Svengaliobit: Kim Fowley

Kim Fowley, the man who brought together Joan Jett and Sandy West to form The Runaways, has died.

Fowley had survived polio in childhood. He attempted a solo career, but it was as producer, writer and general mover-and-shaker that he made his name. He worked with everyone - Lennon, Modern Lovers, Helen Reddy, but The Runaways were his finest hour. After they stopped working together in 1977, Fowley tried to recreate the magic with a number of other acts, but never quite got the formula right in the same way.

More recently, he tried his hand in the movies as well as keeping his hand in the music world.

Clem Burke issued a statement:

"Kim was a great and often misunderstood individual. When Blondie first came to Hollywood Kim was one of the legends we wanted to meet. We did meet him at the Tropicana motel and became friends. I had the privilege of sitting next to Kim at a screening at SXSW of the Runaways film. When it ended, I turned to Kim and told him he was the hero of the film. He seemed happy to hear that."

Fowley had recently been receiving treatment for cancer. He was 75. And he co-wrote this, with Joan Jett:

Joan Jett trying to close down cancer charity album

A bunch of bands covering The Runaways - a nice tribute to Joan Jett, and a way of raising funds for a cancer charity. Who could have a problem with that?

Joan Jett and Cherie Currie, it turns out:

The two-disc album, "Take It or Leave It: A Tribute to the Queens of Noise," features covers of songs by the Runaways, which launched the careers of Jett and Currie. It's supposed to be released June 28.

Jett and Currie say in their lawsuit that the Easton, N.J.-based record label used their names to promote the album without their permission.

The label, Main Man records, say they've not seen the lawsuit and don't appear to have even been contacted by Jett or Currie.

Yes, but are they friends, or friends?

Carmen Electra is reported as having "laughed off" the stories suggesting that she's in a relationship with Joan Jett. Although, actually, what has happened is a spokesperson has issued a brief shrug:

"They are just friends."

Oh, go on, Carmen, you're not going to get a better offer, you know.

Put another dime in the Baywatch baby

Some confusion over at The Sun, where Gary O'Shea seems to think that having a relationship is a bad thing that a person might be accused of:

SEXY CARMEN ELECTRA has been accused of sharing a lesbian love affair with rocker JOAN JETT.

O'Shea fails to explain exactly who is making this "accusation" - or, indeed, why it's an accusation at all. Apparently a "source" says it saw Electra and Jett "kissing and touching", and it's possible the pair might go together to the Dinah Shaw weekend.

Got anything else, Gary?

Joan has refused to discuss her sexuality. But her A.C.D.C. track contains the lyric: “She got some other lover as well as me.”

We love the idea that O'Shea was combing the lyrics of a song called AC/DC to see if they might contain a hint of bisexuality. (Hint, Gary: the name of the song.)

However much you may love rock and roll, you have no need to put a dime in the jukebox, baby

In other words: as part of the push for the new Joan Jett album, Sinner, her MySpace page is hosting a free download of one of the tracks, ACDC.

And before you ask "is it about the band", it's off an album also featuring tracks called Fetish and Androgynous. So, no, then.

music joan jett

WHY WE LOVE PATTI SMITH. STILL: Another mailout reaches us from the Divine Ms Smith:

But back to Venus. To view this slow moving but miraculous event please don your dark glasses or protective eye coverings. I myself will most likely miss it as i will be busy preparing for our own transit by bus to places known and unknown. I have to stop at the dentist to get my teeth cleaned. I only bring this up because it's something i avoided for a long time and i implore you not to make my mistake. Your future will be brighter, to say nothing of your teeth, if you invest an hour of your time once or twice a year taking care of this matter.

I know i have juxtaposed chocolate syrup and dental care but this was entirely unpremeditated. In any event my other mission for tomorrow is to purchase several pairs of overpriced socks to pack for the tour.

I can't express the joy of laying out a new pair of linen socks wrapped in tissue on the motel bureau for the next day. It has been the key to many a transcendent night in places like st. louis and dallas and knoxville. Oh wondrous socks. So uplifting for one trampin from town to town.

