- #JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS HOW TO#
- #JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS MOVIE#
- #JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS FULL#
Eventually, the former Casablanca head Neil Bogart was impressed enough to sign Jett to his new label Boardwalk Records, and he re-released that self-titled debut as Bad Reputation. They pressed up their own records, selling them out of the trunk of Laguna’s car after shows. So Laguna put up his daughter’s college fund, and Jett and Laguna formed their own label, Blackheart Records, to release it. Jett and Laguna figured out that Jett was great at singing cover songs, especially covers of old rock ‘n’ roll songs that necessarily sounded different if a tough young woman was the one singing them.Īfter recording Jett’s self-titled solo debut in 1980, Jett and Laguna shopped the LP around to dozens of labels. But the sound also had a connection to the punk rock and new wave that Jett, with the Runaways, had helped to inspire. That sound drew on both glam and bubblegum bubble-glam star Suzi Quatro was a particular inspiration. Jett and Laguna rounded up some boys from LA’s punk scene to form the Blackhearts, Jett’s new backing band, and they devised a whole new sound for Jett: Simple choruses, enormous gleaming guitar crunch, monster drums. Laguna became Jett’s manager and producer, and Jett moved in with Laguna and his wife in Long Beach, New York.
#JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS MOVIE#
The movie never got finished, but while Jett was working on it, she met Kenny Laguna, a former bubblegum-pop writer and Tommy James And The Shondells keyboard player. Jett was contractually obligated to act in a Runaways movie called We’re All Crazee Now!, starring alongside three women who had not been in the Runaways.
#JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS HOW TO#
Guitarist Lita Ford peaked at #8 with the 1989 Ozzy Osbourne duet “ Close My Eyes Forever.” (It’s a 4.) As a member of the Bangles, original bassist Micki Steele will eventually appear in this column.Īfter the Runaways broke up, Jett produced the Germs’ (GI) album and tried to figure out how to launch her solo career. The members of the group went on to different levels of success. The Runaways fired Fowley in 1977 and then broke up in 1979.
Even “Cherry Bomb,” their now-immortal 1976 debut single, didn’t chart in the US. The Runaways inspired a whole lot of women, but they never really became much of a commercial success. Eventually, though, Jett basically took over as frontwoman and, often, songwriter. (Jett was billed as being 16, though she was really two years older.) Jett wasn’t the leader of the band, at least at first Cherie Currie had that role. When they released their self-titled debut album in 1976, Fowley printed all of the band members’ ages right next to their name, for emphasis. All the members of the band were teenagers, and all of them except Jett were blonde. The Runaways, the fabled all-girl LA proto-punk band, came together in 1975 under the tutelage of manager and “ Alley Oop” co-producer Kim Fowley. She changed her name to Joan Jett when her parents divorced. (I love this.) When she was a teenager, she and her family moved to California’s Inland Empire, and she haunted LA’s glam-rock clubs. She’s a big enough Baltimore Orioles fan that she dedicated her first solo album to the team. (The #1 song on the day of her birth: the Elegants’ “ Little Star.”) Joan Marie Larkin was born outside Philadelphia, and she grew up mostly in the Maryland suburbs of DC. Joan Jett is a couple of years younger than rock ‘n’ roll itself. She makes rock ‘n’ roll sound like something worth loving. She makes a simple statement of musical preference sound like a rallying cry, a statement of religious truth, a come-on.
#JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS FULL#
Joan Jett uses the song to put the full force of her tough-kid charisma on display. The song already sounds totemic by the time it hits the first chorus. The song is so thuddingly simple, so elemental, that it could easily turn hokey and ridiculous. The level of swagger on “I Love Rock ‘N Roll” is out of control. She sounds both bored and annoyed about this particular 17-year-old, but she takes him home anyway. “Saw him dancing there by the record machine,” she sings. She’s got some kind of accent - “me” becomes “ maaaay” - but you can’t really tell what accent it’s supposed to be. And then a voice - strong, androgynous, raspy, distant. A drum beat that sounds like a stadium full of football fans stomping in unison. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.Ī hard, deliberate snare roll.
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