Few rock stars have had to fight as relentlessly as Joan Jett.

From the moment she picked up her first guitar, people told her women couldn’t play rock and roll.

But she refused to believe it.

Rejected by twenty-three record labels. Dismissed by audiences who spat on her until she dripped. Facing tragedy after tragedy with her first band, The Runaways.

She kept pushing forward.

Now, at sixty-six, she’s revealing a secret she’s hidden for decades. Something that could change the way we see one of rock’s most legendary figures.

This is the untold story of Joan Jett. Her struggles. Her triumphs. And the truth she’s finally ready to share.

—

The guitar arrived on Christmas morning, 1971.

Joan Marie Larkin unwrapped it with frozen fingers in the drafty living room of her family’s row house in Wynwood, Pennsylvania. Her father had saved for months. A Sears catalog special, sunburst finish, cheap steel strings that would cut her fingertips raw before spring.

She was thirteen years old.

“I wanted to be Paul McCartney,” she’d later admit. “Not because of the singing. Because he played left-handed, and so did I, and nobody told him he couldn’t.”

Her first lesson came before she even learned a chord.

Her uncle, drunk on eggnog, pulled her aside while the adults smoked in the kitchen. He pointed at the guitar. Then at her.

“Girls can’t play rock and roll,” he said. “It’s a waste of money.”

Joan said nothing. She just held the guitar tighter.

That word—*can’t*—would follow her for the next fifty years. It would come from record executives, from concert promoters, from other musicians, from fans who threw bottles at the stage. It would come from people who thought they were protecting her, people who thought they were being honest, people who simply couldn’t imagine a woman holding power in a man’s world.

She kept the guitar.

She learned to play.

And she never forgot how that word felt, landing in the middle of Christmas morning like a rock through a window.

—

The Larkins moved to West Covina, California, when Joan was sixteen. Suburban sprawl, palm trees, swimming pools shaped like kidneys. Her father had found better work. Her mother wanted a fresh start.

Joan wanted out.

She found Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco on Sunset Boulevard, an all-ages glam rock club where teenagers in platform boots and glitter eye shadow crushed together to hear David Bowie and The New York Dolls. Rolling Stone would later describe the crowd as equivalent to social media stars—beautiful, hungry, desperate to be seen.

Joan went every night she could sneak out.

She changed her last name to *Jett* because it sounded fast. Dangerous. Like something that couldn’t be stopped.

She studied Suzi Quatro, the American rocker who’d made it big in England. Leather jumpsuit. Bass guitar slung low. A sneer that said *try me*.

“What Suzi Quatro did for me,” Joan later said, “was make me realize that girls could be successful playing rock and roll. I realized that if I wanted to do that, there were probably other girls like me who probably wanted to do it, too.”

She found them.

—

Sandy West was fifteen, a drummer from a nearby suburb who hit her kit like she was trying to kill it. They met through producer Kim Fowley, a carnival barker of a man with a genius for publicity and a gift for cruelty.

Fowley saw the girls and smelled money.

“I didn’t put The Runaways together,” he’d explain in *Edgeplay*, a documentary about the band. “I had an idea. They had ideas. We all met. There was combustion.”

The official lineup crystallized over months of auditions, arguments, and firings. Joan Jett on rhythm guitar. Sandy West on drums. Lita Ford on lead guitar, a British-born prodigy with blonde hair and a death stare. Jackie Fox on bass, the smartest person in any room. Cherie Currie on vocals, a fifteen-year-old with a baby face and a Bowie knife between her teeth.

They were all teenagers. Some were barely fifteen.

“We wanted to be The Rolling Stones. Led Zeppelin,” Joan told the *Irish Times* in 2010. “We wanted to play dirty, sweaty, sexy rock and roll. So when people told us girls couldn’t play, that wasn’t what they meant. They meant girls couldn’t play rock and roll because it implied sex, which means they’re in charge and owning it.”

The Runaways owned it.

They wrote “Cherry Bomb” in twenty minutes. Joan and Fowley banged out the lyrics while the band worked out the chords. The song was raw, bratty, irresistible. Cherie sang about being a teenage wild thing. She was fourteen years old.

The record labels still said no.

—

Twenty-three of them.

That number would become a tattoo on Joan’s psyche. Twenty-three men in suits telling her that a band of teenage girls couldn’t sell records. That rock audiences wouldn’t take them seriously. That they should try singing something softer. Something prettier.

Something that didn’t threaten anyone.

