by George Case
One of Led Zeppelin’s most explicitly carnal songs, both celebrating and regretting the bevies of teenage beauties (“the circus of the LA queens”) who latched onto them during their West Coast American visits.
“For Your Life”
A murky note of warning creeps into this firsthand Presence tale of Angeleno late nights and white lines, “paying through the nose… in the City of the Damned.” “Addiction to powders was the worst way to see yourself, a waste of your time and everybody’s time,” Plant later avowed. “You make excuses for yourself why things aren’t right or about what’s happening to your potential. You lie to yourself and rub your nose later.”
“Royal Orleans”
Different interpretations have been made of the cryptic verses here. Led Zeppelin stayed at the Royal Orleans hotel in Louisiana in 1973, where John Paul Jones partied with a local drag queen and ended up unconscious with his room on fire; this song refers to the misadventure. Jones, however, has denied that he was “kissing whiskers left and right” or that he learned “if you take your pick, be careful how you choose it.” “The transvestites were actually friends of Richard [Cole],” he told Mojo magazine in 2007. “That I mistook a transvestite for a girl is rubbish—that happened in another country to somebody else.” Well, it did happen.
“Hots On for Nowhere”
The almost indecipherable line “I’ve got friends who would give me fuck-all” could be Plant’s complaint against Page and Peter Grant, forging ahead with Zeppelin’s next album while he was apart from his family and recovering from a serious injury.
“Tea for One”
Plant’s lyrics on the heartrending rewrite of “Since I’ve Been Loving You” lament his separation from his wife due to his tax exile and their near-fatal Greek car accident of 1975. “I was just sitting in that wheelchair and getting morose,” the singer remembered. “We had just finished a tour, we were away from home, and Robert was in a cast, so I think everybody was a little homesick,” Page was quoted in Guitar World. “Our attitude was summed up in the lyrics for ‘Tea for One.’”
“Hot Dog”
The electric honky-tonk breakdown, where Plant sings that he’ll “never go to Texas anymore,” is supposedly about his Lone Star groupie Audrey Hamilton. The lines “I took her love at seventeen / A little late these days, it seems” are best left without comment.
“Carouselambra”
Many of the lyrics on In Through the Out Door were Plant’s response to the tragic death of his young son and his reevaluation of rock stardom. “Powerless the fabled sat, too smug to lift a hand… Where was your helping, where was your bow?” could be a dig at Jimmy Page’s incapacitation by drugs.
“All My Love”
In the vocal’s emotion as well as in its words, the record’s highlight is quite likely a tribute to Plant’s child and an affirmation of family loyalty.
8
Sounds Caressed My Ear
Led Zeppelin Music Trivia I
To Trip Is Just to Fall: Audible Technical Mistakes in Led Zeppelin Songs
Aside from Page’s much-discussed “sloppy” guitar solos, where his choked or faltering lines have a personality that more fluid players’ do not, there are several Zeppelin songs where one or more of the band noticeably fumbles his part. None of these errors were serious enough to warrant discarding the entire take, and most add a measure of authenticity to the numbers, showing that they were performed by real people in real time. To the extent that they are musical flubs, only the individual listener can decide just how much they detract from the piece they’re in—if at all.
“Your Time Is Gonna Come”
Jimmy Page’s pedal steel guitar is not quite in tune with the rest of the song, as even he admitted to Guitar Player magazine in 1977. “I had never played a pedal steel before, but I just picked it up…. It’s more out of tune on the first album because I hadn’t got a kit to put it together.”
“I Can’t Quit You Baby”
“There are mistakes in it, but it doesn’t make any difference,” Page said in the same ’77 interview. “[T]here are some wrong notes.” He’s right about the lazily executed soloing: Listen for some clams at 1:30, 2:07, and 3:20, at least.
“Heartbreaker”
Of his solo, Page told Guitar World, “That whole section was recorded in a different studio and was sort of slotted in the middle. If you notice, the whole sound of the guitar is different.” In fact, the solo guitar is tuned a little higher than that for the rest of the song.
“Moby Dick”
There are some awkward edits during Bonham’s drum solo, clearly spliced from several takes.
