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Concert Preview: JOAN JETT brings her 'bad reputation' to Warped Tour
from: post-gazette.com
by Ed Masley
PHOENIX -- Some may wonder what JOAN JETT is doing on the Warped Tour.
But the kids down front don't have time to wonder.
They're too busy hanging on her every word, her every move, her every giant, now-we've-got-you chorus.
Strolling on stage with the latest edition of the BLACKHEARTS, she opens with "Bad Reputation," the fuel-injected punk-as-Eddie-Cochran-would've-done-it classic that opens her debut album, and the crowd is hers. Kids who hadn't been born yet when Jett was recording that album are singing along from the opening line. She has them clapping -- hands above their heads -- to Gary Glitter's "Do You Wanna Touch Me (Oh Yeah)," moshing along to the fast part of "Crimson and Clover," the slow part of which is the slowest thing anyone's ever attempted at the Warped Tour. And because she is JOAN JETT, she caps a 30-minute set that also features "Cherry Bomb" with "I Love Rock n' Roll," the single that made her a star in 1982 while logging seven weeks at No. 1.
The kids down front go wild, the way their parents would have done if this had been a county fair.
And then, after posing for pictures and chatting with fans to the side of stage, she bicycles off to the tour bus, leaving longtime producer/co-writer KENNY LAGUNA to hang with members of the Germs, whose punk-rock debut Jett produced back in '79.
"The beauty of it all," Laguna notes, "is that Joan fits into this whole culture perfectly."
She always has, in fact, from her days as the RUNAWAYS' resident rebel through "Bad Reputation" to "SINNER," a raucous new album whose opening cut is a spirited put-down of the Bush administration.
"It's the kind of music I grew up with really, even more than glam," she says. "Because I lived it. I think what the RUNAWAYS did was punk rock. But it's hard for me to qualify what punk rock is. I'm not too sure it's just about playing fast and yelling. It's so much deeper than that. It's about being an underdog, about doing it yourself, about making your own rules."
Born in Philadelphia, Jett spent her childhood on the move before developing her love of rock 'n' roll -- and becoming a teenage Runaway -- in California.
Before her first birthday, the family had settled in Pittsburgh, where they'd spend the next four years before moving to Erie.
"I still remember coming through those tunnels as a little kid," she says. "I've been there recently, and seeing those tunnels, the memories come back of all the times I was in the back seat of the car going in and out of those things. It's funny."
And then, with a smile, she says yinz.
"That proves it," she says, with a laugh. "I wish I could get myself to say it now."
She smiles again before pretending to address a crowd from the aisle of her tour bus.
"'Yinz been great!'"
But getting back to California, where her family moved when she was 14, it was there, at Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco, that she fell in love with glam, a scene whose inspiration stretches from the Gary Glitter covers on "Bad Reputation" to her cover of The Sweet on "SINNER."
"It was a disco for teenagers, and they'd play all the British singles the kids in America didn't hear, like Bowie, T. Rex, Slade, The Sweet, Suzi Quatro, all these great three-minute songs with guitar, big choruses, handclaps, drums, really danceable stuff," she says. "So that was my first sort of musical influence."
There's even something glam about the sexed-up swagger at the punk-rock heart of "Cherry Bomb," her classic contribution to the RUNAWAYS' eponymous debut back in '76. As much as "Cherry Bomb" deserved to be the hit that put her on the map, the world wasn't ready for a group of teenage girls playing their own instruments while taking a distinctly Jagger-esque approach to sex. After several albums failed to launch the girls' career, they went their separate ways.
And then, adding insult to injury, all the other RUNAWAYS got deals.
"I was the last one," Jett recalls, still sounding hurt. "And it was the punk-rock thing, the black leather, the black hair, the heavy eye makeup. If I'm standing there silent in dark makeup, dark hair, a dark leather jacket, a lot of people misconstrue that as being angry or mean or unapproachable. And most of the time, I was just shy."
The sting of failure hurt so bad, she considered enlisting.
"I was devastated that the RUNAWAYS broke up," she says. "I was devastated that people thought it was funny, that people were laughing at it like 'We told you that it wouldn't work.' And I was very angry, very lost and very frustrated, so I thought 'How am I gonna get my [act] together? How am I gonna get focused? Maybe I should go into the military for a couple years.'"
Instead, she started working with Laguna on the soundtrack to a film based on the RUNAWAYS called "We're All Crazy Now."
They'd almost worked together in the RUNAWAYS, Jett says, until Laguna got a "better gig."
She shoots a dirty look Laguna's way and says, "See?! That's how people look at it." Laguna tried to put the "better gig" -- working with Jonathan Richman and Greg Kihn -- in perspective, causing Jett to fire back, "What makes them better than the girls?!"
Laguna laughs.
But it's a nervous laugh.
"Hold on," he says. "You were in Amsterdam. In the winter. And I didn't have the job yet. I had an interview for it. And the president of Berserkley says 'You can do Jonathan Richman, Greg Kihn and Earthquake, five hours a day, we'll put you in a spa in Berkeley.' What would you do? I mean, come on."
At times, they resemble an old married couple, these two, always finishing each other sentences, correcting little details in each other's stories, interrupting, picking fights. And yet, they've stayed together through the good times and the bad because there's something there that works, a magic they could see from that first writing session.
As Jett says, "We hit it off great, became friends right away."
And Laguna became a manager.
"He got stuck with the job," Jett recalls, "because nobody else wanted to deal with me on any level. And even with all his connections he had in the music business, he couldn't do anything. People were still saying. 'No way.' So here we are now, we're a team. Somebody's on my side now. So that gives you strength. He had faith in me, in what he saw and what he thought that I could do. And I had faith in him."
The labels were another story.
