of a bygone era in the music business, one in which the outsize influence of major labels, domineering producers and Machiavellian managers could routinely make or break a band.

. . . The notion of the Bangles as a band of equals quickly went out the window. “Susanna [Hoffs] was pushed forward as the sex symbol,” Bickerdike said. “But Sue is really smart and goofy, she’s actually kind of a dork, you know? So I think that was an uncomfortable role for her.”

And this is a crime:

While the Go-Go’s were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2021, the Bangles have yet to be nominated.

Here’s Susannah singing my favorite Bangles song, “Eternal Flame,” for which she wrote the lyrics, in 2021—when she was sixty (she turned 66 on January 17). She remains beautiful and alluring, and her voice is still lovely. She’s also Jewish, and I’d marry her in a second—if she wasn’t already married.

Here’s a good live version (1996) with just Hoffs and a guitarist. A live version with all the Bangles is here and you can hear the original recording here.  The song topped the charts in both the U.S. and U.K.