“Immigrant Song”
At about 1:40, Plant hesitates on the line “So now you better stop….”
“Since I’ve Been Loving You”
Discovered with the cleaned-up CD releases of 1990, Bonham’s bass drum pedal is squeaking throughout the song. “It sounds louder every time I hear it,” Page has noted. Other songs where this is audible—barely—include “The Rain Song,” “Over the Hills and Far Away,” and “The Crunge.”
“Stairway to Heaven”
Not exactly a mistake, but the overdubbed twelve-string-guitar fanfare before the solo, at about 5:31, is slightly out of sync. There’s also an open G string sounded during Page’s electric solo, near 6:00, that isn’t a bum note but probably wasn’t intentional.
“Misty Mountain Hop”
The band briefly seem to fall out of time around 2:11, at the line “There you sit….”
“The Rover”
Page misplays an E chord at 2:57.
That Confounded Bridge: Studio Noises or Talk in Zeppelin Songs
It was a fashion in the post-Beatles, post-Dylan era of rock ’n’ roll to include snatches of nonmusical dialogue or sounds on album tracks, to impart a realism to the work that distinguished it from the carefully groomed productions of an earlier generation of artists. The device was, in a way, a parallel of the 1960s’ cinematic trends for handheld cameras and improvised scenes that replaced the Hollywood models of technical perfection. Led Zeppelin didn’t intentionally leave studio chatter in very often—other performers of the time were much more casual that way—but several of their cuts contain deliberate or inadvertent sounds besides instruments and singing that can be picked out by careful ears. Here are among the most distinct.
“Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”
The first Led Zeppelin albums were recorded hastily, either in a concentrated couple of weeks or in scattered sessions at a variety of studios, and thus many taping accidents were left in the final mixes: guide takes left audible under masters, vocals “bleeding” into instrumental tracks, and so on. An example of the former comes at 1:45 in this number, where Robert Plant’s ghostly “I can hear it callin’ me” is heard very low. This would have not gone unnoticed by Jimmy Page or engineer Glyn Johns, but it had a cool resonance and so was kept in.
“You Shook Me”
This is another case of one recorded take incompletely erased by a subsequent overdub, with Plant’s off-mic laughter at 1:45 and his faraway moaning around 5:50.
“Whole Lotta Love”
Once more, Plant’s voice came through under another track at around 4:00 but was given a dollop of echo to add another sonic dimension to the recording. The acoustical depth suggested by this kind of production is just not possible with the digitized layering of most current pop music.
“Friends”
The very faint dialogue in the song’s first few seconds is said to be Page mumbling “fuck” as he hesitates on his guitar part.
“Out On the Tiles”
Someone seems to say “stop” at 1:22—possibly to coordinate the tune’s tricky rhythmic breaks.
“Tangerine”
This beautiful ballad enters with a plainly deliberate count-in after Page noodles around some A-minor guitar chords. “That’s commonly known as a false start,” he said in 1970. “It was a tempo guide, and
it seemed like a good idea to leave it in…. I was trying to keep the tempo down a bit. I’m not so sure now if it was a good idea.”
“The Crunge”
The song begins with Page’s studio direction to engineer George Chkiantz (“One more straight away, George”) and ends with Plant’s obvious “Where’s that confounded bridge?”
“The Ocean”
This track starts off with John Bonham’s count-in (which he would repeat in concert performances of the song) and, at about 1:38, some listeners insist a ringing phone can be heard.
“In My Time of Dying”
As this lengthy blues jam winds down, some pleased comments from the musicians are left in after Plant mimics Bonham’s coughs and Page picks some celebratory notes: “That’s gonna be the one, then!” (probably Bonham), “Come have a listen, then” (possibly engineer Andy Johns), and “Oh yes, thank you” (probably Bonham again).
“Boogie with Stu” / “Black Country Woman”
The tail end of the first song hears Plant’s laughter, which leads into the intro to the next, recorded outdoors, where engineer Eddie Kramer asks, “Shall we roll it, Jimmy?” The sound of a passing plane is pointed out by Kramer, but the easygoing Plant says, “Nah, leave it.” These and the “In My Time of Dying” close are the two most au naturel bits of Led Zeppelin’s shoptalk to have made it onto their official records.
