“Rock & Roll” by The Velvet Underground

"Rock & Roll" is Lou Reed's thank-you note to the radio, and it's the beating heart of Loaded, the Velvet Underground's 1970 album. The song follows a girl named Jenny whose humdrum life gets rescued the moment she tunes in to rock and roll, and years later, writing for the Peel Slowly and See box set, Reed admitted that Jenny was really him: without the radio, he figured, he'd never have known there was anything beyond the place he came from.

Reed sings it and shares the electric guitars with Sterling Morrison, while Doug Yule handles both bass and drums, and the whole thing chugs along with the lean, unfussy swagger of a band that has decided to let the sunshine in. Geoffrey Haslam and Shel Kagan produced. Reed never let go of it, either, keeping it in his live shows for years as a solo act.

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