Rocking the boat

GOSHEN -- June Millington is sitting on the edge of her living room sofa in a polka-dot blouse and sweatpants, watching herself on TV. She has scoured shelves and drawers in her 1816 farmhouse to unearth a tape of the fifth episode of "The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour," which aired on Aug. 29, 1971, and featured two guest stars: Phyllis Diller and Fanny, the all-girl rock band Millington founded with her sister Jean . The band performed "Charity Ball," Fanny's first chart single, on the show. Afterward , a wide-eyed Diller turned to Cher with a look of mock shock on her face. Or maybe it was real shock.

"The reaction," says Millington, "was generally disbelief. A, that somebody would try it, and B, that we could actually play."

Fanny was the first female rock band to record a full-length album for a major label. It was 1969, and role models were few and far between: The Shaggs, three sisters from New Hampshire who could neither play nor sing, released an album that year, and Goldie & the Gingerbreads -- who had signed to Atlantic Records in 1964 -- managed to put out only a few singles before imploding.

Fanny, with the full power of the Warner Bros./Reprise machine behind them, became a mainstream success. They toured the world, opening for Jethro Tull and Humble Pie . Fanny was the session band on "Barbra Joan Streisand," the singer's 1971 album. Guitarist June and bassist Jean Millington, keyboardist Nickey Barclay, and drummer Alice de Buhr lived in a Spanish house overlooking the Sunset Strip, wrote beefy riffs, and introduced a wildly skeptical world to the idea that women can write and play rock music as well as men.

Fanny released five albums between 1970 and 1974, and then the group vanished -- from the music scene and to a large extent from rock's history book.

Tonight, three of Fanny's four original members will reunite to perform together for the first time in more than 30 years at Berklee College of Music, where the band will receive the ROCKRGRL Women of Valor Award.

"It's about time," Millington says with a laugh, but she isn't joking. "It feels that way. I think we really did have an influence, but we were disappeared pretty quickly."

Far from a fluke, Fanny felt like manifest destiny for the Millington sisters, daughters of an American father and Filipina mother who spent their early childhood in Manila and their teen years in Sacramento, Calif. In high school in the mid-'60s Jean and June formed the Svelts , and they strummed "Heat Wave" and "Catch Us If You Can" between their boyfriends' surf bands' sets. The Svelts morphed into Wild Honey , which played hootenannies and local clubs and one memorable gig at a San Jose teen center with a young band called Creedence Clearwater Revival . There were various personnel changes during those early years -- but never any boys in the lineup.

"We really needed to be an all-girl band, for whatever reason," says Millington, 58, who runs the Institute for Musical Arts, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting women in music, with her longtime partner, Ann Hackler . "We wanted to be the first. We wanted to get a record deal. It was like the holy grail."

In 1969, Wild Honey traveled from the Bay Area to Los Angeles in an old school bus -- restored for the girls by Mr. Millington -- to play Hoot Night, a weekly open mike at the Troubadour. The club manager looked them over and said they could have five minutes onstage. Afterward, the band returned to the Tropicana motel down the street, packed their bags, and were on their way out the door when the phone rang.

"There was this woman on the phone and she said 'I saw you at the Troubadour and I told my boss about you and he really wants to hear you play.' And we're like, 'We're leaving right now.' She said 'Hold on. I'll call you right back.' And she called back in 20 minutes and said 'My boss would like you to meet him down the street at a recording studio and audition for him.' And that's what happened."

The woman's boss was producer Richard Perry -- fresh off projects with Captain Beefheart, Fats Domino, and Tiny Tim -- who listened to five songs and then called Mo Ostin , the president of Reprise. Ostin signed the band sight unseen. Fanny spent a year recording its self-titled 1970 debut, then hit the road. It would be a daily struggle for Fanny to prove that it wasn't a novelty act but a serious rock band.

"We were blazing a trail and it was definitely a challenge," says Jean Millington, a 57-year-old herbalist in Davis, Calif. "Every time we played, I mean every single time, we knew we were playing for at least 15 minutes to a very negative audience. That wore on you after a while."

If audiences were routinely doubtful, Fanny's peers were sold.

" Before Fanny and for a long, long time after, there really weren't any female rock bands of any note, let alone any who were that dynamic, that beautiful and just, well, that cool, in a good way, " says David Bowie in an e-mail. "I've said this before and I'll say it again, they were extraordinary. They wrote everything, they played like [expletives], they were just colossal and wonderful."

"Everyone was impressed with them," says Todd Rundgren, who produced "Mother's Pride," Fanny's fourth album. "But as much as people cared about music, I think the public was very much into image."

June Millington recalls a photo shoot outside of a hotel in Zurich, when a photographer asked the band members to get down on their hands and knees, facing away from the camera. This was years into Fanny's career, and still, Millington says, " It was all sexual. I looked at our road manager and said very quietly, 'Do I have to do this?' And he said yeah. I was a good soldier. So I got down on my hands and knees with my butt in the air looking up at the camera and I tell you I felt really humiliated."

Shortly after that , June Millington had what she refers to as "a massive meltdown." She left the band in 1973 and staked her claim in another nascent genre -- women's music -- where she found a hospitable community. De Buhr departed soon after , going on to work in marketing at record labels, where she helped break, among other bands, the Go-Go's. (She now works for a home video company in Tucson.) Fanny made one more album, for Casablanca Records, with Patti Quatro (Suzi's sister) on guitar and Brie Howard (film composer James Newton Howard's then-wife) on drums. The album was a disappointment and Fanny soon dissolved.

Fanny's mold-breaking music and critical acclaim didn't translate to an enduring place in the pop music annals. When most people think of all-girl rock groups, it's the Runaways and the Go-Go's that come to mind. Rhino Records released a limited edition four-disc box set, "First Time in a Long Time: The Reprise Recordings," in 2002, and those are the only Fanny recordings available on CD. Rundgren notes that because Fanny didn't have a string of hits, or even one indelible song, "they never got big enough to become a cultural touchstone."

The Millington sisters continued to perform together in a band called Slammin' Babes, which will also play a set tonight at Berklee. But June says her experience in Fanny, and leaving Fanny, was so traumatic that until recently she was reluctant to speak or even think about the band. The timing of the award and reunion show is serendipitous; a few years ago June went back and listened to the group's entire body of work. Lately she's been dreaming about Fanny Hill, their house in the Hollywood Hills, and Fanny songs are looping through her head. She feels ready to come to terms.

"Here we are in 2007 and I'm trying to integrate all that I've done in what I pass on," says Millington, who formed the IMA in 1987. "In some ways we've made a lot of progress. It's a lot more common to see a girl with a guitar. But there's still not a girl guitarist, or a drummer or a bassist, who's a household name. It's so hard to buck the system. Truthfully, it was a lot more challenging than it was joyful. It was like we were beaming it down from another universe."

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. For more on music visit boston.com/ae/music/blog.