Obit: Alan Merrill [Covid 19] (1951?-2020)

Subject: Obit: Alan Merrill (Covid 19) 1951-2020
From: GUEST,Rossey
Date: 29 Mar 20 - 08:17 PM

Sadly, the CV19 outbreak has claimed the life of rock singer, guitarist and songwriter Alan Merrill aged 69, who was living in New York. Among the songs he wrote, was the all time classic 'I Love Rock n' Roll' covered by Joan Jett, Britney Spears and many others and a karaoke standard. Although credited to Jake Hooker as well, Alan wrote the whole song - but had an agreement to cut his band mate from the Arrows in for shares of B-sides- something he would profoundly regret when the record was flipped, then covered by Jett. Recently the song was parodied as the novelty 'I love Sausage Rolls' and made number one in the UK over Christmas (the parody is now properly credited to Merrill and Hooker). I know that this gave him a little kick in his last days. Due to the song's association with Joan Jett, many members of the public and even journalists mention her name as if she wrote it, not knowing that it was a cover of Alan's song.    Alan Merrill was the son of Helen Merrill a well known jazz singer.   It is so tragic that he has predeceased her. Sympathy to his family and all those who knew him.

Subject: RE: Obit: Alan Merrill (Covid 19) 1951-2020
From: GUEST,Rossey
Date: 30 Mar 20 - 01:20 PM

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-52089768

Subject: RE: Obit: Alan Merrill (Covid 19) 1951-2020
From: Mrrzy
Date: 01 Apr 20 - 10:22 AM

I love I Love Rock-n-Roll! Aw man.

Subject: RE: Obit: Alan Merrill (Covid 19) 1951-2020
From: GUEST,Rossey
Date: 01 Apr 20 - 12:00 PM

It looks like Alan may have fibbed about his age by a couple of years! It's still a tragic example of the CV14 pandemic effect among musicians. Incidentally, he got ripped off by Joan Jett's record company and a fortune disappeared. He only started getting some of the money back when Britney Spears recorded the song. He was only getting 25% royalty due to cutting his bandmate in for a share even though the party had nothing to do with writing 'I Love Rock n' Roll'. 50% also went to the publisher. Not many people will be interested on this site, as it's not folk music. But then when you write an all time sing a long hit, it becomes a folk song, when everyone knows it, and people adapt it in parodies.            
                                                               
      From the New York Times:
Alan Merrill, a guitarist and singer whose song “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” became Joan Jett’s breakthrough hit, and who had early success as one of the few Western rock stars in Japan in the late 1960s and early ’70s, died on Sunday in Manhattan.
The cause was complications of the coronavirus, his daughter Laura Merrill said. She said he was 69, although some documents indicate that he may have been 71.
“I was just at his show a couple of weeks ago,” Ms. Merrill wrote in a post on Facebook announcing his death. “He played down the ‘cold’ he thought he had.”
Mr. Merrill grew up in a family that was deeply connected to the music industry. His parents were both noted jazz musicians: His mother, Helen Merrill, is a singer; his father, Aaron Sachs, was a saxophonist and clarinetist who died in 2014.
As a teenager, Mr. Merrill played in rock bands, and in the 1960s auditioned to join the band the Left Banke as a guitarist. In the summer of 1968, Mr. Merrill moved to Tokyo, where his mother had been living.
There he saw on television mop-topped, Beatles-esque bands like the Tigers playing to crowds of screaming teenage girls.
“It was like an alternate universe where everybody’s Asian, but I think I can get in here somehow,” he recalled thinking in an interview with The New York Times in 2017.
Through his mother’s connections in the music business, Mr. Merrill began playing guitar in Japanese rock bands. He joined the Lead, whose members were all Westerners. It had a hit in 1968 with “Akuma Ga Kureta Aoi Bara,” which Mr. Merrill sang in Japanese, though he did not speak the language.
He recorded two solo albums in Japan: “Alone in Tokyo” (1971), in Japanese, which yielded another hit, “Namida” (“Teardrops”), and “Merrill 1” (1972), in English. At the same time, he played with the popular glam-rock group Vodka Collins, and acted in a television soap opera, “Jikan Desuyo.”
But by 1974 — after a disagreement with his talent manager, he said — Mr. Merrill left for London, where he helped start a new glam-pop band, the Arrows; he was its singer and bassist. The group had a Top 10 hit in Britain in 1974 with “Touch Too Much.” A single the next year, “Broken Down Heart,” was unsuccessful, but its B-side, “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll,” written by Mr. Merrill and Jake Hooker, the guitarist for the Arrows, would become a classic.
The song caught the ear of Ms. Jett, who recorded it for the first album with her band the Blackhearts, releasing it in 1981. It held the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for seven weeks the following year, and — with a few tweaks to place the song from a woman’s point of view — launched Ms. Jett’s career as a tough-talking rock star.
“I can still remember watching the Arrows on TV in London and being blown away by the song that screamed hit to me,” Ms. Jett recalled in a Facebook post on Sunday.
In a 2009 interview with the website Songfacts, Mr. Merrill described “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” as a “knee-jerk response” to the 1974 Rolling Stones song “It’s Only Rock ’n Roll (But I Like It),” and to Mick Jagger’s elite social circle.
“I almost felt like ‘It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll’ was an apology to those jet-set princes and princesses that he was hanging around with — the aristocracy, you know,” Mr. Merrill said. “That was my interpretation as a young man: OK, I love rock ’n’ roll.”
Allan Preston Sachs was born in New York on Feb. 19, either in 1949 or 1951, and grew up in the Bronx. His extended family also included the songwriter Laura Nyro, to whom he was related through a relative’s marriage. He and Ms. Nyro, who died in 1997, referred to each other as cousins, and in his teenage years he often went to her apartment after school to watch her compose songs.
After the Arrows disbanded in 1977, Mr. Merrill played with Rick Derringer and Meat Loaf, and in 1985 released a solo album on the Polydor label, titled simply “Alan Merrill.” Vodka Collins reunited in the 1990s and released three new albums, and Mr. Merrill became a fixture in the New York rock world, playing widely and building a reputation as a raconteur telling stories of his own singular career.
In addition to his mother and daughter, Mr. Merrill is survived by his wife, Joanna Lisanti; another daughter, Allegra Soler; and a son, Allan Sachs-Ambia.

Subject: RE: Obit: Alan Merrill (Covid 19) 1951-2020
From: GUEST,Starship
Date: 01 Apr 20 - 12:50 PM

I find the approach taken by LoudWire News very distasteful, but it's worth listening to and reading anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3MDQlTvO5M

Subject: RE: Obit: Alan Merrill (Covid 19) 1951-2020
From: GUEST,Rossey
Date: 01 Apr 20 - 05:17 PM

Thanks Starship. It does sound as though poor Alan might have stood more of a chance if they'd admitted him sooner. He was still posting on Facebook until just a few days before, and e-mailed a friend of mine quite close to when he went in. Scary how it happens, and tragic when those closest have to fight to see them to say goodbye. 'I love rock n' roll' will live on, just a shame Alan has to share a joint credit on it with another deceased band mate who didn't have anything to do with its writing. But that's the way it's always been since they invented the concept of crediting and royalties! It makes it awkward when reporting a death, when many journalists know Alan Merrill wrote it solo, but have to put co-wrote in there as well, due to the formal credit.