Joan Jett & the Blackhearts – I Love Rock’n’Roll
The take that spent seven weeks at No.1 was recorded while the producers were out of the building, by a man who decided not to wait for them.
Glen Kolotkin was alone in the control room at Kingdom Sound on Long Island in the summer of 1981. He was the associate producer, and the two men whose names would go on the record, Kenny Laguna and Ritchie Cordell, had gone out. Kolotkin asked the band to run the song once. Then he rolled tape without telling them it was a take, because he could hear what it was and, as he put it, he was not going to let it “slip away.” They played it once. By the time Laguna and Cordell came back, the record that would spend seven weeks at No.1 was essentially finished.
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Almost nothing about that afternoon was an accident, though, because Joan Jett had been trying to make this particular record for five years. She first heard the song in 1976, touring England with the Runaways, watching a London-based glam band called the Arrows perform it on their own television series. Alan Merrill and Jake Hooker had written it the year before as a shot back at the Rolling Stones: Merrill heard It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (But I Like It) as Jagger apologizing for what he did for a living, and wrote the opposite sentiment on purpose. RAK Records put it out in July 1975 with Mickie Most producing, and buried it on the B-side of a single that went nowhere.
Jett brought it back to the Runaways and they passed on it. After the band broke up she recorded it in London in 1979 with Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols, and that version went out as the B-side of her cover of You Don’t Own Me — which is to say she buried it on a B-side too, exactly as the Arrows had. Three separate bands had now decided this song was not the important one.
Twenty-odd rejections and a car trunk
What happened between 1979 and 1981 is the part the song is usually made to stand for. Every major label Jett and Laguna approached turned her down, so the two of them founded Blackheart Records and sold her debut album out of the trunk of a car at shows. Neil Bogart, who had built Casablanca, saw the demand that independent distribution was generating and signed her to his new Boardwalk label. That is how a rejected artist arrived at Kingdom Sound with studio time and a band, and it is why Kolotkin pressing record on an unannounced take reads as luck arriving somewhere it had been earned.
Boardwalk released the I Love Rock ‘n Roll album on November 18, 1981, and the first thing anyone noticed about it was not the title track. It was a hard-rock version of Little Drummer Boy, which got seasonal radio play, then came off the record after Christmas and was replaced with Woe Is Me. That novelty opened the door. The label issued the title song as a single on January 20, 1982. It knocked the J. Geils Band’s Centerfold off the top of the Hot 100, held there for seven weeks, and was finally displaced by the Vangelis Chariots of Fire theme. Britain put it at No.4. The album reached No.2 on the Billboard 200, the RIAA certified the single Platinum, and Billboard ranked it the third-biggest song of 1982.
The production is what carried it that far. Kolotkin, Laguna and Cordell built the one-take performance into something enormous — stacked vocals, hand claps loud enough to function as a second drum kit, a guitar sound with no air around it at all. It is a two-minute-fifty-five-second record with four chords and no bridge, arranged as if it were a stadium.
Jett never had another No.1, which gets used against her by people who mistake chart arithmetic for a career. She had eight more top 40 hits, and the song she is defined by is one she spent five years insisting on while three different sets of musicians and roughly two dozen record executives told her it was not worth the tape. Alan Merrill, who wrote it, died on March 29, 2020, having watched somebody else’s version of his B-side become one of the most recognized recordings in American popular music. Both halves of that sentence are the same story: the song only ever worked for the person who would not let it go.