Footwear, astronomy safety advice, dental care - what other rock queen cares so much for her fans? When was the last time Joan Jett recommended you an osteopath?

THEY MUST RATE STARS DIFFERENTLY IN IOWA: The Iowa media is getting really excited by the 'stars' out in force for the caucuses: the drummer from the E-Street Band being just one of the, uh, huge names out and about to try and persuade enough people to go vote that the rest of the US might shut up about how the Iowa procedures are a bit rubbish.

Seriously, of course, some of the candidates ("Howard Dean - and Wesley Clark, if you count people calling it in") are calling on some fairly big names. Joan Jett turned out for Dean at the weekend ("Jett has played Iowa before" pointed out the Fort Dodge Messenger, lest we think the appearance of a rock star in the state is a total novelty). Now, we'd heard rumours that there had been a bit of pushing and shoving at an event attended by Joan Jett and Janeane Garofalo - there was a link to a news story on the local ABC affialiate but the story seems to have disappeared.

Dick Gephardt had the vocal support of Michael Bolton to contend with. Poor sod.

What the pop papers say: Anglo-American edition

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Blimey, it's aged her

We can understand that having a stalker might worry you, but we're not sure that ananova was being a little cruel using this picture to illustrate the story:

I mean, Britney looks like she's just seen Joan Jett walk in carrying a jackhammer...

That was my people

Over on Freezing to Death in the Nuclear Bunker, JBR not only provides an excellent overview of the Joan Jett Letter To Rolling Stone, but also updates that it turns out it wasn't written by Joan Jett at all. Indeed, the official Joan Jett website apologises now for the "confusion" over the letter - that would be the confusion caused by saying it was a letter from someone it wasn't then, would it?

Mormonism: A clarification

It's been pointed out to us that the analogy we use to try and grasp Joan jett's objections to Pink - that it's like Mormonism, because you have to be born into it, doesn't actually stack up. Which we suppose is actually true, but we were stretching the point that you get your ancestors reverse-baptised. But, no, it doesn't really work. So, instead, we'll suggest that Joan Jett is trying for a version of the 1970's closed shop - where it is not enough to be competent, but you have to have served years as an apprentice and be a member of the right Union. Apologies to the Latter-Day Saints for our earlier sloppiness.

Defintions

DEFINITIONS: There's some good and some bad in the open letter to Rolling Stone that currently greets visitors to Joan Jett's website.
We're curious as to why Joan Jett thinks that Pink can't count as rock simply because she's done some hip-hop R&B as well - is rock turning into the musical equivalent of mormonism, whereby you must have been born into it to be able to do it?

We suspect that the story she tells of Britney "butchering" I Love Rock & Roll and then saying "I've always loved Pat Benatar" may have been the cassus belli for the letter - that must hurt, and, yeah, Avril and Britney and Eve aren't traditional rock, and having barely a page on Sleater Kinney and nothing about Karen O suggests that the editors of the the Stone have no idea what's happening in the music scene at all.

But complaining at the "misuse" of the word "rock" rather than the offensiveness of an edition that was little more than an excuse to get Brit's tits to flog a few extra copies masquerading as a girl-power thing? You're fighting a lost battle, Joan, and you sound past-it.

Please see the accompanying clarification on Mormonism

Weekend videos of note

Britney, when you sing "knew he must have been about seventeen" in your cover of I Love Rock and Roll, why would that be of note? When Joan Jett sang the line, the implication was "he's younger than me, probably a virgin, I'm going to take him, teach him, and possibly break him." When you sing it, Britney, it implies nothing so much as "he was in my year at school, then." Still, the video is as an impressive piece of attempted market repositioining as I've seen in an age - especially the frantic rubbing yourself clean of any residual spittle from Justin Timberlake (although in future you might find a kleenex more effective than a motorcycle.)
I'm sure a lot of men, and the author of the ever-excellent glitter-splashed britney-loving lesbo, will be suddenly realising that they now do, actually, have to make good whatever their half of the deal with god, satan or their own personal jesus was.

