How Joan Jett taught herself the guitar
As an inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it would be difficult to argue that Joan Jett isn’t something of a rock icon. She is perhaps best known as the lead singer of Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, although she found earlier fame with the Runaways and their single ‘Cherry Bomb’.
Several of the best guitarists of all time are self-taught, and while Jett may not be necessarily considered part of that exclusive group, she is indeed self-taught. She once admitted, “I did try to take lessons, but being an exuberant 13-year-old, I figured you could learn everything in one day. I went to the guitar teacher and said, ‘Teach me how to play rock’n’roll.’ He looked at me like I had three heads.”
Jett quit learning with her guitar teacher after just one lesson, and taught herself barre chords with a ‘how to play guitar book’. She added, “Then I sat in my bedroom and listened to records by Free, Deep Purple, T Rex and Black Sabbath because they had big fat barre chords and were slow and easy to play; I learned by ear. Playing with my records didn’t seem difficult or like music homework, it was more like fun.”
The first guitar that Jett played was a Silvertone electric that her parents bought for her one Christmas aged 13. A natural left-hander, the guitar was meant for right-handed players, so Jett tried to flip the guitar over as Jimi Hendrix had once done. However, it felt more natural for Jett to have her left hand on the frets (as a right-handed player would do) “because I needed to have more dexterity with that hand while my right hand would only be strumming.”
Jett is admittedly a guitarist not too interested in complex techniques. As a songwriter, rather than a lead guitarist, she is more interested in the chords and the rhythm of the music, or as she puts it herself, “just pure music, not really thinking about technique too much. I’m not into difficult fingerings and style, I just like the feel of the guitar.”
The Silvertone guitar would lay the blueprint for Jett’s overall feel of learning the guitar. The expense was not necessarily as important as the technique. This much is true, you can put an amateur guitarist on a USA Custom Stratocaster, and they wouldn’t sound 10 per cent as good as a professional on a plastic guitar from Woolworths.
Jett also gave advice to young female musicians in her own mould. She said, “don’t listen to what people tell you. You may run into people asking you what you’re doing, saying that girls don’t play guitar. You’d think we’d be way past that now, but that’s not the case. It’s easy for men to throw those snide comments at girls to make them question what they’re doing, and use it as a way to put girls in their place. But just screw all that and keep at it.“