The Runaways – School Days (1977)

Their singer quit, their producer was on his way out the door — and The Runaways answered with School Days, the sound of Joan Jett taking over.

“School Days” exists because Cherie Currie walked out. In August 1977, The Runaways’ lead singer quit the band, two months before their third album was due. The remaining four members did not audition replacements and did not slow down. Rhythm guitarist Joan Jett — nineteen years old, already the band’s engine — stepped to the microphone, and within weeks the new four-piece Runaways were at Larrabee Studios in Los Angeles cutting the record that would introduce her as a frontwoman. The lead single was “School Days,” written by Jett with producer Kim Fowley: two and a half minutes of leather-jacket nostalgia for a school career Jett had traded for rock and roll.

Keep watching: The Runaways – Cherry Bomb · more Runaways →

The band that made it was running on fumes and defiance. Formed in Los Angeles in 1975 by Jett and drummer Sandy West — two sixteen-year-olds who had separately approached Fowley about starting an all-girl rock band, and whom he simply introduced to each other — The Runaways had burned through two years of relentless touring, a sensational reception in Japan that Jett compared to Beatlemania, and a punishing schedule that had already cost them bassist Jackie Fox mid-tour. Vicki Blue took over the bass and made her recorded debut on this album. Currie’s exit could have ended everything. Instead it produced the leanest Runaways lineup: Jett singing and playing rhythm, Lita Ford on lead guitar, Blue on bass, West holding it all together from the drum stool.

Fowley’s Last Record With the Band

Waitin’ for the Night arrived on October 17, 1977 on Mercury, and it carried an ending inside it: Kim Fowley, the Svengali who had assembled the band and controlled nearly every aspect of its existence, was finished. Days before the album’s release, he confirmed on national television that he was quitting the group. The split turned acrimonious — the band accused him of controlling and abusive behavior and of keeping money they had earned — and “School Days” stands as one of the last songs he and Jett wrote together. The album never charted in the United States, though Europe kept the faith: the record reached No. 34 in Sweden, and “School Days” climbed to No. 29 on the Belgian singles chart while the band toured Ireland, France, Switzerland, the UK, and the Low Countries through the fall of 1977.

Commercial numbers were never the real measure of this band, though. The Runaways disbanded in April 1979, and then the seeds scattered: Jett formed the Blackhearts and took “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” to No. 1 around the world; Ford became one of the defining hard rock guitarists of the 1980s. The band they came from was reappraised as what it had actually been all along — the first all-female rock band to matter, the group that made every one that followed possible.

The Drummer Who Started It All

None of it happens without Sandy West. Born Sandra Sue Pesavento on July 10, 1959 in Long Beach, California, she got her first drum kit from her grandfather at age nine and was, by fifteen, the player around whom the whole Runaways idea crystallized — it was West and Jett, meeting at West’s home to run through songs, who lit the fuse. On “School Days” and everything else the band recorded, she is the power source: a drummer Joan Jett later placed in the caliber of John Bonham. West never got the reunion she spent decades hoping for. She died of cancer on October 21, 2006, at 47, and Cherie Currie called her the greatest female drummer in the history of rock and roll — the true heart of the band. A monument to her stands in Dana Point, California: a mermaid with a guitar, a few miles down the coast from the beaches where a nine-year-old girl first decided she was going to play.