I LOVE JOAN JETT

Full disclosure: This one is personal.

I met Joan Jett and her manager, songwriting collaborator and bandmate Kenny Laguna—whom I also love—in the trenches of the 2004 election campaign to deny George W. Bush a second term. At the time, I was a senior advisor to former Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, based largely on the fact that he had been the first governor to sign into law the “civil union” rights of same-sex couples. This wasn’t even gay marriage, but in 2000 he put his career on the line with that signature. He stood up for my rights. It felt like my obligation to ensure that his act of political courage got support in return, especially from my community.

When I was seeking out other high-profile names to support Governor Dean (David Crosby, Graham Nash, Whoopi Goldberg and Melissa Etheridge all signed up), I happened to notice a name on the donor list: “Jett, Joan.” Really? So I called her cold. Like many others, she had also been impressed by Dean’s strong opposition to the war in Iraq. Fast forward to January of 2004 in a hotel ballroom in Des Moines, where Joan and a small band (including Kenny on guitar) were playing to a packed crowd of Dean supporters. Joan was doing something she had never done before—changing the lyrics of her iconic “I Love Rock ’N Roll” to “I Love Howard Dean!” The crowd was loving it, singing louder on every chorus, when suddenly the doors burst open and the ballroom was invaded by a phalanx of chanting Young Republicans itching for a brawl. Joan and Kenny never left the stage (although memory conveniently fails me on what she actually said to the young Shrubbers, all of whom looked like they had been recruited by either J. Crew or J. Goebbels). Order was quickly restored by hotel security, but that surreal experience taught me two invaluable lessons that remain with me. The first is that if you ever find yourself at the barricades, you want Joan Jett and Kenny Laguna with you. The second realization that hit home with me viscerally in that Leni Riefenstahl moment was that, yes, it really can happen here.

With that bracing thought top of mind, it was clearly time to reach out to Joan as she, Alanis Morissette and Morgan Wade prepare to embark on an election-year tour of our fractious nation. Since our halcyon days on the campaign trail, Joan and her band, The Blackhearts, became 2015 inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Even with eight platinum and gold albums and nine Top 40 singles under her belt, Joan is still serious about giving it her all at every show. I caught up with her during a break in rehearsals for the upcoming tour.

Joan, when you’re out on the road now, or certainly in the last eight years, is there a different kind of attitude? More anger and division? Or do people come together at your shows and leave that all behind?

I’ll tell you, David, I expected to see it—that somehow it would have to manifest itself at concerts. But I have not really seen that in the venues. I think people just want to come together. I think, regardless of what side you’re on, everyone’s tired of this shit. I expected to see more, but I really haven’t seen anything.

Music unites people in a way that no rhetoric, no politician can do. Now I want to go back to the beginning, musically. When you were in the all-girl band The Runaways, all anyone wanted to talk about was sex. It was not sexual orientation. They wanted to ask about sex. They just wanted to know everything…

Salacious stories!

And you said, “If we start talking about sex, that’s all they’re going to want to talk about.”

Yes. Well, that was me, specifically, because I don’t know what the other girls spoke about. But I do remember the interview. I don’t remember who he was or what it was for, but I was young. I was probably 16, right after the band started, and it was something about our sexuality—probing questions. And I thought, “You know, if you answer this guy, that’s all the questions you’ll ever get. You will never get a question about music.” This was my higher self. I could feel it was like another being coming and saying “If you answer that, this is what will happen. These are the consequences; make the right choice.” And so I just steered him away from it. I don’t know how I answered it. Something like: “I don’t want to talk about that; ask me a music question.” They were trying to brand The Runaways with that anyway.

We didn’t get support from feminists because they thought we were using our sexuality for publicity, so we controlled how each of us presented ourselves and lived with that. It was our doing, you know? Rock & roll says, “This is what I’m going to do to you,” where pop music is more like “This is what you can do to me.” That’s how I felt about it at the time, that pop music was more of a passive sort of thing, where rock & roll is an active, “I’m gonna take charge of the situation” thing—which then, of course, scared people. You could put them in two categories: people who appreciated strong women and people who didn’t. And they get very hostile.

You had people throwing things, right?

Hey, it’s political. What The Runaways were doing was political. The music we were doing wasn’t necessarily political, but the actions made it political because we were girls, or young women, achieving equality in a world that we thought might be more equal. But we realized rock & roll is just as bad as all the other ones, so that idea falls by the wayside and you realize you’re in the fight of your life, no matter where you go as a woman, to be able to be looked at as an equal.

In the ’70s you were dealing with a lot of transition in the way sexual roles were viewed. You had David Bowie…

Yes.

I grew up in L.A., but I didn’t go to the L.A. club scene in the ’70s. What was the underground scene like then?

