Joan Jett became a rock and roll icon in the 1970s, wielding an electric guitar on hits like "I Love Rock 'n' Roll," with the Blackhearts, and "Bad Reputation" on her own. But as she reveals in a new interview, before could climb the charts she had to battle sexism, starting with her role as a guitarist in the Runaways.
Female rock and rollers were a rarity when the band formed in 1975. It was more common to find women guitarists strumming an acoustic guitar. Jett wanted to break that trend and show what the other sex could do with an electrified six-string.
“I was so into this idea of girls being able to play rock and roll, and that they'd play as well as boys would,” she once said (via NBC). “Girls playing rock and roll would be so cool and sexy, because it had never been done. I thought everybody would love it.”
However, as she tells RNZ in a new interview, that didn’t prove to be the case.
“It would have been okay if I had an acoustic guitar, but it was the fact that the electricity made it like ‘You're not allowed,’” she says. “And it’s like, ‘What do you mean I'm not allowed?’
“But I have girls in my class next to me playing Beethoven and Bach on violin and different instruments. So you’re not saying I’m not capable of it; what you're saying is I’m not allowed to.”
As Jett told The Guardian in 2022, her parents had bought her an electric guitar for Christmas. But when she approached her teacher for lessons, she was met with derision.
“I went in there all excited and said to the teacher: ‘I wanna play rock ’n’ roll,’” she recalled. “And he said to me, ‘Girls don’t play rock ’n’ roll. Let me teach you ‘On Top of Old Smokey’ instead.’”
But Jett had no interest in learning old folk tunes. In rebellion, she bought a book and began teaching herself.
Years later, when the Runaways were looking for a record label, she found more roadblocks in her way. “We have 23 rejection letters to prove it," she tells RNZ that. "We sent them five hits" — each of which, Jett notes, went on to become hits — "and they sent us a variety of rejection letters from ‘uninterested’ with no reason, to ‘lose the guitar’, to — my favorite — ‘you need a song search.’”
Even when the band broke the mold for a generation, they still found resistance in a male-led world. Onstage, they’d regularly be booed, sometimes spat at, as “no one gave us any credit that we could play at all,” Jett said (via The Guardian).
“We were one hit away from opening the door for everybody else,” she told Guitar World in 2017. “But there was always resistance from the radio. Like, only one girl gets to be played at a time.”
But Jett has always been resolute in her defiance, and it's paid dividends. Her legendary status is undeniable. She became the first woman to have a signature guitar — a 2008 re-creation of her Runaways and Blackhearts 1965 Gibson Melody Maker for a production run in 2008. Vitally, she paved the way for more to follow in her wake — but still not enough, one could argue. As late as 2019, Fender accepted that it needed more female signature artists in its ranks.
In that same year, Jett was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, becoming only the second female guitarist given the honor, after Sister Rosetta Tharpe the year prior.
Meanwhile, her former bandmate, Lita Ford, has offered advice for aspiring guitarists and explained why being a little “street rat” can make you a better player.
