For a while it was assumed that I was writing women's songs. Then men began to notice that they saw themselves in the songs, too. A good piece of art should be androgynous. I'm not a feminist. That's too divisional for me.... This guy came up to me . . . and he said to me, Joni, you're the best woman songwriter in the world.' And I went, 'Ha.... ' And he insisted, `No, you are the greatest female singer/songwriter ever.' And I walked off And he thought it was because I was being modest. But this whole female singer/ songwriter tag is strange. You know, my peers are not Carly Simon and these other women." Joni Mitchell, 1991

The '70s began noisily. As the Vietnam War continued to escalate, Young America bellowed its outrage in the streets outside the White House. Inside, Richard Nixon hunched over a televised Redskins game. By the spring of 1970, bombs had begun to fall on Cambodia, and a sense of futility had begun to outpace activists' energies. Who didn't long to quit the barricades and head for the hills? What a balm to be or be with - those ethereal California girls. Not those cute, sun-bleached wahines with helium between their ears and beach tar on their feet who the Beach Boys had lusted for circa '65. But Ladies of the Canyon.

Lady - as in "my old lady" - was a sexy and respectful honorific then. I can recall lying on a cold linoleum dorm floor, with Ladies of the Canyon, Joni Mitchell's 1970 album, on the tinny portable stereo; for an escapist moment I was one of her willowy tribe, a thoughtful being in gauzy clothes, well read, well loved, experienced. The canyon lady was a modern woman: liberated but committed, informed but serene, rereading The Second Sex while bread rose in the whitewashed adobe kitchen and the old man - a guy who can whip up the right mix of sex and sensitivity and flip it for you like the perfect omelet - snoozed, handsome, beneath the heirloom quilt.

OK, she was an ideal, but she did glide convincingly through the passion plays and romantic disenchantments of my California heroine's songs. If Jane Austen had been around to limn the fractured morays of womanly existence in the 1970s, she might have sounded like Joni Mitchell. Call it Sense and Sinsemilla. Once many of us picked up Mitchell's work and found ourselves, we just couldn't put it down.

It was a sensibility and a sound that appealed to both sexes. The same wry, enlightened resignation that would buoy Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" ("They paved paradise/Put up a parking lot!") would also power Carole King's "You've Got a Friend," leaven the Eagles"' "Best of My Love" and"Hotel California." Mellowing out seemed the only sane thing to do. And it was predictable that this Call to Chill would come from artists settled amid the wavy tectonics of laid-back California. The Eagles captured the ethos succinctly in "Take It Easy":

Lighten up while you still can, Don't even try to understand, Just find a place to make your stand And take it easy.

Joni Mitchell was at the forefront of this California wave, but it would be wrong to classify her as "mellow"; her music was folkier, artier, edgier than most of the easy-chair pop that would flow from the Los Angeles scene. There was nothing MOR about the singer who accompanied herself with guitar tunings that were just a smidge - but perfectly - off-center. In her, the clear stream of singer/songwriter talent that has so recently come a gusher found its natural source.

For all her devotion to California, Joni Mitchell was not a native of the canyons. Roberta Joan Anderson was born in Alberta, Canada, in 1943 to an ex-Royal Canadian officer and a schoolteacher. She was stricken with polio at age 9; the enforced stillness turned her toward the arts and left her with the urge to move: "In my teens, I loved to dance. I instigated a Wednesday-night dance 'cause I could hardly make it to the weekends. For dancing, I loved Chuck Berry, Ray Charles' `What'd I Say?' I like Elvis Presley . . . the Everly Brothers. But then this thing happened: Rock & roll went through a really dumb vanilla period. And during that period, folk music came in to fill the hole."

She and her friends said "later" to Frankie Avalon's beach-blanket blandishments and sat around singing Kingston Trio songs. "That's why I bought an instrument," she explained. "To sing at those parties. It was no more ambitious than that."

Joni was headed for art school, but after her commercial course work, the music beckoned again. She sang in Toronto cafes, married a singer named Chuck Mitchell and wound up in New York when the marriage broke up after two years. She was first successful as a songwriter, turning out material diverse and idiosyncratic enough to fit Tom Rush, Judy Collins - and Buffy Sainte-Marie.

She began recording in the late '6os and had her first hit album with Ladies of the Canyon. She continued to produce prodigiously - almost an album a year. Blue and Court and Spark won her critical raves and a fanatical connoisseurs' following that today includes the likes of Chrissie Hynde, Janet Jackson, Madonna and the Artist. Like Bob Dylan, Mitchell could write and record sheaves of great songs with astonishing ease and speed.

Her art has been a graceful pas de deux between emotion and intellect. Poet, painter, performer, she grew to be a woman of such personal and artistic magnetism that this magazine dubbed her Old Lady of the Year and printed a most unfortunate chart of her romantic rock liaisons, from Jackson Browne to Graham Nash. Years later, after her self-imposed exile from these pages, she'd laugh about it: "The people that were involved called me up to console me. My victims called first. That took some of the sting out. There was a lot of affection in those relationships. The fact that I couldn't stay in them for one reason or another was painful to me. The men involved are good people."

