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KENNY LAGUNA has seen it all working with JOAN JETT
from: PostCrescent.com
By Jim Lundstrom, Post-Crescent staff writer
KENNY LAGUNA misses the days when the mob was running the music industry and juvenile delinquent street kids were making the records.
"Now corporations run the industry and overeducated computer nerds make the records," Laguna said. "They get a hit and dress up in leather, but, in truth, that's not who they are. That's part of the problem, who the acts are."
Laguna certainly knows his leather-clad rockers, having worked with JOAN JETT from her post-Runaway period on as friend, producer, manager, co-songwriter and, currently, as keyboard player in The BLACKHEARTS, who appear with Jett at Waterfest in Oshkosh on Aug. 22.
After more than 20 years leading her own band, you can imagine Jett has grown weary of the same old questions about how it feels to be a woman in a male-dominated rock world and what she thinks about being an early role model for female punk rockers.
So it's not surprising that a request to speak with Jett in advance of the concert was deflected to the loquacious Laguna, who, it turns out, has a refreshing take on the whole business.
"I played on every single record Joan ever made," Laguna said. "And I produced all of them except one song. We made some recent changes in the music and the band. I'll probably drop out again (from the stage band), but right now I'm back. It's like Ma Partridge with the punk rockers."
The 50-year-old Laguna began in the music business as a precocious 13-year-old musician playing behind groups like the Shangri-Las and the Regents.
He thrived during the 1960s as a performer and producer of bubblegum pop, playing in bands such as the 1910 Fruitgum Co., Ohio Express, The Archies and Tommy James and the Shondels.
Part of that musical story is documented on the 2000 BLACKHEART RECORDS release "Laguna Tunes," 22 mostly obscure songs Laguna did with people like Darlene Love, pre-Dawn Tony Orlando, Sissy Spacek (who was part of a Laguna singing group called Moose and the Pelicans), a post-Righteous Brothers Bill Medley and the Beach Boys singing with JOAN JETT.
There's also a great, souped-up cover of Cole Porter's "Let's Do It" by Jett and Greg Graffin of Bad Religion.
"That was a record I thought about for 20 years," Laguna said. "A lot of those songs would have been lost forever. There's much more. The biggest records I was involved with aren't on there. Most of them are obscure, but there's seven records on there that I consider hits."
One of those tunes, the hilarious "Stairway to Gilligan's Island," was a hit on the West Coast in 1978, with the words of the '60s TV show theme song sung to the music of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven."
"The guys who manufactured it called up and said, 'Oh, man, this is it! We're in the chips!'" he said. "We sold 10,000 records in a week. Suddenly Led Zeppelin showed up and killed it."
Laguna has a million stories about the music industry.
"There was this tough guy who owned Roullette Records, a legend, actually, Morris Levy, who is depicted in The Sopranos as Tony's father's old friend in the record business (Hesh Rabkin). That's Morris Levy," Laguna said.
"Morris says to me (and Laguna's voice drops into a gravelly 'Godfather' register), 'I'm not going to pay you kid, but someday I'll give you a name and wit dat name you make your money and den you can steal someone else's money. Dat's how it works.' I liked that. It was a good system. It was like being an indentured servant. At least the Mafia said, 'You ain't getting paid,' so you knew where you stood."
Laguna's history with Jett goes back to the late 1970s when she was still a member of the all-girl group The RUNAWAYS with guitarist Lita Ford.
He was tapped to produce the band's first album without lead singer Cherie Currie.
"I turned them down," he said.
Then he got another call, saying The RUNAWAYS had broken up and JOAN JETT needed his help to deliver a batch of songs.
Laguna credits his wife, Meryl, to his accepting the challenge.
"Meryl said, 'JOAN JETT has become very significant. I've been reading stuff she says. She seems really smart. You should definitely go meet her,'" he said. "We finished up the six songs so she wouldn't get sued and I made the record with her. I just fell in love. She had the ability to let it all hang out. I'm sure Janis Joplin had it. Darlene Love, who I worked with, had it. But most girls, they were so trained to be girls and to behave in appropriate ways. Even guys, there are only a few guys who can really let it hang the way Mick Jagger can. Even less with the girls, 'cause they're taught all their lives to be contained.
"But Joan, when she was singing a song, I went crazy,'" he said. "I said, 'You're great. I want to get you a record deal.'"
But Laguna found it wasn't going to be easy.
"She was totally rejected in the record industry as a has-been," Laguna said.
One group was all set to take her on, then decided all punk musicians were Nazis.
"JOAN JETT is so PC," Laguna said. "She's a tree hugger. She's a peacenik. If it was a different era, she would have been a hippie. Nevertheless, they threw us out of the office."
Still, Joan was playing to sold-out venues all over the East Coast.
"We were happening, still the industry was rejecting us. The whole industry just totally missed the whole thing," he said. "We have 23 rejection letters that we saved in a file. Clive Davis (formerly of Columbia Records) is obviously a genius hearing certain kinds of hits. We sent him a tape of 'I Love Rock & Roll,' 'Crimson & Clover,' 'Do You Wanna Touch Me?' and 'You Don't Own Me.' We still have his letter, which said, 'Joan is an interesting artist, but she'll need a song search.' Later on we wrote back to him, 'If you signed Cole Porter you'd have him do a song search.'"
So in 1980 they decided to form BLACKHEART RECORDS.
"Eventually we had a hit on our own label," Laguna said. "But we didn't really have distribution, so we're selling records out of the back of the car. I had this huge old Cadillac. We'd fill the trunk up with these vinyl records. It was called 'JOAN JETT' and later got renamed 'Bad Reputation.' We were selling them for like $2.50, $3, really too cheap, but people were just eating them up.
"Next thing you know, we have a No. 1 record and people are patting me on the back, saying, 'You're the manager of the year,'" Laguna said. "The people made those things happen. The industry has never heard Joan's records."
Eleven albums later, Jett and Laguna continue slugging it out, though the battles are wearying.
"I still think Joan has the best rock 'n' roll chick voice in the business," Laguna said. "Nobody can sing over guitars like JOAN JETT."
But she remains an outsider.
"It's annoying to me that labels won't out our records out," Laguna said. "At this point we're physically exhausted by going against the system. We've gone against the system so many times, I don't really feel like I can do it. It's too awesome to go against these corporations."
In the can now is Jett's version of Paul Westerberg's "Androgynous."
"It sounds like a smash to me, but everywhere we bring it, it's 'Naw, naw.' But that's what they did with all our records. We'll find a way to put it out."
Laguna said he firmly believes another great hit is coming from JOAN JETT.
"I really believe, in the bottom of my heart, that that's our destiny," he said. "Joan was 16 when she first got famous, and now we'll come back and do it again, because I still don't hear anybody better than her. Wait 'til you see her. Absolutely stunning. She's got the body of a 16-year-old. We're gonna rock!" |
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