Led Zeppelin IV

by Barney Hoskyns

  For Smith, it quickly became clear that Plant was far more of a country boy than Page. “I remember there was a little stream that was nearby,” Henry said. “Robert and I were laying in the grass by the stream, parting the grass and looking at all the creatures and things running around in there. Robert was working on a song and used some of that feel of what we were doing for the song.”

  By the time the band was back at Island Studios in December, winding down this most profitable of years, the introduction to “Stairway to Heaven” was complete. As others have pointed out, the intro’s descending chords sound remarkably like the Spirit instrumental “Taurus,” though the resolution in the final bar is different. (It’s likely that Page would have heard the track, given that Plant was an avid fan of the LA band. Indeed, he’d been to see Spirit play at Mother’s in Birmingham early in 1970, suffering a car accident on the way home to Kidderminster.)

  Work also began on the track that became “Four Sticks.” The studio vibe, however, wasn’t right; once again, Zeppelin felt the urge to decamp—to “get it together in the country,” in the rock parlance of the times.

  “It’s better to do it all the way we do now, because you haven’t got so many distractions,” John Paul Jones told Disc. “We’ve done a good deal: [we’ve] broken the back of it, and recording starts this month. But rather than waste a lot of studio time thinking of the riffs and lyrics in the studio, we decided this place in Hampshire was definitely the best place to get the numbers down before we were there.”

  “You really do need the sort of facilities where you can take a break for a cup of tea and a wander [around] the garden, and then go back in and do whatever you have to do,” Jimmy Page told Zeppelin biographer Ritchie Yorke. “Instead of that feeling of walking into a studio, down a flight of steps and into fluorescent lights … and opening up the big soundproof door and being surrounded by acoustic tiles. To work like that … you’ve got to program yourself. You’re walking down those stairs telling yourself that you’re going to play the solo of your life. But you so rarely do in those conditions. It’s that hospital atmosphere that all studios have.”

  Initially, the band considered the rather more comfortable option of renting Mick Jagger’s country house, Stargroves—also in Hampshire—for the sessions. Jimmy Page, however, turned out to be as penny-pinching as Jagger himself.

  “Jimmy had the nickname ‘Led Wallet,’ and it’s true that he was a bit tight,” recalled Andy Johns, who’d recently done some engineering on the Rolling Stones’s Sticky Fingers album at Stargroves and was now on board for Zeppelin’s fourth album. “Mick Jagger had offered us his baronial mansion for £1,000 [or approximately $1,906 US] a week and Jimmy wouldn’t pay it.” Come the New Year, it was back to Headley Grange.

  Plant and Bonham arrived together in one of the latter’s many cars. Page, who’d never learned to drive, was driven down to Hampshire by Richard Cole. “I taught Jimmy to drive, but he never took his test,” Cole says. “He had an Austin Champ Jeep we used to drive into Berkshire.”

  Jones, as was his wont, pitched up last. Headley in the winter was even more unprepossessing than it had been the previous spring. “[It] was horrible,” Jones complained. “It was cold and damp … virtually no furniture, no pool table, no pub nearby….” Jones recalled that they all “ran in when we arrived in a mad scramble to get the driest rooms.” But once their roadies had got the fireplaces going—and Page had laid claim to a room on the third floor that came with a small electric fire—the band quickly settled in.

  “It’s that old cliché about a place in the country, but it was really great,” Plant told Canadian journalist Rick McGrath. “The mikes coming in through the windows and a fire going in the hearth and people coming in with cups of tea and cakes and people tripping over leads, and the whole thing is utter chaos … it was a good feeling, and we did it as easy as pie.”

  Richard Cole says Zeppelin ate like “million-dollar Boy Scouts” at Headley Grange, lubricated by copious quantities of alcohol. Wearing a gamekeeper’s cap and tweed jacket, Bonham frequently withdrew to the nearest pub after the band had knocked off for the day.

  “There weren’t any serious drugs around the band at that point,” Cole added. “Just dope and a bit of coke. We had an account at a shop in the village, and we’d go down there regularly and collect huge quantities of cider. They were playing at being country squires. They found an old shotgun and used to shoot at squirrels in the woods, not that they ever hit any. And there was this lovely old black Labrador wandering around [that] we used to feed.”