Her difficulties as a lover, she decided, involved the same character trait that prodded her art past the blander boundaries of pop: "I'm a confronter by nature," she concluded. "I have a tendency to confront my relationships much more often than people would care. I'm always being told that I talk too much."

But once those confrontations were honed, harmonized and directed into a microphone, no one would dream of suggesting she pipe down. Mitchell turned out records that teemed with melody and metaphor. Way back in 1971, in a song on Blue ("A Case of You"), she was singing about a lover. But she could have been describing the dicey position of arty rock in a relentlessly commercial market.

Just before our love got lost, you said, "I am constant as the Northern Star." And I said, "Constantly in the darkness Where's that at? If you want me I'll be in the bar."

Shining in the dark would prove an apt and durable metaphor for singer/ songwriters in a constellation that stretches from Laura Nyro through Joan Armatrading, Tracy Chapman, et al. Mitchell never had to pull an Ani DiFranco, pushing out a steady stream of indie albums from one buzzing room in Buffalo, NY. Her early hits afforded her fame, money and the relative luxuries of experimentation. But Mitchell's further explorations, including collaborations with techno-Brit Thomas Dolby and late jazz great Charles Mingus, left the critics and some fans decidedly cool. In 1994, she sent forth her 17th album, Turbulent Indigo, and it was set on the more familiar ground of its color-coordinated progenitor, Blue. Mitchell has spent much of the last few years in quiet reassessment, catching up with the grown daughter she gave up for adoption at birth in the late '6os, putting out a book of her poems and lyrics, and completing a memoir due out next year.

There were more and more Ladies putting out records in the cavernous sound studios that were expanding all over Los Angeles. They plied the clubs in West Hollywood, where tables of A&R men pondered the music and the marketing math over long-necked Coronas. These women wrote and sang in a more accessible pop mode and found a huge audience.

Putting it in the pocket had never been a problem for New Yorker Carole King, who had spent the '6os writing girl-group hits like "The Loco-Motion" for Little Eva and the Shirelles' "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?"

Transplanted to Los Angeles with two young children in 1968, King was not all that keen on the rigors of performance and the graceless dance of promotion. She was working on song demos, singing them herself with no intention to venture outside the studio, when a young singer named James Taylor - friend to a musician she'd been working with - coaxed her into the light. "He invited me onto his stage as a side person playing piano," King recalled. "And then one night, he said, `Why don't we let you play one of your songs?' `Up on the Roof,' which he always loved. And I did. And I was preloved, because they already loved James. And they knew the songs, so it was really a no-lose situation."

King went back to the studio, kept noodling with her demos, sat at the piano and performed the songs herself. Released in 1971, Tapestry sold 10 million copies and yielded a brace of pop evergreens ("It's Too Late," "I Feel the Earth Move").

Unlike King's early teen confections, Tapestry was a record that dared to look youth's disillusionment in the face, sigh and get on with it. After the love-ins came . . . the mortgage? The orthodontist? Hard rock might never admit to stretch marks and alimony blues, but those kids weren't Carole King's constituency. After all, she'd also co-written the decidedly adult "Natural Woman," frank and fiery enough to become a signature song for Lady Soul.

She was divorced from Gerry Goffin and raising her children when she wove personal uncertainties into a confident, hook-laden pop statement. And there were legions of Woodstock postgrads who heard her, loud and clear. Though few of her subsequent records fared particularly well, Tapestry's standout success made it possible for King to retreat to the comforts of a sprawling ranch out West and her family.

As the '7os tripped forward, the media cant grew more insistent: Single women were supposed to be free and swinging. Cosmo said so, as did the newly founded Ms. magazine. But if you went to the movies, the message wasn't so upbeat. Diane Keaton was romanced by a psychokiller in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Ellen Burstyn sponged down miles of sticky diner Formica before Kris Kristofferson showed up in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

Amid all these dour portraits, there was a poster girl for well-adjusted MOR feminism. She was another West Coast canyon dweller. Arizona-born Linda Ronstadt stepped into the spotlight as a healthy, attractive single woman with a roaring career, an active love life that included Jerry Brown, Steve Martin, George Lucas. She started out fronting the Stone Poneys, in 1964. Not long after their 1967 hit, "Different Drum," she skated off as a solo act, trading on her confident readings of country classics ("Silver Threads and Golden Needles") and torchers ("You're No Good," "Love Has No Pride").

"It's so easy," she sang in a hit of that title, but according to Ronstadt, it never was. In the beginning, she said, she had great difficulty bossing men around for the sound she wanted: "When I got to L.A., I was so intimidated by the quality of everyone's musicianship that, instead of trying to get better, I chickened out and wouldn't work."

Ronstadt's self-esteem didn't keep pace with her popularity and her sales: "When Heart Like a Wheel went to No. 1, I just walked around apologizing.... I could see that my supposed friends resented me. I went around going, `I'm not that good of a singer.'. . . And I got so self-conscious that when I went onstage I couldn't sing at all. It almost made me go crazy. . . . I mean, I needed a lot of help."

She began seeing a therapist. But here is her description of her triumphant 1976 tour: "I threw up on the way to the airport and for the first two weeks of the tour. I had taken six months off because I'd become a physical and emotional wreck.... I just didn't think I was good enough."

