The Advice From Robert Plant That Got A Fellow Rock Star Arrested

In September 1976, the groundbreaking all-female LA band the Runaways were on their first European tour, a month-long whirlwind affair that began and nearly ended early in England. The band — Joan Jett on rhythm guitar and vocals, singer Cherie Currie, Lita Ford on lead guitar, drummer Sandy West, and Jackie Fox on bass — were all teenagers who were excited to be out of the country and wanted something to remember their trip. But the unique souvenirs they began collecting landed them in a British jail and earned Joan Jett her first and only arrest.

It all started when Jett and the other Runaways played their first big show at LA's Starwood nightclub that January. Among the crowd there to see the young rock n' roll rebels were Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, before their band, Led Zeppelin, broke up due to the death of drummer John Bonham. Plant even sported a Runaways T-shirt, and the girls hung out with him after the show. At some point, Jett and the others asked him about what to get on the road, and his answer — hotel room keys — would eventually turn out to be terrible advice.

The idea that the hard rock idol Robert Plant would be hanging out at a Runaways show at the height of Led Zeppelin's fame giving out dodgy advice isn't actually that weird. In the 1970s, Plant embraced a range of new music, from punk to prog rock, even jamming with the Sex Pistols' guitar player Steve Jones and later helping push Rush to reunite after a long hiatus. But in the case of the Runways, Plant's helpful advice backfired in a big way. It wasn't intentional — Plant himself collected hotel room keys.

"He had shadowboxes of his hotel keys, like souvenirs, and they clock all the places you've been — these cities 'cause it's kind of hard to remember 'Was I there?' 'Yeah'," Cherie Currie later recalled to Backfire magazine (via "Bad Reputation: The Unauthorized Biography of Joan Jett"). While Plant's idea sounded good to the members of the Runaways at the time, Jett would come to regret taking his advice. "I blame Robert Plant, because we once asked him what souvenirs we should get on the road; he said he took hotel room keys," she said in a 2020 interview with The Guardian. "In England, the keys were big, ornate, metal things." Exactly how Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, and Sandy West (Lita Ford and Jackie Fox were not held) ended up locked up in an English jail has, over the years, taken on the status of legend, and as such, the circumstances are a bit sketchy.

Depending on who you ask, it either started with a missing hairdryer reported stolen by a hotel manager or a Scotland Yard police officer suspicious about the large sum of cash in the possession of the band's road manager. However the interaction with law enforcement was precipitated, the end result was a search of the girls' luggage that turned up the collection of British hotel room keys. "I had four," Joan Jett recalled to The Guardian. "At customs, the guy said, 'Hmm, sticky fingers, you're under arrest', and put me in a jail cell."

Jett, Cherie Currie, and Sandy West were held in jail for 19 hours. Because Jett was 18, she was held separately from the others. "It was stupid," Jett said (via "Queens of Noise: The Real Story of the Runaways"). "I was amused for a minute, then I started getting freaked out. So I started singing 'Dead End Justice," down the hallway." The Runaways song Jett picked includes the lyrics, "Oh yes, I was arrested / Oh God, how I protested." After Jett and the others were released, she had to pay the equivalent of a $70 fine (about $380 today). She apparently didn't hold this against Plant. After the breakup of the Runaways, due in part due to drugs and infighting, Jett and her new band, the Blackhearts, toured with Plant in 1988. No word on whether they kept any hotel room keys.