Making Music <i> Together</i> : Remember the old days when all we heard from were the boys in the band? And when women were left to join forces in all-female groups? Well, it’s the ‘90s, so forget all that. The sound you hear is gender bending.

John, Paul, George and Ringo . . . Keith, Mick, Brian, Bill and Charlie. . . . Jimmy, Robert, John Paul and Bonzo . . . Bono, the Edge, Larry and Adam.

It’s easy to understand why rock ‘n’ roll was strictly a men’s club for decades when you hear a top executive at prestigious Geffen Records admit to a prejudice in the ‘70s and ‘80s against aspiring female musicians.

“When I used to see a girl holding an electric guitar, I thought it looked strange,” the executive says. “Except for Chrissie Hynde, who was tough and cool, it just didn’t work for me. In general, girl bands looked like they were just playing around.”

What makes the statement especially revealing is that it’s not a sexist male talking.

The Geffen executive is a woman: Roberta Petersen, a 24-year industry veteran who heads Geffen’s admired talent acquisition and development department.

Petersen smiles when she talks about those old days, because there has been a revolutionary gender change in rock--especially at Geffen, where three of the most promising bands on the roster are female-dominated: Hole, Veruca Salt and Elastica.

Unlike the days when women banded together in all-female groups or fronted otherwise all-male bands, all three of the acclaimed Geffen acts are in the forefront of what is emerging as the strongest new component in pop: co-ed rock.

Welcome to the world of Courtney, Eric, Patty and Melissa (Hole) . . . Nina, Jim, Louise and Steve (Veruca Salt) . . . and Justine, Justin, Annie and Donna (Elastica).

“This isn’t just a trend,” Petersen says of the co-ed rock movement, which also includes such highly regarded acts as Belly, the Breeders, Madder Rose, Stereolab and Bikini Kill. “This is a new reality in the record business . . . a natural progression.”

Cliff Burnstein, a partner with Peter Mensch in one of rock’s most powerful management firms, shakes his head over the changes since the ‘80s when his company was a bastion of male hard rock--with a client list that included Metallica and Def Leppard. Burnstein admits he would have thought twice about signing a female rock band in the past--even if he had found one that he liked.

“Our history was in hard rock, and most of our acts got play on album-oriented rock stations, and I can tell you album-oriented rock wouldn’t play a woman,” he recalls. “You couldn’t get a female record on the radio . . . except maybe Heart, for a minute.

“One reason is a lot of the female acts that came up in the ‘70s were seen as gimmicks in one way or another--bands who simply didn’t deliver the music.”

It’s a sign of these new co-ed bands’ captivating imagination and blistering energy that Burnstein and Mensch now manage three of them, including Hole and Veruca Salt. The pair, who still represent Metallica and Def Leppard, are even eyeing a fourth co-ed group.

“You know, it’s funny,” Burnstein says. “Someone asked us, ‘How can you have all these female bands?’ And Peter and I just laughed and said, ‘How could we have had all those male bands in the ‘80s?’ ”

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The gender realignment has been so swift that Janet Billig, who managed Hole before recently becoming senior vice president of Atlantic Records, says that almost a third of the 16 unsigned bands she is actively scouting have women in them--and she’s surprised more don’t, given the speed with which women are becoming a force in rock.

Todd Boyd, assistant professor of critical studies at the USC School of Cinema-Television, believes that the rise of women in rock is at the forefront of a sociocultural swing that will be felt in other areas of the arts.

“If we look at other aspects of society, we have seen women gain prominence in places that they had never been before . . . starting with Hillary Clinton,” he says. “I think music probably takes the lead in setting trends as far as culture is concerned because rock is a phenomenon of a younger group of people--people who have grown up in the last 20 to 25 years (amid) these changes.”

Boyd’s views are seconded by the co-ed rock bands themselves. Unlike many of their predecessors, most of the band members interviewed never had to deal with the male dominance of the music in earlier decades. For that reason, they don’t claim any victory in breaking down barriers.

“I never lived through any other time, so I don’t know what it was like then, but I’m actually surprised whenever I read women talking about how tough it is to be in rock,” says Justine Frischmann, the 25-year-old lead singer and writer of Elastica, an acclaimed new British band that consists of three women and one man.

“I am not sure whether it is something that’s brought up by journalists who want to talk about it as an angle or whether it is something that women still really feel. You definitely have specific problems as a woman in the music industry, but I’m not sure they aren’t any more or less true of being a woman in general.”

Atlantic’s Billig, 27, echoes the thought.

“I don’t want to sound like wide-eyed or anything, but I didn’t pay attention to the gender,” she says. “When I saw Hole, I wasn’t looking for a co-ed rock band or a girls’ band or a guys’ band. I was just looking for a great band.”

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Some industry cynics have suggested that co-ed bands are a clever marketing device--a way to tap into the female creative energy that seems to abound in the ‘90s while avoiding the gimmicky feel that has surrounded many all-female bands.

