THE BANGLES--LOCAL GIRLS MAKE GOOD

Four ways to tell when you’ve made it, courtesy of the Bangles:

Drummer Debbi Peterson: “It’s so amazing, standing on the corner--this happened in Washington, D.C.--and somebody comes by in a Cadillac and you hear ‘Manic Monday’ on the radio, and you don’t even know this person, and they’re listening to it and singing along with it. Wow! Blows your mind.”

“I think when it really got me,” says bassist Michael Steele, “was when we were in the bus outside a hotel somewhere in Texas, and Arnold Palmer was staying in the same hotel. . . . He came out and he was talking to Lamar, our bus driver, and he said, ‘So who’s in the bus?’ and Lamar said, ‘It’s an all-girl band, you know,’ and Arnold goes, ‘Is it the Bangles?’ ”

For guitarist Susanna Hoffs, “It’s great seeing those People magazine ads on TV (for the issue with the Bangles profile). They play it every 15 minutes it seems like. . . . That is great, I love that. There’s a little bit of the video, and a little shot of the magazine spread.”

Summarizes guitarist Vicki Peterson, “And you know you’ve really hit mainstream when you are the background music to ‘One Life to Live’--when they go to a disco and it’s ‘Manic Monday’ playing. That is mainstream. It cracked me up.”

Another way to tell, of course, is simply to look at the charts, where the Bangles’ rich vocal blend and bright pop hooks are registering strongly: Their Prince-composed single “Manic Monday” hit the No. 2 spot, and their second album “Different Light” brushed the Top 10 and just crashed the gold (500,000 sales) barrier.

Accompanying the records’ success has been a mini media-blitz. The photogenic foursome, once strictly the domain of local music publications, has been covered in every magazine short of Field & Stream--and the group will probably show up there if the editors find out that Debbi enjoys backpacking.

Of course it’s not just selling records that makes the Bangles good copy. After all, how long has it been since a female rock band with ‘60s pop foundations works its way up through the Los Angeles club scene to become a national success? At least since the Go-Go’s.

It all adds up to what Steele, 26, calls a “very crucial time” for the group, whose current tour includes shows at the Greek Theatre May 17, San Diego State University May 18 and Santa Barbara’s Arlington Theatre May 19.

“Actually, the feeling crucial is translated into feeling tired,” continued Steele, a veteran of several bands including the first edition L.A.’s original girl group, the Runaways. “We do enjoy it every once in a while. We think, ‘God, a gold record!’ ”

“But you don’t go jumping up and down and screaming, ‘Let’s go celebrate and drink a lot,’ because you don’t have time,” adds Debbi Peterson, 23, who’s joined her rhythm section teammate for an interview at their manager’s Hollywood apartment.

Steele: “Not that I want to make it sound like we’re complaining. It’s just when you’re tired you’re tired. You try to Zen your way through it, you try to just float through it and do what you have to do, and we’re hoping that the situation will get a little more pleasurable further on down the line.

“But this is a real transition for us now. . . . We don’t have time to let it go to our heads. I don’t see how people do it and take drugs and stuff like that. . . .

“We’ve done a couple of tours where we’ve watched people in other bands just keep going, like coke-alcohol, coke-alcohol, and you get on this real bad sort of downward spiral, and at the end of the tour everyone is out of their minds. We don’t work that way.”

In contrast to the Runaways, who got mired in their calculated street-trash image and tumultuous personality clashes, and the Go-Go’s, who started as a lighthearted diversion, the Bangles have been clear-eyed, level-headed and ambitious from the word go.

The Peterson sisters, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley and moved to Palos Verdes in time to attend Rolling Hills High School, had been leading various bands without much success when they met Brentwood product Hoffs in 1981 through an ad in the Recycler. Their rapport wasn’t exclusively musical.

“Debbi and I had gone through a series of playing with women and men who were trying to be in bands, but they always were lacking that sense of commitment,” Vicki, 25, said, sitting with Hoffs at their manager’s office in Hollywood.

“It was frustrating to have guitarists or bass players who would come to rehearsal with their books because they were actually studying to be archeologists, or who just wanted to drink through the entire process and couldn’t remember the chords once they got on stage.

“We went through so much of that that when I finally met Susanna we said, ‘Well, how far do you want to take this? I mean, are you as crazy as we are?’ And she definitely was. You could tell right off that she was, and it was wonderful.”

With Annette Zilinskas on bass, the band (then called the Bangs) worked local bars, but couldn’t break into the rock club circuit, even on the lowest levels. They released their own single, “Getting Out of Hand,” in 1982, and then came the first turning point--an invitation to play at a benefit concert for the underground journal No magazine.

Said Vicki, “We were really scared. . . . The kids that were there were basically kids that were going to listen to Channel 3 and the Descendants and stuff, and they were not what we thought were an audience that would accept us playing Paul Revere & the Raiders.”

