|
All news is attributed to the source from which it was received so that readers may judge the validity of the statements for themselves.
Have Joan Jett news to report? Email us at jettfc@aol.com, and please include the source of the information so it can be validated.
Queen of noise
from: music.guardian.co.uk
by Laura Barton
While her friends were into the Osmonds, JOAN JETT was strumming along to T Rex. When a woman plays rock'n'roll, she owns her sexuality, she tells Laura Barton. Perhaps that's why male critics find her so scary.
As the lift ascends to the third floor of the Brighton Centre, its passengers stand in companionable silence: Lemmy in an open-necked shirt, clutching a copy of Ian Rankin's Exit Music, and behind him the tiny frame of JOAN JETT, her eyes painted in iridescent wings of colour. Jett is halfway through a UK tour, sharing the bill with Motorhead and Alice Cooper. It is, one gathers, something of a reunion: she has known Lemmy since 1976, when she was 16 and her first band, The RUNAWAYS, opened for Motörhead in London. "It was a time," Jett explains throatily, "when we may have been more notorious than famous."
The name of JOAN JETT has long been tinged with notoriety; the original female rocker, she has not only enjoyed a successful career with hits such as I Love Rock'n'Roll, Crimson and Clover and Bad Reputation, earning herself a place in Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists of all time - one of only two women to make the list - but she has also been an inspiration to generations of female musicians, from the riot grrrl movement of the early 90s to Britney Spears, who covered I Love Rock'n'Roll in 2002, and now to the cluster of female fans who wait, flushed-faced, to meet her this evening in Brighton. In 1976, however, the notoriety stemmed from little more than "being teenage girls playing rock'n'roll - because in those days, and even now, it's not really the norm, I suppose." She sniffs. "It seemed pretty normal to me, but girls playing rock'n'roll was pushing the boundaries."
Now 47, she has, this evening, the air of the motor mechanic about her: it's in the sniff, in the easy physicality, in the husky drawl that sounds as if it could readily fall to talking of fuel gauges and chassis systems. The tips of her fingers are scarred from decades of guitar-playing. Jett's parents bought her first guitar, an electric from Sears, when she was in her early teens. "Initially I tried to take guitar lessons," she remembers. "I went to a guitar teacher and said I wanna play rock'n'roll. When you're a kid you think everything can happen right away and you don't realise you have to go through a process of actually learning it. So he tried to teach me On Top of Old Smokey, and I said screw this and went and got one of those Teach Yourself To Play Guitar books, and just sat in my room and taught myself basic bar chords and played along with my Led Zeppelin and T Rex records." It was no different to what thousands of teenage boys were doing across the country, yet holed up in her Los Angeles bedroom, Jett was already an anomaly; it was the height of Osmond mania and few of her girlfriends were into rock, let alone into picking up a guitar and playing it themselves.
Around the same time she began frequenting a nightclub in Hollywood named Rodney's English Disco. "They used to play all the British hits that American kids never even heard: Gary Glitter, Suzi Quatro, Alvin Stardust, The Sweet, Bowie, T Rex, all those great three-minute hits," she recalls with gusto. It was via a girl she met at Rodney's that Jett was introduced to music industry mogul Kim Fowley. "I'd been screwing around with the guitar, and I think the fact that I was able to hear people like Suzi Quatro having success playing rock'n'roll made me think, 'Well, if she's doing it, why can't I?'" she explains. "And I thought if I want to play rock'n'roll, there's gotta be girls around in Los Angeles that wanna play like I do." Fowley put her in touch with a girl named Sandy West who had approached him in a parking lot and told him, "I play drums, I've played with a bunch of guys but I wanna form an all-girl band." Jett took the bus to West's house and they began jamming in her basement, "just basic rock'n'roll progression, like a Chuck Berry kinda thing," she remembers. "I called Kim and said, 'Listen to this', and just played down the phone, and he said, 'It sounds great, let's start looking for other girls.'"
It was essential to Jett that The RUNAWAYS would be an all-girl band. "Because nobody had done it," she says firmly. "And I think it was also the fact that we should be able to do it. I had grown up being told by my parents that I could be whatever I wanted, so I believed that that was a reality. So when people would say to me, 'Well, girls don't play rock'n'roll, why are you doing this?' I would say, 'Well, what are you implying? Are you saying that girls can't play the guitar because girls play cello and violin in symphony orchestras and play Bach and Schubert? You're saying they're not capable of mastering guitar? No, what you are saying is that really it's not socially acceptable for a girl to play rock'n'roll. My personal opinion is that rock'n' roll is very sexual, and when you're playing it, you're owning your sexuality. And I guess that's very threatening to a lot of people - that's the only thing I can figure why we ran into so much resistance."
