Joan Jett

Rejection as a Launching Pad

In 1980, no major record label wanted anything to do with Joan Jett. Twenty-three labels rejected her first album, deeming it too raw or not commercial enough for a woman. But she decided the system wouldn't dictate her career, and she founded Blackheart Records with Kenny Laguna.

That move, born of pure business survival, made her the first woman to own an independent record label. And time proved her right in the most decisive way possible.

The gamble paid off.

Before that slam of the door in her face came the noise of Los Angeles. In 1975, she formed The Runaways at just sixteen years old. It wasn't a manufactured product, even though Kim Fowley tried to control everything from behind the scenes. Jett brought the rhythmic structure and the steady gaze that New York punk would later inherit.

The group broke up in 1979 over creative differences and the accumulated fatigue of endless tours that nobody was keeping in check. But Jett didn't go home. She stayed in England to record three songs with Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols. That's where the sound that would dominate radio three years later began to take shape.

The Camera and the Distortion

In 1982 the success of I Love Rock ‘n Roll broke the industry's mold. The song stayed at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for seven consecutive weeks. It was a technical phenomenon built on a simple riff and a direct production that left no room for unnecessary frills.

Movies were quick to come calling. In 1987 she made her big-screen debut in Light of Day. She played Patty Rasnick opposite a Michael J. Fox who was trying to shake off his friendly TV image. Paul Schrader directed the film, and Bruce Springsteen wrote the title song specifically for her.

Jett's performance was dry and free of frills. She wasn't seeking critical acclaim so much as capturing the toughness of bar bands in the industrial areas of Ohio.

That film earned just under eleven million dollars.

During the nineties, her work focused on producing other bands. In 1992 she produced the album The Gits and got involved in the Riot Grrrl movement. Jett understood that her place was as much on stage as behind the mixing board, helping bands who faced the same contempt she had endured years earlier.

Total Control of the Catalog

In 2010 she served as executive producer of the biopic The Runaways. Kristen Stewart was the one who brought her to life under Floria Sigismondi's direction. The film wasn't a massive box office hit, but it helped establish the value of the intellectual property of their original recordings.

Movies were always a secondary but necessary refuge.

In 2015, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was a belated honor for someone who had already sold millions of copies without the help of major labels. But Jett didn't stop at tributes; she kept a concert schedule of more than one hundred dates a year until global logistics came to a halt in 2020.

In 2018 the documentary Bad Reputation premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. The film examined her career from a purely professional angle and avoided the sentimentality of other music biographies. It detailed how she bought the rights to her own songs so she wouldn't have to depend on third parties.

In 2022 she released Changeup. It's an album made up of twenty-five of her own songs re-recorded in acoustic format. Production was handled by Kenny Laguna and Thom Panunzio at the Blackheart Studios in New York. The record was released on her own label under catalog number BH4800.