JUNE MILLINGTON
- August Bernadicou
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
SVELTS, WILD HONEY, FANNY, PERFORMER
History is finally coming around, and the women who were there are getting credit for their work. We are very close with the story of the rainbow flag: a lady named “Faerie Argyle Rainbow” made it. It was not the work of one man. Faerie was a performer, as is June Millington, who broke ground as a woman in a male-dominated industry. June was in the bands the Svelts and Wild Honey. Later in 1969, she moved to Los Angeles and started the band Fanny. She played guitar and sang. Double whammy! Fanny was the “first all-women rock band to release an album on a major record label.” After Richard Perry’s secretary scouted the band and brought them to his attention, he produced their first three albums for Reprise Records. After Fanny, June got involved with the women’s music movement (here and here!).
What struck me about June was her fire. Music is her life (she runs the nonprofit IMA), and she is tired of the nonsense that holds back talent. She mentioned the word “misogyny” ten times in the interview. We get it, and we know you do too. Women and LGBTQ+ people have been oppressed for over 2,000 years. A talented band touring the world and selling thousands of copies, yet going relatively unnoticed? There is also suppression. LGBTQHP stands up for the truth!
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
“I grew up in the Philippines. I was the eldest of six at the time. Then we moved to Sacramento, California, when I was 13, and I was the eldest of seven after about a year. My parents fought, so that wasn't good. They did stay together until my sister Jean and I graduated from high school and were out of the house with the Svelts, and then Wild Honey, and then Fanny. We pretty much left the house while in high school because we did so many gigs. It was partly to avoid the conflict, but my dad never left us without enough food to eat. He was a lieutenant commander in the Navy. He understood discipline, and he really did try to get it together for us.
When I was younger, I knew that one of our band members didn't like our manager in high school because he said he was gay. I got from him that that was bad. But he never talked to us about that—what he really was and what that meant to him. So there wasn't any real conversation about it, but I felt a little bit of fear knowing that somebody would not like someone so much on that level without really knowing them. I was lucky when I finally realized I accepted it—I was 19, and I had a girlfriend. Then we went out together in Los Angeles, and I eventually ended up with Tret Fure.
I can't think of any way in which lesbians weren't oppressed. They couldn't tell their parents. They couldn't tell their coworkers. They couldn't tell the kids around them. You had to be really circumspect and just basically shut up about the whole thing, which was a drag. I kind of avoided it. I'm just like, ‘Fuck you. I'm on the road doing rock and roll. I don't want to hear that.’
Music was my passion, and it's still my passion. You can leave a girlfriend, you can have a girlfriend leave you. There's no way. Music is in you. It's in your blood. It's part of how you breathe, what you breathe. I really trust in music, and I know that there was a lot of stuff that went on in the women's music movement that was a little bit shoddy about the way women treated each other—wouldn't go off—running off of somebody else. It was just like the real sort of straight world. After a while, I didn't really see any difference. But we were young. I don't know how lesbians are now when they're older, but many lesbians have not stayed together.
The Svelts was first. We learned to ignore people's voices and their sneers, especially when we got on stage right away. You could see because most stages were above, and you could look down. You could see the kids come towards the stage, see the sneers, especially from the boys. Boy, did they sneer at us, but the second we started to play, they forgot that they were upset with us for being girls who played in the band, and they were off on the dance floor dancing, and that made them happy. That was our real connection with them after all was said and done, but we also learned not to listen to them. We were in our own orbit, and that really worked well because we didn't have to listen to all that people were saying around us because we had to get into the music.
It was just so big that people had a hard time getting over the fact that we were women. We couldn't get away from that. So whatever people put into what they interpreted as political or good or bad or offensive or whatever—see, that was all part of the outside noise as far as we were concerned. Because we had to turn it into that. We couldn't be listening to that all the time. We had a lot of work to do, and that's what we did. We worked really hard, and we just ignored everybody else. Besides that, we had fans, a lot of fans, and a lot of fans within the music industry, which was great.
We got a lot of positive reactions when our first album as Fanny, called Fanny, came out, and people were saying good things about us. Pretty soon, it got to the point where there was always some sort of caveat: I really liked them, but I don't. I really don't like seeing girls on stage playing rock. There always had to be something that was a downer, rather than a complete rave.
Playing with Fanny was a full-time job. We rehearsed every day we weren't on the road, in the studio, or performing on a TV show. We rehearsed every day, so that kind of cut us off from everyone else. We weren't like the kind who would go into a party and say, ‘Hey, I'm here,’ pull out a doobie and some coke and be the life of the party in that way. We didn't know how to do that, so we weren't girls on the make in that way. We were girls on the make for our music, and we were serious about that. And if you couldn't get with that program, you weren't going to be sitting around.
We played on all the rock shows, okay? But people, because of their prejudices, could not accept us for what we really were, which was a great band. What they would see is girls who could play well: wait a minute, I'm not sure I like that. Or they read somewhere that somebody isn't sure they like that, or whatever. They just couldn't fall into it fully, like you would with any other band, as we did with other bands, like when we realized bands were so good—we fell in love with them. But we didn't say, ‘Wait a minute, those are guys. Those are our competitors. We can't like them. We have to resist because our ego, our pride, is at stake.’ We never went through that, even though guys did that all the time.
They couldn't accept us. Sometimes they opened for us, and they couldn't accept us still because they thought, ‘Fuck, those are girls, and they're better than we are.’ Literally, that's what they thought. ‘They're better than us.’ When we opened for the James Gang in Colorado, there were a couple of guys who were at that show, and they said James Gang didn't want to come on because we wiped the floor with them. We were at that place, and they were just starting. I don't even remember James Gang. I don't remember a thing about them. I don't remember a thing about Joe Walsh. Humble Pie. I mean, when I heard Humble Pie, I really liked the guitar players' licks. I like the band, but I don't remember anything about them. You have got to remember we were playing gigs all the time and all over the place. We played with practically everybody.
We worked with the Winter brothers, both Winter Brothers. We worked with the Staples Singers, Dr. John. We worked with everybody as far as I could tell. Slade. We played with Redbone. Oh my God, they were friends of ours. We used to hang out at the Whisky a Go Go in Hollywood, and I was so happy for them when they got that hit. So everyone was on that professional level, really trying to get a leg up in the business. The only way you could do that was to have a record or a song that people fell in love with, because you can't force someone to love a piece of music. They really do have to fall in love with it.
Our problem was that no matter how much work we did, it didn't reach the masses. Like Rolling Stone never wrote about us, for example. Why? I mean, I really questioned that. Why didn't you write about us? We were a big thing on the scene, but you had two half-Filipino girls, and we were rock and roll, and—I don't know. There was something about us they didn't like. Obviously, if they never wrote about us. Maybe they realized that two of us were lesbian, and they and we couldn't push us in that way. But that seems kind of silly. I mean, look at the Beatles—the way they conducted themselves, they did a lot of edgy stuff.
The clarity of our purpose was so razor sharp. I cannot forget that, and I certainly don't want anybody not to know about that because that was really our goal. Our goal was to get really good and do great music that people would listen to and be affected by. There are so many songs: Soul Child is a really good song. Jean and I wrote that together, and then the covers that we did. Hey Bulldog, for example, is well listened to now.”
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The LGBTQ History Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit preserving the lives and legacies of LGBTQ+ activists from the first wave of gay liberation through oral histories, archives and the QueerCore Podcast.
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