Released exclusively in Europe, it was enthusiastically praised by U.S. The completed product, entitled Joan Jett, featured the songs she'd cut earlier with Paul Cook and Steve Jones, as well as new material. Laguna had worked with a variety of groups, from the Archies to the Steve Gibbons Band Cordell was a bubblegum legend who had co-written the Shondells' "I Think We're Alone Now" and "Mony Mony." The two men offered to help Jett with her career, but their plans were delayed when she was diagnosed as having a heart-valve infection and pneumonia, which kept her hospitalized for six weeks.īy 1980, Jett had recovered and began putting together her solo album, with Laguna and Cordell producing. Although the film was never released, it proved to be very important to Jett's career, for while working on it, she met record producer Kenny Laguna and producer-writer Ritchie Cordell. Returning to Los Angeles, she produced an album for a punk group known as the Germs, then played the lead in the film We're All Crazy Now, which was loosely based on the Runaways.
She cut three songs with former Sex Pistols Paul Cook and Steve Jones, but the songs were released only in Holland. In the spring of 1979, Jett went to England to try to establish a solo career, but with little result. After that, Jett, who felt that they were turning too much in the direction of heavy metal, quit the group, which collapsed shortly thereafter. The Runaways played their last gig in San Francisco, on New Year's Eve, 1978. The Runaways became immensely popular in Japan, where three of their records went gold, but they continued to be largely ignored in their own country, where they were dismissed as "jailbait rockers." Some of the only favorable notices they ever received in the United States came after they served as the opening act for the Ramones' 1978 tour. With their amateurish playing, "the stigma of Fowley-as-Svengali, and a blantantly sexual presentation-lead singer Cherie Currie wore lingerie onstage-they often seemed more like tease objects than real musicians." Conflicts within the band caused Currie and Fox to quit in mid-1977, and Jett, who already wrote most of the group's material, took over Currie's role as lead singer. Their lack of musical experience was painfully evident on the album, however. In May 1976, their debut album, entitled simply The Runaways, was released. "They were presented as five hot, tough high-school-age girls out for sex and fun (a fairly novel idea in pre-punk days)," according to the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll. Sandy West, Lita Ford, Cherie Currie and Jackie Fox were soon recruited through newspaper advertisments, and Fowley won them a contract with Mercury.
Krome asked Jett, an acquaintance of hers, to join the group Fowley was forming. He had come up with the idea for the Runaways after meeting Kari Krome, a thirteen-year-old lyrist with a repertoire of songs about sex.
She got her chance to act out her fantasies at the age of fifteen, when she met producer-manager Kim Fowley. Rex, Slade, Sweet, and Gary Glitter, but her most important inspiration was Suzi Quatro, whose tough-girl stance she sought to imitate. Jett's family moved from the East Coast to Southern California when she was fourteen, and that same year, she was given her first guitar as a Christmas gift. But the raucous young singer/guitarist proved her critics wrong by launching a solo career and developing into "one of rock's most contemporary women-both serious and trashy, tough and tender," in the words of Rolling Stone contributor Rob Tannenbaum, who adds, "In this decade, Chrissie Hynde, Joan Armatrading, and Annie Lennox are the only other women who have confronted rock stereotypes as successfully and interestingly as Joan has." Many people in the rock establishment felt that Joan Jett's musical career was finished after the Runaways, the group in which she got her start, disbanded when Jett was just nineteen years old. Born September 22, 1960, in Philadephia, Pa.
0 kommentar(er)
