Joan Jett & the Blackhearts – I Love Rock’n’Roll

“I Love Rock ‘n Roll” – Single by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts from the album I Love Rock ‘n Roll
B-side “You Don’t Know What You’ve Got” or “Love is Pain”
Released January 1982
Label Boardwalk
Songwriters Alan Merrill, Jake Hooker
Charted No.1 in US; No.4 in UK; No.6 in West Germany; No.1 in Sweden; No.1 in Netherlands; No.1 in Canada; No.2 in Belgium.

“I Love Rock ‘n Roll” spent 20 weeks at No.1 on Billboard HOT 100 for 7 weeks from February 6, 1982 until March 20, 1982.

The song was originally recorded and released by the Arrows in 1975 on Rak Records, with Merrill on lead vocals and guitar and Mickie Most producing.

Joan Jett saw the Arrows perform “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” on their weekly UK television series Arrows while she was touring England with the Runaways in 1976. The Runaways’ producer and manager Kim Fowley had the band learn the song in the summer of 1977, during the brief period when Vicki Blue had replaced Jackie Fox as bass player and Cherie Currie was still the group’s vocalist.

Jett first recorded the song in 1979 with two of the Sex Pistols, Steve Jones and Paul Cook. This first version was released on vinyl in 1979 on Vertigo records as a B-side to “You Don’t Own Me”. In 1981, Jett re-recorded the song, this time with her band, the Blackhearts. This single was released in late 1981 in Australia and New Zealand by Liberation Records, and by Boardwalk Entertainment in Canada. This recording became a US Billboard Hot 100 number-one single for seven weeks, being the only one for the band

Record World said it “has anthem qualities and heroic lead guitar riffs.”

The music video for “I Love Rock ‘n Roll” produced by Barry Ralbag, received heavy play by the fledgling MTV network. It featured Jett and the Blackhearts traveling to a small, dingy bar and then exciting the drunken crowd by performing the song and yelling out its chorus. A snippet of Jett’s 1981 hit “Bad Reputation” can be heard at the beginning of the video. The video was originally in colour, but it was converted to black and white because Jett hated the look of her red leather jumpsuit.

In the original version, the lyrics are about a guy picking up a young girl and taking her home, which was fairly typical rock and roll subject matter. When Jett covered this, however, it became a song about a girl who notices a guy next to a jukebox and brings him home to have sex. Other hit songs like “Physical” by Olivia Newton John and “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” by Pat Benatar also had sexual overtones, but Jett sang about aggressively pursuing the guy, which for many women made this a female-empowerment anthem. This song helped shape Jett’s image as a tough, confident rock star and became an inspiration to many female musicians.

The line “Put another dime in the jukebox” was dated by the time Jett released her version, as very few jukeboxes took dimes. “Quarter” didn’t sound good in the lyrics, and as jukeboxes slowly disappeared or became computerized contraptions accepting paper currency, it didn’t matter anyway.

The video was directed by Arnold Levine, who also did many of the Loverboy and Bruce Springsteen clips. Jett wore a red leather outfit to the shoot, which took place at New York club called Private’s with an assortment of fans that showed up that day forming the crowd. When Jett and Levine looked at the edit, the colors were a mess, with way too much red and mauve in the shots because of poor fashion choices. This was not the rock and roll video they imagined, but when Jett saw the black-and-white work copy, she loved it. Without the color, the clip looked gritty and retro, which is what they were going for.