How I Wrote... "I Love Rock 'N' Roll"

The late Alan Merrill recalled how his flop became Joan Jett's runaway hit.

- By Mark McStea

JOAN JETT HAS so fully inhabited her 1981 signature hit, "I Love Rock 'N' Roll"; that most people assume she wrote it. In fact, it was penned by Alan Merrill, a New Yorker who in 1974 moved to the U.K., where he found success with the glam act Arrows. Although the group scored a handful of hits, ironically "l Love Rock 'N' Roll" didn't even scrape the lower reaches of the U.K. charts and might have been forgotten forever had Jett not chosen to cut it.

Merrill told me the story behind the song's creation in 2016, and we remained close friends up to his untimely death from Covid-19 in March 2020, making him one of the pandemic's earliest victims.

"Arrows needed a fourth single, and Mickie Most, our producer and owner of our label [Rak], suggested I try to come up with something, as our first three singles had been written for us," he explained. "He said, 'Think of a simple three-chord rocker with an anthemic sing-along chorus and a great riff.'"

FROM JET FARE...