Led Zeppelin IV

by Barney Hoskyns

“I played the riff automatically,” Page recalled, “[and] we got through the whole of the 12-bar bit. We said, ‘This is great, forget ‘Four Sticks,’ let’s work on this.’ ” It was, he said, “a spontaneous combustion number.” He later claimed the song was written in 15 minutes and recorded in three takes, complete with an Ian Stewart piano contribution that was worthy of Chuck Berry’s immortal 88-key sideman Johnnie Johnson. (Stewart also featured on the self-explanatory “Boogie with Stu,” a throwaway jam based on Richie Valens’s “Ooh My Head” that was later included on Physical Graffiti.)

  “It sounded good, and we went into the truck to hear it,” Page told Disc’s Andrew Tyler. “We did about 30 seconds. Within 15 minutes, the whole framework for the rest had been written and recorded. That’s quite raw, and those sorts of things are happening all the time. Whenever we get together, we come up with something.”

  “It’s Been a Long Time”—or “Rock and Roll,” as the song was eventually titled—was something of a departure for Led Zeppelin. For all that they adored early R&B and rockabilly—they’d often covered Elvis Presley’s “That’s Alright, Mama” live, for instance—they’d hitherto avoided that particular musical terrain on record. But the track makes a point, which was that Zeppelin was no less obsessed with ’50s rock and roll than any of the other ’70s acts (from Don McLean on “American Pie” to John Lennon on “Rock ’n’ Roll”) who paid homage to the stars of that era.

  “The early rockabilly guitarists, like Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore, were just as important to me as the blues guitarists,” said Jimmy Page, whose collection of early Sun and rockabilly singles was rumored to rival even his collection of Aleister Crowley artifacts.

  Plant, too, was something of an aficionado of American “oldies.” The lyrics he wrote, virtually on the spot, amounted to a high-speed hymn of nostalgia, referencing the Diamonds, the Monotones, and the Drifters as he sought to rekindle the innocent magic of rock’s early days. When interviewer Rick McGrath hung out with Zeppelin backstage in Vancouver at the end of the year, he watched the band “flailing away on acoustic guitars and loudly singing old rock hits like ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’ and ‘The Bristol Stomp.’ ” Could one have imagined Grand Funk Railroad doing the same?

  But even that isn’t really the point of rock and roll. “Robert Plant sings about rock and roll,” Chuck Eddy commented in his book Stairway to Hell, “but that’s subsidiary: The sound is rock and roll, it rewrites the dictionary, curses anyone who won’t accept the new way.”

  The unplugged side of Led Zeppelin, so powerfully in evidence on Led Zeppelin III, also made its presence felt at Headley Grange in January’s 2-week creative blitz. Evenings were particularly conducive to quieter, more reflective songwriting. One night, after the others had retired to bed, Jimmy Page noticed the mandolin that John Paul Jones had acquired in America in 1969—and had taught himself to play, using only a copy of Teach Yourself Bluegrass Mandolin.

  “I just picked up this mandolin and started playing a sequence,” he told Stuart Grundy and John Tobler. “[It] probably consisted of the most basic chords on a mandolin, but from that I worked out the sequence to [‘The Battle of Evermore’].” Page told Dave Schulps that exactly the same thing had happened with the banjo part on Led Zeppelin III’s “Gallows Pole”: “I’d never played one before. It was [Jonesy’s] instrument again, I just picked it up and started playing, and it sort of worked. Started moving my fingers around until the chords sounded right, which is more or less the way I work on compositions anyway.”

  Although it was “my very first experiment with the [mandolin]”—whose tuning, moreover, was “totally different” from the guitar—Page claimed he was well-served by the basic fingerpicking technique he’d learned on London’s folk circuit in the mid-’60s. “My fingerpicking,” he said self-deprecatingly, “is a sort of cross between Pete Seeger, Earl Scruggs, and total incompetence.”

  Although Page admitted that “The Battle of Evermore” “sounded like a dance-around-the-maypole number,” he claimed the song “wasn’t purposely a ‘Let’s do a folksy number now.’ ” Initially, he said, “it sounded like an old English instrumental, and then it started to become a vocal.”

