Later exposed to Top 40, Jett remembers hearing a diversity on the air that she doesn’t quite hear the same way today-Stevie Wonder, Grand Funk Railroad, Alice Cooper. The stuff she heard, she wanted to make those sounds too. Growing up, Jett heard the music of Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Glen Campbell, and others. He was saying rock ‘n’ roll is sexual and you don’t want to hear girls talking about sex and owning it.” So, he wasn’t saying girls can’t learn instruments. “In school, I played clarinet with other girls who played cello. But the flabbergast, the idea that “girls don’t do that,” drove her immediately and clearly toward something new.
In her head, she knew she was just a person-a girl, yes-who simply wanted to learn to play the electric guitar. “He was so taken aback,” Jett says, “that I was like, ‘Oh my God, what have I hit on here?’”Īt that moment, Jett was stunned. To her surprise, he was flustered and blurted, “Oh, no! Girls don’t play electric guitar!”
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“I got such a reaction,” Jett says, “when I wanted to learn how to play electric guitar.”Įarly on in her playing days, recalls Jett (born Joan Marie Larkin), she approached a teacher and said to him that she wanted to learn the instrument. But for Jett, it all began with an electric guitar and an incorrect-yet-know-it-all teacher. From starring in the all-girl group The Runaways as a teenager to fronting her band The Blackhearts and rising up the rock charts while wearing studded leather jackets. Being who she is, Jett’s life has been one of great attention. How to step away and “just be the witness.” It’s a philosophical exercise as much as lifting weights is a physical one. She wants her mind occupied so that it does not veer into phony territories. She likes variety, things to investigate. There are plants and the walls are colorful. Her two cats, Felicia and Cleopatra, lay about. One wall of her living room shows the ocean. The ‘I’m great, I did all this.’ I always try to go back to, ‘No, I am just the vessel and where this comes from, I don’t really know.’” You’ve got to be really careful-the me, me, me aspect of it. Because I want to remember that I am not this person. Instead of living starry-eyed, Jett wants to live a philosophically-minded life, to be one of those people who leans into encouragement and not dismissal. Namely, maintaining a personal openness to the world and to others. But to let in the various permutations of what that word- legend-means it can cloud or blind one to what’s important. She’s rebellion personified, which is and was no easy task to achieve. Yet, at the same time, Jett works to consciously sever herself from the potentially egotistical sensibility that somehow the musical sun could ever rise and fall at her behest.
Hers is a nuanced perspective in which she hopes her name can help carry on her music and the important songs and messages she’s been a part of. Captivating rock star Joan Jett thinks about her legacy, but not in the way many others might.
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