The RUNAWAYS enjoyed considerable success in Europe, with hits such as Cherry Bomb and Queens of Noise, but failed to make much of an impression in their homeland. When they broke up in 1979 and Jett attempted to launch a solo career, she encountered further resistance. She met producer and performer KENNY LAGUNA, who would become her lifelong songwriting partner, manager, producer and best friend. "He figured it would be kinda easy with his connections to get me a record deal," she recalls. In fact few record labels would touch Jett. "It's hard to imagine, now, the resistance," she says. "It wasn't only about girls and rock'n'roll but also my image was so much harder than other girls in rock'n'roll, with the black hair and the leather jacket. We still have all the rejection letters; 23 of them." The labels gave a variety of reasons: "They'd say, 'You have no songs'," Jett gives a lop-sided smirk, "and the tape we sent had I Love Rock'n'Roll, Crimson and Clover, Do You Wanna Touch Me and Bad Reputation. So they didn't only miss one, they missed four hits ... And we'd get a lot of, 'Drop the guitar, stop hiding behind the guitar, change your image, sing softer songs.' It was you're not allowed to be edgy and you're not allowed to be hard if you're a girl." She looks puzzled. "I'm so confused about that."
Jett and Laguna summoned a new band, The BLACKHEARTS, and decided to form their own label - a gamble that paid off in 1982 when her cover of The Arrows' I Love Rock'n'Roll occupied the US No1 spot for seven weeks. This week she releases a new album, SINNER, and a cover of a track by The Sweet called AC DC: "It's a little provocative," she says with a knowing smile. "It pushes the envelope," - as indeed does its video, featuring Carmen Electra, whom Jett has been rumoured to be dating.
Another track, Riddles, which samples a speech by Dick Cheney, "is sort of about doublespeak, the 1984 aspect of what's going on in the world." Speaking openly about American politics is, she says, "a calculated risk ... You saw the reaction to the Dixie Chicks! I mean it's pretty frightening to me to consider the fact that on one hand you live in the Land of the Free and that dissent is part of democracy, and then to be singled out for speaking out when you do." She looks flabbergasted. "I'm not coming out and saying, 'So-and-so's a moron', it's really just about trying to discuss the issues. I would consider myself a liberal but I wanna be able to talk to conservatives, to find a common ground, because the bottom line is we all love our country, and everyone's just looking to be happy."
In 2004, Jett joined Howard Dean's campaign group as he ran to be the Democratic candidate. "I Googled all the candidates, and I found Howard Dean's record as governor of Vermont: he'd been governor for 11 years, and worked very well with Republicans and Democrats. He got universal healthcare for all children under 18. He got prescription benefits for the elderly. And he was against the Iraq war, way before anyone else was saying it was wrong. So I went out on the road to Iowa and New Hampshire, and we'd go round to the coffeeshops and meet the voters and talk to them about why I thought he was a good candidate for president." She was present on the night of the infamous "Dean Scream" when during an impassioned, red-faced speech he spoke of taking the White House and gave a rallying "Yeagh!" that was deemed "unpresidential" by the American media. "It was like that's how you're judging who should be president? It was all about 'electability'," she spits, "and Howard Dean spoke too clearly. He had a little edge," she adds as if beneath all the healthcare and prescription benefits, Dean, too, was a rock' n'roller. "Whereas John Kerry ..." she licks her finger and holds it aloft, "put his finger in the air to see which way the wind was blowing."
In the early 90s, Jett was spending a lot of time in Seattle. "It was really exciting then," she says. "It seemed like girls in rock'n'roll might break out because you had bands like L7, Babes in Toyland, Bikini Kill, the Breeders and Sleater-Kinney having a lot of success." One wonders what happened to all the success accumulated by those riot grrrl bands. Jett shrugs and looks disappointed. "I wish I had an answer for ya," she says. "I can only take a shot: I think as with a lot of bands, people live their lives and want to move on - not everybody wants to do this for their whole life. And especially for girls, who are always taking shit, always getting criticised, verbally, for no reason. Just because you play music, they call you all sorts of names." Like what? "Cunt, dyke, whore. Y'know, that's just routine. So maybe it's that for some of them ... women, girls, we live in our self- esteem much more than guys. And it hurts when people say negative things for no reason - certainly when you're a musician and you're criticised for something that has nothing to do with being a musician." She gives a derisory, disappointed sniff. "You know, there's a girl band in every city playing rock'n'roll and they're really good, so I don't really understand why there's not more acceptance, why people are still not willing to give girls a shot".
|
| |
This Week:
No shows scheduled this week.
Click on the LIVE DATES link for upcoming shows |
Item Of The Month:
|