Adds Hoffs, 25, “Up to then I used to be really shy on stage and stand and just watch the neck of my guitar the entire show. I had made this decision. I thought, ‘If Bruce Springsteen can run around and have the nerve to do that, I’m gonna do that. What is it? I just have to have guts on stage. I’m not going to worry about making a jerk of myself.’ Then we knew this is the real us. This is much more fun than being nervous and trying to be cool.”

Vicki: “We knew we’d just have to break loose, so we did. We were like little savages running around acting like idiots. Had a great time. It was really funny. I remember there were kids, a bunch of skinheads going, ‘Can’t believe it, skinheads slam dancing to the Seeds. What is this?’ I just said, ‘All right, we got ‘em.’ ”

Things really began moving then. The Bangs established themselves on the L.A. club circuit, where their intriguing harmonies, strong lead vocals and folk-rock and British Invasion sources got them aligned with the ‘60s-influenced “paisley underground” scene, along with bands like the Rain Parade and the Long Ryders.

They were signed to a management deal by Miles Copeland’s Los Angeles Personal Management (whose clients also included the Go-Go’s), changed their name to the Bangles because an East Coast band had a prior claim to “Bangs,” were thrown to the wolves as the opening act on the English Beat’s U.S. tour, released a five-song EP, and brought in Newport Beach native Steele to replace Zilinskas, who left the band in 1983 to join Blood on the Saddle.

Meantime, Vicki took her inspiration where she could find it--and it wasn’t just the girl bands.

“For instance, the Knack,” she said. “I saw them play at the Troubadour once, and then a year later they played the Forum. . . . I went to the show at the Forum because I wanted to tell myself it is possible. I bought the Billboard (magazine) where they were No 1. I told myself, ‘This band was playing the clubs a year ago, they are now No. 1. It’s possible.’ I found that really inspiring.”

Peter Philbin, an A&R; executive for Columbia Records, had been keeping his eye on the band. “I saw them when they were the Bangs,” Philbin, now at Elektra Records, recalled recently. “They were very undeveloped, but at that point it was obvious it was a real band that simply needed more experience, more songs and to actually learn how to play.

“But they were a band . They looked like they belonged together and they had a common drive and they had the personality of a band. . . . They had very unusual harmonies that had a common voice, and four individual voices being able to react together and then come apart and come back together. That rare chemistry of a band, that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, but all the parts are exciting.”

According Debbi Peterson, the attention surprised the Bangles. “We had an EP out and all of a sudden we find record companies are interested in us, and we’re thinking, ‘Oh, that’s really nice, but we don’t think we’re ready for it.’

“We had this budding baby band going and we hadn’t reached that development we wanted to reach before we got signed to a major label. We were thrilled to death that they were even interested in us. We just couldn’t believe it, we were such a thrash band.”

Thrash band or no, Columbia signed the Bangles, put them together with producer David Kahne and released their debut album, “All Over the Place,” in late ’84. The LP wasn’t a smash, but it helped get the group established nationally, and set the stage for the current success.

One side effect of that success is further credibility for self-contained, all-female rock bands--something that was strictly a novelty until the Runaways and the Go-Go’s did their pioneering.

Said Vicki, “It’s so stupid. I mean, there are a lot of guys out there who are complete bull, who have nothing to their act, who are just doing it to do it, just like there are girls out there who are doing it to do it. And there are a lot of talented male musicians and a lot of talented female musicians. I’d just like to see the line get blown away.”

Actually, when replacing bassist Zilinskas, the Bangles auditioned male and female musicians. “I think with the other three Bangles,” said Steele, who got the job, “it’s just that they felt more comfortable personally and musically with another woman, and it’s just the way it is. That’s the reason why a lot of guy bands are guys.”

Observes Hoffs, “There are different chemistries you can have in different bands, and part of that’s caused by the gender. What we do is interesting because when you get four girls together there’s a certain kind of feeling you get and a certain form of camaraderie that might be different from four guys together.

“I think the thing that people like about us is the fact that we’re just a rock band. It’s not like the Supremes or something where it was put together. . . . What they like about us is that we’re real.”

And that’s the way they want to keep it amid the intensified activity and growing popularity.

“When you’re a club band and you’re setting your sights on bigger and further horizons for yourself,” says Vicki, “your mentality is a little bit more, ‘Let’s just have fun, let’s just do this, what the hell.’

“And to hold on to a little of that as you play bigger places I think is a good thing. Because it keeps the whole thing in perspective a little bit. I mean, we go out on stage and we still say, ‘OK, we’re the Ramones tonight, let’s really rock.’ You still have to make it fun and not take it too seriously. We find ourselves taking things too seriously sometimes. This is so important to us, we really want to do well.”