Led Zeppelin FAQ_All That's Left to Know About the Greatest Hard Rock Band of All Time

by George Case

  The Jeff Beck Group’s 1968 album was said by critics to be the obvious model for Led Zeppelin.

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  There are certainly parallels between the two LPs, and Page in all likelihood would have heard and studied Beck’s when preparing his own. Truth is a premier album from a talented English electric blues guitarist, constructed to show off the artist’s skills with extended solos and a crunching overall feel; Beck’s own liner notes suggest, “This must be played at maximum volume whatever phonograph you use,” and characterize his playing as “[p]robably the rudest sounds ever recorded, intended for listening to whilst angry or stoned.” Sound familiar? The Jeff Beck Group was a four-piece lineup, with Rod Stewart on raspy vocals, Ron Wood on bass, and Mick Waller on drums; Truth consisted of heavy blues numbers (“Let Me Love You,” “Blues Deluxe,” “I Ain’t Superstitious”), covers and standards rearranged for hard rock (“Morning Dew,” “Ol’ Man River”), and even a traditional acoustic guitar instrumental (“Greensleeves”). A standout is the slow blues “You Shook Me.” On first listen, comparing those to Led Zeppelin’s “How Many More Times,” “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” “Black Mountain Side,” and, well, “You Shook Me” requires no great critical insight.

  Led Zeppelin were of course playing the same styles of music as the Jeff Beck Group and loads of other late-’60s rock acts, with their drawn-out dirty blues, psychedelic guitar, howling vocals, and extended instrumental jams. Beck and Jimmy Page had been chums since their teen years, sharing a love for the rockabilly licks of James Burton and Cliff Gallup, and as young men in the Yardbirds they had been the star attractions of a popular touring and recording act. Both of them knew and worked with John Paul Jones, who even contributed keyboard to some of the Beck cuts. “If you’ve got things you enjoy, then you want to do them,” Page said of his and Beck’s musical correspondence. The Truth-versus–Led Zeppelin argument was perhaps a foreseeable conflict between two players of the same age and background with similar tastes and at the same points in their respective careers, responding to the same trends in pop music.

  Their differences, though, are just as significant. Jimmy Page produced his record, while Beck’s was overseen by the erstwhile Yardbirds director Mickie Most. Led Zeppelin benefits from what have been described as its “terraced dynamics” (jarring cuts and segues whereby each song comes in sharp contrast to those on either side of it), whereas Truth is more of a meandering selection of pieces harder to distinguish from one another. (And for what it’s worth, Truth’s “Rock My Plimsoul,” “Blues Deluxe,” and “Let Me Love You” have been heard as unlawful rips of B. B. King’s “Rock Me Baby” and “Gambler’s Blues,” and Buddy Guy’s “Let Me Love You Baby,” respectively.) Led Zeppelin was a self-contained act whose first collection required an outsider, tabla player Viram Jasani, for but a single cut, while the Jeff Beck Group brought in John Paul Jones, keyboardist Nicky Hopkins, and, on “Beck’s Bolero,” Jimmy Page himself. Ron Wood and Mick Waller were a good though unspectacular rhythm section, but John Bonham’s opening fills on “Good Times Bad Times” announced the coming of one of the most influential rock drummers ever.

  As much as anything, Led Zeppelin were a quartet to which each member was expected to contribute equally, yet the very name “Jeff Beck Group” implies that there was room for only one person at the top of the bill. Indeed, Beck went on to play with a variety of accompanists throughout the ‘70s, including Stewart, Wood, Waller, Hopkins, and later bassist Tim Bogert, drummers Aynsley Dunbar and Carmine Appice, and keyboardist Jan Hammer. For all his talent, Beck spread himself too thin as a bandleader, while Page shrewdly shared the spotlight with a consistent lineup of individuals who all blossomed in the next few years. Truth is a fine album with a sonic template recognizable in subsequent work by other artists, but Led Zeppelin represents that model concentrated, intensified, and perfected.

  “Good Times Bad Times” (Page-Jones-Bonham)

  Though the song is an original first sketched by John Paul Jones, the title of this hard-hitting leadoff is the same as a 1964 album cut by the Rolling Stones.