But the members of the new bands, male and female, insist they never started out with gender goals in mind.

Courtney Love was briefly in an otherwise all-male band (Faith No More) and an all-female band (Babes in Toyland) before forming Hole in 1989 with guitarist Eric Erlandson.

Elastica’s Frischmann, who started out with men in the band Suede, formed her new group in 1992 with another ex-member of that group, drummer Justin Welch. When they advertised for a guitarist and bassist, they didn’t mention gender--only the names of bands they liked.

“When I started looking for a bass player, Annie (Holland) was the first person I met, and she was brilliant straightaway,” Frischmann says. “When Donna (Matthews) answered our ad, she was surprised to see two other girls, but again it worked.”

Although she sees nothing wrong with being in an all-female band, the Elastica singer thinks any attempt to define the membership of a band in advance is folly.

“The important thing is finding someone you get along with personally and musically, so why exclude anyone because of sex?” she says.

Veruca Salt’s Nina Gordon and Louise Post, too, only turned to Steve Lack and Jim Shapiro after failing to find their first choice: a female drummer and bassist.

“Contrary to what people might write about us, we were not so concerned with the marketing aspect of what we were to become,” says Gordon, 27. “We were mostly concerned with music and with people we could get along with. It was never an agenda, where we said, ‘Let’s have men and women working together.’ But co-ed rock makes a lot of sense. We’ve found that we do bring different perspectives to our group, and that is ultimately a positive thing.”

Shapiro, who is Gordon’s brother, also sees the co-ed element as a plus.

“I feel like we are making some inexorable progress toward a point at which the male and female split in the population will be reflected in the population of bands,” he says. “So, if women (compose) slightly more than 50% of the people in the world, then at some point we’ll reach a point where over 50% of the people playing in bands will be women. I just think we are at an intermediate state between 1976 and that time.”

To Heather Nova, the 27-year-old leader of a promising three-man, two-woman band from England that carries her name, the important thing as a musician is finding others who share your musical vision. Yet she does feel more comfortable with at least one other woman in her group.

“It’s always important for me to have another woman in the band, just for balance on a personal level,” she says. “It would be very unbalanced to be surrounded just by men. At the same time, I wouldn’t want to be surrounded just by women. I feel there is a chemistry to (the co-ed lineups) that is good. . . . It’s just a natural thing.”

Y ou can count the number of great female rock artists from the ‘50s through the ‘80s on the fingers of one hand.

R&B; and country stars such as Ruth Brown and Patsy Cline were important pioneer influences in the ‘50s, but Janis Joplin in the ‘60s, Patti Smith in the ‘70s and Chrissie Hynde in the ‘80s are the real consensus choices.

Aretha Franklin and Joni Mitchell are the leading candidates for the two remaining fingers, though too many fans associate them with soul and folk music, respectively, for them to be considered consensus selections. Significantly, all five were solo artists backed by male bands.

The second level, creatively, of female rock stars has been dominated by all-female groups: from the jailbait tease of the Runaways in the ‘70s to the party bounce of the Go-Go’s and the hard-rock macho intensity of Girlschool in the ‘80s.

The forerunners of today’s co-ed bands were such early new wave and indie-rock figures as Deborah Harry of Blondie, Exene Cervenka of X, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth and Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads.

While many of these women are mentioned as influences by today’s co-ed rockers, male influences are just as likely to be cited. The reason, they say, is obvious: Men have made so many more records.

Yet the music of the co-ed rock bands--most of which depend on the visions of female writers--is far from simply an echo of male tradition. Along with such acclaimed solo artists as Liz Phair and PJ Harvey, the co-ed rock bands reflect on relationships with a freshness and intensity that stand out in contemporary rock. The music ranges from sometimes stormy tales of sexual politics to sassy put-downs to disarming innocence and longing.

The result is that female artists are dominating the Village Voice’s annual poll of the nation’s pop critics. Phair’s debut album, “Exile in Guyville,” topped the poll in 1993, and Hole’s “Live Through This,” in a landslide, was voted the best album of 1994. Veruca Salt’s angry “Seether” was second only to Beck’s “Loser” in the honor roll of singles. Elastica’s debut EP, “Stutter,” also won favor with the voters.

Beyond the richness of the fe male perspective after years of male attitudes in rock, manager Burnstein believes that the co-ed rock leaders benefit from some added maturity.

“Many of the women in these bands are beyond college age when they really decide to commit themselves to music,” Burnstein says. “They come at it from a different perspective. They are more mature. They have more time to have been in their failed relationships or whatever--as opposed to having these guys who were like 16 and they want to go out and party.

“That will probably change as more young girls see a future for themselves in music. They, too, will be frustrated with things in their life and pick up a guitar and declare, ‘This is my way out’--the same way boys have been doing for years. Whether they form all-girl bands or co-ed bands, it’s going to improve the music. That’s why I think what you see going on now is more than a revolution. It’s probably one of the things that is going to save rock from going into a museum.”