But to me they're mentors because I listened to their music and I relate to that, I learn from that. Taylor: “I have mentors that I've never even met musicians that I've never met in my life, and they're not even alive on this planet anymore. Taylor and I have together professionally, you know, playing onstage together, doing songs together, that stuff.” Joan: “It's not so formal as like, ‘Well, I'm your manager, you're the student.’ I was never an intentional mentor. But the organic response of the fans was so enthusiastic, so genuine and it came from a place of no judgement.” They like to build you up to tear you down. Taylor: “I feel like when we put out our first album, we went over to the UK and the reaction there was way more hostile and judgmental because we're talking about the 2010 tabloid prime in the UK. They wouldn’t just cut you down, they would give you a reason.” I find that even though the audiences are tough, they will still watch critically. In Britain, there’s a greater variety of music infused into the British life. I didn't know why it was so important for audience members to make those kinds of views known. Joan: “Because it doesn’t mean they liked you, but they weren’t throwing things and calling you names. Or something that felt less hostile in a lot of places to me.” I found in The Runaways and with The Blackhearts that outside of America, countries with the same views as America about women, there was a certain sort of acceptance or a curiosity. That be not just in music, but across the board. Joan: “ They’re the ones making the decisions about the money and where it goes. “When you were talking about women making the money and in charge of it: my manager’s a woman, my lawyer’s a woman…”
Because that's what rock’n’roll is – it's the ultimate freedom.
#Joan jett 70s how to
The way it's distributed, the way you want to put it out, however you want to market it, that can be a collaborative conversation that we have, but I'm not just going to sign my life over and have you – a label or a person or a man or someone behind the curtain – telling me how to express myself. I started working with independent labels and actually licensing all my records so that I could maintain control, because that was something that was really important to me. “To get to your point of women being in control of it: Our first album, like I said, technically was released in America, but it was not pushed, it was not received, it was essentially shunned. You were one of the trailblazers that really allowed me to do this as a profession. I always say it has this healing quality to it it’s like soul food. That gave me this boost, because I need this rock’n’roll. It was like, ‘Whoa, okay, you just get written off.’ And at the same time I could look around at people like you, Debbie Harry and Suzi Quatro and go, ‘They did it.’ And they did it in a time period where this was unheard of. It was a very weird time where I felt very… I don't even think judged is the right word. It technically was released here, but it never really got a chance. Our first record came out and never got played on radio in America. Before they’d even heard it or seen it, people written it off before they even gave it a chance. When I first formed Pretty Reckless, I was 14, 15 years old. And that's not to say that women won’t necessarily open doors for other women all the time, either. “I think until women control the money – control the dollars and who gets them, where the money goes – that ceiling is still gonna be there. Since the early Runaways, where I was taken seriously.
But I can’t explain it… I hadn’t felt ‘seen’ since I Love Rock’N’Roll. And, you know, it's never something I aspired to I didn't join a band to get into the Hall Of Fame. You just don't know how much people notice it or not. I thought when I got to the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame it was a big deal.
#Joan jett 70s crack
is live and well, but I feel it crack a little bit more each time. “Musically I still had a lot of resistance until fairly recently. In The Runaways, we had no shot of doing anything like that. Women and girls have a lot more tools now: social media, the internet, you can get your music out to people easier and cheaply, and you can reach the world. But there is an appearance of equality, the PR of ‘You’re equal’. They believe, ‘We’ve come so far, women are equal,’ but if you live in this business – or I bet countless women will tell you – things haven’t changed that much.
Joan: “Attitudes have not changed as radically as people would like to believe.