  “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” (Traditional, arranged by Jimmy Page)

  The first of Zeppelin’s great “light and shade” hybrids, whose later editions included “Ramble On,” “Over the Hills and Far Away,” “Ten Years Gone,” and “Stairway to Heaven,” “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” was planned as one of the group’s hallmark numbers from at least Page and Plant’s first get-together in the summer of 1968. Page was intrigued by the idea of merging soft folk or pop songs into hard rock, perhaps thinking of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin,” or Vanilla Fudge’s outrageous take on the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” The guitarist heard Joan Baez do the piece and rebuilt it around overdubbed acoustic and electric guitars, Plant’s soaring vocals, and John Bonham’s mighty drum work. More than ten years later, the American Anne Bredon (née Ann Loeb), possibly through one of her grown children, was made aware that one of the biggest rock ’n’ roll acts in the world had done one of her songs on their premier album. By then the singer-songwriter was no longer active in the folk music scene, and in fact she is primarily remembered today for her convoluted connection to Led Zeppelin.

  It turned out that Joan Baez had indirectly heard, through the coffeehouse circuit, Bredon’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” and then performed it on her own 1962 album Joan Baez in Concert, assuming Bredon’s tune to be a public-domain standard and citing it as such (Baez and Page, coincidentally, share a birthday). So Led Zeppelin’s “Babe” of 1969 only repeated the “Traditional” credit first noted by Baez; subsequently both the Baez and Zeppelin track listings have been corrected to name Bredon as the composer or cocomposer of the new arrangement, and Bredon herself now earns royalties from the song. Many Zeppelin analysts have unquestioningly described “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” as the group’s version of “a traditional folk song,” as unaware as Baez or Page that it was in fact written by a living performer in the middle of the twentieth century. In other places the obscure Bredon is misidentified as British folksinger Anne Briggs.

  The confusion around “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” underscores the glibness of the Zeppelin plagiarism accusations, if even a musician as respected for her ideals as Joan Baez could mistake a copyrighted work for a preindustrial archetype. Players and listeners of the US and British folk music movement of the 1950s and 60s were devoted to the notion of rustic realism, to music that belonged “to the people,” rather than the commercial assembly lines of Tin Pan Alley. Occasionally, as in this case, they chose to believe that their songs were old ballads or spirituals rather than actually confirming it. In its plaintive minor chords and themes of rambling, seasons, and “I can hear it callin’ me,” “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” does sound like something from the 1800s, and it is heard on the Baez album alongside actual folk standards such as “Kumbaya” and “Streets of Laredo.” Other old songs with similar moods include “I’m A-Leavin’ Cheyenne,” “The Girl I Left Behind,” and “Oh, Babe, It Ain’t No Lie.” Though in retrospect it is easy to point out misstated authorship once a song is featured on a hit record, the matter is far less transparent in the active lives of gigging and recording musicians selecting an eclectic body of material.

  “You Shook Me” (Willie Dixon)

  Although the blues bassist and songwriter is rightly named as the author of this track—and later said it was one of the works he was “proudest to be associated with,” alongside Foghat’s recital of his “I Just Want to Make Love to You” and the Rolling Stones’ rendering of “Little Red Rooster” —“You Shook Me” is not a note-for-note, word-for-word cover. Robert Plant can’t resist sneaking in some of Robert Johnson’s “Stones in My Passway,” in the lines “I have a bird that whistles / And I have a bird that sings…” That few of Zeppelin’s vociferous detractors have picked up on the addition impli
es that, to them, it’s okay to “borrow” material from a venerable black performer if another one is getting the credit. Recent credits of the song add J. B. Lenoir’s name to Dixon’s.

  “Dazed and Confused” (Jimmy Page)

  Arguably the most egregious of Led Zeppelin’s infringements, the climax of Led Zeppelin’s first side was a direct remake of American folk singer Jake Holmes’s “Dazed and Confused,” which the Yardbirds had seen performed in 1967. The Yardbirds put the number into their own final sets, designated

  Legendary bluesman Robert Johnson’s lyrics and music occasionally turned up in Zeppelin material.

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  “I’m Confused,” and by the time of its inclusion on the Zeppelin album it had reverted to “Dazed and Confused” but gained different lyrics, a bowed guitar solo from Jimmy Page, and then a fast passage that utilized the Yardbirds’ old “Think About It” instrumental break. A regular part of the group’s concerts for several years, it was, despite its new electrification, Gothic vocals, and special effects, still recognizably the Jake Holmes song.

