Lita Ford was born in London, England, in 1958 and grew up in Long Beach, California, where she picked up the guitar as a young girl inspired by Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple. In 1975, at just sixteen years old, she auditioned for and joined an all-female rock outfit being assembled by producer Kim Fowley, alongside Joan Jett and drummer Sandy West. That band became The Runaways, one of the first all-girl hard rock groups to break into the mainstream, and Ford quickly became known for her fierce guitar solos on tracks like "You Drive Me Wild" and "Dead End Justice" . The group toured relentlessly and built a devoted following, especially overseas, before splitting apart in April 1979.
After The Runaways disbanded, Ford launched a solo career, releasing early albums like Out for Blood (1983) and Dancin' on the Edge (1984) that established her as a serious guitarist even though they did not achieve mainstream success. Her true breakthrough came with her 1988 self-titled album, Lita, produced by Mike Chapman, which yielded the hit single "Kiss Me Deadly," which put Ford in the Billboard Top 20 for the first time in her career , reaching number 12 on the Hot 100. The album's follow-up single, "Close My Eyes Forever," a duet with Ozzy Osbourne, became the first Top Ten single for either artist , cementing her as one of the leading female voices of the glam metal era.
Throughout the following years, Ford continued releasing albums including Stiletto (1990) and Dangerous Curves (1991), though none matched the commercial peak of Lita as the rock landscape shifted in the alternative-driven early 1990s. She stepped away from music for roughly a decade to raise her two sons, before making a full return beginning in 2008 with performances at hard rock festivals, followed by touring with Queensrÿche and the release of Wicked Wonderland in 2009. Her most celebrated comeback effort, 2012's Living Like a Runaway, coincided with a high-profile arena tour alongside Def Leppard and Poison , and led to a live album, The Bitch Is Back... Live, recorded at the Canyon Club that same year. Her achievements were later recognized with a string of honors, including the Guitar Player Lifetime Achievement Award and induction into the Guitar Player Hall of Fame in 2014 .
Ford has remained active in the years since, continuing to release new music, including Time Capsule, and touring internationally while also branching into television appearances and a 2016 memoir, Living Like a Runaway. Her legacy as one of the pioneering women of hard rock and heavy metal endures, both through her groundbreaking work with The Runaways and her enduring solo catalog, and she is still widely regarded, in the words of one retrospective, as the pioneer who helped restore the "Queen of Metal" to her throne .
Wayne Dennon captured Lita Ford on stage just once, in 2008, right as she was re-emerging into the touring world after her hiatus, and that single show yielded 86 photographs preserved here in his archive. Fittingly for an artist whose career has always been defined by a fiercely loyal fanbase, those images have drawn 64,286 views from archive visitors over the years, a testament to how much her music continues to resonate with the fans who first discovered her decades ago and the new generations still finding her today.