Somehow she got through the tour, but even though the ordeal was done, her assessment sounded a lot like Janis Joplin's chick-singer blues: "They haven't invented a word for that loneliness that everybody goes through on the road. The world is tearing by you, real fast, and all these people are looking at you like you're people in stars' suits. People see me in my `girl singer' suit and think I'm famous and act like fools. It's very dehumanizing."

Still, Ronstadt was incredibly loved. Women and men seemed equally smitten by a performer who could be alternately tough and kittenish. Her harmonies were knowing and delicate, but she could also sing about the deepest hurts ("When Will I Be Loved") with the brio of Ethel Merman belting "Everything's Coming Up Roses." Ronstadt was so beloved that the Los Angeles Dodgers insisted she sing the national anthem during the '77 World Series there. By the following year she was the highest-paid woman in rock; her bankability rested on the multiplatinum success of albums like Heart Like a Wheel, Hasten Down the Wind and Living in the U.S.A.

Then, not long after becoming one of the first rock artists to ever "ship" double platinum (2 million copies), Ronstadt decided to step out of that stress-inducing spotlight. She turned on her tooled boot heel and walked off to experiment in less-pressured, less-lucrative streams. She recorded a rather illfitting punkish album in Los Angeles (Mad Love) and lovingly interpreted the ranchera music of her part-Mexican father. Such pricey departures were the privilege of an established hitmaker.

Other women experimented with root American forms in California studios, but they found themselves working in the murky chiaroscuro of a record industry that was becoming increasingly hit-driven and less open to unclassifiable mongrel music. Emmylou Harris' duets with Gram Parsons were stunning, pristine drafts of pure country. She then tarried some in the L.A. country-rock scene, only to return to Nashville studios, where her love of the form - and her always-gorgeous voice produced a string of mid'70s country hits.

Bonnie Raitt had been an accomplished slide-guitar player since her early 20s; red-haired, freckled and pale as 2 percent milk, she learned to hold her own with her blues heroes, from Sippie Wallace to Buddy Guy. She released several albums of smart, capable blues, country and rock in the '7os that drew critical respect and a cult following. Playing with the big boys, Raitt would note later, set her to drinking with them as well. She told ROLLING STONE in 1990, "There was a romance about-drinking and doing blues.... I bought into that whole lifestyle. I thought Keith Richards was cool, that he was really dangerous." It would take another decade to sober up and marshal her forces behind the 1989 album Nick of Time, which brought Raitt three Grammys and overdue recognition.

Manhattan-bred, high-strung and working 3,000 miles from the mellow epicenter of the California sound, Carly Simon suffered severe stage fright, stemming, she said, from a childhood stutter. Her mother taught her to sing her way through the affliction, and on record she laid it down without reserve. A credible songwriter, she scored a huge hit in 1972 with "You're So Vain" and slid easily into the easy-listening slipstream. That same year, her marriage to (and recordings with) James Taylor and motherhood made her one of rock's first hot mamas: a capable woman who could bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan - and pose for an album cover (Playing Possum) in very high boots and a really tiny teddy.

The pliant, willowy women of Fleetwood Mac had no difficulty turning out music that was unabashedly California pop, smooth as guacamole and great for a snack. Mick Fleetwood and John and Christine McVie, British expats who had landed in L.A., teamed up with Californians Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. In Nicks, they found an appealing frontwoman. Blonde, wide-eyed and blessed with a light, pretty voice that cracked now and then like tinder-dry mesquite, Nicks was the canyon lady gone a wee bit over the cliff. Her vocals, her trailing, spidery dresses and her possessed body language were a determinedly witchy foil to McVie's grounded, more soulful sound. The sales of their successive albums Fleetwood Mac (I975) and Rumours (1977) spiced by "rumours" of their everchanging romantic permutations gave new meaning to the term "supergroup." There was no fern bar anywhere in America, no fitness center, no dry-cleaners' counter that didn't vibrate to the Mac bromide, "Don't! Stop! Thinking about tomorrow."

Despite all those easy-listening sounds drifting in from the west, the national climate remained far from balmy. Few decades have been more tempest-tossed in terms of fashion, politics and sexual identity. We hounded Nixon out of office and got . . . Gerald Ford. Cocaine had become such a popular recreational drug that suburban matrons invested in sterling coke spoons - yet the Justice Department was still trying to deport John Lennon on a '60s marijuana charge. The nation suffered crippling oil shortages, yet petroleum-based fashion ruled: little Qiana nothings that could mold to a thigh like Saran Wrap during a steamy Latin hustle. Over it all crashed the first wave of denim distressed by commercial process rather than by plain hard work.

On the East Coast - that bastion of enlightened pessimism - no one performer caught this ball of confusion and ran with it better than Bette Midler, a nice Jewish girl from . . . Honolulu? Named after that drag-queen icon Bette Davis, the Divine One got her start singing in her lingerie at Manhattan gay baths. She emerged as the patron saint of the confused and abused, an outsiders' moll who could score with the '4os camp of the Andrews Sisters' "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and torch her way through a standard rocker like "Do You Want to Dance?" When he caught her at a club one night, Atlantic Records' Ahmet Ertegun knew instinctively that she was more than a novelty act. The woman could sing. "I don't usually like what is called popular music," said Ertegun, "so Bette's sort of stuff wouldn't be my cup of tea if she weren't so talented.... The first time I saw her, at the Upstairs at the Downstairs . . . I was never so stunned by a performer.... The rapport she established with us, the audience, was fantastic."

