In 1979, I lost a radio show in part because of a woman I'd never met named Sandy Pesavento.
I'd just got a British pressing of a 45 by my favourite rock band of then-recent months. It wasn't on the playlist at the time, and I thought I could get away with breaking format and playing the thing because management slept while my show was on. I hadn't realised that the program director had just wired a secret aircheck cassette recorder from his office to the control studio board, keyed to tape whenever the mic switch was opened. The PD stopped by the house at 4:30 the next afternoon with my final paycheck and a copy of that overnight's aircheck in his hand, demanding the key to the station front door.
Well, the radio station in question was bought out by a religious outfit last year; they now broadcast material from the kind of people my father refused to call "ministers." Dad preferred to think they just had a fetish for wearing their collars backwards. However, I'm still playing what I want to on the radio. I just wish Ms. Pesavento could say the same thing.
Sandy Pesavento was the drummer on the record I'd been canned for playing. You may know her better as Sandy West. The record was "School Days," a track on the most recently released LP by her band, The Runaways.
Just a few minutes ago, I got the news that Sandy West died of lung cancer last night. She was about a year older than me.
I grew up listening to other stuff than the rest of the kids in my schools. They depended on Top 40 radio stations to dictate their tastes to them; after my dad started me on Stan Kenton at the age of 8 (and I got him started on Three Dog Night at the age of 41), I learned fast that there was great music to be found that the radio stations never played. I actually saw a couple of my fellow 6th Graders get into a bloody fist fight after one of them dared to say The Osmonds were better than The Beatles. I loved The Beatles, of course, but not enough to risk stitches for them; at the time they weren't risking stitches for each other. I saw Judee Sill's Heart Food album cover advertised on the inner sleeve to a Harry Chapin LP, and I took a flyer; turns out I played Judee's tunes longer than the record label did. I heard a shortwave radio station from Johannesburg, South Africa (yes it was in apartheid days but before I knew what apartheid -- pronounced "apart-hate" -- even meant), play a nice pop 45 that was a hit there called "Soley Soley" by a group calling themselves Middle Of The Road; I special-ordered the U.S. RCA Victor 45 of that thing from the record shop and wore out the grooves within about seven years (probably the only American to do so). I heard CKOC in Hamilton, Ontario, play a tune called "Lovin' You Ain't Easy" by a Montreal rocker called Pagliaro really late one night in the winter of '72; I still might be the most recent Stateside disc jockey to play that thing on the radio twice in one month within the last ten years. I played Bob Marley before anybody in Oshkosh associated the word "reggae" with anything other than the Herbie Mann LP of that title (which I also played). Suzi Quatro's version of "All Shook Up" got only one play on WOSH, but I happened to be listening after midnight that July night in 1974; a few months later, I went to WOSH to ask about that record, and they gave me their copy of it. I wore that thing out, too. When Fanny came to play the UW-Oshkosh basketball hall, I begged Dad to let me go, but being only 10 at the time -- and the St. Patrick's Day melees fresh in his mind -- he stood his ground and said no. I had to be satisfied with wearing out my 45 of "Charity Ball." (My phonograph may sound like it was cheap, but it really wasn't. I was simply that tough on the vinyl I liked.)
In the Autumn of 1976, 30 years ago last month in fact, there was a blurb that caught my eye in one of the teen mags of the time -- probably Gloria Stavers' 16, which was always the more readable; I seem to recall they used less exclamation points in their texts than Tiger Beat or Teen Bag -- about a new band made up of teenage girls from L.A. called The Runaways. Finally, I thought, after years of a whole lotta crap about John Travolta and Donny Osmond, something I can get into. And I bought their self-titled debut album. Suzi Quatro's single "Your Mama Won't Like Me" prepped me but good for this bunch, or at least what producer Kim Fowley displayed them to be. Joan Jett even looked just like a 16-year-old Quatro (even more than the photos I've since seen of Suzi around that age herself). Lita Ford had long brown hair (she didn't go blonde until at least 1980), held an electric guitar with more self-confidence than I've seen most hunters hold their rifles, and an expression on her face on the inside gatefold photo that said, "Don't get too close if you don't wanna get hurt." Cherie Currie wore a denim shirt in the same photo, the top two-thirds of its buttons undone, and hands defiantly on her hips as if to say, "Whaddya gonna do about it?" Jackie Fox, well, looked like her name suggested.
Sandy West was my favourite of the lot, however. She looked just like a girl who I'd had a painful lust for the previous year who in turn couldn't stand me. At 14, nobody's mouthwash ever makes it, mine included. And that young woman's name, coincidence of coincidences, was also Sandy, and she also had a thing for wearing green t-shirts the exact same shade of Sandy West's in that gatefold photo of the first LP. Sandy West's belly button displayed just above her blue jeans had my 15-year-old hormones partying like Sinatra in Vegas circa '60. I always wondered about Rodney Bingenheimer's being credited with "Orchestration" on that first album, because I didn't hear one damned violin or cello on it. I now suspect this kind of orchestration had more to do with the buttons on Cherie's shirt and Sandy's belly in that photograph, among other image developments.
