Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Bad Reputation
Featured Album
The original grrrl crashing the boys' toga party
Recorded in the waning months of the ’70s and the opening months of the ’80s, when the recently recovered Runaway was just 21, Bad Reputation might be rock history's most brazen depiction of a girl crashing the boys'toga party. It's almost half cover versions, but the selections are anything but random: Sam the Sham's tequila-chugging “Wooly Bully,” the Isleys'only-just-Animal Housed “Shout,” “Too Bad On Your Birthday” from ’70s biker-boogie blam-de-lammers Ram Jam, two male-bonding fist-pumpers from Gary Glitter — plus, on this newest version of an album that's been repeatedly reconfigured since its self-titled European import days, a song from the Who, and Tommy James'frat classic “Hanky Panky.” And before you get to any of those, just to make sure guys don't get the wrong idea, Joan nails Lesley Gore's proto-feminist 1963 “You Don't Own Me.”
But before even that, batting leadoff, there's “Bad Reputation” itself: the toughest shout Joan has ever sung, and one of the rock's all-time great refusals to atone for past sins. Interestingly, the album's other non-covers tend more toward power-balladeering than you might remember, though “Don't Abuse Me,” for one, is hard and fast — and has the album's deadliest guitar solo, from Sex Pistol Steve Jones. In these pre-Blackhearts days, backing musicians shift from song to song; Pistol Paul Cook and Blondie's Clem Burke both take drum turns, and a live 1998 reprise of the title track has the surviving Ramones.
The real highlights, though involve Joan refusing to take any crap. No grrrl before or since has pulled off that flat-voweled Middle Atlantic urban tomboy tone like she does here. And whenever she does it, she sounds like she's going to beat all the fratboys up.
