Suburban recording studios always look the same. They’re tucked into inconspicuous blocky gray industrial parks or office buildings or shopping centers—identified by barely discernible plaques on the door. I suppose it makes sense. After all, no one wants 200 fanatics keeping watch for Joan Jett to emerge through the doors of Syosset, Long Island’s Kingdom Sound, where her third album with the Blackhearts is being mixed. So what happens is, the visitor gets a first impression that ordinary things must be going on inside such an anonymous edifice. Only when you’re past the reception desk and standing behind a mixing board, being blasted by the propulsive rock ’n’ roll of Joan’s new tunes, does the situation’s'extraordinary nature become clear.

To put it plainly—Jett recorded the multimillion selling I Love Rock And Roll album here in 1981, and now, since the start of ’83, she’s out to do it again. Take it from all the bands who couldn’t match their first hit album with another—such a sure thing is not easy to guarantee. Joan certainly knows that truth, but on this particular Saturday, she’s not about to bite her nails over what could happen. Instead, casually but attractively dressed in a red leather jacket and well-worn jeans, Joan is taking care of what is happening. Her ears perk up when she hears a discordant note; she asks her manager/producer Kenny Laguna to modify a too-loud slice of guitar. She agrees and disagrees. In short, Joan Jett is in control. Still only in her mid-20s, Jett can already count close to a decade of music busifiess experience, first in the Runaways, and most successfully, on her own. The years have taught her to go after what she wants, because if she doesn’t, someone is apt to steal it away.

Taking a break from her work, Joan and I settle into the studio’s office and recall the last time we met. On that cold day, I Love Rock And Roll had just been released, and the champagne was flowing. With an amazing grasp of the future, I ventured a guess |hat the LP was likely to be a hit. Let’s hear efitpljfftiism.. At that time, Joan was highly sensitized to the lack of respect she’d been getting from the music business establishment. If you chose to believe the legion of sordid adventures credited to the Runaways or to Jett’s big mouth, she certainly did have a “Bad Reputation.”

With an unchallengeable recorded success and sold-out concerts all over the world, has Joan Jett finally gotten respect? “God, I hope so!” she sighs loudly, then admits the acceptance was slow in coming. “There were still a lot of people who were going, ‘Awww, one-hit wonder.’ Then ‘Crimson and Clover’ was a hit. ‘Awww, flash in the pan.’ They keep movin’ these little obstacles for us to jump over, and we’ve been jumpin’ over them. Now it’s, ‘Come up with a new anthem.’ And you can’t do that! How can you seriously and sanely go about trying to beat that? If there’s a way, I don’t know it. I just know that we should try our best to put out the best rock ’n’ roll album we can.”

Joan returns to her hard-won struggle for credibility several minutes later. Where her opening comments had been outspoken and bold, she starts to consider the implications of how anything Jett says is received, possibly even distorted. Her voice grows softer, but retains the gut-straining conviction which marks whatever she seems to do. “I don’t wanna say too much to get the wrong thing back. ‘Cause what goes around, comes around. So I sit there and I don’t go, ‘Oh man, I’m a fuckin’ rock star,’ because you gotta do this for several albums to prove that you’re worth stayin’ around. I’m worried about that, first. Everyone else can say what they want. I’ll just sit here and be modest, thank you,” she says, quite sincerely.

Ever since her Runaway days, one of Jett’s greatest selling points has been the high intensity of her live shows, and a seemingly endless string of dates helped keep I Love Rock And Roll in the charts. Asked how many months she and the Blackhearts were on the road last year, Joan draws a blank, then says, “I know how many days—618 gigs in three years.” Involving an incalculable amount of energy, since Joan cheats her audiences of nothing. Already, having spent just three months at home on Long Island since ending the last tour, she’s anxious to go out again. A rest period is fine, but making the connection with her audience is the best way for Joan to recharge her batteries.

“It’s very important, because the audience feeds off you. That’s why they go to see you, to do that. And you feed off them. And if you’re lucky, it keeps going like that, and by the end of the show, it’s crazy. Usually even at the beginning of the show, it starts out with everyone excited and up in their seats. I hate orchestra pits, I despise them. Because they keep you away from the audience. If you’re in a nice theater, it ruins it if there’s a pit, ’cause then you got 15 feet between you and the first row. I mean, I hate crash barriers! I like to be close to the audience. I’m not afraid of being close, because I know how to dance away. I think enough not to get in trouble.”

