By the time Lita Ford appears on your television talking about sex, guitar riffs, and rock’s dirtiest secrets, she’s already lived the kind of career most of her male peers only pretended to have. As a member of The Runaways, she kicked down the door for women in hard rock, then stuck around long enough to watch the same radio stations that once banned her songs play them unedited decades later. She’s still laughing at the hypocrisy.
“I released Hungry for Your Sex and nobody would play it,” she says, voice equal parts disbelief and satisfaction. “But then you get bands like 2 Live Crew that come out and they sing about all this nasty, nasty stuff. I think the fact that they were guys and the fact that I was a female—I got pushback and they didn’t. How come they can do it and I can’t?”
Her new gig on AXS TV’s The Top Ten Revealed makes perfect sense. Hosted by Katie Daryl, the show ranks everything from the greatest guitar riffs to the best collaborations, with panelists like Ford weighing in. “Katie says, ‘Oh, this series is much racier than I thought,’” Ford laughs. “We go into talking about sex. It’s just awesome. The songs still hold up today—you hear them on the radio, people cover them, they never go away.”
For Ford, “sex sells” isn’t a cliché, it’s an occupational hazard. Even her biggest hit, “Kiss Me Deadly,” came with a compromise: “I went to a party last Saturday night, I didn’t get laid, I got in a fight.” Too much, said the gatekeepers of 1988 radio. “They made me change it to ‘I didn’t get paid.’ I had all these alternate versions. Now nobody cares. They all play the ‘I didn’t get laid’ version.”
It wasn’t just lyrics that rubbed the industry the wrong way—it was the audacity of a woman playing loud guitar and refusing to apologize. “It was frustrating in The Runaways, it was frustrating for me as a solo artist because I had to fight so many battles,” she admits. “But I never gave up. I never took no for an answer. I just kept plodding through.”
That stubbornness earned her the Icon Award from Marshall Amplification and Guitar Player magazine, a moment that made even Ford pause. “I thought, wow, I am officially an icon because of the way I carved a path for other women in rock and roll.” She didn’t celebrate alone, either—she hit the stage with eleven female guitarists, a living reminder that her door-kicking didn’t go to waste. “As Lzzy Hale says, you kicked down the door, you carved the path. Joan Jett and I basically laid the foundation, and Heart too. Now it’s so cool to see all these women out there kicking butt.”
The subject of The Runaways inevitably creeps back into the conversation. Fans still fantasize about some grand reunion, but Ford isn’t dangling false hope. “I don’t think Joan and I will ever work together,” she says flatly. “But I know Sheree and I might.” In fact, she and Cherie Currie already cut a Christmas single in 2013, while fellow alum Vicki Blue directed Ford’s video for “Mother.” Those collaborations felt more like family than business. “Vicki’s really into film, she’s got all these connections with great camera people. We went out to Joshua Tree and shot a video—it just feels like you’re with family when you do stuff like that.”
As for Currie, Ford still plays cheerleader. “She was like, ‘I don’t want to wear that, I don’t want to wear all that makeup,’ and I’m thinking, Cherie, you’re beautiful, let’s show it off. I dressed her up in Victoria’s Secret pajamas and put red lipstick on her. We had a blast.”
If there’s bitterness about the past, Ford doesn’t show it. She’s more interested in guitars, television cameras, and making sure the next generation knows exactly who kicked down the door for them. And if a few lyrics still make program directors nervous? Even better.
“Sex sells,” she shrugs. “Always has. Always will.”
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