CONFESSIONS OF A HIGH FLYING JETT

Joan Jett is about an hour late showing up for our interview at the offices of the Howard 'the Ed Sullivan of publicists' Bloom Organization, but after finding out about the day she's been through no further excuses are necessary. Seems she's spent the last few hours being root canaled into submission by some D.D.S. and, as one whose four caps and a bridge can speak volumes on behalf of the wondrous long term effects of pure granulated, I sure can sympathize. (Every time I go to the dentist, I have this terrible tendency to giggle, fantasizing that I'm Jonathan Haze in Little Shop of Horrors and my good pal the doc is Jack Nicholson, the masochistic undertaker; and while we're on the subject, who's bright idea was it to dub it 'root canal therapy' as opposed to simple root canal demolition work?) I am tempted to ask Joan if she thinks hanging around with the former Sex Pistols Steve Jones and Paul Cook might have proven to be contagious, but since she's feeling rotten enough (sorry, I couldn't resist that one)...

I quickly find out that the a.m. part of Ms. Jett's day hadn't exactly been the bee's knee's either. She and her new band, the Black Hearts, have been rehearsing at the rented house smack in the middle of little-old-ladyland, better known as Long Beach, N. Y. —figuring, I guess, thaf the old biddies wouldn't mind, being either totally deaf anyway or scared stiff of venturing across the street in anything but packs to nicely ask them to stop since Long Beach is only a hair's breath 15 miles away from Manhattan where terrible things go on right next door and your best bet is to never open the door or the phone or the mailbox, etc. But, as luck would have it, the neighbors next door to Jett are jocks. 'One's a boxer and the other one's a hockey player,' moans Joan, 'and they stormed in this morning and threatened to beat us up if we didn't stop playing. They're bigger then we are, so we stopped,' she sighs. 'Thank goodness, we're going off on tour soon.'

"I think it's a good album; I think people'd be stupid to pass it up."

* The queens of noise were also having their share of internal strife through most of '78, due mainly, Joan asserts, to the direction that the band seemed headed in when they recorded their last album, (English release only). 'We were working with this producer, John Alcock, who's worked with Thin Lizzy—really a heavy metal type guy. Him and Lita(Ford) and Sandy (West) wanted to go in a more heavy metal direction, more guitar-oriented songs, and I didn't want to do that. I wanted to stay mainstream, like the Runaways had always been pretty much. I could see it coming—John, Lita, and Sandy thinking that maybe I stood in the way of their plans. Even though they never said it, I just knew it. So at the beginning of '79,1 quit.'

For awhile, Joan says, she just kinda hung out in L.A. , trying to figure out what to do. 'I was pretty screwed up for awhile,' she says. 'My then-manager, Toby Mamis, asked me if I still wanted to do music and I said yeah, so he got in touch with Phonogram in Europe and they were interested, so I went to England and cut three sides with Steve Jones and Paul Cook; two of the three came out as a single jn Holland only, but the company wasn't doing anything right, so that kinda fell through.' Back to L.A. again for the summer, during which time Joan produced an album for premier local punks, the Germs. 'They were big Runaway fans, and when Slash Records asked them to do an album, they asked me to work on it with them, I guess 'cause I'd done a few albums and been in recording studios and stuff. I didn't even know what to do really, I just listened real hard. It was fun, being on the other side for once. '

Of course, dealing with adverse conditions is not something that Joan Jett is unfamiliar with. As chief songwriter and guiding light of the much maligned Runaways, Joan Jett has already been through hell and back. Caught between punk and new wave, the Runaways never quite fit in anywhere; their gruelling tour with the Ramones in the early '78 was the real 'Black and Blue' tour, if you ask me. The two most misunderstood bands in America—and two of the best, too—doing everything humanly possible to open up some ears around our somnambulant continent, and all they got out of it was the beginning of the end as a band. 'We did our last gig on New Year's Eve at the end of '78 in San Francisco,' recalls Joan. 'We just decided to pack it. in, 'Cause we'd been working so hard and it just seemed like no one was paying any attention anymore. The press was treating us like shit'—Herr Fembacher notwithstanding—'and both our American labql and our British label dropped us. It had gotten really depressing, to work that hard and have no one taking us seriously.'

