Rocktober '80s Song #9: "Bad Reputation" by Joan Jett (1980)

Back in 1980, Joan Jett was less than a year removed from the breakup of The Runaways, and she rightly decided to record a solo album.  Jett had befriended record producer Kenny Laguna, who financed the recording sessions using borrowed studio credits.  The album, which was originally titled Joan Jett, was released in Europe in May 1980.  However, in the U.S., Jett and Laguna could not find a record label willing to back the album.  They were rejected by 23 record labels before they decided to use their personal savings (including Laguna's daughter's college savings!) to form their own label, Blackheart Records, to press and distribute the record themselves -- making Jett one of the first female artists to found her own label.

Originally, Laguna would sell copies of the album out of his trunk at concerts, but it started to sell well enough that, a year later, Boardwalk Records picked it up and re-released it as Bad Reputation with a rearranged track listing.

The title track is two minutes and forty-eight seconds of snarling punk rock energy.  Jett has said the album title and song title are a nod to her supposed bad reputation that she got as a member of The Runaways.  And, as the song says, she doesn't give a damn about her bad reputation.  It was ranked the #29 hard rock song of all-time by VH-1 in 2009, and it served as the title of a 2018 documentary about Jett that is on my list of music docs to see.

In November 1981, Jett and her then-solidified backing band The Blackhearts released the I Love Rock & Roll album, and the title track to that album became a #1 hit (and Jett's signature song).  Thanks to the success of "I Love Rock & Roll" (and her Top 10 cover of Tommy James and The Shondells' "Crimson and Clover" from the same album), Jett made a music video for "Bad Reputation" in 1982.  It's a tongue-in-cheek re-enactment of various record labels rejecting her first solo album, the founding of Blackheart Records, the subsequent success with "I Love Rock 'n' Roll," and the record labels' change of tune.  Laguna makes a cameo as the Warner Brothers executive.

The video is a nice FU to the music establishment, but Jett's ultimate FU to all the labels that rejected her came in 2015 when she was deservedly inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (and I hope The Runaways will be inducted as a group in the future).