He went backstage and offered to sign her. It took eight months to make her debut, The Divine Miss M, but it was an instant hit. Soon her tiny caricature body and her big mouth would rule the most prestigious rooms; gay men followed her from the baths to Broadway and brought along their mums. And we all laughed together.

Midler's licentiousness was witty, nuanced and well art-directed. But a Millie Jackson show in the '70s could be a rough ride, even by R&B standards. Jackson was raunchier than a cathouse too after a busy Saturday night. Her body language was never subtle, favoring squats and spine-cracking grinds. And given her penchant for aerobically challenging spandex, it was quite a sight.

But everyone was getting their ya-ya's out, weren't they? Herpes and AIDS had yet to slither from the fluidities of the new sexual freedom. Mick Jagger was riding a bucking, 4o-foot inflatable penis on one of the Stones' megatours. Labelle had adopted Space Age glitter vamp and nailed a hit about a French Quarter whore, "Lady Marmalade." Flat-topped, gilt-lipped Grace Jones prowled in sprayed-on cat suits, purring ominously, "I Need a Man."

In rock clubs and arenas, genders were bent, crossed or vamped by the likes of David Bowie and Queen. Showbiz rock, born beneath the gaudy corona of Elvis' Vegas excesses, delivered a pair of glam goddesses extreme enough to keep drag performers well-salaried for decades.

Cherilyn Sarkasian LaPier had started off singing backup on girlgroup records when her boyfriend, Sonny Bono, worked for Phil Spector, in the early '6os. She was 17 when she started hanging out at L.A.'s Gold Star Studios, where an excited Ronnie Bennett dragged her into the ladies' room to spill the details of the Ronettes' 1964 British tour. "Ronnie came back with Beatle boots and leather skirts and poorboy T-shirts, and I nearly died," wrote Cher in the introduction to Bennett's autobiography. "It was like she'd gone to nirvana and brought home souvenirs."

Ever the clotheshorse, Cher came up with those matted-dog-fur vests she and Sonny wore to warble "I Got You Babe," their 1965 breakthrough. By 1971, Sonny and Cher - those long-haired weirdos - had morphed into America's Cute Couple on the hit variety show The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.

It can safely be said that Sonny and Cher stayed together for the sake of their careers; their relationship was always far from ideal. Back when Bono had invited broke, teenage Cher to move into his place, he told her, "I don't find you particularly attractive.... just keep the apartment clean and do the cooking." Cher would confess, "It's impossible to explain Sonny's hold on me.

We became Sonny and Cher so quickly, and then we had a kind of decline, and then I got pregnant. For five years before I left him, I wanted to leave, but the Sonny and Cher show was so popular that I was afraid. And when I finally did leave, he said, `America will hate you. You'll never work again.' . . All we did was work. . That was our relationship - work."

Picking up, perhaps, on the stinky chemistry, their TV writers hit a winning formula: the wisecracking, ravenhaired beauty and her hapless, hairy little beast. It worked on several levels; by the time Cher walked off the show and out of the marriage - notably on the arm of record mogul David Geffen - she was a huge star. She touched down in Vegas' biggest rooms, reinventing herself in a blaze of feathered headdresses, cosmetic surgeries, tattoos and a new wave of rockin' old men (Gregg Allman, Kiss' Gene Simmons). With her husky contralto, bombastic rock productions and the sequined sorcery of designer Bob Mackie, she became the self-appointed Doyenne of Dazzle. Beneath it all, Mackie told me, Cher is a canny, practical girl. She regularly held garage sales to resell the beaded and hand-tooled remnants of her gently used former selves.

Diana Ross, the '70s' other glam diva, was more Tattinger than tattoos. When Ross blazed into her solo career, the former Supreme indulged her long-standing schmaltz leanings; she arrayed herself in fluffy show tunes, masses of marabou and the kind of stage presentations that sent high rollers back to the craps tables muttering, "Hell of a show!" In Ross' hands, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's soulful "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" became a huge, saccharine production number.

It played, and to very large venues. Once, traveling with her to a sold-out concert in Amsterdam, I asked Ross about Cher. Was theirs a spangled sisterhood? They had plenty in common: lavish stage shows, a serious Mackie habit, interludes dating Gene Simmons. They were both raising their children alone. And in the grandedame tradition of Mae West, Judy Garland and Joan Crawford, both enjoyed a substantial gay following.

"I get a lot of gays at my shows, and it's my pleasure," Ross told me. "They can put on makeup and probably look a lot like Diana Ross. Cher has a female impersonator in her show. His name is J.C. This guy has all my moves. I watch him, and I see how I look."