  To the outside world—or at any rate the media—it seemed that Led Zeppelin had gone into hiding. As if to compensate for the lack of information, the music weeklies ran speculative news stories about rumors that the group was splitting—unfounded tattle that Peter Grant declined to dignify with a response.

  The band spent a week writing, arranging, and rehearsing before the Rolling Stones’s mobile truck arrived at Headley. “We were keeping pretty regular hours together,” Jimmy Page recalled, “even though they may not have been regular hours for most people.”

  A number of songs—at varying stages of composition—were given run-throughs. But there were many other half-finished (and in some cases half-recorded) contenders for inclusion on an album—enough, in fact, for the band to consider making the LP a double, or more eccentrically releasing four separate EPs.

  “No Quarter,” stemming from a keyboard piece by John Paul Jones, would appear in more brooding form on Houses of the Holy; “Boogie with Stu,” like the antinuclear “Night Flight” and the Neil Young–esque “Down by the Seaside,” would show up on Physical Graffiti. “The Rover,” also included on Graffiti, was a song that then existed only in rudimentary acoustic form. Talking to Bob Harris on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1975, Plant referred to this and other material on Graffiti as “old, crazy stuff … really good stuff that we thought, ‘We can’t keep it in the can any longer….’ ”

  Other songs fleetingly attempted at Headley Grange included “I Wanna Be Her Man,” another nod of sorts to Neil Young, and a version of blues legend Leroy Carr’s “Sloppy Drunk” featuring Page on mandolin and Plant himself on primitive guitar. “Robert wrote the lyrics again for this album,” Page said, “but now he’s getting more into playing the guitar himself, and he also plays drums; he finds that bits of melodies and riffs are also coming to him. Robert still hasn’t plucked up the courage to play guitar on stage, but he is progressing well …” (“Sloppy Drunk,” however, may simply have been a working title for “The Battle of Evermore”—and a reference to the duo’s intoxicated mood.) Houses of the Holy’s “Dancing Days” may also have been given a run-through at Headley.

  As with the first three, the fourth Zeppelin album began with a rapid assessment of the available material. “It was very spontaneous most of the time in Led Zeppelin,” Plant told Joe Smith. “Things were created virtually as a four-piece band. It was Jimmy Page bringing in cassettes or ideas that were then created on the spot. Sometimes John Paul Jones would contribute the main leading part of a song, and then it would be a pretty quick arrangement of bits and pieces so that the thing fitted together rather quickly.”

  “Whenever we got together from the third, fourth, fifth album,” Page told Stuart Grundy and John Tobler, “… we would always say ‘What have you got?’ to anybody else, to see if Jonesy had anything, to be honest. Robert and I were doing all the writing up to that point, unless it was a number … like a blues number. For instance, “When the Levee Breaks” is, and then we would make a split between the four of us. We were always trying to encourage [Jones] to come up with bits and pieces, so to speak, because that’s usually what they were; he never came up with a complete whole song or anything.”

  One of the “bits and pieces” Jones brought to Headley Grange was a complex blues riff suggested to him by Muddy Waters’s “psychedelic blues” album Electric Mud. “One track is a long rambling riff,” Jones told
Dave Lewis, “and I really liked the idea of writing something like that—a riff that would be like a linear journey. The idea came on a train coming back from Page’s Pangbourne house. From the first run-through at the Grange, we knew it was a good one.”

  Actually, the first run-through of “Black Dog”— so known because of the Labrador who wandered about Headley Grange and its grounds—was a shambles that had all four men in stitches. “It was originally all in 3/16 time,” said Jones, “but no one could keep up with that.” The rhythmic changes that Jones, Page, and Bonham devised for the track were so intricate—Page called the song “a bit of a hairy one”—they were almost impossible to play. Particularly confounding was the B section after the first verse, a passage (commencing 41 seconds into the released take) in which Page’s riff is completely out of synch with Bonham’s 4/4 drum pattern.

