The guitar teacher wanted folk songs. The thirteen-year-old wanted noise. That standoff in a suburban Maryland lesson room ended with Joan Jett walking away from formal instruction entirely — and toward the sound that would define her life. Born Joan Marie Larkin on September 22, 1958 in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, she was the eldest of three children in a family where her father sold insurance and her mother worked as a secretary. The household moved to Rockville, Maryland in 1967, a shift that placed a restless kid with a new guitar into the path of a teacher who simply picked the wrong genre.
The name change came later, after the family relocated to California and her parents divorced. Larkin became Jett because she thought it sounded more like a rocker — a small act of self-invention that hinted at the stubbornness already hardening inside her. In Los Angeles, her favorite haunt was the English Disco on the Sunset Strip, a club where glam and proto-punk collided nightly. By age sixteen, she had co-founded the Runaways, a band built around rhythm guitar and songwriting that Jett supplied from the start.
Runaways' rise and Japan fervor
The Runaways were not a gimmick. Sandy West played drums with ferocity, while Jackie Fox, Lita Ford, and Cherie Currie rounded out a lineup that toured as support for Cheap Trick, the Ramones, Van Halen, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Their five albums traced a fast arc from 1976 through a breakup in the spring of 1979. Overseas, especially in Japan, the band found a fervor that American audiences withheld. When Currie departed, Jett stepped to the microphone for Waitin' for the Night in 1977 and And Now... The Runaways a year later.
One moment on a 1976 English tour changed her trajectory. Jett heard the Arrows perform a song called "I Love Rock 'n Roll" and filed it away. After the Runaways collapsed, she recorded three tracks in England with Paul Cook and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols — one of them an early version of that very song. Around the same period, she produced the Germs' only studio album, GI, a record that cemented her credibility in the punk underground while she plotted her next move.
Rejection and Blackheart Records
The solo career began with rejection. Her debut album appeared on Ariola in Europe on May 17, 1980, but twenty-three major American labels passed on it. Jett's response was practical: she and producer Kenny Laguna started Blackheart Records, funded partly by savings intended for Laguna's daughter's education. The album still found its way onto the Billboard 200. That momentum led directly to the formation of Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, the band that would carry her name through everything that followed.
I Love Rock 'n Roll arrived in 1981 and peaked at number two on the Billboard 200. The title track, recorded with the Blackhearts, sat at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for seven consecutive weeks in 1982. A second hit from the same album, a cover of Tommy James and the Shondells' "Crimson and Clover," proved the formula wasn't a fluke. Decades later, in 2016, the single entered the Grammy Hall of Fame — a belated institutional nod to a song that had already become part of the language.
Film, Broadway, and Nirvana tribute
Jett never stopped working the margins. She co-starred with Michael J. Fox in the 1987 film Light of Day, singing a title track written by Bruce Springsteen. Her album Up Your Alley went multiplatinum in 1988, and the single "I Hate Myself for Loving You" earned her first Grammy nomination. She played Columbia in The Rocky Horror Show on Broadway in 2000 and hosted Joan Jett's Radio Revolution on Sirius Satellite Radio. In 2014, she stood in for Kurt Cobain with the surviving members of Nirvana at their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction.
The Hall of Fame came for her the following year, when Joan Jett and the Blackhearts were inducted in 2015. By then the catalog had stretched from the punk economy of GI through the arena-sized hooks of Up Your Alley to Unvarnished, a 2013 album that reached the top fifty of the Billboard chart. Changeup in 2022 marked the first acoustic record of her career — the same artist who once quit guitar lessons over folk songs had found a way back to quieter textures without surrendering the edge.
Sixty-eight years after her birth in Wynnewood, the discography reads like a map of rock's late-century fractures: glam clubs, punk basements, arena stages, Broadway. The early version of "I Love Rock 'n Roll" she cut with Sex Pistols members sits in that lineage as a raw first draft. The Blackheart Records pressing of her debut, financed by a college fund, remains a document of what happens when twenty-three labels say no and one artist says yes.