‘Bad Reputation’ Cements Rocker Joan Jett’s Legend Once And For All

There’s a direct correlation between punk rock venues and their bathrooms. The more legendary the club, the worse its bathroom. CBGB? A lone toilet sitting atop a platform at the end of a row of broken urinals in a dank graffiti covered cellar. At The Rat in Boston the toilets regularly overflowed, spewing waste on many a combat boot and sneaker. ABC No-Rio’s lavatory wasn’t so much a separate room but a corner of the first floor. Instead of a door, a long sheet of plastic hung down. I once walked in on two crusty punks having sex there, a horrific sight forever signed into my corneas and brain.

In the mid-1990s, entrepreneurial punk rockers rented a gymnasium at a People With AIDS Coalition center to put on hardcore shows, which came to be known by the anagram, the P.W.A.C. Their porta potties were almost as gruesome as the venue’s location; Lindenhurst, Long Island. Fugazi played there in 1995 and, expecting a huge crowd, the actual coalition center allowed the use of their office bathrooms. My friend Artie hired me to do “security.” I was the bathroom monitor. At one point I had to stop a short punker chick in a leather jacket from going in the bathroom while someone else was using it. “You got to wait. Only one person can go in at a time.” Then a tall middle aged man behind her leaned over and said, “Come on guy, don’t you know who this is? It’s Joan Jett.” Regardless, she had to wait her turn like everybody else, which she did, graciously I might add. The 2018 documentary Bad Reputation chronicles Jett’s ups and downs over the course of her 45 year career and is currently available for streaming on Hulu.

Like many a rock n’ roll dream, Jett’s journey begins with her first guitar, a gift for her 13^th birthday. She was told “girls don’t play rock n’ roll” by her guitar teacher but growing up in the wake of ‘70s feminism, Jett refused to believe there was nothing she couldn’t do. As a teenager she began frequenting Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco, the center of Los Angeles’ glam rock scene, and soon fell in with the people who would help her launch her first group, The Runaways.

While not the first all-female rock n’ roll band, The Runaways’ legend and influence has grown over the years. Bridging the gap between glam and punk, the group was mentored by caustic Hollywood scenester Kim Fowley, who envisioned them as a female version of the violent droogs in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Curious given its feminist slant, the film omits any mention of sexual assault allegations against Fowley by other members of the group, with Jett merely saying, “I wasn’t afraid of him.” The band later fired Fowley after learning he had arranged a risqué photoshoot with lead singer Cherrie Currie, but after four albums in half as many years, The Runaways ran their course and Jett found herself back in L.A., a has been at 21.

After considering enlisting in the military and partying so hard she got a heart infection, Jett partnered up with veteran producer and songwriter Kenny Laguna. It’s a creative and personal relationship that remains to this day. With her new band The Blackhearts in tow, she relocated to the East Coast in 1980, touring its ample club circuit and selling records out of the trunk of Laguna’s Cadillac. Demos sent to 23 labels begat 23 rejection letters so they put out Jett’s first album themselves. The following decade would see hit records, label fights, a starring movie role and lots of stupid interview questions about getting married and having kids, questions you can assume few men were ever asked out of context. The ‘90s saw Jett acting as a mentor to a new generation of female rockers and the new century has seen her cement her legend, standing in for Kurt Cobain at Nirvana’s induction into the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame, a year before getting the nod herself.

At one point, Laguna says that because of his mother, an “outrageous feminist,” he never thought The Runaways were groundbreaking until hitting “brick walls” promoting Jett’s career. Likewise, I think we now take the idea of a female rock band or musician for granted precisely because of artists like them who endured indifference, condescension and contempt. Directed by Kevin Kerslake, Bad Reputation is a rare look inside the life of an artist who’s often guarded and protective about herself and her legacy. You get the sense that Joan Jett is telling us her story, how she sees it, which is a tale of self-determination and success despite numerous road blocks and the struggle to be taken seriously. Though Jett would continually buck up against the sexism of the music industry, she didn’t waste time licking her wounds, she simply strapped on her Gibson Melody Maker and blew the doors off their hinges.

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.

Where to stream Joan Jett: Bad Reputation