In a late 80s metal scene full of guys in eyeliner, Jan Kuehnemund was the guitarist who did not need to posture to sound lethal. As founder and lead player of Vixen, she steered an all female band into a genre that barely tolerated women anywhere except in the videos. If you grew up thinking of Vixen as a novelty act, it is time to revisit just how hard Jan actually hit.
Her story runs from St Paul school gyms to the Sunset Strip, from MTV rotation to courtroom fights over the Vixen name, and finally to a quiet, brutal battle with cancer. Along the way she left riffs, decisions and scars that make her one of the most important under credited guitarists in hard rock.
From St Paul teenager to arena stages
Born in St Paul, Minnesota in 1953, Janice Lynn Kuehnemund formed an all female band called Lemon Pepper while she was still in high school, a lineup that cycled through names like Genesis before settling on Vixen, split in the mid 70s, then reformed when she rebuilt Vixen and moved the group to Los Angeles in 1981 with singer Janet Gardner in tow. That retooled unit hustled its way into a cameo in the teen film Hardbodies under the joke bar band name Diaper Rash, then hardened into the classic quartet that signed to EMI, released the albums Vixen and Rev It Up in 1988 and 1990, and toured with heavyweights including Scorpions, Ozzy Osbourne, Bon Jovi, Kiss and Deep Purple. Away from the spotlight she also put together the all female side band Drawing Down The Moon, later returned Vixen with a new lineup for the 2006 album Live & Learn, and ultimately died in Colorado Springs in 2013 after a nine month fight with cancer.
Back home in Minnesota, that journey looked even more radical. Local reporting remembered Vixen as the first fully established all female rock band in the Twin Cities, formed around 1973 while Jan was still at St Paul high school, grinding through bars like the Cabooze, Duffy’s and the Union before relocating to Los Angeles in 1981 for a shot at an EMI deal, and noted that British magazine Kerrang once hyped her as the best female guitarist around, a backhanded compliment that still shows how hard she hit in a boys club scene.
| Era | Band name | Jan’s role | Snapshot |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early 70s | Lemon Pepper / Genesis | Founder, guitarist | All girl bar band learning the ropes in Minnesota. |
| Early 80s | Vixen (LA clubs) | Band leader, guitarist | Relocation to Los Angeles, Hardbodies cameo, label courtship. |
| Late 80s | Vixen on EMI | Lead guitar, songwriter | MTV hits, arena tours with metal heavyweights. |
| 1990s | Hiatus & projects | Guitarist, collaborator | Band breakup, work with Population 361 and songwriters. |
| 2000s | Vixen reboot & DDTM | Only original member | New Vixen lineup, Live & Learn, all female side band. |
Hits, hooks and that guitar sound
Commercially, the peak came fast and loud. A Vintage Guitar remembrance points out that Vixen’s 1988 self titled debut went gold on the strength of MTV staples Cryin and Edge Of A Broken Heart, while 1990 follow up Rev It Up spun off further singles like Love Is a Killer and How Much Love before the label cooled, dropped the band in 1991 and left Jan to resurrect Vixen in 2001 with new bassist Pat Holloway as the other classic members launched their JSRG project.
On those records she sat right at the intersection of LA shred and radio pop. Her solos are short, melodic and hooky, more about singing lines and bends that mirror the vocal than about speed for its own sake, while her rhythm work locks into big open chord choruses that still sound huge beside any Bon Jovi or Def Leppard track from the era. Listen closely and you hear a player who understood arrangement and dynamics as much as flash, which is exactly why the songs have aged better than a lot of faceless 80s metal.
Her tone was all about high gain punch that would still translate on television. Among the brands openly linking themselves with her was Luna Guitars, a company founded by and aimed at women that proudly listed Jan Kuehnemund, alongside Girlschool’s Enid Williams and Jackie Chambers, as flagship Luna players – a neat reversal of the usual macho guitar endorsement pecking order.
