Joan Jett on 'The Runaways'

I might be out of my element with Joan Jett. I know movies and I know interviews, but Joan Jett doesn’t take any fluffy Hollywood sh*t. In a roundtable interview for The Runaways, the story of her first all girl band, Jett owned the room, making her in your face statements however she pleased.


Q: How surreal was it the first time you saw the movie and Kristen’s performance?


Joan Jett: It was pretty surreal, just the whole thing, but I’ve got to tell you I was on set, I did see her so it wasn’t a shock. Having had a chance to see her do it on set, it wasn’t a shock because I’d been seeing her like that. I’d been hanging out with her as me, so yeah. The surrealness is more seeing it as The Runaways I guess.


Q: How real is it from what you remember?


Joan Jett: Well, it’s a movie. It’s a parallel storyline. It doesn’t have every detail. There’s a lot left out but there’s a lot in there, meaning every day was so full there could have been 50 other incidents that could’ve been in there. But yeah, it definitely gives you a sense of what it was like to be in The Runaways. The essence is there for sure.


Q: Is Kim Fowley’s in your face management style the way rock n’ roll has to be done?


Joan Jett: What, with an eccentric manager? Well, remember, it’s a movie. I think that there was more humanity and warmth and camaraderie that existed during this time that I think maybe didn’t come across. You have a lot of great experiences and it’s a family. You follow any family around, you’re going to see elation, you’re going to see disharmony. That’s just the way it is, but Kim, I don't know if that’s how rock n’ roll has to be done.

Q: Thinking about how you’ve succeeded with that band and with another, you’ve done it different ways, right?


Joan Jett: Well, pretty much just doing the music thing. That was really the first and foremost in my mind. I’ve been lucky enough to have other successes. I’ve done some acting and a lot of different things, but mostly it’s the music. My experience with Kim, look, the whole thing when it ended was very depressing. It was a struggle to get through that and just make it through that, of this thing that I loved so much and I really believed could change the world and really thought we were good and genuinely, naively believed this. To see the reaction be so harsh and so mean spirited because we’re playing music? Playing f***ing rock n’ roll? It just was weird and I didn’t get it. It made me really angry and I had to figure out what it is that’s so threatening with people, why people are so threatened for girls to play rock n’ roll. I just don’t get it. I still don’t get it. Be told, “You can’t play rock n’ roll.” What are you talking about? I’m sitting in school with girls playing cello and violin, playing Beethoven and Bach. What are you saying, you can’t play rock n’ roll, what does that mean? Can’t master the instruments? Are you saying no, you can’t do it socially because rock n’ roll is Sticky Fingers’ album cover. Rock n’ roll is Robert Plant standing there with his shirt open like this. Go take a listen to "Whole Lotta Love" again and listen to how dirty that song is, how it drips, how sonically it’s tactile. You can feel it. It’s not overproduced and done in reverb. It’s like you were in the room. When I listened to that, I wanted to make those sounds. Teenagers are sexual. Teenage girls are sexual. Sorry, it’s the reality. To dismiss it like it should not have a voice is very insulting to teenagers. I see this now upon reflection but at the time I wasn’t thinking of it like that, but that’s definitely the fact. Kids are out there having these experiences so why are you making us the villain? If guys are doing it, it’d be like whoa, man, the guys, they know what they want.


Q: We loved when you stood up to the music teacher. I assume that really happened?


