Bands that start out in their fickle teenage years often don't stick together long enough to score a major label deal. The Donnas, four self-proclaimed "nerds" from the San Francisco Bay Area, are an exception - they released their major-label debut, Spend the Night last October after a long association with an independent label. Throughout their nine years of youthful camaraderie (they started playing together when they were just 14), they have released five albums while learning to play their instruments with the panache of a seasoned rock band. In addition, they write all their own songs and have a high-energy stage show that whips their fans into a frenzy.

"When we started our band, it kinda became our identity," explains bassist Maya Ford (Donna F.) We didn't do anything else except our band. It was all we had."

"We were nerds - all we did was school, and we were really good at school, but there really wasn't anything that stood out to me outside of school," agrees guitarist Allison Robertson (Donna R.) "Guitar was the most fun."

The girls are self-taught. Both tried formal music lessons but were turned off by their overly-critical male teachers. Robertson's father was a trained musician, so she started practicing with him on the weekends, learning chords and playing old Ventures songs. "He'd be like, take this CD home and next weekend we'll try to play 'Apache '65' together. The songs are really simple, but they do teach you technique without actually having a teacher," she explains.

Inspired by bands like L7, Shonen Knife and Muffs, they were dying to get a band together. Ford played a "beat-up, shitty" acoustic guitar and then took up bass. Robertson borrowed her father's Fender GNL, and finally cajoled him into buying her a "Made in Mexico" Telecaster. They started practicing R.E.M covers in the eighth grade but soon realized they needed a singer and a drummer. Together with lead singer Brett Anderson (Donna A.) and drummer Torry Castellano (Donna C.) the future rock sirens played their first show at Jordan Middle School. Then known as Ragady Anne, music was the uniting force that brought these four "misfits" together - all had relocated to Palo Alto with their parents, and they felt the sting of their peers' criticism.

"We tried to form a band with some of our other friends, but we had very few friends. All the guys just thought we were ridiculous," Robertson remembers. "The two of us basically were sort of loners, and the all the guys sort of thought, 'Oh my god, that is so gross. They're trying to play guitars, those girls are nasty.' They just hated us.

"Everybody was so set in this Gap world - very J. Crew, into complete preppiness," she continues.

"And we wore used clothes, so everyone thought we were big weirdos and had already spread rumors about us. And then we were playing instruments, so we were like lepers and nobody would touch us," Ford chuckles ironically, during an interview from the back of their tour bus on a rainy Monday in Nashville.

Both switched to Gibson in their high school years; Ford got a cream-colored Thunderbird bass (it's still her favorite) and Robertson a Les Paul Studio (she couldn't afford a Standard yet, which is now her stage guitar.)

"All the sudden, I got really into KISS and kind of revisited all my early hair metal bands that I loved when I was a kid, like Cinderella," she conceded. "Everybody had a Les Paul. I was like, that's what I need. So I sold my Silvertone and my Telecaster, and I traded them for the Studio.

"Instead of trying to play trashy, I was trying to make myself bend strings right and have a lot of sustain, and noodle around a little more than I was used to doing. Try things I'd never done before. It was easier to do on that guitar - you can get totally different sounds on a Les Paul."

At this point in time, the band - interestingly enough - had an alter ego. They had evolved from Ragady Anne to a more metal-based sound and changed their name to The Electrocutes. Then a friend and local rock impresario, Darin Raffaelli, convinced them to adopt Ramones-like monikers and perform punk-styled songs with inane lyrics they had cowritten together. The two bands had clashing personalities and would talk trash about each other, once even performing live, back-to-back sets on the same radio station.

"The Donnas first album was a side-project experiment thing. We were sort of saying, would anybody buy this? We were singing about everybody we hated, popsicles, candy, the dentist - really random things," explains Robertson. "The Donnas, we thought, were ridiculous, because we were singing about boys and none of us liked boys [at the time]."

"We did an interview for the school newspaper and our other band, The Electrocutes, called the Donnas goody two-shoes. We made fun of them," Ford snickers.

The Donnas eventually won out over The Electrocutes. They recorded their first album in a Mailboxes, Etc. with Raffaelli producing them. It got released as The Donnas in 1997. "We learned the songs, finished writing the lyrics, and recorded them all in one night," remembers Robertson. "We left mistakes in and really didn't change it around that much. We just played the chords and like, really fast, too. It was so random, we didn't think anybody was going to listen to it. The 7-inch was printed on Xerox paper, and they were just envelopes basically, with the record."

They signed with Lookout! Records in 1998 and put out American Teenage Rock 'n Roll Machine, a harder-rocking album. It won two BAMMIES, the Bay-area music awards, for "Outstanding Independent Album" and "Outstanding Punk Artist." Two more albums followed, Get Skintight in 1999 and The Donnas Turn 21in 2001. After years of indie credibility, they took the big leap and signed with Atlantic last October in the hope of breaking through to a wider audience. Spend the Night has cracked "The Billboard 200" chart, so far topping out at No. 62.

They say they sound little like the band they started out as. "I loved the Go-Gos and the Bangles growing up, but I don't think we really sound like that. When the guys compare us to the men, they always compare us to the wrong bands," observes Robertson. "They say we sound like the Ramones, and our early albums do, but . . ."

"We haven't sounded like them for a really long time," Ford agrees. "They're always trying to say that we're like punk or something, but we're rock. And just because we're girls, everyone says we're a gimmick, too - a novelty.

"When they call us chick rock, it's most annoying."

Ford writes her fair share of the lyrics to the Donnas' sexy, tongue-in-cheek songs, and Robertson writes the choruses on her Les Paul Studio that she keeps in her garage with her Fender Hot amp from the old days. It's their turn to be mean to the boys, with lines like "Well, I must've had too many Diet Cokes/Because I'm laughing at all your stupid jokes" (from "All Messed Up") and "I wonder why you're so moody/Is it 'cause you got no booty?" (from "Dirty Denim"). It's all in good fun, of course - their shows tend to draw equal parts men and women. Their straight-ahead, three-minute songs are refreshing in an age when hard-rocking bands are all but absent from radio - especially with women front and center.

"There's not really room for any more girl musicians. It's so hard to get girls played on the radio, and it's so hard to be a girl and have your video played on MTV," bemoans Ford. "I think just because it's not out there, people are afraid to do it."

"If you're similar to another girl band, then there's only enough room for one girl band in each genre. There aren't any that are mainstream rock. Everybody's labeled as a punk band or alternative band or Riot Grrrl band," Robertson concludes. "We just are a rock band."