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7/6: JOAN JETT interview- Teenage Runaway to alternative icon
from: azcentral.com
by Ed Masley
JOAN JETT was all of 16 when she made her first important contribution to the history of rock and roll -- a throbbing jail-bait anthem titled "Cherry Bomb" that gave the world its first taste of the all-girl teenage RUNAWAYS.
Written by Jett and manager Kim Fowley, the opening track on the RUNAWAYS' 1976 debut is now looked back on as a punk-rock classic, arriving the same year the Ramones' first album hit the streets.
"It was one of the best times of my life," Jett recalls. "It was magic. We scared the (expletive) out of people just by being ourselves."
America wasn't ready for a pack of teenage girls who could play their own instruments while singer Cherie Currie, dressed in lingerie, vowed to be "your ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb."
Three hit-free albums later, they disbanded after one last show on New Year's Eve, 1978.
"Those were very dark times for me," Jett recalls. "The RUNAWAYS were the world to me. And I was devastated. Even though I had an active hand in it ending, I was devastated. I just thought the RUNAWAYS were gonna change the world. And we didn't."
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It took meeting KENNY LAGUNA, the man who even now remains her musical partner-in-crime, to get her through those times.
"I met Kenny to write songs for a movie the RUNAWAYS had signed on to do before we broke up," she says. "And we got along great, right away. You know that feeling when you meet somebody and you really mesh with them? We wound up writing some really good songs."
The next speed bump was finding a label.
"Kenny figured he had so many contacts in the business that it would be easy, but nobody wanted us," Jett says. "We have 23 rejection letters. We kept them. They all heard 'Bad Reputation,' 'Crimson and Clover,' 'I Love Rock and Roll' and 'Do You Wanna Touch Me.' "
And yet, they swore they didn't hear a hit.
Jett says, "They all said 'You have no songs,' 'You need a song coach,' 'Lose the guitar,' 'You're an interesting artist, but...' Just a lot of 'No.' And you just had to wonder, 'Can they not hear hits?' Or did they know ahead of time that they just didn't want me so they're making up an excuse? But it turned out to be a blessing in disguise because we put that album out ourselves on BLACKHEART RECORDS. We put out, I think, maybe 500 records at first to sell out of the trunk of the car at gigs. We put 'import' on it and they all sold right out."
It took a second album, though, to really take her to the masses when the title track -- her cover of the Arrows' B-side "I Love Rock and Roll" -- topped Billboard's Hot 100.
Yes, the same track that had brought home 23 rejection letters spent seven consecutive weeks at No. 1 in 1982.
So that felt good, right?
"Oh yeah," Jett says. "It felt really good. But you know, life is long and you're gonna have to deal with all these people in the business. So you want to enjoy your moment but you don't want to be negative about the people who just didn't hear it. I took it for what it was. And I felt vindicated. But you still always have to prove yourself. It's not like you can just rest on your laurels."
"I Love Rock and Roll" was followed that same year by two more cover songs that took her to the upper reaches of the Hot 100 -- "Crimson and Clover" and "Do You Wanna Touch Me," both of which were featured on that demo every major label in America rejected.
In 1988, the star was back in Billboard's Top 10 with "I Hate Myself for Loving You," a song she wrote with Desmond Child. She hasn't gone Top 40 since her take on AC/DC's "Dirty Deeds" in 1990, but her legend just keeps growing.
Embraced in the '90s alternative-radio years as a pioneer, she was joined in 1994 by members of L7, Babes in Toyland and Bikini Kill on "Pure and Simple." Twelve years later, she rocked the punk kids at the Warped Tour in support of that year's "SINNER," which again found her collaborating with Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill.
Then, in 2010, she found herself portrayed by "Twilight" actress Kristen Stewart in "The RUNAWAYS."
"I thought it definitely gave you a sense of what it was like to be in the band," she says of the film. "The actors did an amazing job with the script they had. Having been in the band, of course, I'm gonna feel that way too much is left out and that you don't really get a true sense of everything we went through. But you couldn't really tell the full story, I think, in whatever it was, an hour and a half."
She actually hung out on the set and worked with Stewart.
"I had a few gigs that kept me away for maybe four days," Jett says. "But other than that, I was there and watching with a monitor and headphones. I was there to be a tool for Kristen, anything that she needed to know about me or about the band."
More recently, she's started working on a followup to "SINNER." And Laguna says it's going great.
"We've gotta go back to the exorcism of trying to create new music," he says, "and trying to make it stand up to the library. But Joan is writing as good as any time in her life. The subject matter is good. The words are good. And I think there will be some surprise collaborations. We're not gonna do a Santana record, like a Clive Davis thing. But there are a couple of our friends that wrote songs and it's some pretty good stuff."
Jett says she's feeling it, too.
"It's just different," she says. "Earlier, I focused a lot on, you know, the things you experience. You're going out. You're partying. You're having sex. You're in relationships. That's what you write about. And I still write about that stuff but there are other things that have seeped in through the years."
She mentions a handful of titles for the new songs -- "TMI," "Reality Mentality," "Hard to Grow Up," "Different" -- then says, "I think we're just touching on some of the social commentary on things that are happening today, but hopefully doing it in a fun enough way that you don't come off as necessarily criticizing people." |
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