Joan Jett: That was real life but I didn’t have a fight with the guy. Really I went in, said I want to play rock n’ roll and knowing that you have to learn the basics, now it makes sense to me that he would try to teach me something like that. At the time, I didn’t want to hear it. He tried to teach me On Top of Old Smoky. I sit through the lesson, I leave and that’s it. I never went back. I bought one of those Learn How to Play Guitar Chords By Yourself and it shows you the diagram where to put your hands and I took that in my room, sat with my singles and learned how to play guitar. But, I didn’t fight with the guy.
Q: What was it about your writing with Kim that those songs hold up?
Joan Jett: Yeah, Kim and I, I think beyond the songwriting, we had a bond in the sense that the mission, we were on the same page with the mission of creating this band and getting girls out there to play rock n’ roll. It’s something I really believed, so Kim to me was so many different things. He was a teacher. I had no choice but to learn how to write songs because Kim is kind of s stream of consciousness guy sometimes and he’s a very big personality so we’ll just start saying words. I’ll have the guitar and I just kind of play what comes out. I had never really written anything before so all this stuff is very fertile. It was just fascinating to me how I was so creative at the time and things just popped out. I was mostly a music and melody person. I could be a word person but that was more after the fact. Yeah, it was very stream of consciousness, a lot of the songwriting, but I think what we wrote about were a lot of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. It’s what we were living and it’s what I knew.


Q: What did you think when you met Kristen Stewart?


Joan Jett: Well, I liked her. I liked her right away. I thought she was really great, but it took a minute for us to get comfortable. I’m sure I just started talking to her. I just started blabbing and talking about The Runaways, three hours of just extraneous details, why I formed a band, what it meant to me, what I was trying to achieve, any stories I could remember talking about, the songwriting stuff, just anything I could remember about The Runaways. Private things, things I’d never tell anybody. All that stuff I spoke to her about and I also asked her, “Are you going to cut your hair.” When she said yes, it really gave me a sense of comfort and that she was very committed to becoming me. I burned her a bunch of CDs. I burned her all the studio records, I burned her bootlegs from Cleveland and the Whiskey and from the Starwood which is a club that used to be here that’s gone. So she could hear our onstage banter, hear the audience yelling. I burned her me talking at 14. I had like a half an hour of me talking to my aunt. We used to send tapes back and forth instead of being on the phone, so we’d sort of do this Maryland/Pennsylvania southern drawl thing that I had. Whether or not she utilized it wasn’t important. It was more for her to get a sense of who I was and who is this person that she’s just used to seeing pictures of black hair and heavy makeup and guitar but not knowing who’s Joan. Who’s Joanie? Who is that person?


Q: What are your feelings about Cherie Currie now and how has she changed since you worked together?


Joan Jett: On some levels, not at all. Hopefully on some levels I haven’t changed at all. I want to have learned from my life but I don’t want to be necessarily that different. I want my essence to remain and I think Cherie’s essence remains. It’s really great because I think at the time in The Runaways, we didn’t have enough communication. We didn’t sit down and talk about what’s bothering you or with any of us. Maybe things could’ve been rectified if that had happened but it didn’t and things happened the way they did for a reason. It’s great to be friends with Cherie and just because we went through so many things, you shouldn’t have that distance. I think it’s really special. I’m glad that we have a chance to do this.


Q: How would you describe her essence that hasn’t changed?


Joan Jett: I don't know. I know her as Cherie, lead singer of The Runaways. I mean, I know what my essence is. She’s got a family and a whole life apart from The Runaways which I didn’t know a lot about that. She’s an artist and does a lot of things that I didn’t know she was capable of. I only knew a small sliver of Cherie at that time.

Q: Do you have a motto for life?


Joan Jett: There’s a few of them, yeah. Some of it’s cliché. The follow your dreams thing is really important because so many people are railroaded into taking other paths by their family, their friends, people who should be supportive going, “What are you talking about?” Even just seemingly regular career paths, but if it’s not what people expect for you they kind of react funny. I just think it’s so important for people not to give in to that. Also, something about being strong. It’s about not backing down. That’s not about being mean or even tough or scary or any of those things. It’s just about don’t get pushed around. Really, I guess for girls, it has an added little bit because we have this illusion that we’re equal now, which I think is even more dangerous because it makes people lazy. Oh, I’ve arrived, we arrived, what work do I have to do now? No, we have not. No, we haven’t. When you’re still asked questions and politicians still get sh*t and CEOs still get sh*t and women directors still get sh*t and any place you point, it’s still a tough road to how, it’s important to remember to fight for what you want and what you love and what you believe in. No one else is going to do it for you.