THE LUNACHICKS IN THEIR HEYDAY

Reunion + history of a pioneering all-female punk rock band

A familiar sub-genre by now: the band reunion history doc. So these "chicks" have been reassembled for interviews years after their ca. 1988-2000 heyday, and Ilya Chaiken has made a film about them and their reunion. Chaiken is known for Margarita Happy Hour, a film about motherhood, which premiered at Sundance in 2001 - so she has been around a whlile too, and includes a wealth of period footage here, songs, and interviews with the band members and others spanning a number of years to provide a rounded picture not only of punk music in the late Eighties and Nineties but of the whole experience and needed provocation of being a girl band in one of the more male chauvinist worlds, rock.

The original group - Theo Kogan, Gina Volpe, and Sydney "Squid" Silver - were students at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in NYC, and decided they wanted to form a band. They persuaded Silver's friend Sindi Benezra to join them, and they developed their material in Gina's bedroom over a period of a year. Their first effort, their lengthy "Theme Song," was a gory fantasy about committing murder by stabbing that was about Kogan's and Silver's English teacher (not, however, named in the lyrics). For their first show at age 18 in 1988 they were accompanied on drums by Theo's longhaired boyfriend at the time, Mike.

Doc footage goes back to a runion of the band in 2015. They were always actively Pro Choice and did a performance for Pro Choice in DC in 2004. The girls were best friends to begin with, from what they say, and were running free together as teenagers, enjoying the punk cultural riches of the broken down New York City of the Seventies and Eighties that was famously such a fertile field - a "dirty, dangerous playground" as one of them says - for the arts, before Yuppiedom. Getting away from their parents they haunted the cool clubs at night, and decided to be a band like the ones at CBGB et al. At maybe their second concert they were "discovered" by Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth who got them a record. When their career heated up they were often touring with major acts such as the Ramones, NOFX, and Rancid - though to support themselves they did side jobs, including modeling and acting for Theo Kogan, tattooing and restaurant work for Sydney Silver, composing for Gina Volpe, and carpentry for Chip English.

Beside people they loved and people they hated they wrote songs about TV shows, B movies and an obsession of theirs, John Waters, whose blend of gross provocation and humor they shared: one can very well imagine a Lunachiks concert, with just a little tweaking, becoming part of a Waters movie. The film doesn't focus explicitly on particular songs, but it does name their albums. Waters' Desperate Living inspired the first one, Babysitters on Acid (1990). Subsequent albums were Binge & Purge (1992), Jerk of All Trades (1995), Pretty Ugly (1997), and, the last album, Luxury Problem (1999), which comes in for special praise. The punk-literate listener might much enjoy comparing these to appreciate the band's growing skill with their instruments.

The Lunachicks obviously also paid a lot of attention from the first to how they looked, combing thrift shops constantly for cool costumes, though lead singer Theo Kogan, who was a model, says that the others disapproved of her being pretty and in their heyday they favored clownish exaggerated makeup and blackened teeth. It would have been nice to have described the different themes of their costumes, which obviously varied in style but were coordinated.

We hear a lot from Becky Wreck (Lloyd), their drummer during a key period, who was a very out lesbian (as was her successor). She and another band member became a couple - not comfortable, though not as bad as, later, a couple that was breaking up. Chip English, the drummer from 1992-1999, was an non-New Yorker outlier, from Pennsylvania.

It's Chip English, and Jeanne Fury, the rock journalist who was writing a book on the band, who have the idea of their getting back together for a reunion show, or series of shows. This is threaded through recollections and footage of the band in its prime. They opened frequently for the band Gwar, who say they shared their sense of fun, and referred to them as "our New York rock goddesses."

They differed with the label they recorded for early on, who had wanted to play up their clumsiness and wrong notes for laughs. They wanted to be a real band and to play instead like rock gods, like Kiss, for example.

But as much as for their music the band is notable for their in-your-face theatrics directed particularly at the patriarchy, such as exploded pigs-blood bags to simulate simultaneous group menstruation; their firm disciplining of male misbehavior in the audience during concerts; and their sense of humor, though the latter isn't as much conveyed here as the passion, in my view.

What about drugs? At the point when they needed to "clean up" for an English tour, Becky says she said "'Yeah yeah yeah,' then 'no no no', because at that time I had a ten-bag-a-day heroin habit." Drugs led to her being replaced by Kate Schellenbach. After a car accident when she was driving in which they all might have died, the rest of the band later did an intervention for Sydney's serious addiction and pushed her into rehab. She reports that she has stayed clean ever since.

The Reading Festival '92: "a huge deal," and Nirvana was playing. Expectations at this time for punk being pop and making money were high because Nirvana was going gangbusters. The Lunachicks were part of the second, more accepted, less hardcore era of punk of the Nineties.

This film flows well, though its chronology isn't (for my taste) very precise; the filmmaker has stated that her film was made over a ten-year period, which perhaps she doesn't want to show, because it might confuse the issue for viewers. Beside the main band members, there are (admiring) interviews with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie; Noodles and Dexter Holland of the Offspring; Donita Sparks and Jennifer Finch of L7; Kate Schellenbach of Luscious Jackson; Miss Guy of the Toilet Boys; rock journalist Fury; and others in this multi-voiced account.

The film's blurb describes the Lunachicks as "renowned for their unabashed humor and unwavering pro-women ethos," (starting in 1988) and ending in 2000 due to "a rollercoaster of drugs, romances, and creative conflicts." We learn a bit about what they have done on their own since. One has an art opening. Another has had a restaurant, forced to close. They have children. Chip is transitioning. In 2012 Fury completes her book about the band entitled Fallopian Rhapsody, named after a Lunachick song, and we glimpse a festive signing.

Last minutes of the film feature a backstage view of "The Bronx Show" reunion, where the older ladies now seem to adopt more a hard rock style of sound, and wear more flattering makeup and don glam overalls and costumes blaring political messages, notably "ROE RAGE RIOT." Clearly lifelong friends. they're brave, but happy too. "How are those knees holding up?" asks a photographer as they pose for the reunion half kneeling. "Not," one replies. But the audience is adoring; they have nothing to prove. A surprise addition is Sydney, returned from living and raising a family in Germany for 15 years. Reunion indeed.

The film was an audience hit at DOC NY in 2023, when it premiered. One can see why. It's not just a rock history film but a rock concert film, an entertainment.

Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks, 91 mins., premiered at DOC NYC in 2023, and now has released theatrically and online as of Apr. 24, 2026.


THE LUNACHICKS AT REUNION, SANS CLOWNISH MAKEUP, FROM THE FILM

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.