After 3 decades, Joan Jett still proves herself

RALEIGH, N.C. - The sun has come out on a rainy Warped Tour afternoon, and Joan Jett has things to do.

First of all, the ripped, ageless rocker needs her vegan pre-show meal. That'll be a Taco Bell rice-and-bean burrito, please, and there better not be any cheese on that.

Then she has to make her way from her backstage tour bus to the main stage - one of 10 stages - where she and her band, the Blackhearts, will be headlining the traveling carnival.

"I've got to check my gear," shouts Jett, hopping off the tour bus dressed in camouflage pants and the stringiest of string-bikini tops. "The Buzzcocks are going to be on in 10 minutes!"

Getting there may be a little tricky. Neither she nor Kenny Laguna, her manager, songwriting partner and self-described "valet to the queen of rock and punk," knows exactly where the stage is, only that it lies somewhere across a rain-soaked field of pierced teenagers.

"How will you get there, how do you know where to go?" he asks, worried. This question proves unworthy of an answer. Jett puts on shades, pulls on a pair of leather gloves, and hops on a BMX bike borrowed from her Warped cohorts, the Bouncing Souls, and she's gone, the black heart tattoo on her back disappearing in the distance.

There's a third thing on Jett's agenda, something the singer, born 47 years ago, calls "my life's work," something that has come naturally ever since she fronted the all-female teenage band the Runaways in the 1970s, but that still, after 30 years, she needs to do each time she straps on a guitar.

"I have to prove myself," she says. "Every time. Because I'm a girl that plays rock `n' roll."

This summer Jett, who's best known for raw, rugged `80s hits such as "Crimson and Clover" and "I Hate Myself for Loving You," has ample opportunity.

The femme-rock icon has a new, startlingly vital album called "Sinner," released on her own Blackheart label. It reveals that in addition to looking and sounding as good as she did a generation ago, Jett has gotten better at writing and choosing crunchy rock songs that fool around with issues of sexual identity, like her glam-rock cover of the Sweet's "AC/DC," whose video features Carmen Electra as Jett's lover.

And Jett's out on the road with Warped, headlining along with bands that are not half her age. (And some, like NOFX, that are.) She's riding the bus, staying in Holiday Inns - here in Raleigh, a middle-aged housekeeper named Connie professed her love and turned Jett's rock-star scowl into a grin - and knocking them out with "I Love Rock N' Roll" every day.

"It's amazing," she says of Warped, talking before the show in a chilly hotel lounge. "It's the kind of music I love, and the energy of the show is just great. And there's not a lot of ego-tripping among the bands."

There can't be, since all the acts, from Jett to current big-sellers like AFI, get to play for only 30 minutes each. "She's out here mentoring people, showing bands like Shiragirl that she's been doing it for all these years, that you can't give up," says Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman.

As Jett's stature as a mainstream rock star faded, her standing as a heroine to young female rockers grew.

Kathleen Hanna, formerly of riot-grrl pioneers Bikini Kill and current leader of electro-pop feminists Le Tigre, co-wrote four songs with Jett on "Sinner." Before she was a collaborator, she was a fan.

"I remember being in the car the first time I heard `Crimson and Clover,'" Hanna says. "Her vocal was so good, it was just dripping. And the other thing is she didn't change the pronoun. In terms of gender, I was really excited, and confused."

That's Jett's intention. She has never made a public statement about her sexual orientation. But when she performs in Raleigh - decked out now in a studded, black-leather bikini top - she draws a large lesbian contingent among her demographically diverse crowd.

"I like to sing to everybody," she says. "I think it's important to keep the fantasy alive. Every guy could think I'm singing to them, and every girl could think I'm singing to them."

On "Sinner," she covers Paul Westerberg's "Androgynous," and plays around with songs like "Everyone Knows," which turns out to be about having a preference for bondage gear.

"I was a huge Bowie fan and I always respected that he embraced both sides of himself," she says. "I'm a girl, but I'm not a frilly girl and I've never been one. So I tend to walk that line, just down the middle. I embrace my male side, and it doesn't make me feel any less woman at all."

Hanna met Jett in the early `90s backstage at a show by Fugazi, the post-punk band fronted by Jett's pal Ian MacKaye. The list of Jett's friends is long, and includes ex-Baltimore Oriole Cal Ripken Jr. (he asked her to sing the National Anthem the night he broke Lou Gehrig's record for playing consecutive games); former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean (she was on stage with him for "the Dean Scream"); and talk-show host Oliver North (she plans to travel with him to entertain U.S. troops).