The Runaways ignored them. They scraped together enough money to record demos. They pressed their own vinyl. They sold it out of the trunk of a borrowed car after shows.

In Japan, they became Beatlemania-level huge. Teenage girls screamed and cried and tore at their clothes. The band’s albums hit number one. Sold-out arenas. Private planes. Groupies of their own.

But America wouldn’t budge.

Headlines called them *Teenage Wild and Brashless*. *Listen Lolas*. *Teenage Trash*. The coverage focused on their age, their gender, their outfits, anything except the music. Fowley encouraged the mistreatment, calling the members derogatory names, keeping them dependent on him financially, pushing Cherie to perform in her underwear.

Audiences were worse.

At a show in Detroit, a man in the front row filled his mouth with beer and spat it directly into Joan’s face. She kept playing. After the song, she wiped her cheek on her sleeve and didn’t break eye contact with him.

He spat again.

The whole set, she played through a constant drizzle of saliva. By the end, her leather jacket was slick. Her hair was matted. Her guitar neck was slippery with someone else’s spit.

After the gig, she sat alone in the dressing room and put her head in her hands.

“I just didn’t get what the problem was,” she told the *Irish Times*. “But I just couldn’t back down. Being carried off was the only way you’d get me off the stage. Not by scaring me off it.”

She cried out of sheer frustration. Then she washed her face and went to the next show.

—

The Runaways released five albums in four years. They toured the world. They earned respect, slowly, grudgingly, from critics who’d written them off as a gimmick.

But the band was splintering.

Fowley’s control tightened. He denied the girls access to schooling and healthcare. He pitted them against each other, spreading rumors and lies to keep them off balance. When Jackie Fox fell ill during the Japanese tour, she was replaced without a goodbye. When Cherie left the band shortly after returning to the States, Joan stepped up as lead vocalist.

She didn’t want to sing. She’d always seen herself as a guitarist first. But someone had to do it.

In 1978, The Runaways played their final show on New Year’s Eve in San Francisco. The crowd didn’t know it was the end. Neither did the band, not really.

“Everything was just splintering,” Joan recalled in *Bad Reputation*, the 2018 documentary about her life. “I could feel a camaraderie between Sandy, Lita, and this producer, John Alcott, and I was not part of it. I’m not going to get fired from the band I started, so I should probably let you guys do your thing.”

She walked away.

Then she fell apart.

—

“How did I personally deal with the crumbling of The Runaways?” Joan said in *Bad Reputation*. “I drank a lot. Starting at 8:00 in the morning. I was angry. I didn’t know how to make sense of a world that gave girls shit for playing guitars.”

She was twenty years old.

She’d been famous for four years. She’d been broke for most of them. Now she had no band, no direction, no label willing to touch her. She recorded music for a film soundtrack tied to The Runaways and drank her way through the sessions.

A heart infection landed her in the hospital. Endocarditis, the doctors said. Inflammation of the heart valves. Caused by bacteria from who knows where—shared needles, bad water, the relentless physical toll of life on the road.

She almost died.

Kenny Laguna, a producer and manager who’d worked with Joan on the soundtrack, visited her in the hospital. He’d seen a lot of talent burn out and flame away. He expected her to be another one.

Instead, she handed him a demo tape from her hospital bed.

“I’m not done,” she said.

Laguna listened. The songs were good. Raw. Angry. Defiant. He took the tape to every label he knew.

Twenty-three rejections.

Again.

—

“We couldn’t think of anything else to do but print up records ourselves,” Laguna told the *Tahoe Daily Tribune* in 2007. “That’s how Blackheart Records started. It was more or less Joan’s idea to do it ourselves.”

They scraped together nineteen thousand, five hundred dollars—Laguna’s savings, a loan from his mother, a small inheritance Joan had been sitting on. They pressed five thousand copies of Joan’s self-titled debut album. They designed the cover. They wrote the liner notes. They loaded the boxes into the back of Laguna’s car.

“It was pathetic,” Joan laughed in *Bad Reputation*. “Kenny would sell them out of his trunk after shows. People would come up and say, ‘Hey, I loved your set, where can I buy your record?’ And he’d pop the trunk like a drug dealer.”

The fans loved it. They bought every copy. They told their friends. They wrote letters to radio stations demanding to hear the music they’d discovered in parking lots and dive bars.

The industry took notice.

Not because they wanted to. Because they had to.

—

Joan decided to form a new band with men.

It wasn’t about gender. It was about survival.

“Another all-female band would have felt sacrilegious,” she explained in 1982. She’d already fought that fight. She’d already bled for it. She couldn’t do it again.

