Joan Jett's first music teacher told her girls couldn't play rock and roll.
Her first band was panned by audiences who wouldn't accept women as rock stars.
Her first solo album was rejected by 23 record labels.
But that didn't stop her.
This is the real-life story of Joan Jett.
Joan Jett was born Joan Marie Larkin on September 22, 1958, in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania.
She asked for and received her first guitar for Christmas when she was 13 years old and
was told at her first lesson that girls can't play rock and roll.
Luckily, Jett didn't listen and kept rocking.
Her family soon moved to West Covina, California and soon started going to the area's glam
rock epicenter, Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco.
She changed her last name to Jett and modeled her now-famous look of black leather, black
eyeliner, and a black shag haircut after British rocker Suzi Quatro, who inspired her musically
as well as aesthetically.
Jett told Rolling Stone,
"What Suzi Quatro did for me was make me realise that girls could be successful playing rock
and roll.
I realised that if I wanted to do that, there were probably other girls like me who probably
wanted to do it too."
Jett met drummer Sandy West at Rodney Bingenheimer's via producer Kim Fowley.
Fowley introduced them to other musicians, with the idea of forming an all-girl rock
band.
The Runaways' official lineup consisted of Joan, Sandy, lead guitarist Lita Ford, bassist
Jackie Fox, and lead singer Cherie Currie.
Joan and Kim Fowley wrote most of the Runaways' songs, including the famous "Cherry Bomb."
In 2010, Jett explained to The Irish Times,
"We wanted to be The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin ... We wanted to play dirty, sweaty, sexy
rock 'n' roll, so when people told us girls couldn't play, that wasn't what they meant.
They meant that girls couldn't play rock 'n' roll because it implied sex, which means that
they're in charge and owning it."
But sexist magazine reviews focused on their youth, gender, and looks instead of their
music.
"Rolling Stone hated the Runaways."
And behind the scenes, Fowley was abusive, calling the band members, quote, "Dog sh*t"
while he kept them on drugs and without money of their own, and encouraged the 16-year-old
Cherie Curie to wear underwear onstage and pose for scantily clad photographs, comparing
her to "Lolita."
Audiences were also abusive: Jett told The Irish Times,
"It's difficult to get across to people what it's like to be spat at ... After the gig,
I would be dripping in spit, and just put my head in my hands and cry out of sheer frustration.
I just didn't get what the problem was, but I just can't back down ... And being carried
off was the only way you'd get me off the stage, not by scaring me off it."
The Runaways released five albums in four years and toured the world.
They found more respect and success overseas, with number-one albums in both Australia and
Japan and a reception in Japan that Jett compared to "Beatlemania."
But behind the scenes, things deteriorated.
According to Edgeplay, Fowley continued to mistreat band members, denying them schooling
and health care and playing them against each other.
Bassist Jackie Fox quit the band and was replaced by Vickie Blue, who was then replaced by Laurie
McAllister.
The Runaways played their last show on New Year's Eve 1978 in San Francisco and officially
broke up in April, 1979 after disagreements about their musical direction.
Jett took the dissolution of her band hard.
In her documentary Bad Reputation, Jett said,
"How did I personally deal with the crumbling of the Runaways?
I drank a lot, starting at eight in the morning ... I was angry.
I didn't know how to make sense of a world that gave girls sh*t for playing guitars."
But things soon turned around for Jett when she began working with producer Kenny Laguna,
who would eventually become her manager.
Laguna told the Tahoe Daily Tribune in 2007,
"I worked with her on a film based on The Runaways' career, called We're All Crazee
Now, and had a vision of what could be.
She was fantastic, but no label would take her on.
I love Joanie, but never wanted to be her manager.
But she became a cause."
After a frightening hospitalization for a heart infection, Joan went to Europe and recorded
and released a self-titled debut album.
Back in the States, 23 labels rejected the album, so Laguna and Joan formed independent
label Blackheart Records and released it themselves.
Laguna said,
"We couldn't think of anything else to do but print up records ourselves, and that's
how Blackheart Records started.
It was more or less Joan's idea to do it ourselves."
An advertisement announcing that Jett was looking for "a few good men" led to the formation
of the Blackhearts.
The band started playing around Los Angeles and toured Europe before moving to New York.
Jett told People in 1982 that she wanted a male band because forming another band with
women would have been, quote, "sacrilegious."
Laguna's friend Neil Bogart re-released her self titled solo Joan Jett as Bad Reputation
on his new Boardwalk Records label.
The album's lead single, also called "Bad Reputation," remains iconic to this day — it
was named the 29th best hard rock song of all time by VH1 in 2009 and serves as an answer
song to Jett's critics and naysayers.
But it was her next album that would make Jett an international superstar.
Joan's first album with the Blackhearts, I Love Rock and Roll, came out in 1981 and was
a surprise smash hit, reaching number two on the Billboard album chart.
The title track, a cover of an Arrows song that Joan had performed live for years, became
one of the best-selling singles of all time, topped the Billboard charts for seven weeks,
and was the third most popular song of 1982.
The album remains Joan's most successful one, having sold ten million copies.
