Led Zeppelin FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Greatest Hard Rock Band of All Time (Faq Series)

by George Case

  “They couldn’t get us on the guitar parts or the music,” Page has concluded, “so they nailed us on the lyrics…. If you took the lyric out and listened to the track instrumentally, it’s clearly something new and different.” Not different enough for Willie Dixon, though. The battle over “Whole Lotta Love” sums up the divisions engendered by the popularization of blues-based rock ’n’ roll in the 1960s and after: black versus white, old versus young, mono versus stereo, bar bands versus stadium acts, stern curators versus gleeful experimenters, and a narrow clique of connoisseurs versus a broad, sensation-hungry demographic. Where the assessment rests is conditional on where the assessor sits.

  “The Lemon Song” (Bonham-Jones-Page-Plant)

  Together with “Whole Lotta Love” and “Bring It On Home,” “The Lemon Song” gave Led Zeppelin’s doubters of the early 1970s their choicest ammunition. A number one album by an upstart, corporate-backed assemblage of former studio hacks and long-haired nobodies was found to be rife with unauthorized reproductions of blues stalwarts—every good rock critic of 1969 knew The Blues was where it’s at, and who did these foppish Brit pretenders think they were, daring to pass off the legendary Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor” as their own?

  Through his publisher, Chester “Howlin’ Wolf” Burnett (1910–1976) did sue Led Zeppelin for “The Lemon Song,” resulting in an out-of-court settlement reached in 1972 that put his name on subsequent editions of Zeppelin’s track (including the live version from 1997’s BBC Sessions). Like most of the group’s blues-based material, “The Lemon Song” relies on several older songs for its music and words, and only the most obvious of these was highlighted by the plaintiff and his advocates. As well as 1964’s “Killing Floor” (which featured sterling guitar performances from Wolf regular Hubert Sumlin and a young Buddy Guy), “The Lemon Song” reflects Albert King’s “Crosscut Saw” and quotes the infamous citric line from Robert Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues”: “Squeeze my lemon ‘til the juice runs down my leg….” As usual, Led Zeppelin’s cover was less a reverent study than a starting point for their own soloing, in this case a very groovy John Paul Jones bass showcase and some tight boogie between Jimmy Page and the rhythm section. Given that “The Lemon Song” was dashed off between gigs in their hard-driving circuits of 1969, registering the track as a joint effort by all four members may have seemed like either a lark or a forgettable oversight, but with the album’s eventual blockbuster status the tune became a prime example of Zeppelin’s musical misallocations.

  “Thank You” (Page-Plant)

  The opening verse of this ballad—“If the sun refuse to shine, I would still be lovin’ you / When mountains crumble to the sea, there will still be you and me”—is reminiscent of that for Jimi Hendrix’s “If 6 Was 9,” released two years earlier in 1967—“If the sun refuse to shine, I don’t mind…. / If the mountains fell in the sea, let it be, it ain’t me….” “Thank You” has been noted as one of Plant’s first lyrical contributions to Led Zeppelin, a love song to his wife Maureen, and it sounds like he had Hendrix in mind when he began writing. On the other hand, the imagery of suns losing their shine and mountains crumbling has often been used to signify “forever” in song (the Everly Brothers’ “Devoted to You” and Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” are just two examples, and not the earliest), so if Plant had cribbed the couplet from Hendrix its sun-and-mountains premise seems to have been fair game.

  “Moby Dick” (Bonham-Jones-Page)

  John Bonham’s concert percussion showcase was sometimes introduced as “Pat’s Delight” (after his wife), but on Led Zeppelin II it was renamed “Moby Dick,” perhaps in allusion to drummer Ginger Baker of Cream’s comparably leviathan “Toad.” However, while the drum solo itself is pure Bonzo, the opening and closing guitar riffs strongly resemble those in Bobby Parker’s R&B gem from 1961, “Watch Your Step.”

