Joan Jett and I Sat Down for a Chat. This is What Happened.

When I re-watched the interview I did with rock’n roll trailblazer Joan Jett in 1994 for MuchMusic, it felt just as relevant today. I was proud to interview Joan Jett, a tenacious, ambitious, hardworking musician who rocks as hard as any guy, and proudly supports women who rock along the way. I remember playing “Bad Reputation” as a DJ in Montreal night clubs in the 80’s.

When she belted out “I don’t give a damn ‘bout my bad reputation,”  all my bad-ass girlfriends would shout the lyrics on the dance floor along with her. She was proof that women can make it in a man’s world on their own terms. Here are the highlights of my interview with Joan Jett, Queen of Rock’n Roll. For the record, she was everything and more that I hoped she’d be.

Erica: Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders said in a press conference recently that women can't rock. She said that they're physically unable to hold up a guitar properly, that their chest gets in the way. And that they basically just can't rock. 

Joan Jett: Well, no problems with me. (laughs) I find that kind of an interesting comment, especially coming from Chrissy.  I think that women can rock just as hard. It seems to me that she said that women don’t emote as much as men and that's the reason - that men are more aggressive onstage. I happen to think that women have just as much aggression, not negative, but on a positive physical level. Just like sports, women are able to get their aggressions out. I think that it's a really necessary thing and women shouldn't feel funny about getting up on stage and sweating and things like that, just as men shouldn't feel badly emoting if they have feelings and if they want to cry. I mean you're literally cutting off half of who you are if you do that.

Erica: This songs on this album are clearly being written from the perspective of a woman. Tell me about some of the songs and how they only could have been written by a woman.

Joan Jett: Okay, the first song is called Go Home. It's about being stalked about attacked and attacked. It's really about winning about overcoming. It's supposed to be an empowering song. And unfortunately, it was written about what happened to a woman named Mia Zapata in a band called The Gits in Seattle, who was raped and murdered. I wanted to take the situation and try to turn it into a positive thing for other women saying, look, you know there's a lot of evil out there now and you can't just leave a gig and say oh I just live two blocks away, I'll be okay, I've done this a million times You can't look at life like that unfortunately any more. You've got to learn how to be responsible, whether it's just learning the simple basics of self defence, whether it's stepping on someone’s insole, whether it's screaming into someone’s face - just anything that can help get you away from the situation for those few seconds to call for help. 

Erica: What about your song Spinster?

Joan Jett: We wanted to bring a positive connotation and meaning back to the word spinster. Originally Spinster had a very positive meaning pre Industrial Revolution. Back then a spinster was a name given to the women who had become very adept at something, so if you would call someone a spinster that was a real compliments. Just like not anybody could be a blacksmith. It was sort of like a compliment people paid to women. And then over the years as certain women decided for whatever reason not to get married the negative connotations slowly sunk in. What we wanted to do with this song was to say gentleman bachelor equals single and spinster also equals single. It shouldn't be negative, it should be positive. 

Erica: Let's talk a little bit of Riot Girrrl movement. Some say that you were the first Riot Grrrl. Can you tell me about the movement.

Joan Jett: I wasn't there at the beginning. What I can tell you is that it was a group of young women, either late high school or college age, that would deal with many problems facing women, whether it has to do with abuse - all kinds of abuse -  family abuse, verbal abuse, physical abuse, and it seemed like nobody would ever listen to them. So the way these women were able to deal with it, almost in a therapeutic way, was to write fanzines, and they would write to each other across the country, and they became known as the riot grrrls. It pretty much started out with a band called Bikini Kill, and also a band called Bratmobile, there's several bands considered the initiators of the movement. 

Erica: Would they consider themselves feminists?

Joan Jett:  Oh yeah, definitely. They were very hardcore on that level!

A side note, Joan Jett produced the Bikini Kill EP and wrote a song “Activity Grrrl” about the younger generation of female rockers which was included on her album Pure and Simple, the album she was promoting during our interview.

Joan Jett continues to be a role model for women like me, still rocking at the age of 62. Watch the whole interview here.