“I think a lot of kids don’t know her, but by the time they leave here, they know who she is,” he says. Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman says Jett is bringing “some style and class” to the festival. “Everyone knows she’s sung ‘I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll’ 3,000 times, but she can do it like it’s the very first time she’s sung it. “She’s a total showman,” says Kathleen Hannah, the singer for Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, who co-wrote several songs on Jett’s new album.
Wearing black leather pants and a bikini top, she hammered out 90 minutes of loud, sweaty rock to an equally loud, sweaty crowd. And she was an independent artist years before the indie-rock trend.Īt her show last month at the Brooklyn nightclub Southpaw, Jett was in impressive shape, boasting muscular arms and a supermodel-smooth stomach. With a new album, “Sinner,” released on her own Blackheart Records label, the time seems right for Jett to reintroduce herself to a generation that probably knows her only as that lady who sang “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” back in the early ‘80s.īut Jett was a “woman in rock” long before that term became a catchphrase. “To me, it means being a rebel, being an underdog, being outside and doing it yourself.” “I never subscribed to the idea that punk rock means you have to play fast and scream,” Jett says, speaking by phone while on the road recently. The band is Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, a group that’s been around since the early 1980s, decades before the Warped Tour even existed.Īt 45, Jett is at least twice the age of the kids she’s playing to (and with) this summer, but in some ways she fits right in. They recently played four sold-out dates at small clubs in New York, including CBGB.Īnd now, for the first time, they’re one of the star acts at America’s premier punk festival, the Vans Warped Tour. They scored a breakthrough single and signed to a major label. They pounded the club circuit for years and released their first album independently.
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