  Given that the drum solo rose out of onstage jams, it may have been that Page and Jones spontaneously gave it a launch pad based around a simple figure they could both master quickly, and Parker’s “Watch Your Step” was the one they unconsciously settled on. The “Moby Dick” guitar line, which Page punctuates with devastating solo licks heard nowhere on “Watch Your Step,” is one of those primal boogie runs that have more to do with the layout of the instrument than any planned execution—countless rock and blues songs are based on this I-IV-V structure, where the player simply transposes the same fingering patterns to different strings or different frets to achieve an expansion and then resolution of an initial sequence. Page had already tried a precursor of this riff in “The Girl I Love She Got Long Black Wavy Hair” on BBC Radio, and an echo can be detected in the Jeff Beck–era Yardbirds’ “I Wish You Would,” a number credited to Billy Boy Arnold. Even the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” and “Day Tripper” have been mentioned as takeoffs of “Watch Your Step” (John Lennon was a fan of the Parker single), while “Watch Your Step” is said to have been based in turn on jazzman Dizzie Gillespie’s “Manteca”—all of which suggests how nebulous the influence of a simple guitar hook repeated in a blues progression can be.

  “Bring It On Home” (Page-Plant)

  The third brazen blues binge on Led Zeppelin II, “Bring It On Home” is actually a good example of how innovative the foursome were when putting their own marks on other people’s songs, in this case Rice Miller’s (aka Sonny Boy Williamson) performance of Willie Dixon’s number. This too became part of the financial settlement between the band and Dixon, whose name has once more been restored to the particulars of Zeppelin publishing entries.

  The 1969 performance begins with what Page later defended as “a tribute” to Sonny Boy Williamson (c. 1910–1965)—a direct imitation of his 1963 recording for the Chess label of Chicago—then opens up with a deliberate boost in volume level into a heavy rock riff whose bluesy origins are nearly drowned out in decibels. Ironically, this was not the first time the members of Led Zeppelin had run afoul of Sonny Boy Williamson. Jimmy Page and other young English players had recorded with the crusty singer and harmonica player when he crossed the Atlantic in 1964–65 (uncomfortable takes of “I See a Man Downstairs” and “It’s a Bloody Life” surfaced afterward), and a blues-besotted teen named Robert Plant even claimed to have walked away with one of Williamson’s mouth organs after seeing the bluesman play in Birmingham around the same time. The lyrics of the Led Zeppelin version are not far from Williamson’s, and the faithful opening segment is certainly a giveaway, but their metallic take serves to underscore how differently they played the blues from the men they were allegedly copying.

  “Since I’ve Been Loving You” (Page-Plant-Jones)

  A magnificently tragic slow blues, “Since I’ve Been Loving You” is in essence the usual three-chord progression redone in a minor key, augmented by Jones’s soulful keyboards and one of Page’s most expressive guitar solos. Though a common device untraceable to any one author, the minor blues arrangement was recognizable from such earlier songs as B. B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone” and Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball and Chain,” as covered by Janis Joplin.

  Lyrically, “Since I’ve Been Loving You” is one of Robert Plant’s lazier efforts, with its first line, “Workin’ from seven to eleven every night / Really makes life a drag, I don’t think that’s right,” plainly appropriated from “Never,” done in 1968 by Moby Grape, one of the singer’s beloved West Coast hippie groups: “Working from eleven to seven every night / Ought to make life a drag, yeah, and I know that ain’t right….” Likewise, his evocation of losing his worried mind and tears that fell like rain are veritable clichés of blues and pop wording, long established in such numbers as “Worried Man Blues” and “Crying in the Rain.” The Zeppelin title could even be an amalgam of Ivory Joe Hunter’s “Since I Met You Baby” and Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” Though one of the band’s best-known and most powerful cuts, boasting superb performances from each member, “Since I’ve Been Loving You” exempl
ifies how the foursome could sometimes lean far too heavily on a hodgepodge of other people’s work when constructing their own (admittedly very striking) material.

  “Gallows Pole” (Traditional, arranged by Page and Plant)

  This really is a traditional song and therefore properly designated as one, although just how Led Zeppelin came by their heavy folk variation is open to conjecture. Jimmy Page has pointed to American Fred Gerlach’s 1950s version as his model, but it has also been heard as taken from Dorris Henderson’s “Hangman,” recorded in 1965. It’s possible that both Gerlach and Henderson were working from “Gallis Tree,” issued by the great American folk singer Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter (1885–1949), but many lyrical modifications on the song have been transcribed in “The Gallows Pole,” “Penitentiary Blues,” “The Maid Freed from the Gallows,” “Poor Boy,” and others. Whatever the source, Page must have known the song was familiar enough not to try to claim it as his own.

