"Rock and Roll" | ||||
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German single picture sleeve
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Single by Led Zeppelin | ||||
from the album Led Zeppelin IV | ||||
B-side | "Four Sticks" | |||
Released | 21 February 1972 | (US)|||
Format | 7-inch single | |||
Recorded | Headley Grange, Headley, England, 1971 | |||
Genre | ||||
Length | 3:40 | |||
Label | Atlantic (no. 2865) | |||
Writer(s) | ||||
Producer(s) | Jimmy Page | |||
Led Zeppelin singles chronology | ||||
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"Rock and Roll" is a song by the English rock band Led Zeppelin, which was first released as the second track from the band's fourth album in 1971, with a guest appearance by The Rolling Stones pianist Ian Stewart.
Befitting its title, the song is based on one of the most popular structures in rock and roll, the twelve-bar blues progression (in A). "Rock and Roll" stands as one of the best-known songs in the band's catalogue.
Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page has said that this song came to be written as a spontaneous jam session, whilst the band were trying (and failing) to finish the track "Four Sticks", at the Headley Grange mansion they had rented in Hampshire, England to record the track. Drummer John Bonham played the introduction in triplets and Page added a guitar riff. The tapes were rolling and fifteen minutes later the basis of the song was down. Said Page:
We were recording another number [Four Sticks]; we’d just finished a take and John Bonham did the drum intro and we just followed on. I started doing pretty much half of that riff you hear on Rock n Roll and it was just so exciting that we thought, "let’s just work on this". The riff and the sequence was really immediate to those 12-bar patterns that you had in those old rock songs like Little Richard, etc, and it was just so spur-of-the-moment the way that it just came together more or less out of nowhere.
Page also commented:
It actually ground to a halt after about 12 bars, but it was enough to know that there was enough of a number there to keep working on it. Robert [Plant] even came in singing on it straight away.
To achieve the distinctive guitar sound on the track, Page plugged his guitar directly into the mixing console, bypassing the traditional amplifier and microphone setup.