Why I Love Joan Jett So Much

Why I Love Joan Jett So Much...

For the past several months, for my stand-up act, I have chosen to use Joan Jett's "I Love Rock and Roll" as my intro song. It is a great high-energy song to come on stage to. Sometimes I take a moment at the beginning of my set to acknowledge the music and to refer to "Joanie" as my good-luck charm. Another way I work Joan into my set is when I say that I didn't get any number of stereotypical gay genes, I am fond of saying, for example, "when G-d was handing out the fashion gene to gay men, I was in the next room at the Joan Jett concert."

If you love a good, hard-edged pop/rock song as much as I do, and if your tastes run similar to mine, it's easy on the surface to see why I love Joan Jett so much. In a word, she is awesome. Her body of work over the past 30 years has been consistently good. Her songs are tight, her vocals are strong, and she is undoubtedly one of the finest rhythm guitar players on the circuit today. Her live shows take it one step further. She gives it her all, each and every time. To paraphrase a lyric from her rap song, "Black Leather," she is Joan, and she is love.

But there is another dimension to why I love Joan Jett so much. It has to do with something that happened over 20 years ago, when I was managing Tower Records in New York City. Joan and her band were scheduled to do an autograph-signing appearance at our Lincoln Center location to promote her latest release, "Glorious Results of a Misspent Youth," which remains to this day the album of hers I listen to most, with "Good Music" running a close second. Joan was scheduled to arrive at 10:00 AM and stay until 12:00 noon. When she arrived, there were 2,000 fans outside our store waiting to meet her. There was no way we would be able to move 2,000 people through the line in just two hours. Joan looked at the crowd and said to her manager, and then to me, "I'll stay until everyone's gone through the line." And she stayed for eight hours. Eight hours! For her fans! This, to me, is the ultimate in professionalism, the ultimate in respect for the business and for your art, the ultimate in respect for the fans who adore you and who are in no small part responsible for your success. The fact that you do this to acknowledge this to your fans shows how much you care about that relationship. The only other person who ever did this was Luciano Pavarotti, who stayed for six hours a few months after that. Contrast that with Billy Idol, who came 45 minutes late and left after an hour, leaving us with 1,500 12-year-old girls going into heat for the first time banging on our windows and our doors to get in. We had to call the NYPD to bring a squad car up to the front door and the horse patrol to move the crowds away. It was scary, and whatever little respect I may have had for Billy Idol prior to that afternoon, I lost completely that day.

Joan, you are the best, and I love you, and I love coming on stage to "I Love Rock and Roll." Keep well, and keep up the good work!

It was a great time in my life, and I love reliving it each time I listen to Joan Jett!

Thanks for listening, have a great day.

Kenny A.