JOAN JETT UNCHAINED

“You picked an interesting time to visit.” Michael J. Fox has his tongue planted firmly in cheek as he stands in the backyard of a small bar in Cleveland. The yard is paved with stones and covered with puddles, extras, equipment and four journalists, to whom Fox had addressed his remark.

It’s the last week of shooting for director/screenwriter Paul Schrader’s movie Light Of Day. Things are moving a bit slowly; tempers are still good-natured, but the surrounding cloud of tension grows more palpable each day. It’s not fun to pay union wages on weekends.

Without going into too many details, Light Of Day is a family drama concerning a brother and sister and their relationships with each other and their parents; the siblings are also in a bar band. (Once upon a time, Light Of Day was called Born In The U.S.A., but Bruce Springsteen liberated the title before the movie even began shooting; he contributed the current title song.) Fox plays the brother and the sister is played by rocker extraordinaire Joan Jett, in her major motion picture debut.

Jett is tired. She’s been working on the film longer than practically anyone except Schrader; first the acting coach, then music rehearsals for the movie band, then the shooting...The days get longer towards the end, the weather turns cold and drizzly, scenes are done over and over and over again for different camera angles. And it’s Cleveland. She wants this to be over; she wants to get back to her abiding passion, music.

Less than a month later Jett is ensconsed in a NYC recording studio, rested and excited. Her hair’s still dyed the lighter brown it had been for the movie, but other than that there are no traces of the foggy daze that dogged cast and crew alike those last days in Cleveland. She has a deep tan, a ready smile and her usual seemingly boundless energy and curiosity. She, producer/songwriter Kenny Laguna (who also co-manages Jett with Meryl, his wife) and producer Thom Panunzio are adding flourishes and overdubs, part of the recording process that is, in its own way, just as stunningly tedious and exacting as the filmmaking process—and just as incomprehensible at times to the casual observer. It is an interesting time to visit.

This latest technological process will produce Jett’s newest LP, at press time to be called Contact, it is her fifth album and her first for a new label, Blackheart/CBS. The new label is, in itself, a cause for celebration within Jett’s camp. Into a successful but not exactly smooth career— which could optimistically be described as character-building—Jett’s former label, MCA, apparently doing its best not to interrupt her obstacle course, considerately threw more obstacles her way, as reported and observed by those close to the Blackheart camp. The two albums she and the Blackhearts released during their MCA tenure, Album—the superior follow-up to 1981 ’s multi-platinum / Love Rock ’N Roll—and Glorious Results Of A Misspent Youth, didn’t, shall we say, receive the full benefits of MCA’s formidable promotional wallop.

Laguna delicately explains the band’s unhappy working relationship with MCA. “We wanted to leave MCA before Glorious Results; we wanted to leave MCA about three weeks after we had our first record out.” MCA, he says, overshipped Album with the result that even though it went gold quickly, it appeared to sell very badly. “So instead of the company getting behind us and trying to salvage a little dignity, what they did was they started to get angry at us for their mistakes. Three weeks after the record, Irving Azoff, (President of MCA) was our enemy. And then when we delivered our next record, Glorious Results, he gave us a hard time and held the record up for two months. Then he didn’t let the record happen. He didn’t ever react when something good happened to the record.

“They wouldn’t let us off the agreement,” says Laguna, when the band wanted out of the recording contract, “and they wouldn’t let us exist in the agreement.

“Azoff never looked at it like, we have a problem to overcome together. He looked at it like it was a war between wills. That was the crux of the relationship. The whole point was that he didn’t seem like he wanted to win and have hit records as much as he wanted to get even with me and Joan for being on his label and not selling two million records.”

Glorious Results was released in late 1984, and roughly a year later, due to the assistance of a high-powered lawyer wellversed in extracting musicians from unhappy contracts, Jett was released from MCA. A week after that, she landed the Light Of Day role (“If we had gotten the movie part a week earlier,” Laguna says, grinning, “I’ll betcha MCA would never have let us out”).

Jett, sitting in an empty office between takes, understands the teetering dynamics in her recording situation—she could either be under a lot of pressure in her first record-new label position, or feel tremendous relief.

“Yeah,” she says, “but you also sit there and think—what about all the other albums that you feel were really good that never got a shot?” She sighs. “It’s frustrating. I say, ‘If I could just have this song now!’ But...life goes on, and you write new songs. I’ve got new songs that I’m really excited about that I can’t wait to do.”

