If you only remember Susanna Hoffs for that sideways glance in the “Walk Like an Egyptian” video, you are missing the most interesting part of her story. Before MTV turned her into an 80s icon, she was a bookish art student, a punk convert, and a determined guitarist hunting for bandmates through classifieds and bathroom flyers. What she helped build with The Bangles was not just a hit factory, but a quietly radical all female guitar band.
Growing up Hoffs: books, Beatles and bohemia
Susanna Lee Hoffs was born in Los Angeles in 1959, the middle child in a Jewish family that treated art as oxygen rather than decoration. Her mother, Tamar Simon Hoffs, was a filmmaker, her father a psychoanalyst, and their home was packed with books, scripts, and records, with the Beatles and other 60s artists spinning constantly in the background.
She took ballet as a kid, picked up guitar in elementary school thanks to an uncle, and bounced between dance, theater, film, and art at the University of California, Berkeley. While there she worked on movie sets and even acted in the 1978 indie film “Stony Island,” but two shows turned her life: the last Sex Pistols concert at Winterland and a Patti Smith gig that convinced her she wanted to be on stage with a band, not in the wings with a clipboard.
From Berkeley punk fan to L.A. guitar hopeful
Immersed in the Bay Area punk and new wave scene, Hoffs watched a new generation shred the rulebook and decided to fuse that energy with her love of 60s pop. Back in Los Angeles after graduation, she set out to start her own band, placing an ad in the local free paper The Recycler and plastering hand drawn flyers in the women’s restroom at the Whisky a Go Go during a Go Go’s show.
One of the responses led her to sisters Vicki and Debbi Peterson, who were already playing together. When Hoffs called the house they shared with a mutual acquaintance, Vicki picked up, and the two bonded immediately over their grief at John Lennon’s recent murder and their obsession with 60s records. Within days they were rehearsing in the garage apartment at Hoffs’s parents’ Brentwood home, jamming on Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and realizing they had stumbled onto a volatile mix of girl group harmony and garage rock attitude.
From Colours to Bangs to Bangles
The new trio cycled through names as quickly as they were writing songs. First they called themselves the Colours, with the British spelling a nod to their 60s fixation. After Hoffs spotted an old Esquire piece on 60s “supersonic bangs” hairstyles, they rechristened themselves The Supersonic Bangs, then trimmed that down to The Bangs, enjoying the suggestion of both hair and impact.
What mattered more than the logo was the sound. They leaned hard into close three part harmonies and jangling guitars, drawing on the Beatles, the Byrds, the Hollies, and West Coast psychedelia while sharing bills with other Paisley Underground outfits in small Los Angeles clubs. When bassist Annette Zilinskas joined, the lineup that would become The Bangles was in place and already playing tougher and stranger than their later pop image would suggest.
DIY seven inches and a garage headquarters
In late 1981 the band, still called The Bangs, scraped together cash from day jobs to cut their debut single “Getting Out of Hand” backed with “Call on Me.” They formed their own imprint, Downkiddie Records, recorded quickly at Radio Tokyo, then assembled and sleeved the 45s in Hoffs’s Brentwood garage, photocopying artwork and literally stuffing records by hand.
Hoffs pushed the single into the right hands, including influential KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, whose airplay turned “Getting Out of Hand” into a local cult hit and fueled demand for shows. As the trio evolved into a four piece and signed with Miles Copeland’s Faulty Products, a legal threat from another band called The Bangs forced a last minute name change. Dropping “The” and tacking “les” on the end, they emerged as The Bangles, a joke on their Beatles worship that also happened to be the name that would end up on millions of records.
Key waypoints in the Hoffs Bangles origin story
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Late 1970s | Art student at Berkeley, sees Sex Pistols and Patti Smith, decides she wants a band, not a day job. |
| 1980 | Returns to LA, places Recycler ad and flyers at the Whisky, connects with Vicki and Debbi Peterson. |
| 1981 | Trio becomes The Bangs, then adds Annette Zilinskas on bass; they self release “Getting Out of Hand.” |
| 1982 | Signed to Faulty Products, threatened with legal action over their name, switch to The Bangles. |
| 1984 | Release debut LP “All Over the Place,” a lean guitar record that hints at what is coming. |
Scrappy band, reluctant pinup
From the start, Hoffs saw The Bangles as a scrappy, self styled outfit crashing a business that still assumed “girl bands” should stand at the mic while men played the instruments. Looking back, she has described how they did their own styling, embraced a slightly punky edge, and navigated a music industry that felt very much like a man’s world, leaning on an old school Freudian therapist to survive the anxiety that came with suddenly being signed and sent on the road.
