The Tragic Real-Life Story Of Joan Jett

Publish date: 2024-05-08

Joan Jett was born Joan Marie Larkin on September 22, 1958, in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. She asked for and received her first guitar for Christmas when she was 13 years old and was told at her first lesson that "girls can't play rock and roll," according to the 2018 documentary Bad Reputation. Luckily, Joan didn't listen and kept rocking. 

Her family soon moved to West Covina, California, and, as recounted to Rolling Stone, she started going to Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco, the "all-ages glam-rock club" on Sunset Boulevard where the crowd was "the equivalent of social-media stars." She changed her last name to Jett and modeled her now-famous look of black leather, black eyeliner, and a black shag haircut after American rocker Suzi Quatro, who inspired her musically as well as aesthetically. "What Suzi Quatro did for me was make me realise that girls could be successful playing rock and roll. I realised that if I wanted to do that, there were probably other girls like me who probably wanted to do it too." 

She met drummer Sandy West at Rodney Bingenheimer's via producer Kim Fowley. Fowley introduced them to other musicians, seemingly with the intention of putting together a band of teenage girls, although he claimed in Edgeplay: A Film About the Runaways: "I didn't put the Runaways together, I had an idea, they had ideas, we all met, there was combustion, and out of five different versions of that group came the five girls who were the ones that people liked."

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