Run Down Love Battery

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on a cut that still throws a little grit into the speakers, and the Zoo Freaks out there on the other end of the wire are going to recognize the charge. "Run Down Love Battery" is the lead track on Rock Hard, the 1988 mini-album by The Pandoras, and it is the sound of a Hollywood garage band that had already been through a major-label wreck and came out the other side louder, glossier, and a whole lot meaner. Paula Pierce wrote it, sang it, and played the lead and rhythm guitar on it. The lyric is not a shy metaphor. She has been using somebody's love as fuel, she has worn the poor soul out, and now she is the one who is going to plug him back in. "I'll charge you up, start you up," she promises, while the band hammers a hook that sounds like a starter motor catching. It is a three-and-a-half-minute hard-rock song about desire treated like a car battery, and the Zoo Crew has always had a soft spot for a record that says the quiet part with a power chord.

The story behind the track is messier than the riff, which is how the good ones usually go. By the middle of the eighties The Pandoras had already cut the garage-punk album It's About Time for Voxx and the tougher Stop Pretending for Rhino, and Elektra came calling. A&R man Steve Pross, who was also dating Pierce at the time, signed the band for an album that was going to be called Come Inside. They made several passes at it. Drummer Kelly Dillard, who was only in the group for about two months, even cut an early version of "Run Down Love Battery" for those sessions and turned up in the photo shoots meant for the Elektra cover. Then Pross was let go, and Elektra dropped both bands he had signed, Jetboy and The Pandoras, before the records ever hit the racks. Come Inside reached the test-pressing stage and then vanished. Bootleggers later scooped up the demos and put them out as Psychedelic Sluts. Pierce, who had wanted to be the rock star she already believed she was, did not fold the band.

What the public got instead was Rock Hard, a six-song mini-album on Restless Records in 1988. The lineup on the record is the one that had clawed its way out of the Elektra mess: Pierce on vocals and guitar, Rita D'Albert on rhythm guitar, Melanie Vammen on keyboards, Kim Shattuck on bass, and Sheri Kaplan on drums, all of them singing backup except Pierce, who was out front. Steve Pross stayed on as executive producer. The producer was Stevie Salas, the guitarist who had been working the same Hollywood circuit and knew how to put a sheen on a hard-rock session without sanding off the attitude. Engineers Jan Lucas and John X tracked it, Lisa Sutton handled the art direction, and Hugh Brown shot the cover. The other five songs are "Tryin' Ain't Good Enough," "Six Times a Day," "He's Coming," "Craving," and the slower "Close Behind." Restless pressed it as a vinyl mini-album, a cassette, and a compact disc, catalog 7 72292, and a year later GWR put a version out in Europe. It is filed under hard rock and heavy metal on the collector sites, which would have made the 1984 garage crowd blink.

Writers who came back to the record years afterward have been honest about the shock. The band had started as a raucous punk and garage outfit, queens of the Hollywood Paisley Underground, and Rock Hard arrived dressed more like the hair-metal records crowding the racks. One long look at the single called "Run Down Love Battery" a high-quality metal song that simply did not sound like anything The Pandoras had done before, and compared "Close Behind" to the smoother pop-rock records coming out of Los Angeles at the same time. Fans who caught it on the hard-rock satellite station Z-Rock remembered the riff years later and argued about whether the band was bargain-basement punky hard rock or something sharper. The Zoo Crew will settle it the old way. Spin the thing. If the chorus sticks in your head on the drive home, the record did its job.

The single got a video, and that video landed on MTV's Headbangers Ball, which pulled in a metal audience the old garage crowd had never sent them. The band also played "Run Down Love Battery" on the first episode of The Arsenio Hall Show, a strange and perfect booking for a group that had spent years in the gossip columns of BAM, Music Connection, and LA Weekly. Closer to the home turf of THE ZOO, The Pandoras rolled through Dallas on the Rock Hard tour and played a show at Z Rock that was taped for a coast-to-coast concert series. Restless later issued that Dallas tape as the live album Live Nymphomania in 1989. Pierce and the band were not thrilled with the release, but they went out and worked it anyway. D'Albert had already left in February 1989, right before the tour, to join Human Drama. Billie Jo Hash came in on guitar for the second leg and lasted through the summer. Rodney Bingenheimer, the KROQ disc jockey who had championed the band from the garage days, was still introducing them in the clubs, including a stand at Jack's Sugar Shack where the band tore into this same song.