Gracing the cover of ROLLING STONE - and starring in pneumatic similitude in countless drag clubs was the '70s' unlikeliest glam crossover. Country queen Dolly Parton arrived as a 4o-DDD conundrum - a honey-voiced, Bible-quotin' sweetheart with a wicked gleam beneath those heavily Maybellined lashes. She sang like an angel: sad songs, corny songs, true yarns about coming up hard but loved as one of 12 kids. Dolly's bell-bottom jumpsuits were unabashedly Elvis-inspired; her monumental cleavage was the great refuge of Tonight Show joke writers and of her own stage humor. ("Honey," she told me on tour during the late '7os, "I'd like to go joggin', but I'd black both my eyes.") You had to love her; leaping off her tour bus in deepest Wisconsin, I dashed into a Wal-Mart to fetch her a fresh supply of mascara. And after three days with Dolly, I felt like I was carrying the Olympic torch back to her impossibly froufrou'd bus lounge.

Despite its rhinestone excesses, beyond its trumped-up rivalries, the women of country music have retained a certain kitchen-table solidity, one that boasts big hearts and bigger hair. Loretta Lynn swore it was the ghost of her pal and mentor Patsy Cline who appeared to her in a Vegas showroom and miraculously cured her ailing voice. Oh, Lynn and Tammy Wynette had their differences: Nixon booster Wynette - she of the conservative "Stand by Your Man" - released "Woman to Woman," in 1974, which clung to a Stone Age, close-youreyes-and-do-it-to-keep-him-home sexuality. Then came Lynn's "The Pill," which was banned as licentious by many Bible Belt radio programmers. But both of them sold, and 'those canny pros knew the sales wisdom of debating the s-e-x question.

Who wasn't talking about - or thinking about - sex? The Joy of Sex, that Kamasutra for the tract-ranch set, ruled the New York Times bestseller list for an astonishing 362 weeks, beginning in 1973. Sex, artfully simulated, was selling everything from extralong smokes to steel-belted radials. On album covers and Sunset Boulevard billboards, lingerie ruled; boys and girls drooled. It seemed anyone could do it - with whomever or whatever they pleased.

The frenzy all came together beneath the copulatory boogie-oogieoogie thud of disco, a most egalitarian form. Donna Summer snapped her choruses over booming rhythm tracks that moved the artfully tied construction boots of gay men and the teetery hetero platforms of the Saturday Night Fever disco hordes. The Bee Gees made that movie's soundtrack a monstrous hit, singing about macho triumphs in nosebleed, girlie falsetto.

For the most part, the disco era was one long Ladies' Nite, from Donna Summer's "Bad Girls" to Gloria Gaynor's Moog operatics and the joyful party-down adventurism of Sister Sledge (Joni, Kathy, Kim and Debbie Sledge). And, given disco's synthesized, overwrought productions, it was a time of musical co-dependencies. Like many girl-group singers, disco queens were deeply reliant on the multilayered engineering of male producers such as Giorgio Moroder and Nile Rodgers.

Those factory-stamped rhythm tracks, synthesizer beeps and gusting pseudo-strings provided the background urge for Gaynor's anthem, "I Will Survive," and Chic's "Le Freak." Designed to induce a boogie trance sustainable through a 12-inch extended cut, disco was hardly a lyric-driven form. Time magazine's authoritative analysis reported that Donna Summer's vocalizing on "Love to Love You Baby" consisted of 21 distinctly moaned orgasms.

Disco was primarily a black thing, in terms of performance, but the '70s did see some straight-soul survivors. Aretha Franklin scored some moderate hits; the late Minnie Riperton's astonishing high notes on "Loving You" floated above the din, and the ever-classy Gladys Knight, freed from years of benign neglect at Motown, turned out her signature "Midnight Train to Georgia," beginning a string of lush, achy ballads on her new label, Buddah.

Chaka Khan, a wildhaired, ebullient sister, was born Yvette Marie Stevens in 1953, more than a decade after Knight and Franklin. She came up in Chicago with a perspective that had plenty of rhythm but far fewer adult blues. After a brief stint in a girl group, she took on the African name of Chaka, meaning "fire," in high school. Then she became the lambent life force fronting the funk band Rufus. Khan took any stage by storm, a bumping, whirling vision in jangling bracelets, vests and bellbottoms approximating the width and locomotion of a modest tornado. She could get soulful, and she could rock; hers is a flexibility that helped her bounce into the '8os with "I Feel for You" and a rousing duet on Steve Winwood's "Higher Love."

Plenty of soul singers have blamed the corporate tyrannies of disco for the demise of their own freeform vocalizing. It's partly true, of course. Even the strongest voices can get lost in the whirlwind of a dance craze - particularly if it has strong corporate backing. And disco did huge business. But there were some notable breaches in this wall of sound. To punch through, it helped to be very loud, and extremely rude. And until rap, only white kids could get away with it.

BOLLOCKS! Punk came hurtling through all disco's stylized hormonal displays, through all that mellow MOR rock, like a fat, juicy spitball. What an astringent moment when Poly Styrene whispered a girlish intro ("Sssome people think little girls should be seen and not heard... ."), then roared into a mike, "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!" How refreshing when the Slits, a brace of female Brits opening for the Clash at London's Roxy, invited critical audience members to take over their instruments while the band hit the floor and danced. This stylishly skanky bunch knew they sucked; that was the whole point.

By the late '70s, didn't everything suck? The King had toppled, dead, off his bathroom throne. Rock deaths (from Janis Joplin to Jim Morrison, Keith Moon, Florence Ballard, Tim Buckley, Bobby Darin, Jim Croce, Elvis!) occurred with the speed and randomness of a kozmic demolition derby. And punk's nihilism seemed a swell idea in an age when the Village People could fill New York's Madison Square Garden and Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life" hit No. 1.

