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...
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PRS
PREVIOUSLY PART OF PRS's Maryland-built guitar line, the SE NF3 was recently reissued in the company's offshore-produced SE series. The SE NF3 is so named for its Narrowfield Deep Dish (a.k.a. DD) \"S\" pickups. These unique PRS-design units have deeper bobbins to accommodate more windings and extra metal pieces between the magnets to yield a more powerful \"single-coil\" tone, while remaining noise-free because they are in fact humbuckers. A control set consisting of master volume, tone and a five-way blade switch allows the usual selections of bridge, middle and neck pickups by themselves and the neck-plus-middle and bridge-plus-middle combinations that allow the SE NF3 to veer into Strat-like territory in switch positions two and four.
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