  “Tangerine” (Page)

  One of Led Zeppelin’s prettiest ballads was begun two years prior to its 1970 release on Led Zeppelin III, when Jimmy Page and his fellow Yardbirds recorded a very similar demo called “Knowing That I’m Losing You” with different words. Along with “Dazed and Confused” (also begun under the Yardbirds), this is one of the two Zeppelin non-instrumentals that credit Page as the sole songwriter. Yet the ’Birds’ vocalist, Keith Relf, must surely have had a hand in “Knowing That I’m Losing You,” so why wouldn’t he have been included in a share of “Tangerine”?

  From Led Zeppelin III, “Tangerine” had its roots in an earlier song jointly composed by Page and Yardbird Keith Relf.

  Author’s Collection

  Relf died of electric shock in 1976, so it’s impossible to get his side of the story. The strummed A minor–G-D guitar figure and pedal steel licks are doubtless all Page’s invention, but where the new lyrics came from is uncertain. (There was already a Johnny Mercer swing number from the 1940s called “Tangerine,” bearing no relation to either the Yardbirds or Led Zeppelin.) Remaining Yardbirds Jim McCarty and Chris Dreja, as well as Keith Relf’s sister, Jane, have all complained that some of Relf’s original lines can be heard in “Tangerine” (the verse beginning “Measuring a summer’s day…” is common to both songs) and that Relf could have used the resultant royalties as his career declined. Page may have sincerely believed that the unfinished state of “Knowing That I’m Losing You” made it eligible for him to claim the remake as completely his, or he may have walked away with another man’s work with the confidence of a rising rock star against the diminished clout of a fading one. It’s been speculated that the lost love of “Tangerine” is Page’s mid-’60s girlfriend, American singer-songwriter Jackie DeShannon (which might coincide with the song’s inception in early 1968), although there is no firm evidence to support this.

  “That’s the Way” (Page-Plant)

  Though the lyrics of this plaintive ballad are Plant’s, the chords were very loosely inspired by the folk perennial “The Waggoner’s Lad,” as performed by the premier British folk guitarists of the 1960s, John Renbourn and Bert Jansch. “That’s the Way” is one of the few instances of a Led Zeppelin piece whose music is more derivative than its words, although only the most attentive musicologists would spot the kinship of “That’s the Way” and “The Waggoner’s Lad.”

  “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper” (Traditional, arranged by Charles Obscure)

  Another mix of blues storylines dominates this Led Zeppelin III oddity. Most of the verses are from “Shake ’Em On Down,” by Booker T. Washington, aka Bukka White (1909–1977), but there’s also input from Mississippi Fred McDowell (1904–1972), Oscar Woods’s “Lone Wolf Blues,” and Howlin’ Wolf’s “Brown-Skin Woman.” The “Charles Obscure” tag may be Page’s nudge at the sensibilities of archivists who duly tracked down every possible root of such songs—his way of saying that the ultimate author was forever lost in the mists of time—although it turns out there’s not as much obscurity as he may have thought. The title echoes Del Shannon’s 1961 hit “Hats Off to Larry.”

  “Black Dog” (Jones-Page-Plant)

  Nothing on this spiraling and excruciatingly tricky riff-based track could be construed as stolen from elsewhere, but chief songwriter John Paul Jones has acknowledged that the intricacy of the signature run first came to him after listening to Muddy Waters’s Electric Mud album of 1969, with songs like “Tom Cat” and “She’s Alright”: “I wanted to write an original riff that had that same type of busy, yet plodding, feel.” Others have suggested Jones was in fact recalling This Is Howlin’ Wolf’s New Album, a similarly psychedelicized treatment of a veteran bluesman from the same time. Jimmy Page, for his part, admits that the structure of “Black Dog”—unaccompanied singing interspersed with electric guitar boogie—was based on Fleetwood Mac’s “Oh Well,” by Peter Green: “I wanted to create a call and response between Robert’s vocal and the band.” The Who’s treatment of Mose Allison’s “Young Man Blues,” from 1970’s Live at Leeds, is built on the same alternating pattern. As with so much rock and pop, the distinction between following a successful but malleable formula and merely copying someone else’s specific ideas depends on the judgment of the listener.

