Interviews: Jett Lagged

Interviews: Jett Lagged

Joan Jett

Before I reformed my wicked ways, I plied the dark alleys of the fourth estate. Touring through my back pages, I intend to report here on some of those bits and pieces.

I got into bed with Joan Jett and thought, not for the first time, that truly, I have the best job in the world. She was very Joan Jett, too. Rail thin, her crow black hair styled in a cross between a mullet and Jane Fonda’s from Klute, a stripe of black kohl across her eyes, red bandana tied around one wrist, black leather studs on the other. I wasn’t sure if she wasn’t going to kiss me or beat me up—and, either way, I’d be okay with it.

She brooded and she burned in that big bed in that small Manhattan hotel room, guitars and hair blowers on the floor, pizza boxes and beer cans on the table. She was sort of like an amped up version of the way Kristen Stewart played her in The Runaways years later, except this Joan Jett, the real Joan Jett, the one who the night before in a packed club belted out her hits such as “I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll,” “Crimson and Clover,” “I Hate Myself For Loving You,” and “Bad Reputation” was garrulous, talking non-stop, jet-lag anxious, caffeinated jittery. “I can’t get used to getting off the road,” she said, sitting up, crossed legged, flexing her hands like a boxer before getting gloved. “I never unpack. I can’t. I’ve got to run, even when I’m in bed. It’s fun, this life, working hard, getting blisters on your fingers from playing guitar all night, getting cramps from dancing around the stage, getting so tired sometimes because it’s like an hour and a half non-stop moving around horizontally with no time to breathe, like sex. 

She bursts out a guffaw and her head collapses onto the pillow, getting back into her groove, “And all the smoke and the lights—it’s like over a hundred degrees on stage—and if you stop for water everybody screams, ‘Hurry up, you—’ well, ‘hurry up’—and you think you’re just going to collapse any minute, just fall down in exhaustion and die, but you don’t, and that makes it all even better. God, I love it. Rock ‘n’ roll is better than sex.”

         During all of this, and though we’re both lying down in the bed, she never stops moving, twitching, arms flailing, miming a Pete Townsend guitar swipe or a series of Iggy Pop contortions, sitting up, flopping down. Being in bed with her is exhausting.

         Maybe she’s high, or maybe I’m low. She gets on about record companies and her original band The Runaways, and the enthusiasm turns sour. “We were slammed from here to eternity,” she says about the band, “because we were teenage girls playing sweaty rock ‘n’ roll, and then,” her eyes torch up, “they tag us with this sexual image.” She looks away, half disgusted, half embarrassed, “From there on then it was jailbait.”

         “I was always thought it was about the anger,” I offer.

        “Anger?” she says, angrily. “I’m not angry. I’m aggressive. There’s a difference. Men get to be aggressive because people will cut you down just because you’re rowdy and loud and wanna have a good time because otherwise what else is there, and that’s aggressive living, and that’s okay for a man. But for a woman, she’s angry like it’s this bad thing. You know what? I am angry. I’m angry at people who think I’m angry.”

        She rolls on her side facing me, head in hand, “Doesn’t it boggle your mind the way people twist? The same people who said to me two years ago, ‘Please, get lost,’ now say, ‘I always knew you were great.’ I’ve seen it repeatedly and it’s disgusting. But you don’t have to be in a rock ‘n’ roll band to get that. You see it in entertainment, you damn well see it in politics. I bet you see it in every hut and street corner in the world. That’s the human condition, isn’t it? And if that doesn’t—you know—the lies, the bullshit, the double-dealing, the raw manipulation, if that doesn’t make you angry, then you’re just not paying attention. That’s why the only truth there is, the only thing real, sometimes, I feel, is that time on stage, that time when the lights are hot, the music is loud, you’re soaked in sweat, your hands are numb, you’re playing out of a near death experience, and everyone in that room is with you, for that song, maybe a note, you got them, they got you. Yeah, I live for that. I got the best fucking job in the world.”

I lay down corrected.