As it turned out, my initial lustings for this new Sandy developed into legitimate musical admiration as time went on. I did a review of The Runaways' second album, Queens of Noise, for my high school newspaper. Unfortunately, the only reaction the review recieved from the paper's readers was from a talentless heckler who ridiculed my having any interest in "that awful band" while there were "better" performers like Peter Frampton to check out. Guess he bought a copy of that live album too; dunno if his copy wound up being one of the hundreds I've since encountered at Goodwill stores, though.
Anyway, by the time the '70s ended I'd come away with the firm belief that the decade produced two brilliant rock drummers who never got their due, particularly because they were best known as members of all-female bands at a time when women that rocked harder than, say, Linda Ronstadt were looked upon as freaks by the chauvanists that dominated the rock audience of the time. Those drummers were Alice de Buhr of Fanny and Sandy West of The Runaways.
I have two concert posters on the wall next to me as I write this. One is definitely a fake; after all, in March of 1968 it wasn't necessary to put the year on the date for a Big Brother & The Holding Company show at the Fillmore East. The fact that the words "Janis Joplin" are in the largest type on the poster is probably a giveaway, too. The other is for a Runaways show San Francisco's Mabuhay Gardens in September 1978; that one I suspect may be fake, too, as the photo on it is from the same shoot as the gatefold pic on the first Runaways album, but the poster lists Vicki Blue as being a member and Cherie Currie as still being with the band; I'm positive that Cherie's solo album after splitting from the band, Beauty's Only Skin Deep, was issued in France the previous June and I was playing it on my show (on a station different from the one that fired me for playing "School Days") that July. (If you're wondering, I was a radio deejay all through my teens. It's an odd story. Remind me to tell it sometime.)
Anyway, there hasn't been a day I haven't lived in this apartment that I haven't thought of Sandy West. And nary a week in 30 years, either. Kinda like that line in Citizen Kane that Everett Sloane was blessed to have uttered, about the girl he saw on the Staten Island Ferry decades ago, she didn't see him at all, and "I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl."
I'll be doing a lot of thinking about this woman today. And if anyone has Alice de Buhr's mailing address, get it to me immediately. I'm serious. I let the time frame on Sandy's thank you note run out, and I'll be damned if I let Alice's do the same.
I'd just got a British pressing of a 45 by my favourite rock band of then-recent months. It wasn't on the playlist at the time, and I thought I could get away with breaking format and playing the thing because management slept while my show was on. I hadn't realised that the program director had just wired a secret aircheck cassette recorder from his office to the control studio board, keyed to tape whenever the mic switch was opened. The PD stopped by the house at 4:30 the next afternoon with my final paycheck and a copy of that overnight's aircheck in his hand, demanding the key to the station front door.
Well, the radio station in question was bought out by a religious outfit last year; they now broadcast material from the kind of people my father refused to call "ministers." Dad preferred to think they just had a fetish for wearing their collars backwards. However, I'm still playing what I want to on the radio. I just wish Ms. Pesavento could say the same thing.
Sandy Pesavento was the drummer on the record I'd been canned for playing. You may know her better as Sandy West. The record was "School Days," a track on the most recently released LP by her band, The Runaways.
Just a few minutes ago, I got the news that Sandy West died of lung cancer last night. She was about a year older than me.
I grew up listening to other stuff than the rest of the kids in my schools. They depended on Top 40 radio stations to dictate their tastes to them; after my dad started me on Stan Kenton at the age of 8 (and I got him started on Three Dog Night at the age of 41), I learned fast that there was great music to be found that the radio stations never played. I actually saw a couple of my fellow 6th Graders get into a bloody fist fight after one of them dared to say The Osmonds were better than The Beatles. I loved The Beatles, of course, but not enough to risk stitches for them; at the time they weren't risking stitches for each other. I saw Judee Sill's Heart Food album cover advertised on the inner sleeve to a Harry Chapin LP, and I took a flyer; turns out I played Judee's tunes longer than the record label did. I heard a shortwave radio station from Johannesburg, South Africa (yes it was in apartheid days but before I knew what apartheid -- pronounced "apart-hate" -- even meant), play a nice pop 45 that was a hit there called "Soley Soley" by a group calling themselves Middle Of The Road; I special-ordered the U.S. RCA Victor 45 of that thing from the record shop and wore out the grooves within about seven years (probably the only American to do so). I heard CKOC in Hamilton, Ontario, play a tune called "Lovin' You Ain't Easy" by a Montreal rocker called Pagliaro really late one night in the winter of '72; I still might be the most recent Stateside disc jockey to play that thing on the radio twice in one month within the last ten years. I played Bob Marley before anybody in Oshkosh associated the word "reggae" with anything other than the Herbie Mann LP of that title (which I also played). Suzi Quatro's version of "All Shook Up" got only one play on WOSH, but I happened to be listening after midnight that July night in 1974; a few months later, I went to WOSH to ask about that record, and they gave me their copy of it. I wore that thing out, too. When Fanny came to play the UW-Oshkosh basketball hall, I begged Dad to let me go, but being only 10 at the time -- and the St. Patrick's Day melees fresh in his mind -- he stood his ground and said no. I had to be satisfied with wearing out my 45 of "Charity Ball." (My phonograph may sound like it was cheap, but it really wasn't. I was simply that tough on the vinyl I liked.)