When it came to chord changes and costumes, minimalism was the other punk ethos. (Unless, of course, you counted up all the piercings, studs and dog collars. This was a genre that knew how to accessorize anger.) And antifashion did have a gorgeous pinup in Blondie's Debbie Harry.

One chilly day in the late '8os, I had a date with that self-styled Pop-Tart of '7os rock. She was releasing a solo album lo years after Blondie's hightide hit "Heart of Glass." To avoid the hackneyed chat-in-the-manager'soffice, I coaxed a leather-jacketed Harry to New York's Museum of Modern Art for a retrospective on her late pal Andy Warhol.

Inside the museum, plenty of inky-clad art students stopped staring at the soup cans and turned their gazes to Harry. Those runway cheekbones were still unmistakable beneath her shades and wool scarf. It was one of those mirror-crack'd moments, strolling with one pop icon through the brash, vibrating oeuvre of the Master.

Everything - the multiple Marilyns, Warhol's infamous "piss paintings" - seemed to trigger vivid memory for a girl so downtown she used to get the bends above 14th Street. But I was puzzled when Harry grabbed my coat sleeve and hauled me to a silk-screen of S&H Green Stamps, a long-defunct consumer incentive. It was a simple '6os equation: spend, get green stamps from the supermarket, paste them in the books, trade them for stuff Harry was transfixed. Seemed she'd worked in a New Jersey S&H "redemption center." Presiding over these cheesy rites of retail, handing out TV trays and cute chip-'n-dip sets, was, she confessed, far more satisfying than her other incarnations as waitress, shampoo girl, aerobics instructor. She pointed out that every chick rock singer she knew had paid the rent with numbing straight gigs, and, of course, she was right. Janis Joplin punched out IBM cards, set down foamy glasses of Schlitz - who didn't wait tables? Irma Thomas sold auto parts at Montgomery Ward, Grace Slick modeled, and Bette Midler sold women's gloves at a Manhattan department store.

"I got to be a rock singer," Harry said. "But, whooeee, first I was, um . . an American girl!" We both laughed. Amid all that Warholia, I'd had my own flashback, to the gas-station owner who promised me a summer job - if I'd pump high test in hot pants. In the '70s, Miss American Pie was one puzzled creature. All those recent revolutions had left us with nothing but choices and relatively little equipment to help one do the right thing. Birth control was dispensed like Chiclets, but true love had a higher price than ever - even Elvis and Priscilla got divorced. Our Bodies, Our Selves was a feminist bestseller, but guys were poring over it like a users manual.

Irony seemed to be the best defense. Debbie and her cohorts thought up the band's name after some trucker hollered at her on the street, "Hey, blondie, how about a blow job?" Out-cheesing the assholes - going for platinum hair with black roots, lyrics like chainsawed ad slogans - turned out to be the best revenge.

To that end, Harry's band was spinning out tough, chewy little hits, with titles like "Rip Her to Shreds," and posters that featured the blonde singer in a ripped vinyl minidress, razors hanging from the hems. As she'd later write in a song lyric, "A torn T-shirt made it all dangerous again.... "

If Harry indulged in what she's described as ad hoc Dumpster dressing, Blondie's lyrics were also scavenged from decades of cultural landfill. Songs like "Contact in Red Square" and "Eat to the Beat" were soldered together willy-nilly from literature, sitcoms and soap ads. Some female punk performers even adopted brand names, like the aforementioned Styrene and Slits' drummer, Palmolive. There was a deep love-hate relationship between punk kids and the processed cheese they'd grown up on. Anything was fair game amid this Rubik's Cube lyricism. Punk bands plundered surf music, girl-group la-la, rap and reggae. The kids had great fun and left the semiotic analysis to fusty rock critics.

Like the '60s, the punk era enjoyed a foreign-exchange program with the U.K.; this time, instead of mop tops 'n' dollybirds, it was rudeboys 'n' sluts. That canny fashion-and-rock trickster Malcolm McLaren, who masterminded the Sex Pistols, would show up stateside plotting with the crossdressing New York Dolls. And over came a louder, shriller, more intensely costumed bevy of rub- > berware babes: Poly Styrene (of XRay Spex), Siouxsie Sioux (and her Banshees), the Raincoats, the Slits, the Au Pairs. They were singular: Siouxsie, who'd jumped the traces of secretarial school to follow the Sex Pistols around, performed topless once she formed her own band, and accented her sod off! insouciance with thoughtfully placed swastikas.

Like a stubborn case of acne, punk would enjoy sporadic breakouts. In the early '8os, there was the well-muscled and -mohawked Wendy 0. Williams of the Plasmatics, who chainsawed wrecked cars onstage to sweeten the mix. On the L.A. scene, Exene Cervenka (of the band X) was a literate, Rubenesque punkette who tossed her zebra-streaked mane and smiled through the heady poetry of "Real Child of Hell":

Men of flesh hitch a ride Shorts and tans and greasy thighs At night drive into slimy bars And piss it out on our front yards.