  “We were messing around when the other lads suddenly came up with that passage on ‘Black Dog,’ ” Plant told Ritchie Yorke. “They just played it, fell about all over the floor for 10 minutes in fits of laughter, played it again, burst into more laughter, then put it down on tape.”

  “When I wrote it,” Jones told Susan Fast, “the B section of the riff was actually phrased as three 9/8 bars and one 5/8 bar over the straight 4/4, but nobody else could play it!” Jones maintains that they solved the conundrum of this “turnaround” section simply by counting four-time through as if there were no turnaround.

  “I told Bonzo he had to keep playing four-to-the-bar all the way through,” Jones added, “… but in the turnaround there is a 5/8 rhythm over the top. If you go through enough 5/8s, it arrives back on the beat.” Jones stated that he wanted the riff “to turn back on itself.”

  To these ears, after all these years, the turnaround of “Black Dog” still sounds rhythmically wrong. In the words of Keith Shadwick, “no matter how many times you hear it, your ears are torn in two….” A bootleg of the band working out the riffs at Headley Grange shows Bonham initially trying to stay more in step with Page’s guitar rather than ploughing his own furrow through the song. Instead the band made a conscious decision to go for the impossible.

  “You can’t play it,” Plant admitted in 1983. “Because it’s got a beat that’s a count of five over a count of four, and trips and skips and stuff like that. It was our prerogative and our joy to take what people thought…. We just wanted to see people try to move to it and then miss the beat. And then still call it heavy. It was just a trick, a game, and well within our capabilities to do. And it just stopped a lot of other people from doing the same thing, from copying it.” (It almost stopped Led Zeppelin too: At a show later that year in Rochester, New York, “Black Dog” completely fell apart and would have ground to a complete halt had Page not winged his way out of the chaos with a blaringly loud solo.)

  Even without the jarring turnaround section, “Black Dog” is one of the most fiendishly intricate songs in all of rock and roll. John Reid of the Hampton String Quartet, which performs an instrumental version of the song, claims the song “has something like 98 time-signature changes.” It is also one of the most diabolically powerful tracks in the Led Zeppelin catalog—in the words of Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash, “the biggest, baddest, sexiest riff out there.”

  But which riff does Slash mean? There are so many interlinked in one continuous, unfurling sequence in the song, with the only real “breaks” or punctuations being Plant’s a capella vocal phrases, starting with the immortal and unforgettable “Hey hey, mama, said the way you move….” Inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s “Oh Well,” these hollered interpolations turn out to have been Page’s idea.

  “[Jonesy] had this great riff … and I added some sections to it as well and then we had the ideas,” Jimmy told Stuart Grundy and John Tobler. “Actually, I must be totally honest, I suggested how you get the breaks with the vocals. That’s it, I’ve finally owned up, as no one else will in the band. But that was the idea, to give it the vocal thing and then bring the riffs in.”

  Amusingly, if you listen carefully to “Black Dog,” you can hear Bonzo clicking his sticks behind Plant before the band comes in, for example, on 12 seconds, 23 seconds, 35 seconds. “He did that to keep time and to signal the band,” Page said. “We tried to eliminate most of them, but muting was much more difficult in those days than it is now.”

  The song itself has inspired much debate and conjecture over the years. For those obsessed with Page’s diabolism, the title was assumed to refer to some hound of hell. For such listeners, the line “eyes that shine, burnin’ red” seems to carry satanic resonance, or at least to suggest that the woman driving Plant mad is some evil harpy.

  True, the lyric juxtaposes the girl with a “steadyrollin’ woman” who won’t tell him no lies or spend his money while “tellin’ her friends she gonna be a star.” (Is this fiendish temptress really just a groupie gold-digger?) But Erik Davis is surely right when he concludes that the burning eyes belong to Plant himself and that the song demonizes not “woman’s sexual power” but “the male’s own lust, experienced as a possession from within.” Moreover the implication is that, unable to “get my fill,” Percy returns powerlessly to the honey-dripping “pretty baby” in the song’s last verse.

