I Hate Myself for Loving You

That opening riff does not ask permission. It walks in, plants its boots, and dares the room to look away. Joan Jett and the Blackhearts cut "I Hate Myself for Loving You" for the 1988 album Up Your Alley, and it still sounds like a leather jacket thrown across a barstool. Four minutes and seven seconds of hard rock with a glam-metal sheen, built on a hook you can shout from the back of a club or the front seat of a car with the windows down. If you are tuned to THE ZOO, you already know the rule around here: deep cuts and the big ones get the same respect, as long as the guitar tells the truth.

The song almost had a title radio would never have printed. Producer Kenny Laguna has said Joan came in with the riff and a working lyric called "I Hate Myself Because I Can't Get Laid." Catchy in a backstage kind of way. Unplayable on commercial rock radio in 1988. Laguna had been chasing songwriter and producer Desmond Child after hearing an early pass of Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer." Child was busy chasing bigger names and did not want the meeting. Laguna kept after him until he gave in. Child, who already had "I Was Made for Lovin' You" for Kiss and "You Give Love a Bad Name" for Bon Jovi on his résumé, heard the riff and made one demand that changed everything. Put love in the title. The raw frustration stayed. The language got a coat of chrome. Joan Jett and Desmond Child share the writing credit. Child and Laguna share the production. That is how a joke of a working title became the last Top 10 pop single of Joan Jett's career.

They cut it at Dreamland Recording Studios in Hurley, New York, the same room that had already hosted a run of loud records. The Blackhearts on the track were the working band of that stretch: Ricky Byrd on rhythm guitar, Kasim Sulton on bass, Thommy Price on drums, with Ronnie Lawson on keyboards. Then came the guest who still surprises people the first time they hear the story. Mick Taylor, the former Rolling Stones lead guitarist from the early 1970s, played the solo. Taylor later called it minimalist and said he had jammed with the Blackhearts in New York before the session, partly because Byrd was a fan. It is not a shred solo. It is a Stones-school bend dropped into a Blackhearts groove, and it fits because nobody overplays it. The single went out on Blackheart Records, the label Joan and Laguna built after the major labels passed, with a live take of "Love Is Pain" on the vinyl B-side and a cover of the Troggs' "I Can't Control Myself" on the CD single.

Released in June 1988 as the lead single from Up Your Alley, it climbed to number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100. That made it Joan's third and last Top 10, the first since "Crimson and Clover" in 1982, and it hung around the chart six weeks longer than "I Love Rock 'n Roll," which had been a number 1. Mainstream Rock stopped it at number 20. Cash Box had it at 10. Overseas it hit number 8 in New Zealand, number 12 in Sweden, number 46 in the UK, and, in one of those chart footnotes that radio people love, number 1 in Zimbabwe. The parent album, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts' sixth studio set, arrived on Blackheart/CBS on May 23, 1988, peaked at number 19 on the Billboard 200, and went platinum. The follow-up single, "Little Liar," another Jett and Child co-write, reached number 19. The band picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. They did not win. The record did not need the trophy.

Years later the same chorus got rewritten for NBC's pro football telecasts. Pink cut a version in 2006 with the hook bent toward the broadcast. Faith Hill took the slot the next season, and Carrie Underwood later on. Joan has said the football money made it her best-paying composition. That is the strange second life of a song that started as a frustrated riff in a rehearsal room: stadiums full of people who could not name the album, singing a line about loving somebody they should have walked away from.

To get why this record lands the way it does, you have to go back to Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, and a kid named Joan Marie Larkin, born September 22, 1958. The family moved west. In Los Angeles she fell in with Kim Fowley and a teenage band that did not ask the industry for a hall pass. The Runaways, formed in 1975, put Joan on rhythm guitar and vocals beside Lita Ford, Sandy West, Jackie Fox, and Cherie Currie. Four studio albums, a lot of tours, and a reputation that ran ahead of the sales. When the Runaways split in 1979, Joan tried to shop a solo record with Kenny Laguna. Label after label said no. She has put the rejection count around twenty-three. Instead of waiting for a yes, she and Laguna started Blackheart Records and put the music out themselves. The 1980 album, first called Joan Jett and later reissued as Bad Reputation, carried the title track that became a mission statement. "I don't give a damn about my reputation." The Blackhearts formed around her. In 1981 they cut a cover of the Arrows' "I Love Rock 'n Roll," took it to number 1, and parked the album at number 2. A cover of Tommy James and the Shondells' "Crimson and Clover" followed it into the Top 10. Boardwalk Records had the distribution by then. The point of Blackheart never changed. She owned the masters and the name on the door.

The middle of the decade was steadier than the myth sometimes allows. Album, Glorious Results of a Misspent Youth, and Good Music kept the band on the road. She appeared in the 1987 film Light of Day with Michael J. Fox, playing a bar-band singer, and the title song, written by Bruce Springsteen, gave her another chart record. Up Your Alley was the rebound that reminded pop radio she was still dangerous. After that came The Hit List in 1990, a covers album, then a long run of studio records on her own label, right through the acoustic set Changeup in 2022. In 2015 she went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, presented as the guitar player who made a generation of kids pick up an instrument without asking if they were supposed to. The Runaways got their own film in 2010, with Kristen Stewart playing Joan. She has produced, acted, and kept Blackheart open for bands who needed a door that was not corporate. Official word on tours, records, and the store lives at joanjett.com, with the band on Facebook, Instagram, and X.

Listen again to the lyric and you hear the whole résumé in one bad decision. She hates the hold this person has. She is not leaving. The verses are a list of evidence, the chorus is the confession, and the band refuses to soften either one. That is the Joan Jett method from the Runaways forward. State the problem. Turn the guitar up. Do not apologize for the volume. On THE ZOO we play it because it still kicks the door open, the same way it did when Up Your Alley hit the racks, and because a station built on album rock owes a debt to the woman who decided the industry could keep its permission slip.