And it’s a good thing she does, because for all her power, Joan is a petite young woman, wiry and compact. Yet she has no fear of being tackled by a crew of overenthusiastic rock ’n’ roll linebackers. Mentally and physically, she’s conditioned to cope with the rigors and the risks of her performance. “That never worried me, about people rushin’ the stage, ’cause the band and I feel completely at home. The stage is our turf. When the kids get onstage, they don’t know where the hell they are! I guess I’ve never been in a situation where thousands of kids have done it at once, and hope I’m never in that sort of thing.

“I have been in situations where I feel really exhausted, because we’re very energetic. It’s like a basketball game every time we play. It’s back and forth, and runnin’ around, and there’s times when everything gets really loud—I’m sure other bands can relate— when they can’t hear their monitors and it’s SO FUCKIN’ HOT,” she says breathily, as if reliving the event. “And everybody’s looking at you and you look down and think, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got seven songs to go!’ (So that’s what the band is thinking while I’m wondering if the balcony is about to collapse from all the stomping and pounding...) But somehow, you find a way. You get out of the way and grab a breath. There’s been reports of me passing out, but that’s all crap. Knock on wood, that hasn’t happened to me yet, but I can see how it could, because I know what it feels like. You close your eyes and the room spins, then you open your eyes really fast so you can get your bearings, especially with all the lights flashing.”

And for Jett’s band, particularly its leader, it’s 90 minutes of such non-stop frenzy, making the guitars wail, leaping in the air and running from one side of the stage to the other so often that the sweat flies off her shaking body, slapping hands with the dedicated front rows, doing encores until she’s hoarse. Then, blessedly, peeling themselves off the floorboards and into a dressing room where, Jett solemnly describes, “People come by and look at the band and go, ‘Oooh, ahhba, they’re stoned.’ That makes me real mad. REAL MAD,” she says with a deadly, deliberate calm, barely whispering the words, she’s just so outraged. “You’ve been there for an hour and a half, working your butt off, and people believe what they want,” Jett concludes, the contempt almost visible beneath her quiet recitation.

You have to have a semi-defensive attitude all the time, I think.

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“I’ll tell you this right now,” Joan says, after describing the extent of the Blackhearts’ 1982 tour of the U.S.* Europe and the Far East—which included days where she woke up so disoriented she had no idea ofwhat country they were in—“You certainly couldn’t do it if you weren’t healthy. It’s very taxing, not only physically, at least I always feel like you gotta be aware of everything that’s going on, because there’s people always slaggin’ at ya. You have to.have a semi-defensive attitude all the time, I think. Not mean,” she quickly clarifies, “you just always have to know if someone has an attitude about you.”

Obviously, when certain performers are particularly set-upon, they eventually come across the most effective coping mechanism: pretend it’s not happening and maybe it’ll go away. Believe me, it’s useful when you’re packed into the subway like sardines after a long hard slog at the office and at one end of the corridor a box is blasting disco, at the other end, the guy sitting next to you is tunelessly (and tonelessly) whistling, and there’s a panhandler making his way down the middle aisle. The rock ’n’ roll equivalent of tune-out was first mentioned to me by Kiss, as their tried and’true method of coping with religious fanatics. It seems to be Joan’s plan of action as well.

\ “I completely block people out,” she agrees, if they’re acting truly stupid. “And if they push me, I turn around and hit ’em, or I attempt to. But usually somebody stops me. That kind of thing doesn’t happen very much now, Or ever. It was a long time ago. Kenny jumps on anybody who looks like they’re gonnamess around with me.

“This is something you don’t really think about when you’re gettin’ into a band. You don’t think—oooh, you’re public property too, and everybody’s gonna say whatever the hell they want to about you, and you gotta deal with it because you did it. You wanted to be in a rock ’n’ roll band; you wanted to get up on that stage. Sometimes it’s better to decide, ‘say what you want.’ ‘Cause you know the truth, and your real friends know the truth.”

Which brings us neatly to one of several songs I’ve been able to hear on Joan’s new album, this called “Fake Friends.” “You don’t have to be in a rock band to have fake friends either,” Joan dryly points out. She’s never been one to mince words in her songs, all the way back to, “I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation.” But on this album, tentatively called Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, the anger, the wariness and the disillusionment are more skillfully couched in a challenging instrumental context. Her thoughts are pretty pure, but the band is working harder than ever to deliver them with conviction. As she describes it, “the songs we’ve been writin’ are harder, even though they’re simple. I find that I’m writing harder guitar parts for myself, which I didn’t do before.”

