The pioneering Joan Jett song that was rejected 23 times: “We got our asses kicked”
Joan Jett is known as the godmother of punk. In the early days, she was regarded as too punkish to make it in the industry, which seems to be an oxymoron. But, of course, the same rules that applied for men in the music industry in the 1980s weren’t extended to women.
Experiencing rejection is a large part of the punk ethos; you need to be kicked down to know how it feels to be on the floor, trodden on, abandoned, like a puppy left behind a garbage can after the magic of Christmas dissipates. Think about it: all of the best success stories come with a sharp decline in fortune at one point in the road. But for one of Jett’s, there wasn’t just one unhappy misstep…there were 23.
Many other musicians would’ve hidden the fact, afraid their pride would be wounded easily with public knowledge of their repeated failure. However, some of the most successful wear their pain openly, with a smile: William Saroyan, an Oscar-winning, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, accumulated some 7,000 rejection slips before he sold his very first short story. Linkin Park auditioned for 40 record labels before finding a home at Warner Records. It’s a tale we hear again and again.
Turns out, Jett has something in common with Saroyan and Linkin Park; in the bio for the 1980 release, Bad Reputation, the icon admitted that she was rejected 23 times by record companies.
In an interview in 1999, the star recalled what this experience was like, and she had the same candour almost two decades after the fact: “It was really hard,” she admitted.
The refusals brought up a lot of bad memories for Jett, who looked back with great agony: “I came from the experience of The Runaways, where we got our asses kicked for being girls playing rock and roll”.
She added, “We weren’t supposed to do that. We got called every name in the book and people were rude and judged every little thing we did.”
Of course, The Runaways would split in April 1979, following their final concert on New Year’s Eve the year prior. There was one major difference for Jett after this: She had the support of producer Kenny Laguna. It’s hard to understate the power of male backing in a male-dominated industry. Ever astute, this wasn’t lost on Jett: “It was powerful, and that’s what kept me going initially through that early period when the early Blackhearts and the rejection and the fans.”
Even when the odds were stacked against her, even when she had been spat at hundreds of times and found herself at the centre of a failed passion project, Jett continued forth. After the repeated industry rejection, Laguna and Jett took matters into their own hands, forming Blackheart Records, selling records from a Cadillac trunk, a smirking Jett waving vinyls in the air as if to embody the words we’d all come to know so well: “I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation!”
