REBEL HEART

For Jesse Jo Stark, clothes, music and family have always gone together.

- Samuel Maude

At one point, Jesse Jo Stark wanted to drop the “Jo” from her name in favor of just “Jesse.”

Jesse self-identified as a tomboy. She split a trailer with her parents, Richard and Laurie Lynn Stark (who ran the family business, Chrome Hearts); mingled with the animals on the family ranch; and liked to toss a ball back and forth. Jesse revved dirt bikes and crashed four-wheelers, earning a scar on her hand. “I just kept getting hurt,” says Stark, speaking from her own rural hideaway outside Los Angeles. “My parents joked, ‘It’s not going well for you. You've got to do a different thing." And so began her shift from the gravel road to the recording studio. Stark lived what some would consider a dream childhood. Her parents supplied ‘fits for a roster of rock legends, decking out drummers and guitarists in silver jewelry and leather, giving the genre the aesthetic of a chic motorcycle gang. As a child, Stark happily toddled around her parents’ factory amid incense and loud music. While most kids were rubbing shoulders with Annie from algebra, Stark was running into Guns N' Roses’ Duff McKagan, the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones, or her godmother, Cher. “They were just uncles and aunts to me. It felt normal,” Stark remembers. “But when I started listening to [rock music] and had that first punk rock boyfriend, it was like, ‘Holy shit. I need to ask [the legends] questions. I need to understand what this is.’”