Sweetwater has launched a series of Gearfest 2020 interviews, conducted from quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
On being a pioneer for female guitarists in the hard rock / heavy metal, Lita Ford said:
“I never really thought about the fact that girls didn’t do those kinds of things (play guitar) back in the early ’70s. It never dawned on me that ‘girls don’t play like Jimi Hendrix, girls don’t play like Ritchie Blackmore or Tony Iommi.
Here I am learning all these guitar parts from all these great idols of mine, and then I used to invite everyone in the neighborhood. I was only 13 years old, people would come over and we would play guitar, and they used to say ‘How come you can do that and we can’t?’ I’d be like ‘I don’t know. How come you can’t?
It never made sense to me, it was something that just came second nature. I did pick up a lot of stuff from all these great musicians in my past and having grown up with them and then becoming a member of The Runaways, getting to meet these people and jam with these people, it was like ‘Wow, this was meant to be.'”