In the Autumn of 1976, 30 years ago last month in fact, there was a blurb that caught my eye in one of the teen mags of the time -- probably Gloria Stavers' 16, which was always the more readable; I seem to recall they used less exclamation points in their texts than Tiger Beat or Teen Bag -- about a new band made up of teenage girls from L.A. called The Runaways. Finally, I thought, after years of a whole lotta crap about John Travolta and Donny Osmond, something I can get into. And I bought their self-titled debut album. Suzi Quatro's single "Your Mama Won't Like Me" prepped me but good for this bunch, or at least what producer Kim Fowley displayed them to be. Joan Jett even looked just like a 16-year-old Quatro (even more than the photos I've since seen of Suzi around that age herself). Lita Ford had long brown hair (she didn't go blonde until at least 1980), held an electric guitar with more self-confidence than I've seen most hunters hold their rifles, and an expression on her face on the inside gatefold photo that said, "Don't get too close if you don't wanna get hurt." Cherie Currie wore a denim shirt in the same photo, the top two-thirds of its buttons undone, and hands defiantly on her hips as if to say, "Whaddya gonna do about it?" Jackie Fox, well, looked like her name suggested.
Sandy West was my favourite of the lot, however. She looked just like a girl who I'd had a painful lust for the previous year who in turn couldn't stand me. At 14, nobody's mouthwash ever makes it, mine included. And that young woman's name, coincidence of coincidences, was also Sandy, and she also had a thing for wearing green t-shirts the exact same shade of Sandy West's in that gatefold photo of the first LP. Sandy West's belly button displayed just above her blue jeans had my 15-year-old hormones partying like Sinatra in Vegas circa '60. I always wondered about Rodney Bingenheimer's being credited with "Orchestration" on that first album, because I didn't hear one damned violin or cello on it. I now suspect this kind of orchestration had more to do with the buttons on Cherie's shirt and Sandy's belly in that photograph, among other image developments.
As it turned out, my initial lustings for this new Sandy developed into legitimate musical admiration as time went on. I did a review of The Runaways' second album, Queens of Noise, for my high school newspaper. Unfortunately, the only reaction the review recieved from the paper's readers was from a talentless heckler who ridiculed my having any interest in "that awful band" while there were "better" performers like Peter Frampton to check out. Guess he bought a copy of that live album too; dunno if his copy wound up being one of the hundreds I've since encountered at Goodwill stores, though.
Anyway, by the time the '70s ended I'd come away with the firm belief that the decade produced two brilliant rock drummers who never got their due, particularly because they were best known as members of all-female bands at a time when women that rocked harder than, say, Linda Ronstadt were looked upon as freaks by the chauvanists that dominated the rock audience of the time. Those drummers were Alice de Buhr of Fanny and Sandy West of The Runaways.
I have two concert posters on the wall next to me as I write this. One is definitely a fake; after all, in March of 1968 it wasn't necessary to put the year on the date for a Big Brother & The Holding Company show at the Fillmore East. The fact that the words "Janis Joplin" are in the largest type on the poster is probably a giveaway, too. The other is for a Runaways show San Francisco's Mabuhay Gardens in September 1978; that one I suspect may be fake, too, as the photo on it is from the same shoot as the gatefold pic on the first Runaways album, but the poster lists Vicki Blue as being a member and Cherie Currie as still being with the band; I'm positive that Cherie's solo album after splitting from the band, Beauty's Only Skin Deep, was issued in France the previous June and I was playing it on my show (on a station different from the one that fired me for playing "School Days") that July. (If you're wondering, I was a radio deejay all through my teens. It's an odd story. Remind me to tell it sometime.)
Anyway, there hasn't been a day I haven't lived in this apartment that I haven't thought of Sandy West. And nary a week in 30 years, either. Kinda like that line in Citizen Kane that Everett Sloane was blessed to have uttered, about the girl he saw on the Staten Island Ferry decades ago, she didn't see him at all, and "I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl."
I'll be doing a lot of thinking about this woman today. And if anyone has Alice de Buhr's mailing address, get it to me immediately. I'm serious. I let the time frame on Sandy's thank you note run out, and I'll be damned if I let Alice's do the same.