It’s 2003, and the coolest fictional garage band of the year, Pink Slip, is about to take the stage at the House of Blues. It's their biggest opportunity yet, and the pressure is on. Backstage, they assure each other they'll still love each other even if it blows. They're friends first, band second, and they're determined to take their shot. What they don't know is that the performance they're about to give will cement them in the hearts and minds of an entire generation.
A remake of the 1976 film of the same name (itself an adaptation of a novel written by Mary Rodgers), Walt Disney Pictures’ 2003 smash success Freaky Friday stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as a captivatingly chaotic mother-daughter duo trapped in each other’s bodies. It’s not a perfect production (the film’s depiction of Asian stereotypes has been rightly criticized as harmful caricature), but its portrayal of teenage angst and a dysfunctional family yearning for mutual understanding have long stood the test of time.
Its characterization of a mother and daughter at familial war isn’t the only thing that’s proved timeless. Freaky Friday came complete with a soundtrack to teenage rebellion. Featuring Simple Plan and Bowling For Soup alongside anthemic tracks from Lillix and Halo Friendlies, it remains as beloved today as it was when the film was first released two decades ago. Chief among them: fictional rockers Pink Slip.
Twenty years later, Freaky Friday is an iconic piece of pop culture, and Pink Slip is a beloved touchstone that has informed and inspired real-life groups, such as Meet Me @ the Altar and MUNA, in the years since. The reasons are multifold: Pink Slip were aspirational in a way that didn’t feel out of reach. Fronted by Lindsay Lohan, Christina Vidal, and Haley Hudson, the group was fashionable without being fancy, alternative even though the film they featured in was a mainstream success. And they rocked. Hard. When they stepped out onto the stage at the House of Blues, they owned it (even with their lead guitarist being trapped in her mother’s body). That they only landed their slot on that stage as first alternates made the power they possessed feel all the more tangible.
Like The Stains before them, Pink Slip were ready to rock. Unlike Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, which depicted a band battling the extreme turbulence of life on the road, Freaky Friday showcased a band just trying to make it out of their garage. While fellow fictional faves Josie and the Pussycats’s story followed a band navigating the highs and lows of sudden success (complete with an evil corporation trying to control the youth via mainstream media), Pink Slip were just trying to make it through their next audition.
They weren’t famous. They weren’t touring. They were just a group of friends with passion, grit, and ferocious talent to boot. As Freaky Friday reaches the landmark age of twenty years old, we spoke to director Mark Waters, screenwriter Heather Hach, and actress and musician Christina Vidal about making the music happen, and MUNA and Meet Me @ The Altar about wearing its influence on their sleeve.
Every good hero has an origin story. Pink Slip’s is a story that almost never happened.
Heather Hach [screenwriter]: In the first draft I wrote, Anna was a skateboarder, which didn't really work. I had one draft where she was just obsessed with Gwen Stefani. I'm obsessed with Gwen, so it was sort of selfish on my end. I wanted to meet Gwen Stefani and find out her skincare secrets. Ultimately, that didn't happen.
Mark Waters [director]: The original script was about a girl who wrote for the school newspaper and wanted to get an interview with Gwen Stefani, who was playing at the House Of Blues. When I went in to meet at Disney, it was one of those interviews where I was prepared to not get the movie because I didn't like the script. I was very upfront about it. I said, “f you're going to go to the House of Blues you might as well have her be in a rock band.” I pitched this whole thing out. I expected them to say “get out of here.” And they did. But then they called and said apparently they liked my version of the movie better. So I came on board and I worked with Heather on the script, we refashioned it into this new concept.
Hach: Once we figured out that she was in this band, she had this opportunity to perform, and the time crunch was the night of the rehearsal dinner, it just fell into place. It really gave life and personality and distinction. And it was much easier for me to write. I love music. I love anything to do with music and it was just a great way into their worlds, the conflict between mother and daughter. I related to that a lot more than I did the skateboarder.
From concept to living, shredding rock stars, Pink Slip were a daydream purpose-built for success.
Waters: There definitely were some seminal influences, like the riot grrrl movement in Seattle, bands like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney. Those bands, admittedly, were very marginal indie bands at the time, but they were the inspiration for this. Having not just a female lead singer but a female lead guitarist, which you didn't see that often, it was almost a little bit of a fantasy element that we made reality, and people dug it.
