Q: Who do you look up to?
It was her birthday recently, so this is likely to get lost among the million things you'll have seen posted about her in the last little bit, but I have to talk a bit about how much Joan has meant to me over the years.
I remember when I was stationed in Germany for the three miserable months I was there, the bright shining light of the whole experience for me began with buying a copy of the rock music mag Circus, which had a big article on the Ramones. It was the first time I had heard of punk rock, and it rung a very loud bell for me. I felt the same thing I had felt as a tyke when I first heard of The Beatles. It was all laid out -- the simplicity, the power, the uniqueness. It was that original rock and roll charge. I was walking around K-Town a couple of days later and spotted a record store. I went in and started combing the stacks. This was kind of a new activity for me, but I had done it previously looking for John & Yoko stuff. The little record/music store in Calais, ME (where I loved for my last year or so of high school) had about 3 racks of records, so there wasn't very much to look at there.
In that store in Germany, which I wish I could remember the name of (It was on Königstrasse in Kaiserslautern, if I recall, and is long gone, I'm sure) I started with the Rs, because I wanted to get something by the Ramones, and I think I found my own copy of Rocket to Russia) but pretty soon I started to feel lost, because there was so much I didn't know, so I asked a clerk to help me (he spoke English very well) and he started pulling out records for me. I stopped him at about 20 things, but I noted most of them for later. I took home the Ramones, the Stranglers Rattus Norvegicus, and the first Runaways album. I loved them all, and everyone else in the barracks hated them. They sounded nothing like either the Commodores or the Marshall Tucker Band, though some of them kind of saw some value in Rattus Norvegicus because of the keyboards, I think.
But I was hooked! There were no other Stranglers records, but next payday I bought the other two Ramones albums and 3 more Runaways records, and a few other things as well. I liked the way that music was simple yet complete. I liked the Runaways especially because I had never heard of an all-girl rock bacd before. I was immediately drawn to Joan. She looked tough and smart and I was a compulsive sleeve and label reader, so I knew that she was the main songwriter for the band. My favorite of their records was the last one I got in Germany, Waitin' For the Night, which seemed more like their record than something whipped up by their svengali Kim Fowley, and had Joan on lead vocals, because Cherie had left the band.
Joan Jett is at the heart of my ideal for the way to conduct a good life. She had a dream and she made it real, blazing a trail into uncharted territory. When that dream fell apart, she kept going and remade her dream even better. She didn't let setbacks stop her. They still don't. Every hard thing that she goes through seems to be fuel for new growth. After her band the Blackhearts lost their major label record deal, she stripped down her sound and soon was making even better records, like Pure and Simple, from which the track above is taken. She's a year older than me, almost to the day, and she is still on the upswing. I consider her most recent album, Unvarnished, to be her best work yet.
Here's an example: I get this song stuck in my head from time to time:
I've known about her, identified with her, and admired what she does since we were both teenagers. If I were anyone other than myself, I would want to be Joan Jett.
