I Love Rock'nRoll

On Songs That Get Second Chances, Songs That Give Second Chances & Songs That Have A Life Of Their Own

By 1981, Joan Jett was 23 years old and already pretty much considered a has-been. After a few burnt out years recalibrating and recovering from life with The Runaways, she hit the studio and recorded demos for a solo album. She and her manager Kenny Laguna sent them to 23 record labels. They received 23 rejection letters.

The pair decided to take matters into their own hands, took Laguna’s savings for his daughter’s college funds and started Blackheart Records, releasing the album independently themselves. Her cover version of I Love Rock’n’Roll, became a career defining bona fide classic hit, topping the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks, and launching Jett as a solo artist. She and Laguna still release her music themselves, true trailblazers in the independent music scene, who proved that putting everything you’ve got into backing yourself is where the smart money is.

Joan had heard the song by The Arrows on their English TV show in 1976, while touring the UK with The Runaways, and fell hard for it. She starting covering it soon after the Runaways breakup and recorded a different version in 1979 with Paul Cook and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols before the iconic version we all know and love today.

I still have my concert ticket from going to see Joan Jett alone at the Thebarton Theatre as a passionate 12 year old fan in Adelaide. I wish Mark Zuckerberg or Hedy Lamar or someone would hurry up and invent time travel so I could pop back there.

The super hit was written by Alan Merrill, in response to producer Mickey Most’s exertion to ‘Think of a simple three-chord rocker with an anthemic sing-along chorus and a great riff.’ It was his second attempt at doing this that hit pay dirt. Merrill says “The Stones had just released It’s Only Rock ’n Roll, which sounded a bit apologetic to me. I wanted to say it loud and clear. I wrote the riff, the guitar break and the verses that night. I played it for Mickie on an acoustic guitar and he told me that was exactly what he meant.”

Merrill gave his band mate Jake Hooker a co-writing credit, a good faith way to return a Tokyo-London airfare that Hooker had paid for Merrill in 1974.

“Jake used to say that it took him 15 minutes to write I Love Rock ’N’ Roll, which used to really annoy me,” Merrill said. “The 15 minutes was how long it took me to teach him how to play it. But as I’ve gotten older I’ve taken a more philosophical approach to the whole thing. Life has its own way of working things out, and I guess if things hadn’t panned out the way they did, Joan might never have heard the song, not had the hit, and I wouldn’t have the life that I’ve got now. I think the song has earned about 50 million dollars to date in worldwide royalties. Considering that the plane ticket cost Jake a thousand bucks, he got a pretty good return.”

Excuse me while I digress here, but I found this fun fact in the YouTube notes and have to share it: Cosmic oddity: Arrows singer Alan Merrill and Joan Jett are both left handed, but play their instruments right handed. That’s it, I love that stuff.

It’s really quite incredible how faithfully Joan sticks to the Arrows template - and yet, she totally owns the song, and has in turn inspired covers by Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus and countless others - and it gave her a second chance at kickstarting a whole new career. Merrill also credits the song with changing the trajectory of his life saying 'I wouldn’t be living here on the Upper East Side without it. I’d probably be homeless’.

Songwriter Jack Lee said in a great YouTube interview that before he wrote Hanging on the Telephone he didn’t really care about lyrics. He’d been struck by Bob Dylan’s Tarantula in a book store, sitting down and reading half of it right there, then getting stuck into the illustrated Beatles song book and feeling inspired by a cartoon of a girl with a telephone cord wrapped around her neck. He explained that the keys to writing great songs suddenly became clear to him “I’m starting to see patterns…. they’re repeating things”

“I hit a G chord, a chord that I’d used all my life, and it went ‘bbbrrring’ and out I shouted ‘I’m in the phone booth its the one just down the hall’ It just came to me…. I start spitting out these words….I wanted to see how … effectively I could rhyme …. then it all flowed into me… the story started developing… it was me catching up with the flow of inspiration that was coming into me”

He recorded with his short lived power pop/punk band The Nerves in 1978 - which also featured the great songwriter Peter Case - but it didn’t really get any traction. It was their only release. I listened to a deep and fascinating interview with Peter Case on a podcast a couple of years back that frustratingly I can’t find now, but I do recall he said that Jack Lee was obsessed with the idea of Blondie covering the song but had no idea of how to get it to them. Weirdly, Jeffrey Lee Pierce from The Gun Club was a huge fan of the song, and a friend of Blondie’s, and sent them a mix tape with the track on it that they listened to obsessively throughout a fairly terrible tour of Australia in support of their B side In The Flesh becoming a random Oz hit due to Countdown host Molly Meldrum’s support of it (Side note: Chris Stein on Australia in The Music “The very first gig we played was in Perth and it was like going into the '50s or something – the women were wearing ankle-length floral skirts; it was very strange. And the whole gear and touring situation was so primitive. We were there during John Denver month and every time we asked for a piece of gear for our tour, it was like, 'No, John has it.”)