The tunes in progress that weekend include a PMRC theme song “Just Lust,” which is an anthem in the vein of “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll”; a very neat Beach-Boysmeet-the-Rolling-Stones textured production called “Good Music” and a rap song called “Black Leather.” That’s right—a rap song, written by ex-Grandmaster Flasher Scorpio and colleague Reggie Griffin, with lyrics that are surprisingly personal, proudly defiant with a warm, loyal core, which pleased Jett (who added the melody and the chorus).

“It’s real nice to know that if people want to, they can really find out what I’m like,” she says. “It’s not just this big, bad image—a mean bitch. If people really want to look, they can find out what I’m about. A lot of people can’t deal with you on your own terms people in certain positions that should be able to, can’t.”

Jett wants to add different flavors and ideas to Contact without changing her style or sound, hence the rap song and the decision to use musicians other than the Blackheads (guitarist Ricky Byrd, drummer Lee Crystal and bassist Gary Ryan) on several of the cuts.

Even in rough form, the fledgling LP’s songs are impressive. Jett is focused in her direction—and intense quaity that also came in handy as an actress—and keeps her music honest, straightforward and exuberant, treading that fine line between craft and spontaneity.

‘‘Sometimes I think there’s a split between creative people,” Jett says. “There’s creative people who think completely differently than I think; I think I go pretty much on instinct. Other people will really dissect things, analyze them; they’re very artistic about their art. Where other people just sort of do it the way they feel it, which I think is my category.

“I think the film was a growing step, in a way,” Jett continues, “doing that kind of work, getting different emotions and being in front of the camera and so many people. Onstage I’m used to doing that, being spontaneous you’re used to having people see you do things that you don’t know you’re going to do—like mistakes.” She smiles. “It was just a different kind of work, very concentrated.

“I think it’s going to help me, just dealing with people, maybe working on control and controlling myself in ways I didn’t know I could do. If I know my concentrationg is good, I can yell at myself and say, ‘Joan, get on the ball. Go work.’ Sometimes you can help beat up yourself a little better.”

Jett is hoping to get back on the road with the Blackheads in the fall for yet another of the band’s dedicated world jaunts (“It’s a definite two-year tour, as far as I’m concerned,” Jett says gleefully. “Maybe three.”), not letting current events get in their way.

“I’m not playing musical politics like that,” Jett says about the question of touring Europe. “I think if you cut it out, if everyone stops going and says, ‘Oh, fuck the Europeans,’ everyone’s going to get really hostile. It makes everything worse. I don’t want to be reckless and careless and dangerous, but it’s not right to do it to yourself and I don’t think it’s very fair to do it to your fans, because they don’t control what goes on in world situations just like we don’t. I still want to go to Russia,” she adds, “that’s still one of the places I really want to play in my lifetime.”

While you’ll see Jett and the Blackhearts coming soon to a city near you, you won’t see a corporate sponsor attached to her high-tops. Management has already turned down massive amounts of money for the use of Jett’s name and image, and once even forced a promoter to remove a sponsor’s advertisement from behind the stage.

“I’ve never been an endorsement kind of person,” Jett says. “I’m not a billboard. I’m not there to sell stuff. But I will admit the pressure to do it is tremendous. And it only gets worse; it’s worse now than it was a year ago. A lot of times they can’t understand—you have to do literally nothing to make a fortune. But that little bit of something you have to do is...” she pauses “...a big deal. To me it’s like being a prostitute. Not that that’s bad if that’s what you want to do, if you know that’s what you’re doing—if you say, ‘Hey, kids’ll believe me, I don’t care, I’m not ashamed, I don’t give a shit, I don’t use this product, I’m just doing it for the money.’ Then, you know, fine. But don’t do it and then pretend that somebody tricked you into it or something.”

Though the 26-year-old Jett has perhaps grown more thoughtful, more mature, she has neither mellowed nor compromised her music or her image, as she finds a lot of people do as they grow up.

“I think a lot of it’s conditioning,” she says. “What is it they say that I’ve got...arrested adolescence? They say you can’t wear sneakers the rest of your life, you can’t wear jeans— why?! Why can’t I? It’s not required for my job that I change clothes. People grow up and it’s like they’re expected to go into the mainstream of life and they can’t speak the way they used to because it will offend somebody; they can’t dress the way they used to because it will offend the people who they’re getting the money from to live.

“I notice that people do grow up and start acting differently, they hang out with different people, they change their lifestyle— which, I think, for some people is for the better,” she chuckles, “but there’s a transference, it’s like all of a sudden they shut off that part that was always excited about music and what’s going on here, what’s going on there.” She shrugs. “I guess we all do things when we’re growing up and then we let go of them. It’s just a pattern of growing up.”

Laguna comes into the office and leans against a broken soda machine. Time to get back to work.

“Did she pass the CREEM audition?” he asks.

With flying colors.