Commercial success shifted the spotlight. With “Manic Monday” and “Walk Like an Egyptian” blasting across radio and MTV, Hoffs’s clear, melodic voice and that famous eye flick in the “Egyptian” video turned her into the de facto face of the band. A recent account of their career notes that they rose from a teen garage band to global stardom and, with hits like “Manic Monday,” “Walk Like an Egyptian,” “Eternal Flame” and more, became the only all female rock band to both sing and play on five Billboard Top 10 singles, even as the press reduced Hoffs to a “rock and roll Audrey Hepburn” when she herself aspired more to Patti Smith’s dangerous poise.
“Eternal Flame” and the price of visibility
The power ballad “Eternal Flame,” co written by Hoffs with Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, was an almost perversely uncommercial idea on paper: a slow, chorus free song built on a repeating middle section and unabashed romanticism. It went to number one in multiple countries and has since become The Bangles’ signature song, the kind you still hear at weddings and on soft rock radio, and it cemented Hoffs in the public mind as the band’s tender voiced torch singer rather than its rhythm guitarist and songwriter.
Success came with a twist of the knife. As labels and media leaned into her image, it became easier to sell The Bangles as Susanna Hoffs with backing vocalists, which eroded the internal equality the band had fought for in those early club years. By the end of the 80s, grinding tours, label pressure, and the imbalance of attention on one member helped fracture the group, a pattern so common in rock history that it almost feels like part of the job description.
A guitarist’s perspective: the Hoffs sound
For players, part of the fascination with Hoffs is how she managed to smuggle serious guitar craft into shiny pop singles. She started on a Gibson SG, then gravitated toward small bodied Rickenbackers for their bright, chiming attack and their lineage back to John Lennon. On the “All Over the Place” era photos you can see her with a black Rickenbacker 325, the visual opposite of the hair sprayed 80s arena axe.
Rickenbacker eventually honored her with the limited edition 350SH Susanna Hoffs model, built between 1988 and 1991. Based on the 350, it featured a Jetglo finish, checkerboard binding, a bound 24 fret neck, two vintage style single coils and a humbucker at the bridge, all tied to the classic “R” tailpiece, and only 250 were ever produced, making it one of the company’s most coveted signature instruments.
Sonically, her Bangles era parts are a lesson in how less can be more for a song:
- Clean, bright rhythm parts built on open chords and arpeggios rather than busy riffing.
- Tight interlocking guitar lines with Vicki Peterson, often panned left and right for a pseudo 12 string shimmer.
- Rhythm figures that follow vocal phrasing, so the guitar feels like a second singer instead of a competing lead.
It is not the kind of playing that wins guitar magazine poll votes, but it is exactly the kind that keeps songs alive for decades.
Life after the first breakup
When The Bangles splintered around the turn of the 1990s, Hoffs pivoted rather than disappeared. She released solo albums, explored more introspective pop, collaborated widely, and much later returned to 60s flavored songwriting on her album “Someday,” then to lovingly curated covers sets and side projects, eventually adding “novelist” to her CV with the music soaked romantic comedy “This Bird Has Flown.”
The band’s story has recently been revisited in the authorized biography “Eternal Flame,” which draws on extensive interviews, diaries, and ephemera to trace their trajectory from a garage in Brentwood to MTV ubiquity. The book underlines just how hostile the 80s music ecosystem could be to women trying to write, play, and control their careers, and argues that The Bangles deserve to be seen not as a cute 80s footnote, but as trailblazers who forced a sexist system to make room for them.
Why Susanna Hoffs’ origin story still resonates
Strip away the myths and you get a story that is more compelling than any marketing campaign. A young woman raised on Beatles vinyl and art films sees punk explode, feels the jolt, and decides to form a band with nothing more than a classified ad, some bathroom flyers, and a garage.
From that gamble came a group that bent 60s jangle, 70s punk spirit, and 80s pop gloss into something instantly recognizable, with Hoffs’ voice and guitar right at the center. For anyone who ever picked up a cheap instrument and thought “why not me,” her path into The Bangles is less a nostalgia trip and more a blueprint.