“The Wanton Song”
Led Zeppelin was really cooking on this knockout rocker, and Page’s enthusiastic “Go!” in the background urges the band on around 3:18. Play loud to hear.
“For Your Life”
Another very attentive listen identifies the sound of snorting through a straw, relevant to the song’s subject, after Plant sings “paying through the nose,” at about 5:30.
Way Down Inside: The Sounds in the Abstract Section of “Whole Lotta Love”
Between 1:23 and 3:00, Zeppelin’s juggernaut went off on the most extreme example of musique concrète ever heard in a Top Ten hit. Hammer of the Gods author Stephen Davis described it as “clamoring trains, women in orgasm, a napalm attack on the Mekong Delta, a steel mill just as the plant shut down,” but the tracks employed for the passage are more prosaic. The main elements were Page’s theremin, Plant’s voice, and Bonham’s snare, hi-hats, and conga—there are no “sound effects” in the sense of prerecorded samples of ordinary noises, and certainly no clips of sex or air raids. “We already had a lot of the sounds on tape, including a theremin and slide with backward echo,” recalled Jimmy Page. It was engineer and Jimi Hendrix collaborator Eddie Kramer who helped the producer realize the potential of the instruments he had on hand. “[H]is knowledge of low-frequency oscillation helped complete the effect. If he hadn’t known how to do that, I would have had to try for something else.” Page also said of the interlude that “all that other stuff, sonic wave sound and all that—I built it up in the studio and put effects on it and things; treatments.” Page’s Sonic Wave theremin produced some pretty weird sounds on its own, but with Page and Kramer’s work at the mixing console they became even weirder: distorted, echoed, reverse echoed, and panned back and forth across the stereo field. Perhaps the final component of the “Whole Lotta Love” surrealism is the studio equipment itself. Page and Kramer mixed the song at an eight-track deck in New York’s A&R Studios, “playing” the faders and pots while the tapes rolled. The methodology seems primitive in today’s programmed, sixty-four-track, digital environment, but in 1969 such an approach—to physically tinker with the technology as it was operating—was sheer ingenuity. Like the song “Whole Lotta Love” itself, Page and Kramer’s performance represented a finite amount of musical input built up into a monster.
Her Face Is Cracked: The Sound at the Beginning of “Celebration Day”
“I was very good at salvaging things that went wrong,” Page said in his revelatory Guitar World interview of 1991. “For example, the rhythm track at the beginning of ‘Celebration Day’ was completely wiped by an engineer…. The engineer had accidentally recorded over Bonzo! And that is why you have that synthesizer drone from the end of ‘Friends’ going into ‘Celebration Day,’ until the rhythm track catches up. We put that on to compensate for the missing drum track.” It’s been said that engineer Andy Johns ran out in terror after the glitch, though he’s never recounted the story, and at the time of the album’s release Page claimed, “The tape got crinkled in the studio and wouldn’t go through the heads.” The implement used to make the electronic hum was likely John Paul Jones’s VCS3, an early machine whose artificial tones were high-tech sci-fi in 1970.
Didn’t Take Too Long: The Sound at the Beginning of “Black Dog”
There are three of Page’s guitars overdubbed in the Led Zeppelin IV blastoff, a favorite technique of his when building up the sonic weight of his riffs. The distortion is jacked to the maximum through use of direct injection and compression—the amplifier is bypassed and the instrument is instead plugged straight into the recording deck, where its tones are scrunched into the thickest possible frequency. “Each riff was triple tracked,” Page explained in 1993. “One left, one right, and one right up the middle.” The hissy tape noise of practice strums and string scratching that precedes Robert Plant’s entry is what Page called “the massing of the guitar armies,” as the separate tracks were rolled and synchronized before the master take was put down. Though the warming-up sounds could easily have been edited out, it makes for an ominous few seconds of calm, like a stray rifle shot before the massive artillery barrage begins.
