The Band She Built: Vixen, Jan Kuehnemund, and the Limits of the Female Bon Jovi
She started the band in 1973 in a Saint Paul high school. She moved it to Los Angeles in 1981. She fought for it across four decades, through three substantially different lineups and one lawsuit she filed to keep the name. She died of cancer in 2013. The body of work she built — two commercial peaks separated by years of structural difficulty — represents one of the more under-credited careers in late hair metal. A retrospective on Vixen, the band that almost everyone called the female Bon Jovi, and on the guitarist whose forty-year creative project the band actually was.
By Deep Cuts · Issue 03 · · 14 min read