Rock ’n’ Roll by John Lennon

Rock 'n' Roll, John Lennon's February 1975 album on Apple, is the sound of a man going home to the jukebox of his youth: a whole record of covers from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Getting it made was pure chaos. Phil Spector ran sessions at A&M Studios in October 1973, then vanished with the tapes and wound up in a car crash, and the recordings stayed out of reach until the Walls and Bridges sessions began. Lennon took the controls himself at the Record Plant in October 1974.

There was a lawsuit lurking too: Morris Levy had sued over one line in "Come Together", and the settlement obliged Lennon to cut three Levy-owned songs. When Walls and Bridges came out first with only one of them, Levy sued again. What survives it all is a loose, loving, sometimes ragged record, led by "Stand By Me" and fronted by a photo Jürgen Vollmer took back in the Beatles' Hamburg days. It went gold in Britain and America.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.