Back to Hanging On The Telephone, Debbie Harry says “We were playing it in the back of a taxicab in Tokyo, and the taxicab driver started tapping his hand on the steering wheel. When we came back to the US, we found that the Nerves weren't together anymore and we said, 'Gee, we should record this.'“

When they called Jack Lee to ask permission to record it, his electricity and his phone were due to be cut off that evening for non-payment. He agreed, of course, and the band agreed to pay Lee’s bills upfront. Their version, produced by the great Mike Chapman producer for their third album Parallel Lines, is an absolutely glorious anthemic Blondie classic hit - that sticks very closely to the Nerves original.

But sometimes the first cut is actually the deepest, as proved by Rod Stewart’s version of The First Cut Is The Deepest, which was written by Cat Stevens and first recorded by the sensational P.P. Arnold, who had a Top 20 UK hit with it, before Sir Rod cut it ten years later and had a monumental hit in the US and the UK with it. Both are fantastic, but without PP’s defining version, Rod would not have had a template to work from.

Red Red Wine was a flop for Neil Diamond in 1967 (even though it’s rather gorgeous) on his second album Just For You but when English act UB40 rerecorded it with their distinctive easy listening reggae vibes in 1983 the song slowly became gigantic hit - five years after its release. UB40 performed it at a Nelson Mandela tribute concert in 1988, an American radio DJ heard and fell in love with it and started playing it on the radio so much that it took off in the US and was reissued and promoted and hit the charts. Neil Diamond performs the UB40 reggae version in his concerts now.

Robin Campbell told Smooth Radio they had ‘absolutely no idea’ it was a Neil Diamond song. "We were concerned it was a Tony Tribe song. We heard the Tony Tribe version in 1969, I think it was. I've still got the vinyl somewhere. And it actually said when I looked on the record, it actually said 'N Diamond' in brackets. And I had no idea, that it still didn't connect, that we thought it was Negus Diamond or somebody. We had no idea until after we recorded it. And for publishing reasons, we then discovered it was a Neil Diamond song, which was quite a shock." Tony Tribe gave Trojan Records their first hit with his cover.

June Carter wrote Ring of Fire with Merle Kilgore for her sister Anita to sing in 1962, inspired by a line from a book of Elizabethan poetry and that fact that she was falling hard for a wild young artist she was touring with - Johnny Cash. They were both married to other people and trying to resist their growing attraction. Anita recorded a sublime, haunting version.

Johnny had an intensely prophetic feeling dream where he heard the song playing accompanied by mariachi horns. He asked permission to record it, apparently saying to Anita '‘ I'll give you about five or six more months, and if you don't hit with it, I'm gonna record it the way I feel it.’ Johnny’s version went to No. 1 on the country chart and No. 17 on the Hot 100 and is still considered his most iconic song. Johnny and June married a few year laters and their burning love endured until the end.

Toni Basil was a successful choreographer and performer, well known on the Hollywood scene since the 60s. appearing in films and working with Frank Sinatra, Elvis, Ann Margret, David Bowie, Tina Turner, Bette Midler, Devo, the TAMI show and countless others. She says she always had this idea about writing a cheerleader song and had tried writing her own - but when she heard Racey’s 1979 song Kitty, written by hit making duo Australian Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn, she thought she’d change the gender and “put a cheerleader’s chant on top of this song”. She conceived, directed, produced and choreographed the unforgettable music video with a teeny budget, wore her actual high school cheerleading uniform and had a number one Billboard hit with it in 1981, at age 39.

Until recently, Toni made no money from the song because the master rights to her recording were owned by a European label and chasing the copyright claim has been an ongoing years long court process that was finally resolved in 2022 in Toni’s favour, making her the sole owner of the master recording rights.

Happily, Toni is as iconic as ever, choreographing Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and winning hearts worldwide giving go-go lessons online during the pandemic.

Jason Isbell’s devastatingly raw ballad Cover Me Up which addresses finding sobriety and true love hit a nerve and virtually achieved instant classic status when his record Southeastern arrived in 2013, spawning endless cover versions, including a massive 2021 Platinum hit version by country artist Morgan Wallen, who first came to prominence via The Voice and has since divided music fans by drunkenly partying without a mask during Covid restrictions and being videoed using ‘the ‘n’ word’ with his mates at the end of a 36 hour alcohol binge. His behaviour prompted radio stations and streaming services to pull his music for a while, awards shows to un-invite him and weirdly won him even more fans - his most recent album topped the Billboard 200 charts for four weeks straight.

Following the revelations, Isbell announced on Twitter “So… A portion of this money goes to me, since I wrote Cover Me Up. I’ve decided to donate everything I’ve made so far from this album to the Nashville chapter of the @NAACP. Thanks for helping out a good cause, folks.” and also joked “If he’s doing cover me up don’t yell at him you guys I’m fine with it”.

Though there will always be definitive versions, songs don’t really belong to anyone once they’re out there in the ether. They can fly away and reinvent themselves and come back as surprising new versions of themselves. Songs, just like people, and ideas, sometimes need reimagining or a new context to fully reveal or inhabit their potential.

Try imagining a song you love recorded by someone unexpected and think about what it would sound like and how it might change the meaning. … this is one of my favourite reinventions:

Tell me, what are your favourite cover versions that have stretched or reinvigorated the life of a song?