Beyond Vixen: side projects and constant hustle
Drawing Down The Moon was not just a side hustle, it bordered on manifesto. The group described its name as coming from an ancient Celtic ritual of female empowerment and presented itself as five women gathering for the kind of empowerment that only music and friendship can offer, with Jan singled out inside the band for innovative songwriting, strong backing vocals and artful guitar work rather than hairspray or chart position.
Free from the major label treadmill she also fronted a co ed band called Population 361 and later told an interviewer she had never really stopped working, sliding between projects even when Vixen was dormant. In the same conversation she remembered early Minnesota gigs at roller rinks, signing autographs for kids, then calling her dad to hook up the little trailer he had built so he could collect the band and their gear, and laughed that being tagged as hard rock queens or the female Bon Jovi only felt good because for years they had to prove there were not guys hidden behind a curtain secretly playing their parts.
Lawsuits, almost reunions and a cruel final chapter
Jan’s insistence on owning what she built could be ruthless. In the late 90s drummer Roxy Petrucci led a version of Vixen without her and issued the Tangerine album, but Kuehnemund dragged the dispute into court, won a copyright case over the band name, and rebuilt Vixen under her own leadership, while the band that gossip writers had once lazily dubbed the female Bon Jovi settled into a lower key cult existence. Years later she and the classic lineup quietly resolved their differences and were days away from announcing a full reunion when she was diagnosed with cancer in January 2013, asked her bandmates to keep it private while they told fans it was a matter of timing, and after nearly a year of treatment she died on 10 October 2013, with the others later revealing how close the comeback had been.
Her last studio word with Vixen captures that mix of control and risk. Live & Learn, released in 2006, features Jenna Sanz Agero on vocals, Lynn Louise Lowrey on bass and Kat Kraft on drums, with Jan as the sole original member handling all guitar parts and backing vocals, and folds a snarling cover of David Bowie’s Suffragette City into a set of modern hard rock songs, a record that would stand as her final studio album before her death.
Seven underappreciated Jan Kuehnemund facts
Quick fire trivia for deep cut fans
- As a teenager she was playing roller rinks in Minnesota, then phoning her dad after shows so her first roadie could tow their homemade trailer full of gear back home.
- An early Vixen lineup appears in the 1984 teen comedy Hardbodies as the on screen bar band Diaper Rash, and the group later pop up in Penelope Spheeris’ cult documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II.
- Outside of the band she even grabbed a tiny acting credit as a secretary in the mid 90s crime flick Bad Business, the sort of random entry you almost never see on an arena rock guitarist’s resume.
- Her pagan tinged project Drawing Down The Moon was consciously built as a circle of women using music as a modern empowerment ritual, not just another club act trying to chase Vixen’s old chart positions.
- Asked what her autobiography should be called, she joked about the title “Vixen: A Little Girl’s Big Dream” and admitted she could barely get through a day without coffee, which is about as rock and roll as it gets for a band leader in her fifties.
- Behind the glam image her personal listening leaned toward modern melodic rock rather than shred clinics, name checking Foo Fighters, U2, Fuel and Gavin DeGraw as current favorites instead of guitarists trying to outgun her.
- Obituaries initially misreported that she died at 51 before Twin Cities media dug in and corrected her age to 59, a fittingly messy final detail for someone who never fit into tidy music business boxes in life.
Why Jan Kuehnemund’s story still hits
Strip away the hairspray and spandex and you end up with a stubborn midwestern kid who refused to accept that guitar heroics were a male only sport. She built an all female band in a hostile era, took it from Upper Midwest bars to gold records, then fought in court to keep her own creation from being taken away, all while writing songs that still punch harder than many supposedly tougher bands from the same period.
If Vixen had been four guys with the same songs, they would probably sit on every classic rock playlist between Bon Jovi and Def Leppard. Instead their founder had to fight twice as hard just to be taken seriously and then died right as a full reunion was within reach, leaving a legacy that is equal parts triumph and near miss. Rewatch the grainy Hardbodies cameo, spin Live & Learn, and those late 80s singles, and you hear exactly what Jan Kuehnemund brought to the table – focus, melody, grit and a refusal to let anyone else tell her what her band should look like.
