Music

The Runaways' Lita Ford was once asked to join Led Zeppelin

by Jeremy Mersereau

With increasingly gross stories surfacing about the interactions between male and female artists, it’s comforting to keep in mind just how far things have come. For instance, thought experiment: Can you imagine how Led Zeppelin’s um, “traditional”, fanbase would’ve reacted to a 17-year-old Lita Ford playing bass for the Zep back in 1975?

In her new memoir Living Like a Runaway, the band’s former guitarist and hesher dream queen Lita Ford says that Robert Plant once approached her to talk about joining Led Zeppelin as bassist, presumably kicking out John Paul Jones. “No! Not my boy JPJ!” – the surely-legions of people whose favourite Zeppelin member is John Paul Jones.

“[Plant] asked me if I could play bass,” Ford says in the memoir, recounting meeting the rock legend after a Runaways gig in Los Angeles. “‘For who?’ I asked. ‘Led Zep.’ He might have been drinking or pulling my leg, but he seemed to be dead serious in the ­moment.”

John Paul Jones did briefly leave Led Zep during that time, but alas it was not to be: Ford never heard back from Plant, who was definitely probably “over the hills and far away” when he made the overture.

In other Lita Ford news, she revealed in an an interview with The Huffington Post that she briefly left The Runaways early on because she was so “freaked out” that her bandmates were gay:

“This was in the early ’70s, mid-’70s, so I was not aware of homosexuality; I didn’t know anything about it. And it was still in the closet; nobody came out and said, ‘I’m gay’ — nobody came out at that time. And when I found out that the girls were all gay in the band, I wasn’t sure how to take it, and I didn’t know what it was. I was only 16 at the time. And I quit the band. I went home and I told my parents that it was the manager’s fault; I blamed it all on him and said that he was too weird and I couldn’t handle him — he was just too freaky. But that wasn’t the case.”

It’s heartening to hear that Ford did get over her initial discomfort with the idea of gay bandmates pretty swiftly:

“So I had given it a couple of weeks and thought about it, and I thought, ‘You know, it’s really no big deal. I shouldn’t worry about that… And thank God they called me back and they said, ‘Lita, we can’t find anybody that can play guitar like you. Please come back.”

If a 16-year-old Lita Ford had the maturity to get over it back in the early ’70s, there’s no excuse now.