"I Love Rock and Roll" is Billboard's 56th All-Time Top Song and is in the Grammy Hall
of Fame.
The song's popularity was bolstered by the constant play of its video on the newly influential
and groundbreaking MTV, featuring Joan and the Blackhearts moodily swaggering and sneering
through a live performance in a dive bar.
The Blackhearts followed up this video with a meta one for "Bad Reputation," depicting
the rise to stardom that resulted from "I Love Rock and Roll."
Magazines that had insulted the Runaways now ran articles like "Joan Jett is a Very Nice
Girl" and "Selling Records Is The Best Revenge."
1982 also saw two more top 20 hits, including her cover of "Crimson and Clover," which became
notable for her decision to keep the pronouns and sing about loving a woman.
The Blackhearts followed I Love Rock and Roll with two less successful albums, 1983's Album
and 1984's Glorious Results of a Misspent Youth.
Neither had a hit single, and the latter only limped to #67 on the Billboard album charts.
Critics weren't impressed either, with Rolling Stone writing that Album, quote, "doesn't
make a very strong argument for Jett as a major talent."
And the 1986 album Good Music fared even worse, only getting to #105 on the billboard album
charts.
But things turned around the next year, when Jett appeared on the big screen opposite Michael
J. Fox in the drama Light of Day.
Critics panned her performance, but her theme song for the film — which was written by
Bruce Springsteen — was a minor hit, landing at #37 on the Billboard charts.
That paved the way for her big 1988 comeback album Up Your Alley, which included the Top
Ten hit "I Hate Myself For Loving You" — which charted at the same time as former Runaways
bandmate Lita Ford's hit single "Kiss Me Deadly."
But that success was short lived.
By the early 90's, the band was floundering again.
Blackhearts drummer Thommy Price said that touring had become a grind.
"We were doing all of these one-off shows.
We'd be going to crappy little towns, doing a state fair ... I went through a phase where
I didn't really give a crap because they were gigs I felt like we shouldn't be doing."
Jett didn't feel the same way, though.
"It's always a different audience, you never know really what to expect, so you never really
get bored, ever."
Though commercial success eluded Jett, artistically the decade led to a new creative flowering,
as a resurgence of interest in punk led to the rise of Grunge and the Riot Grrrl
movements.
After her record deal ended, Jett and producer Kenny Laguna regained creative control and
Jett began working with L7, calling the first time she saw the band live a, quote, "religious
experience."
She also worked with Bikini Kill and recorded an album with the punk band the Gits after
the murder of their lead singer Mia Zapata, with proceeds from the album and tour going
to the murder investigation.
Jett's sexuality has been a subject of discussion and conjecture throughout her career.
She has never officially come out, yet has been an LGBTQIA+ icon for most of her time
in the spotlight.
In Edgeplay, Cherie Currie revealed that she and Joan had been romantically involved during
the Runaways.
Their relationship is also part of the plot of the 2010 movie The Runaways, which was
executive produced by Jett.
When asked about her sexuality, Jett told Rolling Stone she was, quote, "all-inclusive,"
and told Out that fans should go ahead and, quote, "assume away."
When her documentary Bad Reputation screened at the LGBTQ film festival Outfest, though,
some members of the community questioned its inclusion since Jett wasn't technically out.
Jett responded to the criticism, telling The New York Times,
"The more you want me to say it, the more I won’t say it.
I’ll just do it.
I’m telling my story every day onstage, loud.
And if you choose not to hear it because you want me to do it in the way you want me to
do it?
Fine, I’m not going to make you happy then.
If this isn’t for you, bye.
But I think I declare every day, all day long.
[...] You know what I say?
Eat me."
Despite her love of and pride in the Runaways, Jett didn't appear in Vickie Blue's 2004 documentary
Edgeplay: A Film About the Runaways and refused to let them use any songs she had written.
Of the film, which included allegations about manager Kim Fowley's behavior, Jett told the
Montreal Mirror
"If there's gonna be a Runaways movie, it should be about what we accomplished, the
tours we did, the bands we played with, the people we inspired.
I'm not gonna participate in a Jerry Springer fest, bottom line."
After Kim Fowley died in 2015, Jackie Fox came forward and revealed to the Huffington
Post that he had a history of grooming young girls — and that he had publicly raped her
when she was in the Runaways while other band members, including Jett, watched but did not
intervene.
Through a representative, Jett denied any knowledge of the incident.
She told The New York Times,
"If he hurt people, that's not good.
It's hard for me to listen to that.
But I can't really speak to what they're saying."
There's no question that Joan Jett has earned her place as an icon.
And she's still going strong, from playing the Warped Tour in 2006, to producing films
like The Runaways and Bad Reputation, to making social distance music videos during the COVID
quarantine.
Entrepreneur, film producer, rocker, and fashion icon, Joan Jett's career is a testament to
her ability to keep working and stay true to herself and her vision in the face of hardship
and failure.
In 2015, she was honored with the rest of the Blackhearts and Kenny Laguna with an induction
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
In the Blackhearts' Hall of Fame essay, writer Jaan Uhelszki called her
"...the last American rock star, pursuing her considerable craft for the right reasons:
a devotion to the true spirit of the music."
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