Longtime rocker has still got it
Joan Jett’s collaborator, Kenny Laguna, offers a colorful supply of stories about the phenom

By Molly Gilmore-Baldwin

For The Olympian

Joan Jett’s famous cover of Tommy James and the Shondels’ “Crimson and Clover” was the result of one of those magical moments when everything comes together perfectly.

“Joan pulled out the Tommy James album one day, and she goes, ‘Oh, I love this song,’ ” said Kenny Laguna, Jett’s longtime collaborator, and a former Shondel. “We were just fooling around at a sound check one day, and she did the song.

“Joan went into a booth with the guitar, and that record is her singing live,” Laguna said. “That one song was magic right there and then.
She saw God when she was in there.”

Laguna, who’ll play with Jett and the Blackhearts on Saturday in Tacoma, has an endless supply of stories about the hard-rocking Jett — and no wonder: He’s been working with her since 1979 when Jetts’ girl group the Runaways broke up and she formed Joan Jett and the Blackhearts.

A producer, musician, singer and songwriter who started producing bubblegum hits when he was a teenager, Laguna knows just how rare that kind of perfect-the-first-time performance is.

“Live vocal, live guitar, live drums. Everything is just the way it was performed,” he said. “That’s very rare in the modern era. I’ve made a zillion records, and that’s the only time that happened.”

A zillion?

“I’ve had 50 hits, and can you imagine how many bombs?” he asked cheerfully. “There must be thousands.”

Quite a number of the hits were Jett’s, of course — including the infamous “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll,” which still is a staple at Jett’s concerts.

That song — and much of Jett’s post-Runaways work — was released on Jett and Laguna’s own Blackheart Records, which the duo started because no record labels were interested in the music Jett wanted to make.

“We didn’t have a plan,” Laguna said. “We weren’t trying to be independents; we just weren’t able to find anybody to be dependent on.”

Jett and Laguna have produced work for many other artists as well — including, a few years ago, Olympia’s own Bikini Kill.

Jett also collaborated with members of Seattle’s The Gits after the murder of lead singer Mia Zapata.

Blackheart has issued albums in genres from heavy metal to rap. “The business plan became: People that have potential but are being ignored by the industry, we give them a deal,” Laguna said.

At one point, Blackheart had issued three of Billboard’s top 10 rap songs, he said, laughing about the night he was talking shop with a rapper. “He said, ‘You’re Blackheart? You?!’ ”

But most of Blackheart’s underdogs are, not surprisingly, women, who still face some of the same obstacles Jett has long been battling.

“On radio, the rule was never play two women in a row,” Laguna said. “And they try not to have two DJs who are women.

“It’s still true today, but there was a time when that was the law. That was it. If they were playing a Paula Abdul song at a Top 40
station, they’d say, ‘We can’t add ‘I Hate Myself for Loving You.’

“It’s a very misogynist world, the record business.”