The defining anthem of ‘Led Zeppelin IV’, according to Robert Plant
It’s amazing how quickly the narrative around a band could change during the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when the music industry truly was an “industry”: a churning machine in which groups were routinely expected to put out multiple albums and a handful of singles every calendar year.
Case in point, within a few weeks of the much-ballyhooed release of Led Zeppelin III in October of 1970, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were already back in the songwriting lab, motivated to prove something to critics who’d accused them of abandoning their original hard rock sound, or, to put it in unfriendlier terms, “going soft”.
Bearing in mind that Led Zeppelin’s debut album had only come out a year prior, as well, it seems a bit ridiculous that they’d already feel the need to go back to their proverbial roots. Plant was still a 22-year-old kid, and the 26-year-old Page was just two years removed from playing with the Yardbirds. Nonetheless, the group’s untitled fourth LP, better known as Led Zeppelin IV, was a calculated statement – except for the one song that wasn’t properly calculated at all.
While ‘Stairway to Heaven’ carried on more of the folky experimental vibe of Zeppelin III, and ‘When the Levee Breaks’ delivered one of the all-time great British takes on turbo-charged American blues, it was the simply titled ‘Rock and Roll’ that seemed to light the biggest spark during the sessions for Zeppelin IV, reminding the band that, despite the level of refinement they’d undergone after several years of steady recording and touring, they could still let loose like the world’s best garage band.
“We just thought rock and roll needed to be taken on again,” Plant recalled to Creem magazine in 1988. “I was finally in a really successful band, and we felt it was time for actually kicking ass. 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.”
According to Led Zep lore, ‘Rock and Roll’ hadn’t come directly from the mind of any member of the band, but essentially emerged organically during a long day at the Headley Grange mansion. After sluggishly trying to work their way through another track, ‘Four Sticks’, drummer Jon Bonham spontaneously decided to clear everyone’s palette by introducing a very different rhythm; banging out a drum pattern borrowed from Little Richard’s ‘Keep a Knockin.’
Jimmy Page, the great seasoned session pro that he was, invented a matching riff on the spot, John Paul Jones followed suit on the bass, and Plant added the vocals, inspired by that urge to “kick ass” again, as he’d explained it.
Ian Stewart was brought in to add some ‘50s style boogie woogie piano, but overall, compared to a monstrous, meticulous anthem like ‘Stairway’, ‘Rock and Roll’ was laid down at lightning speed, with the band uniformly driven to maintain the energy and spirit that had breathed life into it out of the ether.
As Page later remembered it, the whole track was “written in minutes and recorded within an hour”.
‘Rock and Roll’ achieved its mission, reminding Zeppelin fans and critics who’d baulked at those folk ballads and Tolkien references that their favourite band were still the most powerful, straightforward rock and roll band available to the listening public as the 1970s began.
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