Unlike the songs on I Love Rock And Roll, many of which were live show veterans' by the time they were recorded, Jett’s new material has been played to the public at most three times. They took a break from recording to perform in a hall cleared out of the jungle in the Dominican Republic, and did a few other test runs. One tune that’s so danceable it breaks my heart may turn up under the peculiar name of “Coney Island Whitefish.” But its real identity is gently hinted at in the chorus, roaring, “You’re a scumbag,” over and over, like a foghorn churning a formerly placid sea. This tune, for all its rock ’n’ roll classicism, will have to be handled delicately so as not to frighten the lord high executioners, a.k.a. major market retailers. Unfortunately, for fear of offending the chains, Joan cannot include her power-packed cover version of the Rolling Stones’ “Starfucker” on the album, even though the song has long been a concert highlight.

“I don’t think it’s a bad word,” says Joan openly. Indeed, I have been known to mutter the very phrase under my breath on more than one occasion. “Everyone knows one. In fact, everybody probably knows a couple of scumbags. Buy it and send ’em out to people,” she goodnaturedly suggests, then says, more seriously, “It’s the way I felt at one point.” By writing out her emotional crises, Joan will undoubtedly save herself from ulcers.

While a Joan Jett album is party music, the new record does have its softer moments, too. One song, which describes the unfulfilled yearnings of a star and a fan, one in the hotel and the other in the street below, is a non-cliched “road” song that beautifully hints at Joan’s developing musical maturity. “You liked that?” she lights up. “I liked it, too. It’s sorta like a love story, but it’s so true, the lyrics are more of a states ment. It’s pretty, lonely on the road. It’s a lot different than people think it is—that you’re out there, partying. Maybe those people do, but we don’t.

“The band is your family and your friends. And except for them, you don’t know anybody . You gotta be dedicated to do this thing anyway. Being in a rock band is like a religion, in a certain sense. You can’t take it too seriously, or it’ll drive you nuts.”

At least, after many years of changing personnel, Joan’s band on this album is the identical Blackheart lineup of I Love Rock And Roll (guitarist Ricky Byrd, bassist Gary Ryan and drummer Lee Crystal) and will remain that way when they begin another monumental round of touring. Admittedly happy with her consistency in sidemen, Jett is markedly aware of the difference that has made to her own musicianship. “I didn’t realize it until I listened to the music on tape in rehearsal. Even then, when the songs sounded horrible, I could at least tell that we had grown to a certain extent. It sounds like the same rock ’n’ roll songs to me, but they’re more musical.

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“I just think it gives us the chance to use the fact that we’ve been on the road, we’ve been working with each other, I work off Lee and he works off Ricky, and we have a lot of fun doing it. So when we do the basic tracks and if there’s a guitar break, Ricky does it on the basic track. It’s very liveoriented, right off. Its been different, not having everything completely prepared. We had all the songs done, but you weren’t really sure of everything. You had to improvise. You didn’t have a long time to figure out the parts, so you had to pull it out of your brain. I’m enjoying it,” As a learning experience, I suggest.

“Yeah, that’s the #\ thing for me, is the musician, even more than the singer. Because I always played guitar, but I didn’t always sing. It feels like I’ve always played guitar. That’s what I started out as. I was too scared to open my,mouth and sing. I knew I could carry a tune but I never planned on being a lead singer. And it’s very different.”

Reminding Joan that another song has been punched up on the mixer, if she’d like to get back to the control room, Laguna says his boisterous goodbyes and returns to his production chores. Speaking about her manager with a realistic degree of admiration, Joan has little patience for those who’ve decided that Kenny really runs her life. Already, I have seen that disproved by the way she speaks her mind about her record. I’d bet they make pretty good sparring partners, motormouths ablaze with opinions.

“I trusted Kenny pretty much right off,” she admits. “I don’t know if that was just dumb, because I was destitute and so scared of everything, or if it was real. A lot of people compare Kenpy with Kim Fowley and they talk about Svengali. Kenny’s my friend. Kenny’s my manager. Kenny, I can fire,” she says flatly, decisively. “He was never intended to be a manager. I invited him to do it because I thought he could. He knows what it’s like to be in a band ’cause he was an artist, he was in bands. He knows about a lotta stuff, but he’s much more streetoriented and much more of a kid than people give him credit for. He watches out for, us and us only,” Joan points out with pride. “We like people who are honest and friendly and who wanna be real friends and not a bunch of creeps, but we really watch out for our own.” At which point Joan Jett excuses herself to get back to work, and steps inside the control room leading to the only real world she recognizes.