  As it happened, Page’s chiming mandolin chords perfectly suited a song idea that Robert Plant had hatched at Bron-Yr-Aur, inspired by his ongoing immersion in both Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and the military history of the Middle Ages.

  Picking up where Led Zeppelin II’s “Ramble On” left off, “The Battle of Evermore” references the Battle of Pelennor Fields from The Return of the King. The “Queen of Light” is Eowyn, the “Prince of Peace” Aragorn, the “Dark Lord” most likely Sauron. The namecheck for the Ringwraiths is the song’s most explicit Tolkien connection. (Donald Swann, who had himself written the music for songs based on The Lord of the Rings, opined that “Evermore” was “the best example of a contemporary song based on Tolkien’s work I’ve heard.”) But Plant also alludes to “the angels of Avalon,” a nod to his fascination with English and Celtic mythology. In “The Battle of Evermore” he is particularly concerned with the border wars England waged against its Celtic neighbors, his sympathies clearly lying with the latter.

  “Albion would have been a good place to be,” Plant told Record Mirror in March 1972, “but that was England before it got messed up. You can live in a fairyland if you read enough books and if you’re interested in as much history as I am—you know, the Dark Ages and all that.”

  The basic track for “The Battle of Evermore” was recorded quickly at the Grange, with the mandolin put through a Binson echo unit—a vintage Italian contraption with a small metal drum inside it. It was a device that would also come in handy for the epic “When the Levee Breaks.”

  Tolkien’s influence is also present in “Misty Mountain Hop,” the mountains in question featuring throughout The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Arguably Plant’s lyric draws allegorical parallels between hippies and the dwarves of The Hobbit: He was hardly the only hippie of his time to regard Tolkien as a sacred text of fantasy. The song concerns a drug bust, either in London or in San Francisco, and a consequent desire to flee to a place (the Misty Mountains) “where the spirits go now/Over the hills where the spirits fly….”

  “Somebody once described me as the original hippie,” Plant told NME’s Charles Shaar Murray, “and that’s because of the flowery lyrics, you know, and also because of the buzz we give out.” At a New York press conference in 1970, Plant stated that what he wanted to get across in Led Zeppelin was “a message of enjoyment … for people to be happy.”

  When Cameron Crowe pointed out to Plant 4 years later that he’d been criticized for writing “dated flower-child gibberish,” the singer responded testily. “The essence of the whole trip was the desire for peace and tranquility and an idyllic situation,” he said. “That’s all anybody could ever want, so how could it be ‘dated flower-child gibberish’? If it is, then I’ll just carry on being a dated flower child.”

  “Robert was more of an American type of peacenik than maybe the others were,” says Henry Smith, himself an American. “He was more of a caring soul. I remember times that we would sit down in the ’70s and go, ‘Whatever happened to this peace-love generation? What made it stop in the United States and what made it stop in Europe?’ ”

  As with “The Battle of Evermore,” “Misty Mountain Hop” came together quickly at the Grange. The song’s central riff was worked out by Jimmy Page—“I just came up with that on the spot,” he remembered— before being developed one morning by John Paul Jones, who’d woken earlier than his bandmates and plunked himself down at the electric piano. “Jonesy put the chords in for the chorus bit and that would shape up,” Page recalled. “We used to work pretty fast. A lot of that would have been made up during the point of being at Headley.”

  An acoustic companion to “The Battle of Evermore,” the beautiful “Going to California” contained no Tolkien references but was similarly born of
what Page described as “a late-night guitar twiddle” at Headley. (The song’s actual seed may have been planted in less bucolic circumstances, however. Plant introduced it thus at the Community Theater in Berkeley on September 14 that year: “This is a thing that got together … I was going to say in the Scottish highlands or the Welsh mountains, but I think it was something like the Gorham Hotel on West 37th Street.”)

  “That was the good thing about staying at [Headley Grange],” the guitarist said. “You didn’t have anything like a snooker table or anything like that. No recreational purists at all. It was really good for discipline and getting on with the job. I suppose that’s why a lot of these came at Headley Grange. For instance, “Going to California” and “Battle of Evermore” came out. But obviously then we got together and it was just away and afar, it was Jonesy on the mandolin, myself and Robert singing on it.”