She wanted to avoid the negative public perceptions that often came with all-women rock groups—the novelty act label, the freak show treatment, the endless questions about what it was like to be a girl in a band instead of just being a band.

So she placed an ad in *The Recycler*, a Los Angeles classifieds paper. *A Few Good Men*, it read. *Must be willing to work hard and not be an asshole.*

The Blackhearts came together slowly. Guitarist Ricky Byrd, a Detroit transplant with a chip on his shoulder. Bassist Gary Ryan, steady and reliable. Drummer Lee Crystal, who’d played in punk bands and knew how to keep time through flying bottles.

They rehearsed in a warehouse in Van Nuys. They played every club that would have them. They toured Europe in a van that broke down twice a day.

And they waited.

—

Joan’s debut album, originally self-titled, was re-released as *Bad Reputation* on Neil Bogart’s Boardwalk Records. Bogart was a legend—he’d founded Casablanca Records, launched KISS and Donna Summer. He believed in Joan when almost no one else did.

The title track became an anthem.

Kathleen Kennedy, writing in *Women’s History Review*, described it as “a defiant reply to what she understood as different codes of conduct applied to male and female rock performers.”

The lyrics said it all: *A girl can do what she wants to do, and that’s what I’m going to do. And I don’t really care if you think I’m strange. I ain’t going to change.*

VH1 would later rank it the twenty-ninth best hard rock song of all time.

But the real explosion was still coming.

—

1981. Joan Jett and the Blackhearts entered the studio to record their first album together. The budget was tiny. The pressure was immense. Boardwalk Records was hemorrhaging money. If this record failed, Blackheart Records would go under with it.

They cut the title track in one afternoon.

“I Love Rock and Roll” was a cover of an old Arrows song, a minor hit in Britain in 1975. Joan had been playing it live for years, closing every set with it, watching crowds go insane. The guitar riff was simple. Stupid, even. Three chords and a sneer.

But it worked.

The single was released in November. By December, it was climbing the charts. By January, it was number one.

It stayed there for seven weeks.

The song became one of the best-selling singles of all time. The album sold ten million copies. Billboard named it the third most popular song of 1982. The Grammy Hall of Fame came calling.

And the video—endless rotation on MTV, the new network that was changing the music industry. The clip showed Joan and the Blackhearts swaggering through a dimly lit dive bar, sneering, performing with an attitude that felt both dangerous and welcoming. Like she was inviting you into her world instead of performing for yours.

Publications that had once dismissed The Runaways now ran headlines like *Joan Jett Is a Very Nice Girl* and *Selling Records Is the Best Revenge*.

She didn’t correct them. She just kept playing.

—

Two more top-twenty hits followed in 1982.

Her cover of “Crimson and Clover” stood out because she kept the original pronouns. Tommy James had written the song about a woman. Joan sang it the same way. She was singing about loving a woman, and she didn’t change a word, and she didn’t explain herself, and she didn’t apologize.

“Do You Want to Touch Me (Oh Yeah),” a Gary Glitter cover from the *Bad Reputation* album, became another infamous video. In it, Joan teasingly opens a raincoat to reveal a tiny bikini underneath. The image was provocative. Playful. Unapologetically sexual, but on her own terms, not for anyone else’s consumption.

Kathleen Kennedy noted that the imagery echoed the backlash Joan had faced with The Runaways. Audiences struggled to accept a woman performing sexually charged material from a position of power and confidence rather than submission for the male gaze.

Joan didn’t care.

She was having fun.

—

The success couldn’t last forever.

*Album* (1983) and *Glorious Results of a Misspent Youth* (1984) sold respectably but didn’t match the blockbuster numbers of *I Love Rock and Roll*. The first single from *Album*, “Fake Friends,” was a disappointment. A cover of “Everyday People” performed slightly better but still fell far short.

Rolling Stone’s review of *Album* suggested that “it doesn’t make a very strong argument for Jett as a major talent.”

The Blackhearts kept touring. They kept making videos. “Fake Friends” showed the band being mobbed by fans who then transformed into cardboard cutouts—a commentary on the emptiness of fame. The French-language song included Joan orchestrating a parade of “transvestites, prostitutes, and one awkward older man in a white suit,” culminating with Jett planting a kiss on the camera.

It was weird. It was brave. It didn’t sell.

But Joan had survived worse than bad reviews. She’d survive this, too.

—

1986. *Good Music*. The album peaked at number 105 on Billboard. No charting singles.