None of that late-eighties chrome makes sense until you go back to how Pierce got the band started in the first place. She grew up in Chino, California, and she had been playing in Hollywood bands since 1976, when she was still a teenager. One account of those early years has her as an accomplished accordion player who picked her first collaborator, Don Williams, out of a friend's high school yearbook and jumped into the underground while she was still fourteen. She led a mod and garage pop outfit called the Direct Hits, later Action Now, but she wanted something rawer, closer to the sixties punk singles she loved and to the Ramones, the Who, and the Kinks. In 1982, while she was a graphic arts major at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, she posted a flyer on the cafeteria bulletin board. It read, wanted, another female musician to jam with, influenced by sixties garage punk. Deborah Mendoza, an art major who also went by Menday, answered the ad. The two of them started hauling guitars to school and jamming between classes.

Pierce brought in Gwynne Kahn, also known as Gwynne Kelly, on keyboards and rhythm guitar. Mendoza brought in drummer Casey Gomez. At a band meeting in December 1982 they settled on a name, though not before kicking around the Keyholes, Hole, the wHolesome, and the Goodwylls. Years later Mendoza told the administrator of the band's Facebook fan page that Pierce was the one who stood her ground on the name The Pandoras. Their first EP, I'm Here I'm Gone, came out on Moxie Records in 1983, by which time Mendoza had already left and Bambi Conway had taken the bass. It's About Time followed in 1984 on Greg Shaw's Voxx label, produced with help from Bill Inglot, and then the band split in public. Conway quit, Pierce fired Kahn, Gomez left, and for a short while two groups were both calling themselves The Pandoras. The fight spilled onto Bingenheimer's KROQ show and into the local zines. Pierce kept the name, rebuilt the lineup with Melanie Vammen, Julie Patchouli, and Karen Blankfeld, and cut the "Hot Generation" single. Kim Shattuck joined on bass in July 1985 after a short fill-in by Gayle Morency. That is the core that walked into the Elektra years and, after the wreck, into Rock Hard.

The hard-rock turn was Pierce's idea, and it cost her people. Vammen has said in interviews that the direction around that period felt wrong to her and to Shattuck, too rocker, songs they did not want to stand behind, and that the two of them eventually decided to start a band where they could play whatever they wanted. That band was The Muffs. Before the split, though, they were still in the room when "Run Down Love Battery" went to tape, Shattuck on bass and Vammen on keys, and their voices are in the gang backup. After Rock Hard the group kept shedding members. Pierce removed Vammen in July 1990 because she wanted the new songs without keyboards. Shattuck left a couple of months later. Kaplan quit. In 1991 Pierce was writing again with guitarist Lissa Beltri and auditioning a bass player when the headaches she had been ignoring turned fatal. She died of a brain aneurysm on August 10, 1991, in her Hollywood Hills apartment. She was 31. A tribute at the Coconut Teaser on the Sunset Strip drew Cherie and Marie Currie, the Muffs, Dramarama with Clem Burke, and a slide show of more than 800 pictures.

The name did not stay in the past. Surviving members reunited in the twenty-tens, with Shattuck out front until her death from complications of ALS on October 2, 2019. Melanie Vammen, Karen Basset, and Sheri Kaplan Weinstein have kept playing the old songs, and they have said in interviews that Pierce and Shattuck are still family, sisters, and that they figure Paula would have wanted the band to keep going. The current working lineup also includes Natalie Grace Sweet. They still point fans to the merch rack and to the social pages, and a 40th anniversary edition of Stop Pretending has been lined up through Wicked Cool, remastered by the original producer Bill Inglot. Rock Hard sits in the middle of that long story like a flare. It is the record where the garage queens tried on leather, got a video on Headbangers Ball, played Arsenio, and left a live tape in Dallas. The Zoo Crew is glad to run it again for the Freaks.

The band keeps house on Facebook, posts road shots and reunion news on Instagram, and still has the old X account under TheRealPandoras. Shirts, buttons, and the later reunion records are racked at the Punk Army store the band lists from those pages. There is no separate standalone fan site that still answers the door, so the official pages are the place the Freaks gather.