  “Black Dog” is also notable for its dense clusters of blues diction, as recited by Plant in a sort of pre-digital sampling technique: glancing off traditional songs like “I Got to Roll,” plus “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”; Big Bill Broonzy’s “Hey Hey”; Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee”; Robert Johnson’s “Steady Rollin’ Man”; Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll”; Chan Romero’s “The Hippy Hippy Shake”; and even a couplet that hints at the Beatles’ “Drive My Car,” his use of terminology such as “baby,” “mama,” “shake that thing,” “I don’t know but I been told,” “big-leg woman,” et cetera, makes the song less reliant on any one source—as could be said of “Whole Lotta Love” or “Since I’ve Been Loving You”—and more of a collage of imagery whose various origins are impossible to pin down. “Black Dog” is thus one of Led Zeppelin’s smartest blues “thefts,” if it is a theft at all, in that its allusions are so brief, so scattered, and so self-evidently hark back to a trove of earlier music.

  “Rock and Roll” (Bonham-Jones-Page-Plant)

  Like “Black Dog,” “Rock and Roll” makes no apologies for sounding like a resuscitated nugget from decades previous. Indeed, the number was first played as an ad-lib studio laugh, while the four musicians were struggling to nail the time of “Four Sticks” when a frustrated John Bonham moved to his hi-hat cymbal to bash out Earl Palmer’s intro to Little Richard’s “Keep A-Knockin’,” from 1957. “If something really magical is coming through,” Jimmy Page looked back, “then you follow it.” The rest of the session dropped “Four Sticks” and polished “Rock and Roll.” Page’s riff sounds a little like Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” sped up and turned inside out, although he was more likely winging a conventional Chuck Berry–style twelve-bar progression, and Robert Plant seems to draw on the Diamonds’ “The Stroll,” the Monotones’ “The Book of Love,” and Jackie Wilson’s “Lonely Teardrops” for his verses—all so openly as to moot any question of underhandedness.

  “Stairway to Heaven” (Page-Plant)

  Uh-oh. Is the masterpiece a forgery? A cottage industry of analysis, exegesis, and skepticism has sprouted around Led Zeppelin’s single most celebrated title, perhaps an inevitable by-product of the song’s endless radio airplay and air guitar performances. Yet all the smoke emanating from the alleged plagiarism of “Stairway to Heaven” is generated by a surprisingly small fire. Whereas the cases of “Dazed and Confused” or “Whole Lotta Love” have fairly substantial evidence connecting them to prior songs, the link between “Stairway” and Spirit’s “Taurus” lies in just a few notes—but since they’re among the most instantly identifiable notes in popular music, there is some explaining to do.

  In the years following the release of “Stai
rway to Heaven” in late 1971 and its gradual rise to prominence as an all-time rock ’n’ roll anthem, a few listeners began to connect the song’s quasi-classical descending introduction to a similar progression heard on the acoustic instrumental from Spirit’s self-titled 1968 debut record. The California-based Spirit, whose biggest hit was “I Got a Line on You” (also 1968), had appeared together with Led Zeppelin several times in 1969, and along with covering Spirit’s “Fresh Garbage” on stage, the Englishmen had also adapted Spirit guitarist Randy California’s electronic device of a theremin for their own sets. If Page and his bandmates had been impressed with Spirit enough to play one of their songs and take up one of their most distinctive instruments, it stood to reason that they had also heard “Taurus” and later incorporated its chords into their own work. Or did it?

  To properly compare “Taurus” and “Stairway to Heaven,” a little bit of musicology and a basic knowledge of guitar playing are required. “Taurus” is an eerie, quietly psychedelic piece in which an open A minor chord repeatedly cycles down to F major seventh in single steps—the player’s middle and pinkie fingers move one fret with each arpeggio (where the individual notes of a chord are plucked) until the shape changes to the open F major seventh, and then back to the adjacent fingering of A minor. It’s a hypnotic part that sounds more complicated to execute than it is, and—adding to the controversy—the official sheet music for “Stairway” presents chord boxes (fingering diagrams for guitarists) that show the Led Zeppelin song played in the same way. It isn’t. Jimmy Page’s introduction begins up the neck of the guitar where the notes are higher, again beginning in A minor and going down to F, only with a completely different chord shape that brings in an ascending B and then a C note played on the high E string. The bass notes of both “Taurus” and “Stairway” share a chromatic descent of A to G-sharp to G to F-sharp to F, but Page’s line has an almost jazzy construction, whereas California’s is more of a folk method that slightly recalls the techniques of Donovan or other minstrels.