Pure and Simple: Joan Jett Turns 65
Celebrating the career of an iconic rocker on her big birthday
It was December of 1980 and I was backstage at a Boston club called the Channel.
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts had just finished a heated set and a still-sweating Jett was sitting in the dressing room, tugging on her black skintight pants. “This is really stretchy, like leotards – you can really bend all over the place,” she said, demonstrating. “It’s Spandex – like Pat Benatar, you know.”
She laughed. “I don’t think I wear it in the same way.”
Nor did Jett, who was then all of 22, play the rock ‘n’ roll game the same way. Benatar was all slickness, sheen and sex appeal, playing mainstream radio-ready rock, albeit dressed up in New Wave clothes. Jett, well, as the leader of a four-person hard rock band with three guys in it, had grit and sass. She was playing, as she put it, “fun rock ‘n’ roll, no big deal, we just wanna have a good time.” Stripped down, sexy (not sexist), teenage-based rock, melodic but raw, without pretension to grand insight.
“It’s dumb,” Jett told me, “but people expect a girl to get up there and use her wily ways to win the audience. And when you don’t do that and you do it with pure rock ‘n’ roll and sweat, they can’t handle it. When girls don’t do that extra little sex stuff, somehow people freak out.”
From late 1975 to early 1979, the singer-guitarist was part of the Runaways, the all-female teenage band from Hollywood pushed into the national spotlight in 1976 by entrepreneur Kim Fowley. With a scantily—clad Cherie Currie fronting the band, the “extra sex stuff” certainly was part of the mix – and Currie was just 15 when she joined the band. In the 2010 biopic, The Runaways, Fowley cracks: “Jailbait! Fucking jackpot!”
“I discovered that band,” the late Fowley told CREEM magazine in 1976. “I put them together, I gave them rock ‘n’ roll lessons, I co-wrote seven of their songs, I negotiated their album deal, I made them a worldwide publishing deal, I bought their equipment, and I produced their album. I was like Don Kirshner was with the Monkees and now – like so many bands who were put together’ – they resent that. And they want to do their own thing.”
The female Monkees?
“Never,” said Jett, with some indignation. So why the perception?
“Because that’s what Kim Fowley wants everybody to believe. You don’t realize how powerful he was with the press. He’s 6-feet-6, real skinny and real intense and he got everybody to believe what he said. We fought with him all the time.”
The Runaways broke up, said Jett, because of musical differences and frustration over consistently negative reviews. After the split, Jett said she found herself nearly broke and very confused.
“I was really scared,” she recalled. “I was mixed up; I was drinking too much. I had never given any thought to it before but I didn’t know how to do anything except this.”
Of those Runaways days, Jett said, “I don’t wanna live it down, I’m proud of the Runaways.” She considered their role important to the upcoming wave of female rockers.
Jett recorded with ex-Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones and Paul Cook produced an album by the LA punk band, the Germs, and worked on “a B- type low budget movie based on the Runaways.” It was while doing the movie that she met producers Kenny Laguna and Ritchie Cordell (noted in the rock history books for associations with the bubblegum bands such as Tommy James and the Shondells and the Archies) who pulled her up. “They recognized there’s this girl here who’s been working her butt off and no one understands her and she’s going down the drain.”
Laguna and Cordell worked on Jett’s eponymous debut album, released on their own Blackheart Records, and the partnership with Laguna, as manager with his wife Meryl, turned out to be a lifelong link. In the early ‘80s, her star ascended, scoring hits with “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” – eight weeks at No. 1 – and “Fake Friends.”
By 1983, when we next spoke, Jett and the Blackhearts had sold six million albums. Stardom had not gone to her head. “I thrive on being involved with the audience,” she said. “It keeps me knowing that I’m just like them and it keeps them knowing I’m just like them.”
The music? “We want to keep it gritty and raunchy. Yeah, you’ll find an occasional mistake here or there but they always fit it. Sort of a looseness, but it’s really tight.”