Punk poetics were determinedly pustular: Be a carcass; he dead meat. Early on it was clear that pre-emptive gross-out could be a girl's game - an impulse that persists today in L7's Hungry for Stink and Bikini Kill's incest lullabye, "Suck My Left One."

Amid all the cocoa puff cosmologies and well-miked belches, some folks did get torqued up on intellect. Given the macho, head-butting physicality of the doings at that Manhattan punk palace CBGB, it was amazing, one night, to peer through the stinky blue haze and realize that the Talking Heads' rather businesslike bass player was female. Tina Weymouth, brainy art student from the Rhode Island School of Design, had played her way into the job, over classmate David Byrne's reservations. But she was more than capable, holding a steady tiller beneath Byrne's twitchy, Tourette's-syndrome vocals ("Psychokiller, qu'est-ce que c'est?"). Weymouth's inclusion sent a bulletin across those hot rooms packed with pouty, pierced-lipped anomie: Girls smart girls - can be in a band, as well as vamping out front.

They could also be Poets. The plain white shirts and black pants, the skinny, naked body of Jersey guttersnipe Patti Smith were photographed as monotint Art by her pal and soul mate Robert Mapplethorpe. A former factory worker, Smith was self-educated in the works of great men from Baudelaire to Coltrane to Ca;mus to Bob Dylan, with whom she seemed obsessed. Arriving on the New York scene, she was almost the polar and physical opposite of Nico, the blond German expatriate who starred in Warhol movies, sang on her own records (notably Chelsea Girl) and performed with Lou Reed's Velvet Underground. If Nico's chilly beauty and her art were deeply, smokily boho-femme, Smith's frantic stage evangelism seemed closer to the absinthe reveries of her hero, Rimbaud.

Smith at home in New York, 1969: A New Jersey guttersnipe obsessed with the great men of rock, her "Gloria" seemed to out-macho van Morrison's.

Smith affected the poet-dandy's thin black tie and, sometimes, suspenders. On Horses, her I975 debut album, her turbocharged remake of Van Morrison's "Gloria" seemed to out-macho that Hibernian he-man. She was most comfortable collaborating with men, a gender preference that still has feminists and riot grrrls scrapping over her alleged betrayals and/or revolutions. Smith even wrote lyrics for the bombastically macho Blue Oyster Cult. Her band, the Patti Smith Group, was all male, and her only Top 40 hit, the incendiary "Because the Night," was recorded with and co-written by Bruce Springsteen.

Further confounding her media analysts - and upsetting plenty of her fans - Smith left the national rock scene for domesticity and the unhip Midwest. She spent nine years in Detroit, quietly raising two children with her husband, MCs guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith. He died in 1994, and when his widow re-emerged a year later with a studio album, Gone Again, it was as strong and revelatory as her first "resurrection" album, Easter. (That record was released in I978 after a stage accident shattered her neck and kept her in therapy for months.) Gone was so quiet and introspective that critics were calling it folky. Smith toured briefly behind it, sharing the bill with one of her inspirations. And in each of those shows, Bob Dylan kissed her onstage, with tenderness and respect.

Opting out of the clamor that would soon characterize the '8os was a comfortable, and affordable, choice for confident artists like Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith. And as they rather quietly closed the decade, Marianne Faithfull returned in 1979. Years of chemical abuse and resulting legal hassles left her with a battered but affecting voice and a jagged bouquet of songs that made Broken English a classic piece of womanly introspection. Faithfull has recently been performing a good many of the dark, smoky Kurt Weill songs so well suited to her lived-in voice.

But no female has a more amazing rock-life dossier than Chrissie Hynde, who grew up idolizing the Kinks' Ray Davies as a teenager in Akron, Ohio. She spent three antsy years at Kent State University - inamous for the 1970 murder of student protesters by the National Guard during Hynde's tenure there - then got herself to the Swingin' London she'd longed to see. She began a series of rock adventures there that would include having Davies' child almost 2o years after she first fell in thrall with "You Really Got Me."

Hynde got a job as a rock journalist with Britain's NME (New Musical Express). But after a series of assignments that included meeting David Cassidy's plane, Hynde decided that she preferred a more hands-on approach. She had also been working at Sex, one incarnation of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's little shop of punk horrors; she fashioned earrings of tampons and condoms, and hung out with the Sex Pistols. Hynde offered Sid Vicious two pounds to marry her - so she could get her green card. (They called it off when the registry office was closed.) She also played with one of McLaren's instant, microwaveable bands - Masters of the Backside until she formed her own group, the Pretenders. Their first single, in 1978, was a slamming, harsh cover of the Kinks' "Stop Your Sobbing."

Visually, Hynde was lean and mean: a shock of short black hair over much serious black eyeliner, and the businesslike T's and trousers of most serious male guitarists. And black leather, of course. Her sound was just as muscular - loud and speedy with just enough melody to pull it out of deep punk and into the charts, with singles like "Brass in Pocket."

