“Rock and Roll” by Led Zeppelin

"Rock and Roll" comes blasting out as the second track on Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth album in 1971, and it got there by accident. The band were holed up at Headley Grange, the Hampshire mansion they'd rented, grinding away at "Four Sticks" and getting nowhere, when frustration boiled over into a jam, and the jam turned into this: a flat-out rocker that lives up to its title and then some.

Jimmy Page's riff is dead simple and lethal, leaving plenty of daylight for John Paul Jones and, above all, John Bonham, who drives the thing like a runaway truck at 170 beats per minute in A major. Page stacks the guitars in layers, the opening riff doubled across the stereo field, a dirtier third part growling in the middle and a fourth throwing rock and roll licks over the top, while Ian Stewart, the Rolling Stones' original pianist and co-founder, drops by to pound the keys like it's a sock hop.

Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham share the writing credit, with Robert Plant supplying the words; Page produced it, and Andy Johns engineered and mixed it. Nothing on the record sounds like more fun.

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