People showed up at Runaways gigs to ogle, to gape. Of course they were huge in Japan.īack home was another story. The Runaways scared the shit out of mainstream America: five teenage girls singing loud, fast, and hard about anger, sex, and lust. Most peple remember Joan Jett from her first group, the Runaways, an all-girl rock band that Joan formed under the aegis of impresario Kim Fowley when Joan was around 15. Ya see, we're a very mainstream population in America now a lotta rock 'n' roll ethics are out the window.” Now, with the movie, I think they're gonna give her more respect. “In a way this is weird, 'cause you got all these artists on display, y'know: 'Here you guys-touch your artists! You've played the records, now touch the flesh!' But we do this thing on a one-to-one basis constantly with the radio stations when we tour. He started in the business when he was 15, playing keyboards, and writing songs for Tommy James and the Shondells now he's nearly 40. “It's not a Joan thing to go and do this kind of promotion.” Kenny talks fast, and constantly. But we are not on the way to the shopping center, we are going to the Gavin Report seminars at the Westin Hotel in San Francisco, a big schmoozarama of AOR and Top 40 radio and record promotion people. Kenny's at the wheel of a rented Lincoln Continental, Meryl's up front, and me and Joan and seven-year-old Carianne Laguna are scrunching together in the back seat like mom and dad and the kids in the 'burbs, and this is the way it is for Joan a lot of the time, 'cause she lives with Kenny and Meryl and Cari in Rockville Center, Long Island, when she's not on the road. And it became more important to me than politics, more important to me than anything else in this society. “Whoa! And then there was Chuck Berry! And then there was this whole thing. “I never got over seeing Jailhouse Rock,” is one of the first things Kenny Laguna, who's managed Joan for the last eight years with his wife Meryl, tells me. You can do anything.”ĭo you believe in rock 'n' roll? Do you believe in the magic that'll thrill your soul? Do you still wanna die before you get old? “And then,” she smiles, her mouth sneaking up at the corners like a leprechaun-gone-wrong, “once you get a following, nobody can take that away from you. And once you get a following, you can get more gigs, and get a bigger following. Even if ya gotta play for nothin', or almost nothin'.” “But the most important thing is to keep playing. “Yeah, I know it's hard.” Joan says in her gravel rasp that lets you know just how hard.
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