The Disregard of Timekeeping: The Meter of “Black Dog”
“Black Dog” is the best of many examples of Led Zeppelin’s mastery of time signatures that would have stymied less expert musicians. Not a few of its millions of listeners have thought the main guitar riff is fumbled when it is repeated a fourth lower after the three identical opening salvos, yet somehow Page, Jones, and Bonham stay together without the whole thing turning into a train wreck. Very few well-known songs in Western pop music are timed to irregular numbers—Pink Floyd’s “Money” is in 7/8, and jazzman Dave Brubeck’s classic Time Out album is full of fives and sevens, but most rock ’n’ roll is built on a steady two, four, or eight beats per bar. The trick to “Black Dog” is in the sympathetic ears of the three instrumentalists, who play an idiosyncratic line that really has no formal rhythmic structure with just the right amount of metrical give and take. Page later spoke of his enthusiasm for “shifting the goalposts,” inspired by the quirky stop-start cadences of such blues artists as Howlin’ Wolf and Skip James, and “Black Dog” is similarly basic but with a very funky sense of syncopation.
“When I wrote [“Black Dog”],” John Paul Jones told Susan Fast, “the ‘B’ section of the riff was actually phrased as three 9/8 bars and one 5/8 bars over the straight 4/4 but nobody else could play it!” The bassist has also counted this original conception as 3/16 time, “but no one could keep up with that,” and he clarified to Cameron Crowe. “We struggled with the turnaround, until Bonham figured out that you just count four-time as if there’s no turnaround. That was the secret.” Some transcribers of “Black Dog” time the riff as three bars of 4/4, followed by a single bar of 5/4 and then another 4/4, but anyone trying to do their own version of the song should play it as Led Zeppelin did in 1971: by feel.
Cryin’ Won’t Help You: How the Echo in “When the Levee Breaks” Was Created
John Bonham’s intro to the Led Zeppelin IV Memphis Minnie cover might be the heaviest instrumental performance in the group’s record, and it is certainly one of the classic moments in rock ’n’ roll audio production. Though the song was first attempted in a conventional studio, the trials were unsatisfactory and it was set aside until the band went to the Headley Grange home to lay down tracks with the Rolling Stones’ mobile setup. What the listener hears on the completed take is the combination of three elements. First, Bonham’s spare drum kit happened to have been set up in the three-story entrance hallway, known
as the Minstrel’s Gallery, of Headley Grange. “Bonzo went out to test the kit and the sound was huge because the area was so cavernous,” Jimmy Page recalled. “The acoustics of the stairwell happened to be so balanced that we didn’t even need to mic the kick drum.” Upon listening to Bonham’s first tryouts of the drums in the spacious area, Page decided to record the rhythm track of “When the Levee Breaks” on the spot. Secondly, the natural reverberation of the Minstrel’s Gallery was augmented with compression, echo, and compressed echo by engineer Andy Johns, who ran the signal through a Binson echo chamber, a kind of analog reverb unit that used a steel drum rather than electronics for its effect. This process gave the already palpable attack of the drums an even more physical presence. Finally, the instrumental section of the song (drums, guitar, and bass) was slowed down by Page when mixed, making for an even fuller, more plodding beat. “If you slow things down, it makes everything sound so much thicker,” said Page. “The only problem is you have to be very tight with your playing, because it magnifies any inconsistencies.” That is, an irregular tempo played back at normal speed will sound even more irregular when spaced out more widely by deceleration. Fortunately, Bonham, Page, and Jones were locked in well, securing the vast echo of “When the Levee Breaks” and a milestone recording.
Many Times I’ve Listened: The Sound at the End of “Over the Hills and Far Away”
The haunting fadeout of this number, from about 4:09 on, has puzzled many listeners. A wispy figure that seems to repeat with a harp or keyboard the main acoustic guitar run of the song, it has been explained by Jimmy Page as a recording of pure echo from an electric guitar: “There’s no send on there, just the return,” he told Guitar World, adding that the final notes were achieved with John Paul Jones’s synthesizer. As producer, Page would know what elements are heard in the final mix as well as what instruments were present at the basic take. Elsewhere the sounds are said to come from a harpsichord of Jones’s, although the liner notes credit him with only bass on the track. The consensus seems to be that “Over the Hills and Far Away” ends with the reverberations from Page’s guitar combined a swell from one of Jones’s keyboards, perhaps his mellotron or VCS3 .
