Joan Jett:
Built to
ROCK
The Birth of a
ROCK
STAR
“I had the desire to play the instrument and that’s what made me want to do this.” “Maybe it’s my parents’ fault for telling me when I was five, ‘You can be anything you want,’ “ she says. “Other girls can give up. I get it. People can be rude. But I feel like I was in it for life.” Joan Jett was born Joan Marie Larkin in a Philadelphia suburb on September 22nd, 1958. She was calling herself Joan Jett before the Runaways, when she became a nightly fixture at Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco on Sunset Boulevard in 1974. The crowd at the all-ages glamrock club, hosted by the L.A. disc jockey, was “the equivalent of
social-media stars,” Jett says, citing one Chuck E. Starr. “He had big platform boots, fishnets, a Bowie haircut. I thought, ‘If I’m going to have a phony name, what would it be? Joan Jett! And it’s gotta be a double-t.’” When she was 8 years old she started thinking about being an actress because she wanted to do something where people knew who she was. Later, Joan got turned on to music because there was something about the way it touched her. Listening to the guitar really took over and made her feel great. “I had the desire to play the
instrument and that’s what made me want to do this.” Her passion for music began early, and she received her first guitar at the age of 14. She is the oldest of three children. Her father sold insurance; her mother was a secretary. The family moved often: in western Pennsylvania, then to Maryland — where Jett saw her first concerts, by Black Sabbath and the New York Dolls — and, when she was 13, to Los Angeles. “Then my parents divorced,” Jett says, “which was traumatic.” Playing guitar and going to Bingenheimer’s club were her solace. Neither of her parents played an instrument. She had three guitar lessons, but when they would only teach her folk and classic guitar, she quit. She decided to teach herself rock n’ roll through thousands of hours with a record player, playing her favorite songs.
Still, the song “Cherry Bomb,” with its rebellious and raw edge, which Jett wrote with friend Kim Fowley, became a punk hit. The following year, the Runaways released their sophomore effort, Queens of Noise, which featured such tracks as “Born to Be Bad” and “Neon Angels.” While the album performed poorly in the U.S., the Runaways received a warm welcome in Japan, scoring three gold records there. “You gotta put the Runaways at the same level as the Ramones and the Sex Pistols,” Smear maintains. “They were doing in L.A. what those guys were doing in New York and London: getting kids to join bands. But I don’t think Joan gets what people feel about her. Because she is a very modest person.” After Currie and Fox left in mid-1977, Jett emerged as the group’s lead singer. She was already a powerful force behind the scenes, writing most of the Runaways’ songs. The band struggled through two more albums before they were dropped from their record label.
“You gotta put the Runaways at the same level as the Ramones and the Sex Pistols.” Jett started the Runaways in 1975 with drummer Sandy West after Fowley introduced the two. At first a power trio, the best-known lineup included Currie, guitarist Lita Ford and bassist Jackie Fox. “He gets a bad rep as a manipulator,” Jett says of Fowley, who died at 75 in January and cultivated a polarizing aura — seedy pop genius sold with supercharged hype — over five decades in the music industry. The band was ahead of its time in many ways, with its hard-rock sound emerging during an era when disco music was king. They also felt dismissed by audiences and critics because of their young age and their gender; the public didn’t seem to know what to do with five girls who sang about sex, rebelling, and partying. In 1976, the Runaways released their first self-titled album, which failed to impress critics and music buyers alike.
GOING
SOLO
“Do your thing, play your music. People will think that’s sexy.” The group called it quits in 1979. “When the Runaways broke up, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. A breakup is like losing a very good friend. It’s like a death,” Jett later explained. Deciding to pursue a solo career, Jett spent some time in England working with Paul Cook and Steve Jones, both former members of the legendary punk band the Sex Pistols. She then returned to Los Angeles where she worked as a producer for the first album of the L.A. punk band the Germs. She also tried acting, appearing in a film based on the story of the Runaways entitled We’re All Crazy Now. Around this time, Jett met producer Kenny Laguna and songwriter Ritchie Cordell.
Both men helped her with her first solo album. Jett tried to get a record label to distribute her new album, but she was rejected by 23 different companies. Out of frustration, she and Laguna founded Blackheart Records in 1980, making Jett the first female artist to own and have direct control over an independent record company. In making the record, she got help from an unlikely source—rock supergroup the Who. Laguna was friends with the band members and their manager, and they let Jett use their recording facilities. She later told Rolling Stone magazine that “We wouldn’t have been able to make the record if they hadn’t helped us. They basically
let us record what became Bad Reputation and [said], ‘Pay us when you can.’” At first, Jett and Laguna printed and distributed the record themselves, selling copies at Jett’s shows. The record then was picked up by Boardwalk Records and re-released as Bad Reputation. Her rock-pop sound, however, didn’t quite catch on. Not one to give up, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts put together another album. I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll became a huge hit, driven in large part to the title track, which hit the top of the pop charts in early 1982. Now Jett is entering uncharted territory for a woman in her line of aggression: that age when male elders like the Rolling Stones and the Who pass into rugged gravitas. “People look at women differently,” Jett says irritably. “Men are viable into old age. Women all of a sudden become matronly? C’mon, man! Do your thing, play your music. People will think that’s sexy.”