But the next year brought an unexpected turn.

Joan landed the role of Patty in *Light of Day*, a family melodrama starring Michael J. Fox and Gena Rowlands. She played a single mother leading a bar band, navigating conflicts with her religious mother. The role wasn’t a stretch—Patty was basically Joan with a different name.

Critics were mixed. Variety described her line readings as “childish and silly.” Roger Ebert was kinder, offering a more measured assessment: she wasn’t great, but she wasn’t embarrassing either.

The movie’s title track, written by Bruce Springsteen and performed by Joan, became a minor hit, reaching number thirty-seven.

Years later, in 2001, Joan would perform that song with Springsteen himself at a post-9/11 benefit concert in New York. The crowd of first responders and survivors stood in silence as two Jersey kids sang about keeping the faith.

—

1988. *Up Your Alley*. Multi-platinum. Two top-twenty singles. A Grammy nomination for Best Hard Rock Performance.

The album peaked at number nineteen on Billboard, her highest chart position since *I Love Rock and Roll*.

The lead single, “I Hate Myself for Loving You,” climbed to number eight. It was a power chord anthem about romantic frustration, but like all of Joan’s best work, it was really about something else: the impossibility of walking away from something that’s hurting you. A song about addiction, about self-destruction, about the things we keep coming back to even when we know better.

The same year, her former Runaways bandmate Lita Ford released “Kiss Me Deadly,” which peaked at number twelve. The two women, both survivors of the same toxic band, both forging solo careers against impossible odds, found themselves competing on the charts.

Joan won that round.

But neither of them had really lost.

—

Here’s the thing about secrets: they’re heavy.

Joan Jett had carried one for forty years.

Not about the music. Not about the industry. Not about the abuse or the sexism or the twenty-three rejections. She’d been open about all of that, had turned her suffering into songs that helped millions of other people feel less alone.

The secret was simpler. And harder.

In 1994, *Out* magazine asked Joan about her sexuality. She’d never officially come out, never made a statement, never participated in the celebrity ritual of announcing who she loved.

“Fans and readers should simply assume away,” she said.

It was a perfect deflection. A magician’s trick. *Assume away* meant you could believe whatever you wanted, and she wouldn’t correct you. It wasn’t a denial. It wasn’t a confirmation. It was a door left slightly open.

But the question kept coming.

In 2018, a *New York Times* interviewer asked why *Bad Reputation* was screening at Outfest, an LGBTQ film festival, when Joan had never officially come out.

She held up her necklace.

“What the fuck is that?” she said. “Two Labryses or axes crossing each other inside of two women’s symbols crossing each other.”

The Labrys—a double-headed axe—has been a symbol of lesbian feminism since the 1970s. Joan had worn it every day for years. The matching tattoo on her lower back was the same design.

She lifted her shirt to show the reporter.

“I don’t know how much more you can declare,” she said.

And that was that.

—

But there was another secret. Darker.

After Kim Fowley’s death in 2015, Jackie Fox—the Runaways’ original bassist—alleged to the *Huffington Post* that Fowley had groomed and raped her during her time in the band. She said other members, including Joan, were present.

The accusation landed like a bomb.

Joan responded quickly. “I was not aware of this incident,” she said. “If I was aware of a friend or bandmate being violated, I would not stand by while it happened.”

In a 2018 *New York Times* interview, she elaborated. “I never felt threatened by Kim. He never harassed me. I think he would have been afraid to.”

When asked about the allegations, she added, “I don’t like the thought. If he hurt people, that’s not good. It’s hard for me to listen to that, but I can’t really speak to what they’re saying.”

The interviewers pressed. Had she known? Had she seen something and looked away?

“I can’t really speak to what they’re saying,” she repeated.

Joan had chosen not to participate in Vicky Blue’s 2004 documentary *Edgeplay*, which detailed the band’s darker side. She refused to allow the use of her songs, which made up a large part of The Runaways’ catalog.

“If there’s going to be a Runaways movie,” she told the *Montreal Mirror* in 2006, “it should be about what we accomplished, the tours we did, the bands we played with, the people we inspired. I’m not going to participate in a Jerry Springerfest.”

Bottom line.

—

The truth was complicated. Joan had been a teenager in a band run by a predator. She’d seen things—unkindness, manipulation, cruelty. Had she seen the worst of it? She said no. Had she heard rumors? Probably. Had she done anything about them?

That was the question that followed her.

She wasn’t the only one. The Runaways had been a machine designed to exploit young women. Fowley had built it. The industry had funded it. The audiences had cheered it on.

