Joan Jett: Still Setting Fire to Rock

Joan Jett and her band, the Blackhearts, will bring their high-energy show to the Shooting Star Casino in Mahnomen, Minn. this Friday in a very rare appearance in the region.

Winner of eight platinum and gold albums and nine top 40 singles (including “Bad Reputation,” “I Love Rock and Roll,” “I Hate Myself for Loving You,” and “Do You Want to Touch Me”), Joan Jett has become a rock and roll icon and secured a place for women artists in the industry.
Jett launched her career with the all-girl, teenage rock band, The Runaways, in 1975. Four short years later, she found herself without a band or a label and with a major project to finish.

This was when she met Kenny Laguna, who had been churning out tunes like “Yummy, Yummy” with Tommy James and the Shondells.

“Kenny and I came together to write songs,” Jett recalls. “Kenny’s background was a lot of lot of bubblegum and hit record exposure and lots of songwriting experience. We met to write songs for a project that I had gotten involved with in The Runaways…

I had this obligation to write songs. My manger then knew Kenny from another life and thought we would work well together and called Kenny for this sort of emergency-help-Joan-write-a-bunch-of-songs-really-quick.”

But it definitely was an odd collaboration. Laguna’s work was a musical quirk of AM radio at the time and he was very successful. But when the FM audience grew away from classical and into Jethro Tull and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Laguna’s legacy was left by the wayside.

“The punk rockers liked “Yummy Yummy,” which was really weird, but it saved my career,” Laguna said. “Even to this day when I ran into one of the Beastie Boys, he said he had one of my albums in his house, and it was like his favorite album…but Joan wasn’t impressed at all with bubblegum.”

Jett quickly disagreed. “I liked those records. I definitely didn’t look down on them or anything like that. I was impressed when I knew that you did that stuff,” she said.

“But I think we really came together because Kenny worked in England a lot in the late 70s, and a lot of my influences musically and what I like to listen to as a fan came out of England—a lot of that early 70s British Glitter music. I think we sort of came together in that sense because we liked a 3-minute catchy, hooky, big chords kind of song. We wrote eight songs together initially…

“Of course, we sort of wanted to bring that Glitter sound to our records, to do something that people hadn’t really experienced, which is that Glitter thing. I’m not so sure that we achieved it exactly. We did our version of it.”

Jett soon formed a new band, The Blackhearts, to showcase those songs. Though she had created history by proving that women could handle rock and roll, she decided not to compete with herself by starting another all-female band, so she opted for three male musicians. This was still revolutionary because Jett wasn’t just window dressing as a female lead singer. She wrote and sang her own material and could play guitar with the big boys.

In 1981, Jett shopped an album around to all of the major labels, but was soundly rejected 23 times!

“The thing that’s funny about people turning it down was the songs that they turned down. They turned down ‘I Love Rock and Roll,’ ‘Don’t Want to Touch Me,’ ‘Crimson and Clover,’ and ‘Bad Reputation.’” Jett says.

When Jett and Laguna met, Laguna had a baby daughter named Carianne.

“He took the college fund that he and his wife had started for Carianne. I don’t even know how much money it was, and we printed up 500 records of what became Bad Reputation,” said Jett.

They sold that out of the trunk of Laguna’s Cadillac. “I Love Rock and Roll” became a rock anthem, and Blackheart Records became a staple in the music industry.

While Jett was still with The Runaways, she had produced a record for an LA band, The Germs. Later, she did Circus Lupus and Bikini Kill.

“The Germs that Joan did is considered the ultimate punk album by a lot of critics,” said Laguna. “They point to that as the American equivalent of “Never Mind the Bolux,” a Sex Pistols record.”

Over the years, Blackheart Records has continued to produce Jett’s records and a number of indie bands including The Dolyrots, The Vacancies, and The Eyeliners. They even signed a couple of rappers like Big Daddy Kane. The Dolyrots had a top 40 hit late last year, charting in at about 15, which is extremely difficult for an indie band.

The Blackheart label handles its own distribution, putting CDs directly into stores. Best Buy and Wal-Mart are their two biggest retailers. In addition, Blackheart Records go directly to the Pacific Transworld chain, the corporate arm of a number of record stores including Sam Goody, Coconuts, FYE, Musicland, and Camelot.

Currently, the label is run by Laguna’s daughter Carianne, whose college fund started it all.

“Her vision has been very successful for us. She concentrates on punk rock and especially girls, but not exclusively girls,” says Laguna.

Jett quickly adds, “It definitely was a decision, when Carianne came into the situation, to move this company forward and start going after young bands and certainly letting women know they were welcome in this atmosphere.”

One of their newest signs is the Texas girl band, Girl in a Coma, which toured with Morrisey in 2007. Nina Diaz, their bass player, lead singer, and principal songwriter, said, “It’s a pleasure for our name, Girl in a Coma, to be next to the likes of Joan Jett. Definitely, she’s a door opener for female musicians and for us to be called just musicians.”

Blackheart records gave the band total creative freedom and allowed them to select their own producers in Austin, who did the majority of the record. Jett and Laguna just put the final polish on it.

Though Jett is very busy with her label and an acting career (She was on Law and Order this summer), she also makes time to entertain our troops.

She discovered when she did world tours, that much of her audiences were comprised of US soldiers from nearby military bases. Jett began making those bases part of her world tours, but kept it all under the radar for two decades. She went with the Air Force and entertained in Kosovo during the fighting there.

She’s been to Afghanistan several times, and a wily local CNN reporter outed her appearance there, revealing what Jett had been doing for decades. Though Jett permitted the filming of her appearance there, she was crestfallen that she became the spotlight and not the soldiers.

Joan Jett still keeps recording. Her latest album, “Sinner,” came out last year and “A Blackheart Christmas,” a compilation of Christmas tunes by Blackheart Records artists, is currently available for download from iTunes.

If You Go

What: Joan Jett
Where: Shooting Star Casino, Mahnomen Minn.
When: Fri, Nov 21, 8 pm
Who: 18+, 21+ for alcool
How Much: $25, $35, $45, $55
Info: http://showtix.starcasino.com