“Back in the early 1980s, there were no other girls out there that could play like I could play,” Lita Ford says. “And I had to prove it was me playing those songs, because nobody could accept it.”
These days, it’s a well-established fact that Ford knows her way around an electric guitar. From her groundbreaking work in the 1970s with all-female hard rockers the Runaways to her string of shredding, glam-tinged melodic metal efforts in the ’80s and early 1990s, Ford has remained a highly visible figure in the rock-guitar world for more than 40 years.
And in recent years she has also been celebrated as a major influence on a new generation of guitar-playing front women, in particular Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale, who credits Ford with “kicking the door down” for waves of female six-string slingers.
To make that happen, however, Ford occasionally had to do some actual kicking. As she explains, you may underestimate her skills as a guitarist, but you’ll do so at your own peril.
“I remember one time around ’81, there was a guy in the front row at a show,” Ford recounts. “He was right up against the stage, and he had an unopened can of beer. While I was playing, he shook that beer. I was watching him do it, but he didn’t know I could see him. I was acting like I didn’t see him.
“I knew he was gonna spray me down with his beer, so I waited for him to get the can up, and as he was about to pop the little tab, I walked over and kicked him in the wrist as hard as I could. I know I broke his wrist, because I used to wear these great big clodhopper platform shoes onstage!”
Ford lets out a laugh. “But it was like, Dude, you’re gonna spray me with that? I don’t think so. If someone spits at me, I spit back.”
As Ford tells it, her indoctrination into rock and roll came very early in life. Born in England, she moved with her family to Long Beach, California, at age four. Before she was even a teenager, she says, she was already taken with the heaviest sounds of the era.
“I asked my mother for a guitar,” she recalls. “And she bought me this Sears acoustic model. I ended up giving it away to my girlfriend, and I got another guitar that was a step up from Sears — it was, I don’t know, maybe a Bloomingdale’s model or something. I was playing heavy metal on this acoustic guitar. It was all Black Sabbath and Deep Purple riffs, but it just didn’t sound right to me. It didn’t have the balls I was looking for.”
After a cousin chaperoned Ford to a 1971 Black Sabbath concert at the nearby Long Beach Arena, she knew exactly what she needed. “I saw Tony Iommi, and I had to have a Gibson SG,” she says. “I just loved the darkness and the low end of the sound. I went to this hospital where my mom worked, and I bullshitted my way in and got a job. I saved up $375 from that job and bought myself a chocolate-colored SG.”
Ford was still playing that SG when, a few years later, she joined the Runaways at the tender age of 16; it’s the guitar that can be heard on the band’s classic, self-titled 1976 debut. At that time, however, she needed to update her amplifier.
I went to this hospital where my mom worked, and I bullshitted my way in and got a job. I saved up $375 from that job and bought myself a chocolate-colored SG.”
— Lita Ford
“I had been using my father’s reel-to-reel,” Ford says, laughing. “It was this huge thing, and it had an echo on it that sounded like a delay, which was great. It was like, Wow, I’ve got effects and everything! It was bizarre, but it worked. But once I was in the Runaways, I used a Marshall.”
Later in 1976, Ford augmented her Runaways gear with a pair of eye-catching Hamer Standards — one black, one white. These Gibson Explorer–inspired guitars became her main instruments throughout the rest of her tenure with the band and can be heard on the Runaways’ later albums.
Ford says she enjoyed her time in the Runaways, but the group’s explicit punk stance proved somewhat suffocating, considering that she’d grown up on a steady diet of Iommi, Ritchie Blackmore, and Jimmy Page.
“I would go home and learn stuff like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ — all the riffs, all the solos,” she says, “because that was the type of stuff I wanted to play in the band. But when I got into rehearsal, we would end up doing, you know, ‘Cherry Bomb.’ It was always that chunky, straight-ahead thing.”
It wasn’t until the Runaways dissolved in 1979 that Ford finally found the space to spread her guitar wings.
“I really took over my own self,” she continues. “I cut my hair and changed my clothes. I came up with my own style, my own look, my own way of playing.”
I would go home and learn stuff like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ — all the riffs, all the solos, because that was the type of stuff I wanted to play in the band.”
— Lita Ford
She also swapped out her guitars. “I got into B.C. Rich,” says Ford, who rediscovered her stolen B.C. Rich Mockingbird through an audition. “They became my home away from home. [B.C. Rich founder] Bernie Rico, Sr. was just fantastic, and I was always over there carving out new ideas and helping to make new stuff.
“They would make anything I asked them to make. By the end of the ’80s, I had a stack of different B.C. Rich guitars, and I would play them all in concert, because I wanted to show them off.”
By the latter part of the decade, Ford was also enjoying the success of a bona fide hit record: 1988’s Lita. Her third solo effort overall, the album spawned two hit singles — the hard-rocking “Kiss Me Deadly” and the ballad “Close My Eyes Forever,” sung as a duet with Ozzy Osbourne — and eventually became her first Platinum-seller.
Ford stuck to her guitar-playing guns, so much so that when she saw hard rock’s popularity declining in the early ’90s, she opted to bow out altogether rather than change her music to suit prevailing trends. “The music scene was changing,” she says. “Grunge was kickin’ in, and I was getting tired. So I said, ‘It’s a good time to disappear.’ What else was I gonna do? Go be a country star?”
Ford spent roughly 15 years away from the music scene before returning. It wasn’t easy to dive back in.
“Not at all,” Ford says. “It wasn’t like riding a bike. I had to relearn how to do it. I hadn’t been playing guitar all those years I was away. I even had to get used to wearing clothes again. Because I was living on a deserted island, all I wore was Billabongs. Then all of a sudden it was, ‘My God, I’ve got on high heels and leather pants!’”
Nevertheless, Ford has been fully back in the creative swing of things ever since. As for the music, it remains true to her heavy metal roots.
“Yeah, absolutely,” she says. “If it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood. It never really goes away.”
