Santa Cruz writer brings the bang to the story of ’80s rock band The Bangles

Growing up in Live Oak in the 1980s, Jen Otter was not able to get MTV on her family’s cable system, which was a maddening situation for a pop-culture-savvy middle schooler. Instead, she recorded NBC’s “Friday Night Videos” on the VCR. This is how she discovered The Bangles, the Los Angeles-based pop-rock quartet of women who, among other things, taught the world how to “Walk Like an Egyptian.” 

The Bangles blew her mind.

She couldn’t imagine then that, 40 years later as Jennifer Otter Bickerdike — with a Ph.D. in the culture of fandom and pop music, no less — she would be writing the full story of one of the most successful all-female bands in pop history. But with the publication last week of “Eternal Flame: The Authorized Biography of The Bangles” (Grand Central), she has fulfilled a dream.

The Bangles, she said, were essential in a pop-culture environment where women were rarely represented beyond sensitive singer-songwriters, showcase divas or props in music videos.

“The reason The Bangles were so important to me,” she said, “and it’s something I think people really take for granted, is the idea of possibility as modeled by them. If you don’t see it or are not exposed to it, it’s hard to imagine. But seeing The Bangles, and The Go-Go’s, and Cyndi Lauper, suddenly here were these women who were strong, and really beautiful, and cool.”

Bickerdike has turned her eye to a wide variety of musical icons in her career as a writer and academic. In her previously published books, she has taken a biographer’s deep dive into such subjects as Britney Spears, Joy Division and the enigmatic German pop chanteuse known as Nico. 

“Eternal Flame” tells a story that begins in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, the home of the musically ambitious teen rocker Vicki Peterson and her many attempts to form a band with her girlfriends. That band soon included Vicki’s younger sister Debbi Peterson, and eventually the sisters met up with the talented singer/guitarist Susanna Hoffs. The band went through a number of names — Aisha, the Fans, Those Girls, the Bangs — before landing as the Bangles. 

It was 1984 by the time the Bangles released their debut album, “All Over the Place,” featuring the hit single “Going Down to Liverpool,” and the rocket had launched. With such hits as “Manic Monday” and “Walk Like an Egyptian,” the band had achieved a level of stardom for an all-female band rivaled only by their L.A. cohorts The Go-Go’s. 

It was at that time that in Santa Cruz, Bickerdike first took notice of the band. “I clearly remember going to what was then Long’s Drugs on 41st Avenue and buying Studio Line hair gel to try to get my hair to look like Susanna’s, with that big puff on top. And it wasn’t like I wanted to look like a Bangle. I really just wanted to personify some of that femininity and strength at the same time.”

Bickerdike wanted to tell the story of the meteoric rise, the inevitable breakup and the reunion of the band, but she also wanted to provide a broader context of what the music industry looked liked in the new wave ’80s in a region still hung over from the Laurel Canyon ’70s. 

“I really wanted Los Angeles to be its own character in a lot of ways in this book,” she said. “So, I started calling up people I really admire, like Milo [Aukerman] of the [hardcore punk band] Descendents who I love to pieces, and Henry Rollins who I try to tie into any project I’m working on. I mean, I wanted it to be a kiss-and-tell and deliver the dirt. But that became less important than telling their story as women and the music industry of that time.”

The Harbor High grad currently lives in the United Kingdom, but identification with her hometown of Santa Cruz has always been a part of her public persona as an academic expert on popular culture. Her new book opens with a reminder of the kind of in-the-bone institutional sexism that the women of The Bangles had to face in the music industry, from the belittling of their accomplishments and their artistry in the media to corrosive attitudes of tokenism within the industry.

“I’ve done some interviews with Susanna Hoffs and Vicki Peterson,” said Bickerdike. “And the question that always pisses me off is ‘What female bands influenced you?’ You’re not going to ask Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses, ‘What male bands influenced you?’ Sue and Vicki, they weren’t emulating The Runaways. They wanted to be The Beatles.”

“Eternal Flame: The Authorized Biography of The Bangles” is now on sale.

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