![]() ![]() I don’t want to have a lackadaisical attitude about these things. For me, you’re playing it in front of new people every time, so it’s new. When I ask if she feels she might go mad if she has to crank out I Love Rock’n’Roll one more time, she looks appalled: “Not at all. Jett loves to find new ways to play old songs – “You find all these nooks and crannies that you didn’t know were there,” she says. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesĪlong with a tour, there’s a new album, Changeup, a collection of acoustic versions of old tracks including Crimson and Clover and Bad Reputation. The Runaways in 1976 (l to r): Jackie Fox, Joan Jett, Sandy West, Cherie Currie and Lita Ford. It forced you to slow down, and a lot of people have trouble with that, me included.” It was pretty distressing, but then it was a gift in other ways. There’s this song that Kenny and I wrote many years ago called You Don’t Know What You’ve Got, and that’s actually the case. “It’s the longest I’ve ever gone since I started in the business. Jett spent much of the pandemic at home going stir-crazy, so she couldn’t be happier to be back on stage. “Lift your head up, Kenny!” Jett barks at him, when he lets his camera slip. Nonetheless, they sound just like a married couple with their bossing and bickering. Their relationship is entirely platonic – it was Laguna’s wife, Meryl, who suggested he seek out Jett after reading about her in the British music press. As Laguna puts it in the documentary, he brought the pop while she “brought the menace”. He and Jett have worked together since 1979, when the Runaways fell apart and she graduated from rhythm guitarist to lead singer of the Blackhearts. As a keyboard player in the 1960s, he performed on a string of bubblegum hits including Mony Mony by Tommy James and the Shondells. It’s not like I went around punching people, but people were intimidated and that was purposeful.”Īlso on our call is Jett’s longtime manager, producer, co-writer and best pal Kenny Laguna. “I loved the androgyny, or the gender-bending thing or however you want to put it,” she reflects. Liza Minnelli in Cabaret was among the inspirations for the teenage Jett’s look. Her hair is just as it ever was: dyed black and heavily layered in the classic rocker’s shag cut. Dressed in regulation black vest and jeans, she is toned and athletic-looking. “Excuse my casualness here,” she says, slumped in an armchair, iPhone propped up on her knees. In a low-ceilinged room illuminated with fairy lights, she is relaxing after a late night playing her first concert in months. It’s late afternoon at Jett’s Long Island home when we speak via video call. In 2010, Kristen Stewart played her in the biopic The Runaways (with Dakota Fanning as the band’s singer, Cherie Currie), while in 2018, Bad Reputation, Kevin Kerslake’s documentary named after one of Jett’s signature songs, traced her rise from snarling teen to rock’n’roll grande dame. As the decades have passed, veneration of Jett as a feminist pioneer and all-round force of nature has grown. At 63, she continues to release albums on her label, Blackheart Records, and, pandemic notwithstanding, tours relentlessly. Since those heady, chaotic early years, Jett has barely stopped. The Blackhearts were Jett’s second band her first, the Runaways, in which she played rhythm guitar, had barged their way on to the Los Angeles punk scene in 1976, making their debut with the raucous single Cherry Bomb. This year marks 40 years since I Love Rock’n’Roll, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ cover of a song originally by the Arrows, reached No 1 in the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for seven weeks. “And it’s not just in rock’n’roll, it’s everywhere.” ![]() It wouldn’t be the last time a man tried to put her in her place: “It’s the hand in the face telling you ‘You can’t do this’ or ‘Don’t do that’,” she says. ![]() Let me teach you On Top of Old Smokey instead.’” Jett never went back for a second lesson – instead, she bought a book and taught herself to play. “And he said to me: ‘Girls don’t play rock’n’roll. “I went in there all excited and said to the teacher: ‘I wanna play rock’n’roll,’” she says. W hen Joan Jett was 13 years old, she had her first lesson on the electric guitar her parents had given her for Christmas. ![]()
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