Christina Vidal [Maddie]: It was like playtime on steroids. We were just a bunch of kids just having fun. We had real band rehearsals. We felt like a real band. We really got to bond over that process. I don't remember thinking, “Wow, how cool that we're an all-girl band.” I just remember thinking how cool that we’re a real rock band. We got to be real rock stars. I think my focus was more like, how cool that we get to see this story of these friends. They have a shared passion and they get to do it together. Now, obviously, I see that this is female empowerment. Who knew?
Hach: They were a good band. I really liked the fusion of what they looked like on stage and that it was a diverse group of kids. I love the fact that your eyes are drawn to the female band members and it's because they're great performers. You can see they have the command. I thought that it was kind of ahead of its time in that sense.
With gravelly hooks, a searing guitar solo, and attitude to boot, "Take Me Away" became an anthem of empowerment, a way for young girls to engage with female-fronted rock music in a way they might not have seen before.
Hach: I think it's a perfect song. “Take Me Away” is ultimately what happens to our characters, they're taken away from their bodies until they arrive back in a better place with a better understanding. I think that there's a thematic that worked really well with the conceit and what Freaky Friday's about.
Waters: I loved being able to portray that kind of music in a movie and have it also be an important part of the story. An important part of the climax of the movie was having that guitar solo. We knew that a key thing that was going to sell whether or not the movie worked, was if that guitar solo worked.
Vidal: I came from a soulful music background, R&B, hip hop, that kind of thing. So I was singing “Take Me Away” like that initially. I think it was the director, might have been the writer/producer of the song, they were like, ‘could you sing it more staccato, more rocky?' I think they even gave me some tips, like, 'just try being a little more nasally and slowing it down a little bit.' So they kind of gave me that instruction, to do this kind of whiny growl. I thought 'this is going to be a train wreck, it's going to be so bad.' But I trusted them. And it turned out to be exactly right.
Hach: I was there at House of Blues when they filmed a lot of it. It was just so thrilling to see. It felt so real. There were so many people there in the crowd and it was so exciting. I also went to the filming of the wedding. I remember sitting in my house, writing the scene with these white tents, and then you come and you see it and it's real. It's something you thought of in your imagination and there it is in real life. It was just so exciting.
Vidal: I can't speak for anyone else, but I had no idea what it would turn into when we were doing it. I wanted to keep on doing it. I would get so quietly annoyed every time they had to cut. I just wanted to perform the song from top to bottom over and over again. Singing was my first love, even before acting. I always wanted to sing on stage. I always wanted to perform. It was like I just got the chance to do that for a night. We really felt like a real band performing on a real stage. To be able to say I got to perform on the House of Blues stage? It was a dream come true.
Two decades on, Pink Slip's music is even more revered than the movie it was made for originally. MUNA and Meet Me @ The Altar have both covered the band’s most iconic offering at their live shows, and its influence has even been felt in the music they make themselves.
Naomi McPherson [MUNA]: We’d plotted it for a while, while we were on the road. It just so happened that our show dates in LA were perfectly timed for us to do this as a Halloween moment. We couldn’t have been happier with how it went. All the millennials and zillenials in the room knew what was up from the moment we ran onstage and we just had so, so much fun. We love to commit to the bit, so the crowd committing with us was the fulfilment of a long-time dream and perhaps an age old prophecy. It’s very possible that the film predicted our eventual formation of the band…and the inevitability of our current haircuts.
Téa Campbell [Meet Me @ The Altar]: When we were writing our debut album we were revisiting music from that time, and we were like, ‘“Take Me Away” is fire.’ We wanted to have our own song with that kind of vibe. So we wrote “King of Everything.”
Edith Victoria [Meet Me @ The Altar]: We covered “Take Me Away” on our last tour too, every night.
Campbell: We always used to say that we wished we wrote that song. So we figured we could cover it live. It's just so fun. People have fun when we play it too. That's a big part of it. I never thought I would say this, but it brings people together. This movie that is 20 years old now, it's still ringing true to people today.
This week, Meet Me @ The Altar even released their cover of “Take Me Away” as an official song.
After earning a place in the upper echelon of fictional bands with just two songs, Pink Slip's legacy continues to thrive.
Vidal: One night my husband and I were out getting burgers. We were sitting in the car and I'd got the window rolled down. These young girls walked by, wearing these party dresses like they were either going to or just coming back from the club, and they were singing “Take Me Away” at the top of their voices. I'm such a dork, I was like “Hey, I was in that movie!' And they were like “OHMYGOD!” Freaky Friday was an amazing experience while we were doing it, and it's just the gift that keeps on giving.
