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The beat behind the RUNAWAYS - Sandy West
Drummer. Born Los Angeles, July 10, 1959.
Died San Dimas, California, October 21, aged 47.
from: theaustralian.news.com.au
WOMEN playing guitars in rock bands are scarce enough and female drummers are even rarer, but Sandy West broke the mould. As the drummer with the all-female Californian group the RUNAWAYS, she developed a simple but ferocious style that she unleashed with unalloyed glee on such calculatedly commercial hits as Cherry Bomb and Born to be Bad.
In the male-dominated world of 1970s rock, the RUNAWAYS were widely dismissed as an exploitative novelty act and the manner in which they were marketed as jail-bait was undoubtedly cynical and crude.
Yet although it is easy to dismiss them as the Spice Girls of their day, they were all proficient enough on their instruments and co-wrote much of their own material, while their brattish image was a significant influence on the spate of female-led punk acts that followed them, including Blondie, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Slits and X-Ray Spex.
By the end of the decade the RUNAWAYS had broken up. However, West proved her serious intent as a rock musician by continuing not only to drum but also to sing and play guitar with other bands, until struck by serious illness in 2005.
West grew up in comfortable affluence in Huntington Beach, a classic California girl who might have stepped out of a Beach Boys song and spent her time surfing and skiing. By the age of 14 she had channelled her energies into music, after her grandfather had bought her a drum kit. Within a year she had passed an audition for a band being put together by the west coast pop entrepreneur and record producer Kim Fowley.
The Ramones were already making waves on New York's underground punk scene and the enterprising Fowley hit on the idea of creating a female equivalent.
His first recruits were West, guitarist JOAN JETT and the bassist Micki Steele, and it was as a trio in late 1975 that they made their debut at the famous Whisky-A-Go-Go on Sunset Strip, opening for another Fowley band, the Hollywood Stars. West later recalled that they had not settled on a name at this point and were billed as the Heavy Metal Schoolgirls.
Steele soon left (later to re-emerge in the Bangles) and was replaced by bassist Jackie Foxx, along with additional recruits, lead guitarist Lita Ford and singer Cherrie Currie.
As none of them was older than 16, Fowley named the new five-piece the RUNAWAYS and fashioned them an image that suggested if they had not been in a rock band, they would have been locked up in a girls' reform school as dangerous Lolitas.
Such hype could hardly fail and within weeks Fowley had signed the RUNAWAYS to a deal with Mercury Records, after a stunt that had them playing a showcase for record company executives on the roof of a Los Angeles apartment block.
Their self-titled debut album appeared in the late northern summer in 1976 and was produced by Fowley with material co-written by him, teenage lyricist Kari Krome and Jett. Owing much to the glam-rock ethic of the likes of Suzi Quatro and the Sweet, the most striking track was Cherry Bomb, with its memorably trashy chorus of: "Hello daddy, hello mom, I'm your ch-ch-cherry bomb!"
After a stopover in New York to make their debut at CBGB, famed as the birthplace of punk, the RUNAWAYS headed for Britain, where they proved to be a sensation, not least when they were arrested following complaints from their London hotel that they had stolen hairdryers from their rooms.
A second album in similar style called Queens of Noise followed swiftly in early 1977, and as Fowley realised that time was running out, with the girls approaching the grand old age of 18, by the end of the year a third hastily written and recorded album, Waitin' for the Night, had also been released.
By then, however, Fox and Currie had both left with new recruit, guitarist Vicki Blue, leaving Jett and, on occasion, West to take over the vocal duties. But the bubble inevitably burst and, having broken with Fowley, the RUNAWAYS played their final gig in San Francisco on New Year's Eve in 1978.
West continued to perform as a singer, guitarist and drummer, fronting the Sandy West Band. She also released a solo EP.
She was planning to record a new solo album, to be produced by Currie, when lung cancer was diagnosed in 2005. The following year she was found to have a brain tumour.
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