Fake Friends

The Zoo Crew is spinning "Fake Friends" by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, pulled off the 1983 record they simply called Album, and if you have ever watched the room empty the minute the good times got thin, this one lands like a boot on the floorboards. Joan wrote it with Kenny Laguna, the guy who had been in her corner since the labels started slamming doors. It was the lead single, and it was the first Top 40 hit she actually co-wrote. Up to that point the big radio songs had been covers: "I Love Rock 'n' Roll," "Crimson and Clover," "Do You Wanna Touch Me." This one was hers. Billboard parked it at number 35. Some of the trade papers called that a letdown after the previous album had owned the charts. The Zoo Freaks listening in on THE ZOO already know the difference between a chart position and a song that tells the truth.

Talking to Musician magazine around the time Album came out, Joan pushed back on the idea that the track was pure anger. She said "Fake Friends" was more a show of disgust. Losing people who only tell you what you want to hear was not a big deal, she said, and you do not have to be in rock 'n' roll to understand it. They are everywhere. That lines up with the lyric. When you are down they are never there. When you get back up they come around. The sycophants make romance to the ugly sound of telling you what you want to hear, and you pretend, because they all agree you are supposed to have a better life while you are feeling worse. They build you up until you fool yourself that you are something else, and it is like a curse, because you cannot live up to what they made of you. Then the chorus shrugs: you got nothing to lose, you do not lose when you lose fake friends.

Laguna was not even sold on it as the first single. He later told Creem it was not a natural fit for rock radio, and he had said so, and the label went ahead anyway. In the fan mail, Joan said, everybody was asking for "Everyday People" or "The French Song" to lead. The company put the money behind "Fake Friends" and told radio to play it. Some stations got tired of being told. That is its own little joke. A song about hangers-on got pushed by people who wanted a second miracle single, and the band that had just come off a number-one record got treated like a pop act that was supposed to compete with whoever was soft on the dial that year. Laguna has called "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" a miracle single. After it, an angry cult rock band was suddenly expected to mint anthems on schedule. Album still moved, then MCA overshipped, stores looked stuck, and radio cooled off. None of that changes the riff.

The clip they shot for MTV makes the same point without a speech. Joan and the Blackhearts get mobbed by fans and hangers-on who turn into cardboard cutouts and fall over. Heavy rotation, middling chart. The seven-inch had its own piece of mischief. The American single paired "Fake Friends" with "Nitetime," and "Nitetime" ended in a locked groove, so a jukebox would sit there spinning until somebody walked over and kicked it out. Later pressings of the album kept a bit of that locked groove as its own track. The record was cut at Kingdom Sound in Syosset, New York, with Joan, Laguna, Ritchie Cordell, and Glen Kolotkin producing. Ricky Byrd on lead guitar, Gary Ryan on bass, Lee Crystal on drums, Joan on rhythm guitar and that sandpaper voice. Glam stomp under a punk shrug. Not a party song. A warning you can dance to if you feel like it.

None of that attitude showed up out of nowhere. Joan Marie Larkin was born September 22, 1958, in the Philadelphia area, Wynnewood, and grew up around Baltimore before the family headed west. She wanted a guitar early. A teacher tried to steer her toward folk and told her girls do not play rock 'n' roll. She quit the lessons and taught herself, working through records until the riffs stuck. Suzi Quatro was the picture on the wall: a woman with a bass and a leather jacket who was not asking permission. The family landed in the Los Angeles area, and Joan started haunting Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco, the glam room where the kids dressed like the New York Dolls and T. Rex. She has said she learned to scream from Marc Bolan. She also changed her last name to Jett because Larkin did not sound like a marquee.

At fifteen she put a band together. Drummer Sandy West was the other half of the start. Producer Kim Fowley got involved, the group became the Runaways, and the classic lineup filled in with Lita Ford, Jackie Fox, and Cherie Currie. Joan played rhythm, wrote, and sang some of the leads. "Cherry Bomb," which she wrote with Fowley, was the calling card. Mercury put the first album out in 1976. America mostly shrugged outside Los Angeles. Japan and England did not. They toured hard, opened for bigger names, and cut Queens of Noise before the whole thing came apart in 1979, egos and habits and the usual road damage. Joan stayed in England for a stretch and cut tracks with Sex Pistols Steve Jones and Paul Cook. Then she met Laguna. The majors and the minors passed. She has put the rejection letters at twenty-three. People found a woman who played rock like she meant it threatening. So she and Laguna started Blackheart Records and sold records out of the trunk after the gigs, which is about as old-school as a merch table gets. The Blackhearts formed. Neil Bogart at Boardwalk finally heard what the kids already knew, and "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" did the rest.

By the time Album arrived in July 1983, she had already watched friends scatter when the Runaways ended and watched the industry warm up only after the hit. "Fake Friends" is that story with a backbeat. The second verse tells them you were king of the hill, and when you need a hand, that was yesterday. Get out. The Zoo Crew has played enough rooms to know the type: all hugs when the rider is full, gone when the van breaks down. Joan kept the same leather-and-riffs posture she had at Rodney's, and she kept the label. That is the part the song is really about. You do not lose when you lose fake friends.

If you want the rest of the story from the source, the official site is Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, where the catalog still carries "Fake Friends" right alongside the songs that made the name. The band keeps a page on Facebook, posts road shots and tour notes on Instagram, and checks in on X. Fans comparing set lists and old Album pressings hang out in the Joan Jett and the Blackhearts Fan Club group. Spin it loud. The cardboard people fall over on their own.