The dossier also takes in the overdose deaths of two Pretenders band members, the end of the affair with Davies, a brief marriage to Simple Minds vocalist Jim Kerr (and a second child), public rants that were alternately anti-feminist, anti-PMS, anti-meat and -fur, anti-image (she once trashed Debbie Harry for her Blondie look). Still rocking hard in her mid-qos, raising her children alone, she described her quiet life to writer Amy Raphael: "The girls go to bed. I go to my room. I light a candle. I smoke a spliff. I do my yoga. I go to bed and read." Still, Hynde's occasional nights out don't go unnoticed:

In December 1995, Joni Mitchell has decided to celebrate her 52nd birthday with an "informal open rehearsal" at Fez, a small Manhattan club. It's an event: Mitchell has not toured in 12 years. Within hours, the word has spread and the room is packed with Famous Fans, such as Natalie Merchant, Carly Simon - and Chrissie Hynde, who begins the evening by screaming, "Let it out, Joni!" Hynde keeps screaming throughout the performance, and, seated in the next booth, Carly Simon asks her to stop. Hynde is up, she's grabbed Simon by the neck, pointing at Mitchell, announcing to her astonished captive, "That's a real singer up there!" As a male audience member suggests, none too gently, that Hynde have another drink, the crowd sings "Happy Birthday" to Joni. Simon goes home early.

At the tail end of the '70s, in bopped a new singer/songwriter, a slurry-voiced runaway named Rickie Lee Jones who could not begin to dream of what lay ahead for a rock & roll girl about to meet the '80s. This was no canyon lady. Her California was urban and Chandleresque, all flyspecked diners and lumpy motel beds. The characters in her songs had pockets full of tobacco flakes and pawn tickets: Chuck E., Cunt-finger Louie....

Nico in 1966. She starred in Andy Warhol films, sang with the Velvet Underground.

Rickie Lee Jones has found us a shady spot in New York's Central Park to talk. The day, last summer, is fair and watermelon-crisp. She's hugging her ankles above sensible brown oxfords, laughing at the thought of replaying the tape that's running on the bench between us. It will pick up the hiss of Rollerblades, a sharp bongo crescendo, a quartet of gently cursing boys and the tale of her strange little trip. "We can put this out later," she says. "It's like a poetry piece."

And it's not unlike the new sound collages she's releasing now, jazzed and looped, alternately broad-stroked and painstakingly pointillist. Her songs have long been painterly aural landscapes, peopled with greasyspoon lowlifes and other L.A exotica, on early albums like Richie Lee Jones and Pirates. The lyrics of her newest, Ghostyhead, aren't far from some of the e-mail conversations we've been having, from road-weary airport visions to coffee-fueled clarity. "I stay in the world of waiting to play, and waiting to play again," she taps from the road one night. "Tomorrow I play. Sometimes I feel like the Statue of Liberty. The fog coming in . . . soon autumn."

1979 was a fevered springtime for Rickie Lee Jones. She was flush with a hit ("Chuck E.'s in Love"), in mad love with fellow hipster Tom Waits; she was a dishy, big-boned naiad du jour. Tripping along in short skirts and Matterhorn heels, she'd get blindsided by the high-speed rock commerce of the dawning MTV age. In hindsight, Jones says, she was woefully unprepared. Her embrace was so instantaneous and extreme. Folks took her personal style - fishnet! lingerie! berets!-and set it out for the masses to try on. "It was a big phenomenon," she says now. "There were berets in windows. It was so confusing because it penetrated society so deeply, so fast. And then nobody was quite sure what to do, because in fact I wasn't a pop personality. They were very attracted to the appearance and idea of me. But I didn't turn out to be as sweet as I first appeared to be."

She was the cuddly Christmas puppy who ruined the carpet: There were chemical misadventures; the end of the affair with Waits, which sent her to bed under mother's care for months; some boozy, train-wreck performances that set even adoring critics to shaking their heads. By the mid-'80s, Jones was headed for a dry-out, retreat and motherhood, in that order. "I think I had already tired of my habits," she says. "I was pretty tired of myself then." She was sick of the songs, too - felt she was imitating herself. And she kept hearing her sly, irregular cadences everywhere: "Suddenly there were so many women who were singing in that style, it wasn't mine anymore."

She knew she had to change her off-meter tunes but says she couldn't write for years until her daughter Charlotte, now 9, led her back. They lived in rural, groovy Ojai, Calif., outpost of organic gardeners and crystal healers.

"'Canyon ladies?'"

Jones shoots me a look, then laughs. Yes, there were play groups, other moms and, for the first time in years and years, a close woman friend. She felt like, well . . . talking to people again. "She connects me to the world," Jones says of Charlotte. "She makes me have faith and hope in the world. I must trust that the world will take care of her. So it's created incredible hope. Yeah."

She is feeling so strong, this California artist, that she and Charlotte have moved back to town, to West Hollywood. "And it was a big step," she says, "because I don't smoke, I did not drink, I was very strict, and I went back into the middle of it all again. And I felt confident I could retain my health amid all the debauchery."

She loves it in those hills alive with invigorating kooks and espresso bars, loves working again and says she is ready for the next step: "I never wanted to be motivated by money. But now I think that's not so good. I think the need for money, to not be poor, is a great motivator to do brave work." She grins. "Yeah, you have to have an earthly gain."

If only she'd been hip to that in the '8os, she says as we head out of the park toward rushing Fifth Avenue traffic. Not that she'd have gone . . . va-voom. "I don't know," she's saying. "I still watch some of those videos, and I wonder, `How did those girls do that?'"