In August, Jett worked on a movie that had originally been planned as a Runaways film but which had been passed on by the rest of the girls originally. 'About a year before, these guys wanted to make this B movie with us and no one wanted to do it but me,' Jett says, 'And when they asked, me after we'd broken up if I still wanted to do it, I agreed. They got some actresses to play the rest of the band. It was weird; the film was never released, I guess it was pretty dumb, actually. It was supposed to be called We're All Crazy Now. I suppose if I get real famous, then they'll put it out tb capitalize,' she shrugs.

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The experience wasn't a total loss however, because it was while working on the film that Jett hooked up with producers Kenny Laguna and Richie Cordell, popmeisters best known for all those gloriously simple, toe-tappin' Tommy James and the Shondells records. ('They'd flown out to L.A. to do the soundtrack for the movie and we hit it off real well,' says Joan.) When work]on the movie ended, Laguna and Cordell started to work on an album with Jett, and then, more bad timing, she wound up in the hospital for six weeks with pneumonia and a heart infection ('Sheer torture,' she sneers). Once Joan was well, work resumed and the finished product wound up coming out last summer on, Ariola in Europe and England. An American deal should be forthcoming sometime soon, but in the meantime, Jett. and Laguna have to put it out as an independent here in the U.S. 'We decided to put it out ourselves here 'cause the kids are having to pay ten or twelve bucks for it as an import,' says Joan. 'We put some different stuff on it, so it'd be a little different.'

What is on Joan Jett, both imported and domestic, is some of the neatest hard-rocking pop music I've heard all year. Jett is, quite frankly, a great rock 'n' roll singer, and though under the numbing thumb of Kim Fowley she had to take a back seat to Ms. Currie, it was always her songs that made for the best moments in Runaways sets. Laguna and Cordell have really done well by her, tapping the tough but sensitive strengths of her vocal style and beefing things up with subtle and effective backdrops—short and sweet guitar mangles, spiffo T. James/T. Roe percussion some tinkling ivories here and there—and the net result is an Unassuming, all out fun hard rock record that reminds me of exactly wh&t it's supposed to remind me of, namely the source of Joan Jett's inspiration: Gary Glitter, early Suzi Quatro, Slade. All.stuff that in retrospect was much more important towards shaping today's sounds than most people would liketo admit. That fine line on the edges between heavy metal and bubblegum; it'll do it every time. 'I think it's a good album; I think people'd be stupid to pass it up,' says Joan and I'll second that emotion. You have no idea how many people I've pulled a blind date test with with tracks from this album like 'Bad Reputation,' 'Jezebel' and 'You Don't Know What You've Got.' And you have no idea how many double takes and jaw drops I've seen when I've informed the unsuspecting listeners that this is Joan Jett, the former Runaway's album. ,

'You know,' says Joan when I ask her about how she looks back on the whole Runaways experience, 'People just sorta got this impression of the band; people who never even heard us said that we stunk. And no one but us took ourselves seriously as a band.' How much did this have to do with Fowley? I ask. 'Well, he made it sound like he did everything, like if he said something, we jumped and told us what to wear and what to say. Kim did do a lot for us, but in general, we did things pretty much the way we wanted. He probably wanted us to be raunchier tjVan we were,' Joan laughs, 'And we were pretty raunchy, i look back with lots of different feelings, though. I had so much fun sometimes in that band. We were real buddies, and had some great times. In Japan, boy...women are like second class citizens, and we were their saviors. They'd give us new brushes to brush our hair with, so they'd get pieces of our hair and we interviewed on their equivalent of the Tonight Show; even old ladies knew who we were. Everybody knew us. I mean, they'd kill each other to retrieve empty Dr. Pepper cans!'

Joan Jett's been through quite a lot in her barely out of the teen years, and if Joan Jett is any indication, there's plenty of hot stuff comm' in the future. And she's got class. How else would you describe someone who dedicates their album to the Baltimore Orioles, who she rooted for as a kid in. Rockville, Maryland. And she's got the right kind of class. Her fave Bird: you guessed it, Boog Powell (chew yer Herman Franks on that one, Rick Johnson!).