Looking back on all the labels that rejected Jett based on a demo that, it should be noted, included her chart-topping version of "I Love Rock n' Roll," Laguna says of major-label A&R reps, "Either they don't listen to the things people send them or they can't hear hits. Atlantic said, 'This artist doesn't have the class to be on the label.' They were holding out for Debbie Gibson."
Finally, Laguna gave up on the tin ears and released her debut album on his own new label, BLACKHEART RECORDS. Boasting guest performances by Steve Jones and Paul Cook of Sex Pistols fame and Clem Burke of Blondie, the self-titled album was picked up by Boardwalk and re-titled "Bad Reputation."
It would take a second album, though, to really send her on her way.
That album's title track was "I Love Rock n' Roll," a B-side for the Arrows that she always thought could be a monster hit. Which it became in 1982, quickly followed by "Crimson and Clover" and "Do You Wanna Touch Me," both of which were featured on that demo every major label in America rejected.
The hit parade slowed to a crawl after "Fake Friends" and "Everyday People" the following year, but Jett bounced back in 1987 with a soundtrack hit Bruce Springsteen wrote for "Light of Day." Then, in 1988, she had her biggest hit single since "Crimson and Clover" -- the hard-rock gem "I Hate Myself For Loving You."
She hasn't had much luck at radio since; she hasn't gone Top 40 since an AC/DC cover, "Dirty Deeds," in 1990.
As Laguna says, "It's such a climb to keep a JOAN JETT on the charts because we don't make classic call-out research records. She's been out of vogue her whole career."
But things are looking up again with a headlining spot on the Warped Tour, strong support at college radio for "SINNER" and a warm embrace from a musical underground her early records helped define. Her 1994 debut for Warner Bros., "Pure and Simple," found the singer flanked by members of L7, Babes in Toyland and Bikini Kill. One highlight featured Jett and Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill responding to the brutal rape and murder of Gits singer Mia Zapata, which led to her fronting the Gits on a benefit album, "Evil Stig," the royalties of which were used to hire a private detective to investigate Zapata's murder.
And now, after 12 years of struggling to get a second album out on Warner Bros, where Laguna says they'd hoped to "finish her career out on the Yankees," "SINNER" finds her back on BLACKHEART RECORDS with her most consistent batch of songs since "I Love Rock n' Roll." She's still working with Hanna, who contributed to five tracks, but the punkest thing about it is a track she and Laguna wrote with Linda Perry, of all people.
A spirited shot at the Bush administration's special blend of double-speak, it hangs its chewy glam-rock hooks on Jett's assessment of the damage in Iraq: "We've got ourselves in trouble with no relief in sight / Every day is such a struggle 'cause they had to pick a fight."
It didn't have a thing to do with Bush when she and Perry hammered out the hook three years ago, but Jett kept working on it.
"There was something about the song I liked, and I wanted to finish it," she says. "So we kept rewriting the lyrics, rewriting the lyrics, and finally we were getting close to deadline, and I had to get in there and sing it, so Kenny and I sat down one more time and went through the lyrics word by word, just tried to make them the best that they could be.
And they were, you know, pretty good. But then, as I was out in the studio singing these lyrics we'd just finished, lines were coming to Kenny, lines were coming to me, and we'd stop the tape and go back in and write the words down. As a songwriter, you wait your whole life for this. Things were happening. Now, it's got substance. Now, it's starting to take shape. Now, it's about the government speaking to us in riddles."
While she's never been the most political performer and she did have some concerns that people might be put off by her weighing in on foreign policy at this late stage in her career, she felt the message of the song was too important to let caution rule the day.
"I know that sometimes when people show who they are politically, it can have an effect on you, depending on how they do it," she says. "Some people, you kind of go, 'OK, I'm not so sure I like them too much anymore.' But in the scheme of things, you have to decide what's important. I write a lot about relationships, love, sex, all that stuff. I think I can devote 20 or 30 percent of the record to bigger things sometimes."
As expected, "Riddles" proves a big hit at the Warped Tour, where some kids down front already know the words.
The risk is more in other pockets of her fan base. After all, she is the rare performer who can rock the budding leftists at a Warped Tour stop and still be welcome at the county fair.
Laguna starts to talk about her broad appeal and how it all comes down to two words -- pure and simple -- when Jett cuts him off.
Sure, the music is simple and catchy, she says. "But I think we have kind of an underdog vibe. I've always felt I had to struggle, and I think a lot of people can relate to that, the fighting spirit just to stay in it, whatever your walk of life might be."
It's that connection to her audience that matters most to Jett, especially connecting with first-timers.
"We have some people who really know it and know all the words," she says. "And then you have some kids you know have never seen us but are curious. They might know the name or they know 'I Love Rock n' Roll.' And you can see it in their face, that look I've seen so many times, when they get it. That connection is what you do it for, millions of little connections. That's the [stuff] you remember for the rest of your life."
JOAN JETT: Punker than anybody
Tim McIlrath of Rise Against, a three-time Warped Tour veteran, says it's really cool to have JOAN JETT along for the ride:
"She's amazing. Not only is her set rad, she's really cool. She rolls around here at Warped Tour and hangs out. This is a strange place; it's like a summer camp. Everyone's in line for food every afternoon for lunch and everyone's in line for showers together. It's like there's no ego back here. We roll around on BMXs and have barbecues at night. For a lot of rock stars, that would be strange and white trash, 'cause there's no plush backstages. For someone like JOAN JETT to be out there, she's on a BMX bike and she's going around saying 'hi' to everybody, and I saw her playing baseball the other day -- she's totally down-to-earth and cool and ready to hang out. She's punker than anybody out here."
-- Scott Mervis, Post-Gazette Weekend Mag editor
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