It's On The Rocks

You are locked on THE ZOO, the station that still believes a guitar riff can do more damage than a focus group, and the cut coming out of the ramp is the door-kicker on a record that took four Palo Alto friends from a high-school garage to a major-label billboard. The song is “It’s On The Rocks,” the album is Spend the Night, and the band is The Donnas. Track one. No warm-up. No apology. Just Brett Anderson leaning into the mic like she already filed the papers, Allison Robertson’s guitar chewing through a hard-rock hook that owes as much to AC/DC and Kiss as it does to the Ramones, Maya Ford locking the low end, and Torry Castellano hitting the kit like the party is already over and somebody still owes her money.

The Donnas formed in May 1993 so they could play Palo Alto High School’s Day on the Green. All four were born in 1979: Brett Anderson on May 30, Allison Robertson on August 26, and Maya Ford and Torry Castellano both on January 8. They taught themselves, rehearsed in Castellano’s garage almost every day, and ran through the early names Ragady Anne and The Electrocutes before the Donnas tag stuck. Early on they were a side project built around songs by local musician Darin Raffaelli, who also pushed the matching Donna monikers: Donna A on vocals, Donna R on guitar, Donna F on bass, Donna C on drums. The schtick was half Ramones, half Runaways, and the shirts matched. After American Teenage Rock ’n’ Roll Machine they cut Raffaelli loose and started writing everything themselves. Get Skintight and The Donnas Turn 21, both on Lookout!, proved they could carry a record without a hired pen. Atlantic came calling in December 2001.

Spend the Night, released October 22, 2002, was the fifth studio album and the major-label debut. They cut it with producers Jason Carmer and Robert Shimp at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, the Record Plant in Sausalito, and the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood. Atlantic wanted demos and second opinions. The band wanted to finish. Maya Ford later said the label even paused the sessions for three weeks to argue about the producer, then let them go. What came back was the dirtiest, loudest Donnas record yet: thirteen songs, about forty minutes, all written by Anderson, Robertson, Ford, and Castellano. Swedish rockers The Hellacopters showed up for backing vocals. Limited editions packed a DVD with an Andy Dick interview and a making-of that the band jokingly framed as a five-month slumber party. The album hit number 62 on the Billboard 200, the first time they charted there, and by 2005 Nielsen SoundScan had it at roughly 450,000 copies in the United States. Cherry Red put it back out in November 2016 with six bonus tracks.

“It’s On The Rocks” is the opener, two minutes and fifty-four seconds of kiss-off that never bothers to knock. The lyric is a breakup written like a bar tab. She is done. She is calling the ladies. She is keying the Mercedes. The guy needs attention around the clock and cannot even talk. His loving is a car crash and she has the whiplash. He is a stain that bleach and Shout will not lift. She has to detox him. The punchline is pure Donnas: she had to tell the boys he would rather have a Mai Tai than a tall glass of Bud Dry. The title works two ways at once. The relationship is finished, and the drink is watered down. Allison Robertson’s riff does not wink. It just drives. Compared with the bratty bubblegum of the Lookout! years, this is glam-metal attitude with the safety off, closer to Mötley Crüe and Joan Jett than to anything on the pop charts of 2002.

The single that actually broke the door down was the next song, “Take It Off,” which reached number 17 on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart and the UK top 40. “Who Invited You” and “Too Bad About Your Girl” followed. The band landed on Total Request Live, Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and the Late Show with David Letterman, then took the main stage at Lollapalooza in the summer of 2003. Atlantic stuffed the catalog into games and movies: “Who Invited You” in True Crime: Streets of LA and What a Girl Wants, “Take It Off” in Dodgeball and later The Hangover, a Billy Idol cover in the Mean Girls credits, a Kiss cover of “Strutter” back on the Detroit Rock City soundtrack from the Electrocutes era. Guitarist Allison Robertson had the bloodline for it. Her father, Baxter Robertson, was a working musician, and she learned the metal licks by watching the videos, then turned them into a Flying V and a Marshall stack.

They kept going. Gold Medal arrived in 2004, with a run through Australia’s Big Day Out. Atlantic and the band split amicably in 2006. Bitchin’ came out in 2007 on their own Purple Feather label. In 2009 they issued Greatest Hits Vol. 16 to mark sixteen years, and toured with Pat Benatar and Blondie, but Castellano’s shoulder was shot. Self-taught, she had held the sticks in a way that felt right and wrecked the joint over time. Amy Cesari of the Demonics filled in. On July 9, 2010, Castellano retired from the kit, went back to school, finished at Stanford, then Harvard Law, and later worked as an attorney. The band wound down by 2012. Brett Anderson has said they turned down reunion offers. The records did not go anywhere. Real Gone Music has since put the early singles back out with the band’s cooperation, liner notes from all four, and the old Lookout! sides that had gone scarce.

That is the story sitting under this opener. Four friends from one California high school, a fake last name that became a real band, a major-label debut that still sounds like a club PA turned up past the red line, and a first song that dumps the boyfriend before the second chorus. If you want the rest of the rock-and-roll file, the station that plays it straight is THE ZOO. The band’s own page is still up at Facebook, and the old tour account lives on at X. For the long version, the history is collected at Wikipedia, the early label bio is parked at Epitaph, and the album entry sits at AllMusic. Turn it up. “It’s On The Rocks” does not wait for the room to catch up.