Talking About The Music with Joan Jett

Last year Joan Jett put out an album which went gold and was, by at least one account (mine), one of the most thrilling straight-ahead rock 'n' roll records since Exile On Main Street. This year Joan is putting out a new album (Glorious Results Of A Misspent Youth) which is every bit as ballsy and brilliant as the last one, featuring one track ("Frustrated") which by all rights should become the new anthem of the terminally pissed-off. So why should this woman worry? Well, if you cast your tired memory banks all the way back to 1982, you'll recall that Joan Jett put out an album called / Love Rock 'N' Roll which sold god-knows-how-manymillions-of-copies worldwide and had a big-deal #1 platinum single. Because of this, a lot of people regard last year's Album—which never went above #20 on the charts and had no real single—as a relative bomb, making this new LP sortof-a comeback attempt. All of which pisses Joan Jett off. "You do an album that sells millions of copies and people expect you to come up with this thing that will sell as many every time," says Jett, sitting in the New York offices of her management company. "Do you realize how many albums a million is? To me, if you go gold consistently, that's success."

Leaning forward on the jet black couch in her manager's office, Joan begins to pick up speed. "Everybody looks at you and says, 'Write us another "I Love Rock 'N' Roll." ' I feel like shovin' 'em against a wall and saying, 'you write another "I Love Rock 'N' Roll." Why don't you sit down, figure out what the market's gonna be like three months from now—what everyone's gonna be into then, and write a song for it.' You can't do that. You have to write what you feel. Our attitude is—this is our music, accept it or don't accept it."

Still, Joan and her manager/producer/ co-songwriter Kenny Laguna do have plenty of theories as to why Album (though a strong seller by normal standards) didn't do mega-millions. For one thing there was the "Starfucker" controversy. Jett included a terrific version of the explicit classic on the cassette configuration of Album, but when various chain stores discovered it, they had a communal conniption fit and sent all the tapes back, hurting the album's momentum. "Picture half your records being pulled from all the big chains—the Sears of the world," Joan explains. "We saw the album going up to 20, then all of a sudden 'Star Star' was found. Then the cassette got pulled and it never went further."

"Thank God there's the fans out there to play for."

"The first two weeks we lost about a quarter of a million dollars in sales," adds Kenny Laguna. "We were wrong. We went too far. But I wouldn't trade it back again. To get MCA and Universal

to back up a plan like that is a once in a lifetime chance. You really gotta laugh—that a coupla dirt bombs can put something like 'Starfucker' into K-mart."

Joan is quick to add, though, that the "Starfucker"addition was meant in good fun. "We explained to people that by including 'Starfucker' it wasn't our way of saying, 'Hey, since we had a #1 record, this is our fuck you to you guys.' We'd been doing the song since the Blackhearts got together. We figured we had this song and we wanted to give our fans something extra. The artwork on the album had been finished and we found that we had some more time on the tape, so we put it on there. Now kids want that cassette. They write to me asking how they can get it."

"We might have a bonus track on thi album/' Kenny picks up. "But it won't have curse words on it. On the new album Joan says, 'son-of-a-bitch' and 'I laugh-at-your-ass.' We sent it to K-mart to see if it was acceptable. If they said no, we would have changed the words, because that's a crazy way to get stopped."

Besides the "Starfucker"controversy, Laguna has other theories as to why Album didn't do as well as expected. "Joan's cult is a very quick buying cult—same thing with Springsteen's cult. They don't wanna wait to hear the record on the radio. They wanna buy it and hear it at home right away. So when Album was released it sold 100,000 records the first week. MCA thought they had another 'Saturday Night Cowboy' or whatever, so they freak out and start manufacturing more records. Then they flood the market.

They overstocked and so radio calls the stores and asks, 'What's going on:' and they said, 'We're not moving these,' so radio stops playing it. The overshipping was a major problem. Also, the company led off with the cut 'Fake Friends.' Now in the case of the 'I Love Rock 'N' Roll' single, it came out maybe 12 weeks after the album—radio picked that single. 'Fake Friends' wasn't a natural record. We could've told them that in two seconds."

"In the fan mail, everyone said, 'Everyday People' should have been the first single," adds Joan. "Then "The French Song.'"