  The trio in question gathered outside the next day, the winter weather being unusually mild. “We did [the song] with all of us sitting outside on the grass playing mandolins and whatever else was around,” Jones remembered. “At one point, you can actually hear an airplane going over, but we were always happy to leave that sort of thing in rather than lose a good take.”

  The premise of “Going to California” was simple: It was a love song to Los Angeles, or rather to the Golden State’s more bucolic side. As Plant sang on “Stairway to Heaven,” “there’s a feeling I get when I look to the West….” Specifically, the song paid tribute to Joni Mitchell, the brilliant Canadian song-stress who’d made Laurel Canyon her home early in 1968. “Someone told me there’s a girl out there,” Robert Plant sang, “With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair.” As the singer put it, “when you’re in love with Joni Mitchell, you’ve really got to write about it now and again.”

  “That’s the music that I play at home all the time, Joni Mitchell,” Jimmy Page told Cameron Crowe in 1975. “… the main thing with Joni is that she’s able to look at something that’s happened to her, draw back and crystallize the whole situation, then write about it. She brings tears to my eyes, what more can I say?”

  Robert Plant had mixed feelings about the “mellow” singer-songwriter scene that had blossomed in the LA canyons, not least because the laid-back, patched-denim troubadours within that scene looked on Led Zeppelin as bovine monsters of rock.

  “The people who lived in Laurel Canyon avoided us,” Plant said. “They kept clear because we were in the tackiest part of the Sunset Strip with tacky people like Kim Fowley and the GTOs. I wanted to know about the history of the Hollywood Argyles, and I would never have found that out at a candlelit dinner halfway up the Canyon.”

  Yet Plant had of course been a passionate devotee not only of Mitchell but of the Buffalo Springfield, whose Neil Young he had attempted to meet on an early Zeppelin visit to LA. “Robert desperately wanted to meet Neil,” recalled Nancy Retchin, then a close friend of the Monkees. “Peter Tork said that CSNY was rehearsing at the Greek Theater and we could take Robert [around] there. Unfortunately on the day itself, I took mescalin, and I got so stoned that we ended up driving Robert in my mother’s car all the way down to Watts. I’ll never forget Robert yelling out of the car, ‘Where’s the Greek Theater?!,’ in this completely black neighborhood where nobody had ever heard of it.”

  For Plant, “the canyon scene was a continuation of the artistic will to create some sort of aesthetic and respectable role for pop music, so that there was an intention beyond ‘Rock-a-Hula Baby.’ ” He none the less felt that “confessional” artists such as James Taylor had thrown the rock-and-roll baby out with the bathwater. “It’s a shame that the whole solo singer-songwriter concept had to degenerate into that James Taylor thing of taking things so seriously,” he told Nick Kent in December 1972. “Actually, this’ll probably sound strange, but ultimately, I can envisage Pagey and myself ending up doing a whole Incredible String Band type of thing together. Very gentle stuff.”

  It doesn’t get any gentler than “Going to California” in the Led Zeppelin songbook. Plant claimed that “for a mellow mood,” it was his favorite Zeppelin song of all. “It’s hard to say which single track pleases me most now, since there are so many moods to a day,” he reflected. “ ‘Going to California’ is a really nice song. It’s so simple, and the lyrics just fell out of my mouth.” At the Berkeley show in September, he dedicated the song to “the days when things were really nice and simple, and everything was far out all the time.”

  Along with “Friends,” “That’s the Way,” and others, “Going to California” duly became an integral part of the acoustic miniset the group incorporated into its live repertoire as a sort of musical sorbet between courses.

  “I don’t think the acoustic set was ever discussed as such,” John Paul Jones said. “ ‘Going to California’ and ‘That’s the Way’ were both written, rehearsed, and recorded just sitting in a semicircle, and it seemed an obvious way to present them live. It was also nice to have a rest, and it worked well for the dynamics.”

  The band, however, struggled to get the silence they wanted for their acoustic sets. On many occasions, Plant had to plead with audiences for a little quiet as they played. “You see, the essence of these numbers we wanna do now is silence,” Plant declared before singing “That’s the Way” and “Going to California” at the show in Rochester, New York. “The crying of voices doesn’t really take us back to the Welsh mountains.”

