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Rock icon JOAN JETT to fellow badass women: 'Stick to your guns'
from: nypost.com
By Chuck Arnold
When a 13-year-old JOAN JETT got the electric guitar she asked her parents for as a Christmas present, she was ready to rock. But that all changed after she went to get her first guitar lesson.
"I was all excited. I said, 'Teach me how to play rock 'n' roll!'" the music icon, who turned 60 on Sept. 22, tells The Post. "And the guy said to me, 'Girls don't play rock 'n' roll.' That's probably the first time I realized, 'OK, this electric-guitar thing is gonna be a pain in the butt. I'm gonna get a lot of crap.'
"What he was saying [was], it's not that girls can't master the instrument, but that you're not allowed to play that kind of music."
But despite that early discouragement, Jett played on and launched a groundbreaking career -- first as a member of the all-female band the RUNAWAYS, then as a fierce frontwoman with the BLACKHEARTS -- that earned her a spot in the testosterone-heavy Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2015. Her life as a snarling, punk-spiked pioneer is captured in the new documentary "Bad Reputation," opening Friday, which takes its title from Jett's classic 1981 single.
The film shows just how far Jett -- born Joan Larkin in Wynnewood, Pa. -- has come since she went from playing Beethoven and Bach on the clarinet to cranking up her guitar to the sounds of Free's "All Right Now" and T. Rex's "Bang a Gong (Get It On)."
"My parents engaged my dream," she says of her father, James, who was an insurance agent, and her mother, Dorothy. "They really stepped up when I was a kid, told me I could be anything I wanted to be. I wanted to be an astronaut, I wanted to be an archaeologist, I wanted to act before I played music."
"Bad Reputation" recounts how Jett got her glam-rock education when, as a teen, she frequented Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco in Los Angeles. "It was very eye-opening," she says of the Sunset Strip club, where she could dance to David Bowie while mingling with Iggy Pop.
All of that glitter rock sparked her interest in forming her own all-girl band. "I figured, 'Hey, if I play guitar, there's gotta be other girls in LA who wanna do what I wanna do,' " says Jett, who is now based on Long Island.
But after founding the RUNAWAYS in 1975 with drummer Sandy West, Jett was too shy to be the lead singer -- a position that initially went to Cherie Currie. "I could barely get on the stage without being petrified," Jett says.
Still, Jett did take a leadership role in fighting the sexist treatment that the "Cherry Bomb" band received. "I remember being asked some question about sex," she says of one interview, "but I thought, 'If I answer this question, that's all we'll get asked about is sex. Ask us stuff you'd ask Keith Richards.' We wanted to be spoken to like musicians.
"You had a lot of people not taking us seriously, a lot of name-calling, people throwing stuff at us onstage. People got nasty when they realized we weren't gonna just back down."
But after some band drama led to the RUNAWAYS' breakup in 1979, Jett fell into a dark place, feeling like "a failure" and partying too hard. Following a serious heart infection, she thought, "I'm gonna die if I keep this up," so she contemplated joining the military.
"I was angry," she says in the film. "I didn't know how to make sense of a world that would give girls s - - t for playing guitar."
Shortly thereafter, however, Jett's morale and creativity got a boost from meeting producer-songwriter KENNY LAGUNA, who describes their longtime relationship as "a marriage without the sex" in the film. Making the "Bad Reputation" album together at The Who's Ramport Studios in London, they didn't have to pay for their session time until they could because "we didn't have a dime," says Jett.
But after sending a five-song demo -- including the hits "Do You Wanna Touch Me (Oh Yeah)," "Crimson and Clover" and future No. 1 smash "I Love Rock 'N Roll" -- to labels, they received 23 rejection letters, some from personnel as high-profile as Clive Davis. So they formed their own label, BLACKHEART RECORDS, which is now run by Carianne Brinkman, Laguna's daughter and one of the documentary's producers.
Through an enduring career with 12 studio albums since the RUNAWAYS, Jett still very much loves rock 'n' roll -- and her signature song that perfectly declares her devotion to the genre. "I had to make peace with ['I Love Rock 'N Roll'] long ago, that that song was a big hit and the song people were going to associate with me," she says of the tune, originally by the Arrows, which she discovered while on tour in England with the RUNAWAYS.
And she's still fighting the good fight for women in rock. "There are women and girls in every city playing rock 'n' roll, so they're out there," says Jett. "But the barriers are definitely still there."
Change will come, Jett says, when "women are really in places of power, of real power." Until then, she believes, "people are gonna have a tough time giving women their due, and that's why you have to stick to your guns. You have to go for it and not let people dictate what you're gonna be in life because of your gender. |
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