“We were trying to be known for being excellent musicians, and also we wanted to be good-looking and attractive. “We thought of ourselves as just girls who had to prove themselves,” Jean says. The early version of Fanny, The Svelts, in a home they shared in California’s Los Altos Hills in the 1960s: Jean Millington, Brie Darling, Wendy Haas Mull, June Millington Photo: Steve Griffithīut in the ’70s their ethnic background took a backseat to gender, decades before the term intersectionality was coined. After all, she says, “there weren’t many other girls around then who looked like us.” “We happened to be three teenage girls living in the same part of the country, who had almost the exact same heritage and each played a different instrument,” Darling says. They shared a remarkably similar background: white American fathers who were serving in the military when they met and married their mothers while in the Philippines. That’s where the three met as teens in the early 1960s, a few years after the Millington sisters emigrated from Manila with their family. They’re also appearing with the film this week at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and playing free shows at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens and the Crest Theatre in their hometown of Sacramento. And to celebrate the band is hitting the road for a mini tour through California, the highlight of which is a 50th-anniversary concert at the famed Whisky a Go Go nightclub on LA’s Sunset Strip on May 17.
On May 22 the film will have its broadcast and streaming premiere on PBS nationwide as part of the channel’s programming for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Among those attesting to Fanny’s significance are Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott, Bonnie Raitt, the Go-Gos’ Kathy Valentine, Todd Rundgren, the Runaways’ Cherie Currie, Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian, the B-52s’ Kate Pierson, and Charles Neville. Directed by Bobbi Jo Hart, the film intercuts archival footage of the band’s rollicking heyday with footage of them recording their 2018 reunion album, Fanny Walked the Earth, some four decades after they played their final concert.
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