Hanna's enthusiasm for Jett's primal rock `n' roll knows no bounds. "She's like a little Sex Pistols, a little Clash and a little Jonathan Richman mixed with Liza Minnelli and Suzi Quatro, and poured into a skintight leather jumpsuit."

Jett tends to inspire that kind of devotion. Laguna, a former member of Tommy James & the Shondells (who did the original "Crimson and Clover") as well as the Archies, has been working with her since they collaborated on songs in the late 1970s.

"I made her, and I can break her," he jokes. But mainly, he talks tirelessly on her behalf. When not fetching burritos, he's rubbing sunscreen on her back. Or demanding assurances from Hollywood producers who are making a movie based on her teenage-rock life in Los Angeles that they won't fictionalize the story to the point of having her do something absurd, like have sex with a horse. Or waxing nostalgic about a July 4, 1984, show in Washington when she played guitar alongside Jimmy Page and Brian Wilson.

Jett embarked on that teenage-rock life after spending the first six months of her life in Philadelphia, then moving to Rockville, Md. She caught the bug from early `70s glam-rockers like Gary Glitter and T. Rex, acts she now plays on her Radio Revolution show, which airs Saturday afternoons and Sunday evenings on Little Steven's Underground Garage channel on Sirius Satellite radio.

"I wanted people who were out there, who were actually still making the music," Little Steven says of Jett. "She's just a cool chick, and smart. And the Runaways were innovators as far as rock `n' roll girl groups were concerned."

"It's like the music is connected to my body," Jett says about rock n' roll. "I can't explain more than that. That's why I think rockn' roll is threatening. It's connected to the body, and the crotch. I don't know: I heard those guitar sounds, and I knew I wanted to make those sounds. And I can feel it in my body when I'm making those sounds, through the guitar."

She quit high school and moved to L.A., where she formed the Runaways with Cherie Currie and Lita Ford, among others. Their 1976 debut album made them stars in Japan and Europe. After seeing them perform in his native Leeds, England, singer Jon Langford formed the punk band the Mekons. "It was four women in their underwear playing really loud music," he says. "I wanted to be one of the Runaways."

America, though, wasn't quite ready.

Jett is still bitter, not so much because the album tanked in the States, or that she didn't get to be a normal teenager. She's mad because it was assumed that the Runaways' manager, Kim Fowley, must have been the puppet master. "He didn't come to me and say `Hey, babe, want to come do this?' I went to him with the idea," she says.

The roots of Jett's healthy lifestyle today - she lives on Long Island, N.Y., with her four cats, Luke, Dion, Greta and Stephanie - stem from her "partying like crazy" after the Runaways broke up. She's not the slightest bit interested in Runaways reunion offers.

"If you missed it, you missed it," she says. "To me it was too important to pull it together and try to make it something it's not. I could never do it. I'd rather be homeless."

The failure of the Runaways, though, only made her more determined. She scored a string of hits in the 80s, and starred with Michael J. Fox in Paul Schrader's 1987 movie, "Light of Day." In the90s, as she fell off the pop charts, her music grew more punkish and political. After Mia Zapata of the Seattle band the Gits was murdered in 1993, Jett contacted the members to form the band Evil Stig (Gits Live, backwards), to carry on Zapata's music. "Sinner" sports a smarter-than-your-average-anti-Bush song in "Riddles," and an S&M-flaunting one in "Fetish."

Jett relishes being out on the road with Warped, and is justifiably proud of "Sinner." She's frustrated, though, that "it's not a regular, normal thing for girls to be playing rock `n' roll. It's just stunning to me," she says. "What is this wall? Who makes it? Who sustains it?"

But on second thought, it's not that surprising.

"Pop music says, You can do what you want,'" she theorizes. "But rockn' roll says `I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do with you.'

"And that's the difference. A girl saying that is very threatening to a lot of people. I am the person doing the telling, and that's why people are threatened. You know, 50 percent of the people would be really intrigued and turned on by the lyrics to a song like Fetish.' And another 50 percent would be like:Oh my God, she's the devil!'"

She smiles, and holds two knuckled fingers above her head. "And if that makes me the devil," she says, "then check out my horns."

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(c) 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.