  There was another acoustic interlude on Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, of course. But little did Jimmy Page and Robert Plant guess, when it was completed one night at Headley Grange, that it would introduce the most famous epic in rock history.

  5

  THE TUNE WILL COME TO YOU AT LAST

  “I DON’T want to tell you about it in case it doesn’t come off,” Jimmy Page told NME in April 1970. “It’s an idea for a really long track on the next album…. We want to try something new with the organ and acoustic guitar building up and building up to the electric thing.”

  Having composed the intro for it at Bron-Yr-Aur in the spring of that year, Page continued to work on the “really long track” throughout 1970. Using an eight-track studio he’d installed in his Pangbourne boathouse, he spent many hours working out the different sections of what became “Stairway to Heaven,” layering 6- and 12-string guitars with the aid of a recording unit called the New Vista.

  “It was the deck from the Pye mobile that had been used to record things like the Who’s Live at Leeds,” Page recalled. “We’d used it to record our Albert Hall gig. I’d been fooling around with the acoustic guitar and came up with the different sections, which I married together. So I had the structure and then I ran it through Jonesy.”

  Although the band recorded an early instrumental version of the track at Island Studios in December 1970, “Stairway” at this point had no lyrics, nor was it structurally complete. Returning to it in Hampshire, Zeppelin slowly solved the problems it posed. “It may not make a lot of sense,” Page remembered, “but it was quite a complicated song to actually get across to everybody.”

  Talking to Stuart Grundy and John Tobler in 1983, Page recalled the piecemeal process in more detail. “When we were recording it,” he said, “there were little bits, little sections that I’d done, getting reference pieces down on cassette, and sometimes I referred back to them if I felt there was something that seemed right that could be included. I wanted to try this whole idea musically, this build toward a climax, with John Bonham coming in at a later point—an idea [that] I’d used before—to give it that extra kick.”

  The night after the mobile truck arrived at Headley Grange, Bonzo and Plant adjourned to the pub, leaving Page and Jones to write out the music for the complete version of the track. Bootleg tapes show the two men working out the transition from the song’s bridge to its final solo, as well as Jones trying out keyboard parts on an electric piano.

  “Both Jimmy and I were quite aware of the way a track should unfold and the va
rious levels it would go through,” Jones noted. “We were quite strong on form…. I suppose we were both quite influenced by classical music, and there’s a lot of drama in the classical forms.”

  The following evening, with Jones and Bonham taking a night off—driving to London for a party at the Speakeasy club—Page and Plant sat together in Headley Grange’s drawing room. “Jimmy and I just sat by the fire; it was a remarkable setting,” Plant recalled. “I mean, Hawkwind was probably humming in the background.” As Page picked out the intro chords, Plant’s flagging inspiration was suddenly revived.

  “I was holding a pencil and paper, and for some reason I was in a very bad mood,” Plant recalled. “Then all of a sudden, my hand was writing out the words, ‘There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold/And she’s buying a stairway to heaven.’ I just sat there and looked at the words and then I almost leapt out of my seat.”

  The next day, with the rhythm section returned, more of the song’s lyrics tumbled out of Plant as he sat listening to Page, Jones, and Bonham play. “We were going over and over it from the beginning to the end quite a few times, with Robert sitting on the stool,” said Page. “[We] were all so inspired by how the song could come out—with the building passages and all of those possibilities—that [he] suddenly burst out with the lyrics. Then we all threw in ideas— things such as Bonzo not coming in until the song was well underway to create a change of gear—and the song and the arrangement just came together.”

  “Stairway” ran aground only in one spot in the song. “For some unknown reason, Bonzo couldn’t get the timing on the 12-string intro to the solo,” Page told Dave Schulps. “Apart from that, it flowed very quickly. By the time we’d gone through it a few times, Robert was obviously penciling down words. About 75 to 80 percent of the words he wrote on the spot. Amazing, really. In other words, he didn’t go away and think about it, or have to sort of ponder and ponder and ponder….”