Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, I Love Rock N’ Roll
Catchy and swaggering: an unpretentious rock n' roll classic.
Like her debut solo collection before it, Joan Jett's first album with the Blackhearts opens and peaks with its great and famous title track — but where “Bad Reputation” took years to accrue its reputation in the public eye, “I Love Rock N'Roll” topped the US chart in its own time, and rocked harder than any other ’80s song to do so. It's also, some might be surprised to learn, a cover version — of a rarely heard 1975 B-side by UK glam rock footnotes the Arrows. But to say Joan made it her own is an understatement.
Joan sang it as a 23 year-old woman slavering over a 17 year-old boy standing by the record machine, and it's not the only time she flips gender tables here; she sings “Crimson and Clover” to a girl, just like Tommy James had, and then three songs later yells out a Diddleybeat original called “Be Straight” with a straight face. In general, the originals on I Love Rock N'Roll have catchier guitars and more humor than the originals on Bad Reputation: The beefalo riff in “(I'm Gonna) Run Away” is straight-up Bachman Turner Overdrive, and its title is its own punchline. Joan does the self-assertive I-need-some-space shtick to death, but those Raspberries/Elton pop-rock powerchords and that fake British accent in “You're Too Possessive” are still too delectable to complain about.
On the cornball cover front, “Little Drummer Boy” has the world's foremost vocal-as-drum barumpabums, and enables Joan to call herself a poor boy; “Bits And Pieces” reimagines the Dave Clark Five as Gary Glitter glam; and on this expanded 2006 reissue, “Louie Louie” and “Summertime Blues” feel inevitable. But the real treat is “Nag,” a hilarious No. 25 1961 hit from NYC Coasters mimics the Halos — Joan goes in for the kill while retaining its R&B roll. And in a new version, the Coasters themselves help her out.
