Alan Merrill, a Songwriter of ‘I Love Rock ’n’ Roll,’ Dies

those we’ve lost The musician, who died of the coronavirus, had an early rock career in Japan before helping write the song that became Joan Jett’s breakthrough hit. This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here. 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.