In 1989, American actor and singer Michael Damian recorded a cover version that went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

The lyric pays homage to early rock-and-roll and its surrounding youth subculture, and notably to 1950s rebel James Dean.

The distinctive stripped-back musical arrangement was devised by producer Jeff Wayne after hearing Essex's original vocal demo: According to Wayne, only three session musicians played on the final backing track, and the most prominently featured was veteran session musician Herbie Flowers, whose double-tracked bass guitar was treated with a prominent "slapback" delay effect, creating a complex polyrhythmic backbeat: Flowers himself noted that, as a reward for devising the double-tracked bass line, he was paid double his normal session fee, and thus received £24 instead of the usual £12.

[9] He had earlier created a similar double-tracked bass line for Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side", explaining in a BBC Radio 4 interview that it had also been done because he would be paid double.

The rubbery bassline was an echo of something played in 1956, caught like a sound corked in a bottle and released as a gas twenty years later.

The whole song was akin to a spectre in a photograph, with its cat-ghost strings and Essex's half-asleep vocal summoning a lost era with random signifiers".

He adds that its lyrics offer more questions than answers, and concludes that, "caked in echo and confusion", the song was "the sound of Britain in 1973.

"[10] In Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy (2016), Simon Reynolds comments that Essex's music avoided straightforward 1950s revivalism, deeming "Rock On" and similar singles like "America" (1974) to be hypnotic and "stripped-down" records laden with "studio-warped" sounds, and as such were closer to Dr. John's "humid junglescapes", like "Craney Crow" (1971), and "the cinemascopic funk" of the Temptations' "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" (1972).

[10] In Uncut, Marcello Carlin cites "Rock On" as an example of how "fucking weird" Essex's music was, writing: "Rarely has such a nostalgic record sounded so futuristic and yet somehow lost ('Which is the way that's clear?')".

[12] He also praises Wayne's "visionary" production, commenting that his "dub spaces and raised-eyebrow strings" provide "the missing link between Norman Whitfield and Lee Perry.

[4] According to Luke Haines in his Record Collector column, the song is "David Essex's million-selling, avant-garde, self-penned masterpiece."

He wrote that Essex launching his teen idol career "with a dub record" was novel, writing: "You can thank bassist Herbie Flowers for that, Essex himself for being brave and inventive enough to release it, producer Jeff Wayne, and engineer Gary Martin (Soft Machine, Yes, Gentle Giant, etc) at Advision, who made very sparse instrumentation sound like a lot with judicious use of effects."

[19] Don Partridge of Melody Maker noted Wayne's background acquiring the "precise talents" of jingle writing led to his "masterful" production, citing "Rock On" as an example, as it is "built around a single bass riff, a stark arrangement only relieved by a soaring string section punctuating the chorus line.