Well, I missed the heyday. So I got the tail end of it the last four or five months of when it was really happening. There were no more rock stars hanging out in the Hollywood clubs, but the music was still great and there were still teenagers coming to dance to English rock & roll hits. And that’s why I got turned on to people like Bowie—I had already been turned on to him—but I heard so much by going to those spaces. And T. Rex and Suzi Quatro. All this music American kids weren’t exposed to, and it was three-minute rock & roll songs with these big choruses and gang sing-alongs. It was cool and I loved it. It became part of my writing style, combined with the punk influences, basically just three-chord, catchy rock & roll music.

But because it wasn’t mainstream, there were a lot of gay people who came to those places because they felt comfort in not being othered.

Oh, definitely. And even if they didn’t know what was going on yet, they were just places where you didn’t really feel judged, you know? And I didn’t feel judged either. It’s still such an important aspect of people’s being able to feel safe in that kind of space and it’s harder to do these days. There’s so much negativity around people just trying to figure out what’s going on with their own selves. I don’t think that’s healthy in general. It’s not healthy for the people figuring it out and it’s not healthy for the people judging them.

I guess I always felt kind of androgynous even though I know I’m a woman; I like being a woman. But I definitely have both energies and I’ve known that since I was a kid, and I never really put a word on it because I didn’t feel it was necessary. But I’m finding out now, more and more, that it’s necessary for other people sometimes to make that connection. And that’s why we always do a song called “Androgynous” in the show, no matter where we’re playing in the country. I sometimes expect to get pushback on that from the audience, but I haven’t. So I find that to be hopeful. I think that anybody who wants to know who I am as a person in my private life, all they have to do is listen to my lyrics. It says who I am over and over and over again.

“Crimson and Clover.”

All of them, all the songs. There’s one song, “Everyday People,” that I like to do everywhere, no matter where we play. And you know, sometimes, I guess I expect less of a response in certain states, but that has not been the case. It goes over just as strongly and just as boisterously in every place and sometimes even louder.

So that’s telling me something. But I’ll tell you, when I’m playing guitar, I gesture a lot with my hands, right? And I have a guitar pick in my hand like this, right? And I’m strumming. When I hold my hand up, my thumb and my forefinger are holding a guitar pick so people can figure out what that looks like, it’s kind of like you’re making an “OK” symbol with your hands. I’m playing guitar and I wave my hands up in the air trying to get people to sing and play, sing along or clap, and it’s near the end of the set. One day there was a guy up front, and he was going, “I see what you did there! I see what you did there!” Like I was showing a secret sexual thing. And he kept throwing it up again at the end of the show. I don’t know if he said what it meant to him, but I said, “You don’t listen. Why aren’t you listening? I said the words; listen to the words; listen to what I’m singing.” But you’re a Rorschach test for people. A lot of times they see what they want to see. Then he said, “OK, you gotta keep it quiet. I understand.”

So people will make things into what works for them and I can just be me, you know? I’m not going to chase down every person and say your idea about me is wrong. It’s exhausting and that’s not my job. I’m here. I’m doing the best I can. I’m singing and trying to connect.

The thing about this year that we’re in, the overt hostility to women, the overt homophobia, drag queens getting attacked, transgender people, particularly, just going through hell around the country. That all seems to be on the rise.

But I don’t believe that’s coming from the people themselves. That’s a message sent down from on high. And I don’t mean on high like God. God doesn’t concern Godself with that. If you really believe in God, God will judge you when it’s time to be judged—and how dare people believe they are the messenger on earth. I find that quite blasphemous, and I’m agnostic.

Well, that’s the perfect way to end this. I don’t know if you know that I marched in my first Gay Pride parade in 1977 when I was still sort of closeted. I had just met Harvey Milk.

Oh, wow.

I was 21 years old in Santa Cruz. There were 400 people, and I was terrified of being seen. Today, Pride is a huge thing. It’s global. But I wonder as you watch this now, if you think particularly in this time where we’re seeing LGBTQ rights under attack from on high with people who have power—the Supreme Court and the state legislatures. Do you think it’s important more than ever now for Pride? In this case, it’s gay pride, but it could be pride for women or the Black Lives Matter movement. Do you think it’s important to have that visibility now?

I think it’s really important. And I think your intent is important too, because, as we all know, it’s a numbers game. You want to win more people to your side. And it can be easy to be hostile, but that’s not what’s called for now. We have to reach out and welcome people to our coalition, because it’s important. And as someone who has been around the world and has played in many countries, remember, this is one of the few countries in the world that’s never had a dictatorship. Maybe Canada. Almost everyone else has dealt with it. So be careful what you wish for, you people who want a strongman vibe, because once it’s there, you can’t get rid of it. I think we’re seeing that people value their rights because they recognize that it’s not just going to be gay rights back to the states this time, as it was abortion rights. Because then it’s going to be contraception, it’s going to be all marriage rights, including marriage across races. They’re going to go for all of it, you know? This election is going to be about democracy or the end of it. People have to realize it, and they better vote like it.