The Pandoras

The Pandoras were an American all-female garage punk band from Los Angeles, California, active from 1982 to 1991. The band is among the first handful of all-female rock bands to ever be signed to a major label. From the beginning, the band found a strong following in the Hollywood garage rock and Paisley Underground scene, making the gossip pages almost weekly. The Pandoras enjoyed strong radio support from DJ Rodney Bingenheimer. The band graduated from the garage rock sound to a more contemporary, hard rock style in later years, spawning the off-shoot band the Muffs.

The Pandoras founder/singer/guitarist/songwriter, Paula Pierce, died of a brain aneurysm on August 10, 1991, at the age of 31. The Muffs frontwoman and founder Kim Shattuck, who played bass in the Pandoras from 1985 to 1990, appeared as lead singer and guitarist of the reunited Pandoras with bandmate Melanie Vammen, (longtime Pandora and co-founder of The Muffs) until Shattuck died of complications from ALS on October 2, 2019, aged 56. In 2025, other members who recorded It’s About Time with Paula Pierce, Gwynne Kahn, Bambi Conway, and Casey Gomez—reunited as “The Original Pandoras” and all three are pictured on the album cover but quit or were replaced before Pierce toured with the album "Its About Time" with Melanie Vammen, Karen Blankfeld, and Julie Patchouli who replaced the original members.