Talking of repositioning - I'm supposing the low-key Joy Division at rest styling of the new Fischerspooner video is supposed to be a riposte to critics who accuse them of being all wig, no tunes. "Here we are. This is us. Judge us on our music alone." Okay, then - we will: You sound like the Fixx.

At the other end of the market, there's the new Coral video. You would have thought that faced with a bunch of lads who - let's be honest - aren't ever going to be asked to pose for Calvin Klein - it would have been kinder not to get them to do close-up singing into a fish eye lens; indeed, since they'd gone to the expense of hiring a bear suit, you wonder if maybe they all should have dressed up. I wonder if the whole thing was meant to be a homage to Hotel New Hampshire; whatever, it winds up looking a bit like an animated version of the Be Here Now sleeve.

TEN: Ping Pong Bitches Top Ten of the moment, cited in a rather fine Phinweb interview:
Firestarter - Prodigy
J'taime... moi non plus - Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin
I Love Rock'N'Roll - Joan Jett
Flashlight - P-Funk
French Kiss - Li'l Louis
Ms Jackson -Outkast
Up Middle Finger - Oxide & Neutrino
Cheree - Suicide
Bad Boy for Life - P Diddy
Baby One More Time - Britney Spears

ACTION... CUT...: Michael J Fox and Joan Jett as brother and sister? Read Hollywood Bitchslap's excellent guide to the Ten Bad Rock Career Killing Movies

THE SMILE ALBUM: The Washington Post has theories about why rock stars never smile in photos...
• The blues: Rock bands have been channeling the jaded spirit of original bluesmen since the beginning. The Rolling Stones, for one, were heavily influenced by musicians like Little Walter, a short-tempered harmonica player who drank incessantly and died after a street fight. (There's a Little Walter song on the band's "12 X 5" album of 1964, the same year the band toured with the Chicago legend.) Bluesmen, of course, were a pretty bummed-out lot, either because their labels had bilked them of royalties or they'd been two-timed by big-legged women.

• British dental problems: There's also a very good chance that the Stones, and just about every other influential English band, simply had bad teeth.

• Bob Dylan: Dylan brought gravitas to pop music, and that gravitas wiped the grin off the faces of pop stars. Including the Beatles, who wore mostly mischievous smiles during their years of collarless suits and group bows and who gradually explored moods and shadows as they became acquainted with Dylan. "I'm a Loser" is considered the first Dylan-influenced John Lennon song, a number that, at least lyrically, U-turns from the sunniness of early hits, like "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

• The baby boomers: The baby boomers are behind every trend, demographic and otherwise, so they belong on this list just in case.

• Grunge: Under this hypothesis, the non-smile has been around for many years, but became firmly embedded in the etiquette book of rock mannerisms only after grunge arrived in the early '90s. It wasn't merely that the most famous writer and purveyor of grunge, Kurt Cobain, was depressed enough to commit suicide. The entire grunge ethic, both in fashion and attitude, countered the hair-metal notion that rock stars were somehow different; underneath Cobain's workaday flannel shirt lurked the idea that rock stars were beset by the same anxieties as their fans, who could find those same shirts in an L.L. Bean catalogue.

• Dean and Brando: Forget about Nirvana. "Everything is descended from James Dean and Marlon Brando," says Kenny Laguna, a journeyman song producer and longtime manager of Joan Jett. The lone wolf, the whiny and slouchy outsider, the archetype of the misunderstood punk, comes from these two actors, he claims, and they had enormous influence on people like Dion and Elvis Presley, whose film debut in "Love Me Tender" in 1956 was scorned by some critics as a tacky impersonation.

"It's also about menace," Laguna says. "The invisible difference between rock and pop is that menace. It's that attitude. There are a ton of bands that have menace now, but so much of it is fake. A guy like Marilyn Manson -- it's like he studied it in high school."

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