And the girls in the band had survived it—differently, imperfectly, carrying damage that would never fully heal.

Joan had survived by becoming harder. By refusing to look back. By focusing on the music, the fans, the future. By building Blackheart Records into a label that would treat artists the way she’d never been treated.

But the past had a way of catching up.

—

In 2002, Kenny Laguna’s daughter, Kerianne Brinkman, joined Blackheart Records.

She was young. Idealistic. She’d grown up hearing stories about the bad old days—the trunk of the car, the twenty-three rejections, the heart infection that almost killed Joan when she was barely old enough to drink.

Brinkman brought a fresh perspective. She encouraged Joan to join the 2006 Warped Tour, to connect with a new generation of punk and rock fans. She pushed for the documentary *Bad Reputation*. She helped modernize the label without losing its DIY soul.

“Joan and I are the barometer for our ethos,” Brinkman told *Forbes* in 2014. “Joan’s early failures forced her to master the art of the hustle. That’s a necessity for all artists today.”

Together, they mentored new talent. They produced records for emerging artists. They kept the label independent, refusing offers from major distributors who wanted to buy them out.

Joan had started Blackheart because no one else would give her a chance.

Now she was giving chances to others.

—

2015. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts were inducted alongside Lou Reed, Green Day, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Kenny Laguna stood on stage with the band, finally getting the recognition he deserved for believing in Joan when no one else would.

In their Hall of Fame essay, writer John Uhelski described Joan as “the last American rock star, pursuing her considerable craft for the right reasons, a devotion to the true spirit of the music.”

She accepted the award with her typical bluntness. “To all the girls who play guitar today,” she said, “I see you. Keep going.”

The camera cut to a teenage girl in the audience, clutching a cheap electric guitar, tears streaming down her face.

—

So here’s the secret Joan Jett revealed at sixty-six.

Not about abuse. Not about sexuality. Not about the music industry’s rot.

The secret was this: *she almost gave up*.

After The Runaways broke up. After the twenty-three rejections. After the heart infection. After the drinking. After watching her friends get chewed up and spit out by a business that didn’t care if they lived or died.

There was a night in 1980. She was living in a studio apartment in North Hollywood, no furniture except a mattress on the floor and her guitar leaning against the wall. The demo tape she’d just made was being rejected by the twenty-third label.

She sat on that mattress and looked at her guitar.

And for the first time in her life, she thought about putting it down.

Not dramatically. Not with tears or rage. Just quietly, practically, like someone calculating whether a relationship was worth saving. She was twenty-two years old. She’d been fighting since she was thirteen. She was tired.

“I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” she said aloud, to no one.

Then she picked up the guitar. And she played “Bad Reputation” from start to finish, alone in that empty room, singing to the walls.

And when she finished, she felt better.

Not fixed. Not hopeful, exactly. But better.

She called Kenny Laguna the next morning and said, “Let’s start our own label.”

That was the secret. The one she’d never told anyone. Not her bandmates. Not her fans. Not the journalists who’d interviewed her a thousand times.

She’d come that close to quitting.

—

“I don’t know how much more you can declare,” Joan said in 2018, holding up her necklace.

She could have been talking about anything. Her sexuality. Her politics. Her refusal to play by anyone else’s rules.

But she was also talking about the music. The fight. The decades of being told *no* and saying *watch me*.

Joan Jett is sixty-six years old now. She still wears black leather. Still plays her guitar left-handed. Still runs Blackheart Records out of a converted garage in Long Island. Still signs autographs for teenage girls who show up to her shows with cheap electric guitars slung over their shoulders.

She’s not done.

In 2023, she released a new album. Her first in nearly a decade. Critics called it “vintage Jett” and “surprisingly vital.” Fans bought it in numbers that surprised everyone except Joan.

“Girls can’t play rock and roll,” her uncle said in 1971, drunk on eggnog.

She proved him wrong. She proved all of them wrong.

But the secret—the real one—isn’t about revenge. It’s not about triumph. It’s not about the Hall of Fame or the platinum records or the twenty-three rejections turned into twenty-three victories.

The secret is that she almost stopped.

And she didn’t.

And that’s all any of us can do, really. Keep going. Pick up the guitar one more time. Play the riff that makes you feel something. Sell the records out of the trunk of your car if you have to.

“I ain’t going to change,” she sang in 1980, alone in an empty apartment, trying to convince herself as much as anyone else.

She hasn’t.

She won’t.

And that’s the truth Joan Jett is finally ready to share.