Jett, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, turns 65 on September 22, but of this I have little doubt: Joan Jett still loves rock ‘n’ roll, and she’d surely put another dime in the jukebox, baby. Well, if she could find a jukebox that took dimes and played records, of course.
Times may have changed – once again rock ‘n’ roll has spuriously been declared dead (or at least wounded, a second-tier genre) by some – but Jett remains Ms. Rock ‘n’ Roll Basic Values.
Ask her about her influences, and she’ll answer directly: “David Bowie, T. Rex, late-’70s punk — what I grew up on.” She has no pretensions; she loves to work up a sweat on stage; she lacks the ironic pose some rockers acquire over time. She’ll hang out after gigs and talk to as many fans as she can. She’s tough and sexy in an honest pre- (and post-) Madonna fashion; she was an inspiration for Riot Grrrl. Tell her that she remains the queen of the three-chord banger, and she’ll say “thank you” in her raspy voice.
The grist for her songwriting mill: “I’ve always basically written songs about relationships: good, bad or indifferent.”
In 1994, we spoke about her on-stage sexuality. “I find women being physical on stage to be a very sexy thing. I don’t think it’s an unfeminine thing, the way it was considered with the Runaways. I think it’s the opposite. I love to be able to get really sweaty. The sweatier I am, this might sound really weird, but the sexier you’ll feel.”
And of her continuing career … “I don’t feel I need a big hit single so people know who I am. I would like it to be successful because this is something I’ve never gotten into and talked about. I don’t think it’s on the top of my list to be on the `I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll’ level. But I’m not gonna lie and say I don’t want it to be successful.”
Jett has often been a covers girl; that’s always been a big part of her game. She scored a hit with Tommy James and the Shondells “Crimson and Clover” in 1981. “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” – probably viewed as her signature song – was written by the late Alan Merrill, first recorded by Merrill’s band, the Arrows, in 1975 before Jett found it and made it a hit in 1982.
A few other covers: The Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun,” CCR’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?”, Iggy Pop’s “Real Wild Child,” the J. Geils Band’s “Love Stinks,” Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner,” The Kinks’ “Celluloid Heroes,” Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People,” ZZ Top’s “Tush,” (sweet! Joan lookin’ for some tush), the Rolling Stones’ “Star, Star” (aka “Starfucker”) and AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds.”
Speaking of AC/DC, she covered the Sweet’s song of that name, a rocker extolling the proclivities of a bisexual woman – “She’s got girls, girls all over the world! /She’s got men, every now and then” – a song that certainly fits Jett’s persona.
Jett loves the British glam rock era – Bowie’s “Rebel, Rebel” and T.Rex’s “Jeepster” is in her mix. When I saw her play a 1984 concert, she covered two Gary Glitter songs, “Do Ya Wanna Touch Me? (Oh Yeah)” and “I Love You Love Me Love.” I remember those and they were great, dumb fun, but there were things we didn’t then know then, namely, that Glitter was a serial pedophile. (He was found guilty in 2015 of sexually abusing three young girls in the 1970s. He had been given a 16-year sentence and released after serving half earlier this year. Currently, the 78-year-old is on probation.)
Jett still plays “Do Ya Wanna Touch Me?” in concert, I guess being able to separate the song from its co-writer better than some. According to setlist.fm, in 2023, it was generally her third song of the night.
These days, you’ll find Jett and the Blackhearts – like Cheap Trick – everywhere. Opening big arena shows for The Who, Green Day, Paramore, Aerosmith, Motley Cure, Def Leppard, Bryan Adams this year. The list goes on. Or they’ll headline big clubs 3000-capacity theaters. At present, Jett and company are at a rare point: At rest. And no doubt readying for the next road trip.
VIDEO: Joan Jett and the Blackhearts “I Hate Myself for Loving You”
- St. Vincent Goes to the Symphony - June 10, 2026
- A Decade Without Prince - April 21, 2026
- Rob Hirst Was the Engine of Midnight Oil - January 23, 2026
You May Also Like
-
December 5, 2022 -
March 31, 2020 -
March 8, 2023
i have only recently discovered Joan Jet and I think she is fantastic .. a true rock and roller