![]() ![]() Laguna extrapolates: “I’m feeling democracy at a precipice, in a place where it could disappear” he says. Now I don’t see those types of families making the sort of money my family made: it’s either you’re kind of rich or you’re very poor.” We weren’t rich, but we lived in a neighbourhood and everything seemed normal. ![]() ![]() “When I was growing up, my family was very middle class. Thoughtful and quietly seething, Jett is more eloquent in her observations. The rapidly-changing, oft frightening landscape of tribalism and fascism is something that most of us can agree is pretty shit. Rather: the fears and irritations she and Laguna share are more like universal truths than Back In My Day foibles. ![]() I ask questions that pertain to how things have changed, particularly in the music industry, and though Jett admits she’s “probably gotten a tiny bit more cynical”, there is little to no outward indication that this is true of the musician. And yet it also confuses her to see artists’ every meal being pasted up for all to see. We didn’t know what the early idols were doing,” Laguna says, adding with a humour tinged with sadness: “We didn’t know when they had stomach trouble.” “Sometimes”, Joan concedes, “you can’t be all things”. “I liked it when our idols didn’t share every little bit. Of course, the advent of social media only added to this, creating an ouroboros of crowd-pleasing-to-facilitate-sales. And the separation between rock’n’roll being a rebellion against the status quo became ingratiating to the status quo.” All of a sudden you started seeing bands like Fall Out Boy and Pete Wentz on TV all the time. “I feel like a lot of people make records just to be famous now” Jett muses, “and just do whatever that will get them in the spotlight.” In particular, the pair agree, this is a problem that has gotten progressively worse over the past twenty years. One that derides the commercialisation of rock’n’roll, quails at the rise of fascism in their country and hasn’t got any fucking time for social media. Overall, though, theirs is a tight, shared thought process. Even now, as they sit together on the other side of the Atlantic on a camera-less Google call, the two bounce off one another, sharing ideas and saying so out loud if they disagree with something the other has said. It’s not a surprise Jett calls Laguna a “godsend”. Joan Jett covers T.Rex's 'Jeepster' as part of Marc Bolan tribute album “Now we own the records” Laguna says matter-of-factly, “and they’re worth a lot.” Those future smash-hits (‘I Love Rock’n’Roll’, ‘Crimson and Clover’, ‘Do You Wanna Touch Me’) - “ nobody wanted them”. The two of them circumvented the glass ceiling all those years ago by releasing Jett’s solo work on their own independent label Blackheart Records and have lived their lives in close tandem ever since. Best friends co-songwriters the manager and the talent. Laguna and Jett are a close platonic coupling. “She was clearly good looking, wrote really good songs and yet we couldn’t get through the door,” Laguna adds, “people found it threatening.” Jett sums it up in a gravel-toned deadpan: “I was playing with my dick too much.” “We got 23 rejection letters from all the majors and minors” Jett tells Gigwise, still ever so slightly unbelieving all these decades later. That was the year that Jett, then only 20, started out as a solo artist following the collapse of her teenage band The Runaways. Joan Jett and Kenny Laguna have been, Jett says, “a little army trying to fight together” ever since 1979. ![]()
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