Hach: I find it interesting that people love to listen to music from when they were a teenager, a time of their life that's very dramatic and not necessarily the happiest. It's such a potent experience of being alive that time. It's weird that I'm so nostalgic for a time that I wasn't necessarily the happiest I've ever been. I think that's a universal thing about music. It’s such a uniting factor. It gives language to thoughts that we can't articulate. Music is a kind of magic. And it's powerful. We're all much deeper creatures than we're often allowed to be in real life. Music is one way that we can have access to our depth and our pathos and our joy and our everything.
Vidal: Entertainment is so powerful. Just being able to see, in a movie or a film, someone who you relate to in some way. It's amazing how that can give you the confidence, the inspiration, to be yourself, to follow your dream. We weren't a real band. I was just having fun. Who knew that me living my own dream would spawn all these other things? And all these other dreams could come out of me just living mine? Wow. What an honor. What a blessing. Give yourself completely to the creative process when you're doing anything because you never know what the culmination of it is going to be, who it's going to touch.
Hach: When you create a character on film, you're creating a template for the world, for what you wish the world could be, for what you hope it can be. I wanted to create a character that had a lot of moxie, that people saw themselves in, that people could relate to and it help them feel better. Ultimately, any art makes us connect to our humanity and makes us feel less alone. I wanted to give a voice to that great character. It's a universal character, but to know that still resonates and people still see themselves in it, that I had a small part in what impacts peoples’ souls and helps people? Pop culture becomes a phenomenon because it hits a chord emotionally. It's a moment in time. Knowing that I've had a small piece in helping craft that sense of nostalgia and longing and happiness and joy is just really exciting.
Vidal: I got to be a small part of a very big impactful thing, that had meaning and impact and significance far beyond what I understood when I was doing it. It feels like such an honor to have been a part of that, and it feels like something that's way beyond me.
McPherson: Freaky Friday was a formative movie for many people right around our age. We all remember seeing it in theaters with our families. When the film was released we were also just starting to get serious—if even just privately—about music at the same time. We had no idea when we saw this movie what being in a band was like, but it sure as hell made you want to have a cool garage to practice with your friends in.
Ada Juarez [Meet Me @ The Altar]: “Take Me Away” is SO GOOD. When they played it in the movie it was so addictive. It was pop-punk before pop-punk was that type of pop-punk. I was so young. Me being my gay little self, I thought that they were so cute. I just had to keep watching. I wished that they were real as a kid. I wanted to see Pink Slip live.
Campbell: First of all, they were women. It was so rare to see a band full of women. They were high schoolers too. I feel like that was the first time I really saw a band that wasn't some huge already-made-it thing in the media. They were just high schoolers. And that's our story too. We were also high schoolers when we started our band. We played battle of the bands ourselves growing up. We didn't get to play the House of Blues, and we haven't switched bodies with our mothers, but still.
Now that a sequel to Freaky Friday has been confirmed, the question remains: where might we find Pink Slip in the present day?
Hach: Where would Anna be today? I would love to believe she'd still be performing. Just because you become an adult doesn't mean you have to lose your dreams. I'm still doing what I did as a kid, which is write and pretend.
Waters: I think they'd still be playing. By now they probably have broken up, and have decided to reunite for a tour because people have nostalgia for their music.
Vidal: I think they became a famous band. I think that Lindsay's character went solo. I think my character ended up getting married, having a family, and opening a school of rock for young girls. I think Haley's character went on to be a famous guitarist, to play with huge rock bands. I don't know what the guys did.
Juarez: I would like to canon: YouTube came out in 2005? So, college is over, they all come back to their hometown, and they're like “let's pick up our instruments again.” They film a little video, post it on this fresh new website called youtube.com, and they blow up. Now? Oh, they're playing Madison Square Garden next week — are you trying to go? That's what I'd like to think.
As for whether they’d be up for being involved in the much-anticipated sequel, well…
Vidal: Heck YEAH! I’ve still got energy. I could still get up there and rock out. I'm so down. Whatever a sequel looks like. I'd love to work with Lindsay again, and just see her and Haley.
McPherson: We absolutely would be down. Not sure if they’d want our type of pop music, but if they went that direction we’d get involved in a fucking heartbeat. We’re willing to be cast portraying ourselves as well, obviously…
Victoria: This is what I have in my brain: so, Pink Slip get back together after college, and then they're like, “I miss the old days, we should play another battle of the bands,” and we should be one of the bands that they're playing against. They're like “look at this new, young band. That was us 20 years ago. We miss those days.”