‘Rock and Roll’: The Led Zeppelin anthem that revitalised the genre
As The Yardbirds disbanded in 1968, guitarist Jimmy Page sought to keep the flame alight as the collator of Led Zeppelin. Prior to joining the Yardbirds, he led a successful career as a session but had a newfound taste for public exposure and the rush of the rock ‘n’ roll stage. The only Yardbird willing to continue, Page began to recruit new musicians for the so-called New Yardbirds. Fortunately, some particularly ripe fruit dangled in the Black Country, where a group called Band of Joy had just broken up.
Band of Joy was revered in its locality for frontman Robert Plant’s unique and masterful vocals and John Bonham’s thunderous and innovative approach to percussion. “I was appearing at this college when Jimmy turned up and asked me if I’d like to join the Yardbirds,” Plant told Classic Rock of his first meeting with Page in 2008. “I knew the Yardbirds had done a lot of work in America – which to me meant audiences who would want to know what I might have to offer – so, naturally, I was very interested.”
The frontman sang Jefferson Airplane’s song ‘Somebody To Love’ to Page during this first encounter. “When I auditioned him and heard him sing, I immediately thought there must be something wrong with him personality-wise or that he had to be impossible to work with because I just could not understand why, after he told me he’d been singing for a few years already, he hadn’t become a big name yet,” Page later reflected. “So I had him down to my place for a little while just to sort of check him out, and we got along great. No problems.”
With Plant and Bonham in place and fellow session musician John Paul Jones taking bass duties, Page had his dream team assembled. After completing some lingering touring commitments as the New Yardbirds, the group changed its name to Led Zeppelin. The following year, 1969, would see the arrival of not one but two world-class albums, and by the turn of the decade, Led Zeppelin vied with The Rolling Stones and The Who for The Beatles’ vacant throne.
The first couple of Led Zeppelin albums established the quartet’s long honed talents with a brilliant collection of hard rock classics like ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and ‘Ramble On’ and more blues-faithful tracks like ‘Bring it on Home’ and ‘You Shook Me’. From this firm foundation, the band’s chemistry grew as they challenged one another to take their instrumental and compositional skills to the limit.
Most fans tend to agree that Led Zeppelin reached their unbeatable peak in 1971 with the release of Led Zeppelin IV. Plenty of breathtaking material lay in store in masterpieces like Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti, but this fourth, technically untitled record was bulletproof from start to finish with enduring highlights like ‘When the Levee Breaks’ and ‘Black Dog’.
Led Zeppelin IV was hugely influential on the budding heavy metal genre alongside the work of bands like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. Still, with the folky softness of ‘Going to California’ and the epic convolution of ‘Stairway to Heaven’, there were few areas of contemporary subsequent musical evolution it didn’t touch, either directly or indirectly.
As a true milestone in the history of rock music, it seems fitting that Led Zeppelin IV was the home of the prominent anthem ‘Rock and Roll’. The thunderous, self-referential classic, like The Velvet Underground’s like-titled song of the previous year, seemed to place a marker in the diary to observe just how far the genre had come in the past 15 years or so since Elvis Presley’s emergence.
Besides their obvious virtuosity, there is a primitive and visceral urgency to many of Led Zeppelin’s hits. Plant identified this when discussing ‘Rock and Roll’ with Creem in 1988. “I was finally in a really successful band, and we felt it was time for actually kicking ass,” he said. “It wasn’t an intellectual thing ’cause we didn’t have time for that – we just wanted to let it all come flooding out. It was a very animal thing, a hellishly powerful thing, what we were doing.”
Unlike most of the other songs on the album, especially the arduous ‘Four Sticks’, ‘Rock and Roll’ was written and tracked at lightning speed, reflecting the song’s urgency. “We were recording something else when John Bonham started playing the drum intro to ‘Keep a Knockin’ by Little Richard, and I immediately started playing the riff for ‘Rock and Roll’,” Page remembered in a past conversation with Uncut. “Instead of laughing it off and going back to the previous song, we kept going. ‘Rock and Roll’ was written in minutes and recorded within an hour.”
Led Zeppelin was unique in being highly influential on both the prog-rock and punk waves that prevailed through the 1970s. Their comparatively simple, hard-hitting tracks like ‘Rock and Roll’ lit the way for the genre’s future in which one could be as clever or primitive as they liked. The important thing was to express one’s truest self with no filter.
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