" 'Everyday People,' came out after they had jammed this 'Fake Friends' down everyone's face," Kenny continues. "They put all the money behind it and said 'PLAY THIS. EAT THIS. EAT THIS. E.T. WANTS YOU TO PLAY THIS RECORD.' Then all of a sudden everybody starts hating Joan Jett & The Blackhearts. They said, 'I don't wanna play this record.' "

Ultimately, Kenny and Joan agree that perhaps the most basic problem was in expecting a no-bullshit hard-rock band like the Blackhearts to be a commercially-obsessed singles machine. Laguna terms "I Love Rock 'N' Roll," "a miracle single," and says that after its success, "all of a sudden this band, which is really like an angry-cult-punkband-that-made-it, is being perceived as a pop band and they can't compete with Rick Springfield and Duran Duran. The nature of their music doesn't compete with those bands. But they're thrown in with them in radio's mind. Joan Jett & The Blackhearts play with the same purity as Creedence. It's honest. But to be forced to come up with an anthem every time—that's fucking madness. The Stones did 'Satisfaction' but then they did albums like Beggar's Banquet which really weren't that big."

When discussing all these marketplace issues. Laguna tends to do a good deal of the talking. Joan, on the other hand, would rather talk about the music itself—something she feels completely confident about. She’s particularly pleased, then, when the subject turns to her distinctively crunchy rhythm guitar playing—which has so far been greatly underappreciated by the press. “I was a guitar player before I was a singer,” she explains. “I consider myself a rhythm guitar player who sings, not a singer who can play rhythm guitar. My guitar sound is bright but it’s deep enough to hold the rhythm together. It’s real chunky. I never wanted to play lead guitar. I was never interested in playing real fast, flashy leads. I like-rhythm. If I didn’t play rhythm I probably would have taken up bass. I like playing with the drums and bass. We play off each other all the time.”

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That band tightness comes across both live and in the studio. Like their concert sound, the whole band approach in the studio, especially on the new LP, is rousingly rough. “There’s so much technology that people can use,” Jett explains. “I guess when they get into the studio they say, ‘Wow, let’s go crazy. Let’s put echo here and do this there.’ Then when they get to a gig, they can’t reproduce it. Or maybe they’re millionaires and they can hire people to do those sort of things. We like our records to sound like the live band but with little things to enhance it, like a saxophone underneath the guitars sounds great. It gives it that deep sound. I thought ‘Frustrated’ called for a harmonica or a slide guitar but we added a fiddle and it took the place of both. It doesn’t sound like a fiddle because it’s mixed in with the guitars. I don’t use any effects on my own guitars—no digital delay. 1 want everyone to hear it just like it will sound live.”

Included on the album is a great version of the kick-off track from The Runaways 1976 debut, “Cherry Bomb”—this time featuring a whole slew of the buggers exploding in the background. The lyrics for Jett’s new songs on the LP are every bit as randy as “Cherry Bomb.” Joan admits that the image which arises from her lyrics doesn’t exactly present her as the girl-next-door. “If you listened to every lyric in my songs it would tend to make you afraid of me,” she says. “A lot of it is autobiographical, but a lot of it is incorporated from the feeling I get from fan letters. Since December we’ve been off the road doing this album and I’ve read a lot of the fan mail. They never think I’m going to wind up reading it so they let all their feelings out. You read this stuff over and over again and you see that people feel the same way? Everybody has the same problems.

I write through their feelings because I’m the same way they are. I’m a fan, too.”

As for the new LP, Kenny and Joan are a bit apprehensive about how it will be treated. “We’re real insecure about what’s gonna happen with this new record,” Kenny says. “With the right timing, it would have five hits.”

But still Kenny worries: “There’s a lot of problems with a certain kind of radio mentality, and with a lot of industry types. Like we get beat up in Billboard more than any other band. Very few bands get shit on in Billboard but they’ll bother to pick on this band. There’s an image problem some where... I just played some tracks from the new album for this Top 40 guy today and he said, ‘I don’t understand—why are you trying for a garage band sound—it didn’t work already.’ I said/ ‘WHAT??’ He said, ‘If this record doesn’t happen for you, you might as well crawl into a hole.’ ”

Kenny finds it frustrating how important radio is in keeping a band on top. “You need to make music that doesn’t depend on radio because our business is dangerous. If we could sell out Madison Square Garden once a year, that would be enough for me. That’s my goal for this group. If we could do that every year with or without a hit, then fuck everyone. Jerry Garcia and the Dead are like that. They don’t need radio, and they can still sell out the Garden every year.”

For Joan herself, the great consolation for any misunderstanding she faces in the marketplace is her legion of rabid fans. And when she discusses them, a glow comes into her eyes that is as pure as her core rock ’n’ roll. “A lot of kids write in and say—‘don’t listen to what people say’—‘we’re here’—‘we’re waiting for you to tour.’ There are plenty of people who want to hear that hard rock sound but don’t go to one side—really heavy metal—or the other—real light pop. It all makes you think, thank God there’s the fans out there to play for. It always comes back to that.”