  Plant himself didn’t read too much into “Black Dog.” “I put a lot of work into my lyrics,” he told Cameron Crowe. “Not all my stuff is meant to be scrutinized, though. Things like ‘Black Dog’ are blatant let’s-do-it-in-the-bath-type things, but they make their point just the same.”

  “Black Dog” was in more or less finished form when the Rolling Stones’s mobile unit—complete with accompanying technician Ian “Stu” Stewart, aka “the sixth Stone”—arrived in late January. Parking the truck around the back of the house, Andy Johns ran microphone leads through the windows of the drawing room, whose walls were covered with empty egg cartons that served as acoustic baffles. “Andy was a joy to work with,” said Henry Smith. “He was such a nice guy, it was like he was your brother.”

  “[The truck] is a bit narrow, like a corridor, so your ability to monitor a situation isn’t as good as in a proper studio,” Johns recalled. “You end up talking to the band through a closed-circuit camera and a microphone instead of through the studio glass. It can get a bit impersonal, but the advantage is that the band is more at home. At a place like … Headley Grange, you had a fireplace, people bringing you cups of tea. It’s much nicer than a studio.”

  “It seemed ideal,” Page said. “As soon as we thought of an idea, we put it down on tape. In a way, it was a good method. The only thing wrong was that we’d get so excited about an idea that we’d really rush to finish its format, to get it on tape. It was like a quick productivity thing. It was just so exciting to have all the facilities there.” Page’s priority at this stage was to capture “a really good bass and drum sound,” since he knew he could polish his guitar parts in overdubs after basic tracking.

  For Robert Plant, the Headley Grange sessions evolved “bit by bit” into “a great collage” of tracks. “A studio is an immediate imposition,” he told Disc’s Caroline Boucher in February, shortly over the sessions were over. “It’s quite a limiting thing compared to sitting around a fire playing away, and we’ve been able to experiment with drum sounds by using just one microphone and things. At times it sounds like early Presley records drumming.” Talking to Sounds’s Steve Peacock in June, Plant said the mood at Headley Grange was “bang!” “We could hear the results immediately,” he said. “There was no big scene about going back into the studio and doing it again….”

  One of the first experiments the band attempted was setting up John Bonham’s kit outside the drawing room, at the foot of Headley Grange’s staircase (known as “the Minstrel Gallery”). “It was a sort of three-story house with a huge open hall and a staircase going up,” Page told Stuart Grundy and John Tobler. “That’s where we got the classic drum sound on ‘When the Levee Breaks.’ We had the drums in the hall and sometimes the drums were in
the room as well, and the amplifiers were all over. When Bonzo was in the hall, Jones and I were out there with earphones, the two sets of amps were in the other rooms and other parts such as cupboards and things. A very odd way of recording, but it certainly worked.”

  “We used to try everything,” said John Paul Jones. “Basically, if you’re a guitar-bass-drums band, you’ve got to come up with something a bit different each time so all the tracks don’t sound the same. We used to have amps everywhere—in rooms, up stairwells, in bathrooms, outside the building. One of the advantages of not working in a studio was that in an old house you could always find an old cupboard to stick a guitar amp in.”

  “We hire this recording truck and trudge off to some cruddy old house in the country,” Plant reminisced in 1974. “The last thing you’d expect is the music to fall right into place. But it does. We even spent one night sitting around drinking ourselves under the table, telling each other how good we were.”

  The mobile-truck setup at Headley Grange encouraged a spontaneity that hadn’t been present even for the Led Zeppelin III sessions the previous year. Working, for example, on “Four Sticks,” the song’s loose-rolling riff was proving hard to harness. Intended as a trance-like raga with Indian overtones—Page and Plant re-recorded it the following year with a group of musicians in Bombay—it had the band flummoxed and frustrated. Page recalled attempting the song “on numerous occasions” without success.

  Exasperation led to inspiration, however. Fed up with “Four Sticks,” John Bonham emptied a can of Double Diamond lager down his throat and bashed out Earl Palmer’s intro to Little Richard’s 1957 hit “Keep-a-Knockin.’ ” Suddenly, the tension in the room dissipated as Page weighed in with an uptempo riff from the Chuck Berry manual of vintage rock and roll.