  If Page had kept the title but changed the music, or changed the title but kept the music, the steal would be less obvious and more tolerable, but Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused” is the guitarist at his guiltiest. In later years he dodged the issue of Holmes’s authorship (“What’s he got, the riff or whatever?”), reasonably pointing to the hard rock makeover he gave it in 1968; it’s true that, as a Led Zeppelin set piece, “Dazed and Confused” became longer and darker than anything Holmes had created. Holmes himself was first quoted as saying, “What the hell, let him have it,” upon first learning of the grab, but told Zeppelin biographer Mick Wall in 2008, “I’ve written letters saying, ‘Jesus, man, you don’t have to give it all to me. Keep half! Keep two-thirds! Just give me credit for having originated it.’” Yet even Holmes admits that by now “Dazed and Confused” is so closely tied to Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Page that it has become more their song than his. Between Page’s sonic elaboration and the audience’s experience, through hundreds of live performances and millions of records sold, he is probably right. Still, for Page to take up as his own a song by a fellow artist—not a long-dead itinerant folk singer but someone working the same stages he was—ranks as a definite black mark on his career. As of June 2010, Jake Holmes had formally filed a lawsuit in a California court for his share of the song’s royalties.

  “Your Time Is Gonna Come” (Page-Jones)

  Both the Zeppelin ballad and Ray Charles’s “I Believe to My Soul” contain the lyric “One of these days and it won’t be long… Look for me and I’ll be gone.” The rhymes are so obvious that the intersection may be a coincidence, but considering the rest of the evidence, and Jones’s professed love of Charles’s music, a suspicion lingers.

  “Black Mountain Side (Jimmy Page)

  A raga-like acoustic guitar solo (accompanied by Viram Jasani’s tabla), this was the first indication of Led Zeppelin’s great stylistic range, and Page’s guitar tuning of D-A-D-G-A-D (as opposed to the conventional E-A-D-G-B-E) marks an early herald of the epic “Kashmir,” done in the same configuration. But “Black Mountain Side” is noticeably like Bert Jansch’s “Black Waterside,” released on his album Jack Orion in 1966, where it was credited as a traditional song, arranged by the guitarist. “I wasn’t totally original on that,” Page conceded in a Guitar Player interview from 1977. “It had been done in the folk clubs a lot; Annie Briggs was the first one that I heard do that riff. I was playing it as well, and then there was Bert Jansch’s version.”

  Like “Dazed and Confused,” the song might have attracted less criticism had the title not been identical or nearly identical to its model (blues singer Bessie Smith did a “Black Mountain Blues” and country picker Doc Watson a “Black Mountain Rag”). Both the Briggs and Jansch takes on “Black Waterside” have verses sung over droning chords played slower than the Led Zeppelin track, while “Black Mountain Side” sounds more like a conscious exercise in six-string virtuosity. Bert Jansch, who Page has always named as a major influence, has wryly commented on the closeness of the two pieces but refrained from pursuing any legal action. “Black Waterside” was, as Page attested, a mainstay of the British folk repertoire, and in his mind the Led Zeppelin remake may have been removed enough—faster, unaccompanied by lyrics, and with its sitar-like sonority emphasized—to justify listing himself as the composer.

  “Communication Breakdown” (Bonham-Jones-Page)

  Some listeners have claimed the blistering, trailblazing riff of this cut was patterned after rockabilly hero Eddie Cochran’s “Nervous Breakdown,” but nothing in the Cochran song is reminiscent of Led Zeppelin. Although Jimmy Page was definitely influenced by Cochran and other early rock ’n’ rollers like Cliff Gallup and James Burton, he had already been playing fast, distorted, and bass-heavy guitar lines before “Communication Breakdown” took shape—e.g., “Train Kept A-Rollin’,” “Think About It,” his and Jeff Beck’s workouts on Freddie King’s “I’m Going Down”—and the song’s title was probably a gesture toward other uptempo precedents, such as the Rolling Stones’ “19th Nervous Breakdown” or the bluegrass favorite “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”

  “I Can’t Quit You Baby” (Willie Dixon)

  Confirmed as Dixon’s, like “You Shook Me,” Zeppelin’s effort has been described as hewing more to Otis Rush’s 1966 remake of his own 1950s cover, rather than to the previous Little Milton adaptation. Not a lift, then, but a roundabout homage.

  “How Many More Times” (Bonham-Jones-Page)

  An early sign that Led Zeppelin were playing fast and loose with blues songs came in this nominal original whose lyrics were manifestly indebted to Howlin’ Wolf’s “How Many More Years,” from 1951. Robert Plant, improvising over the band’s psychedelic jam session, also throws in lines from “Steal Away,” Albert King’s “The Hunter,” and pop-country icon Jimmy Rodgers’s “Kisses Sweeter than Wine.” “That has the kitchen sink on it, doesn’t it?” Page asked rhetorically about “How Many More Times.” “It was made up of little pieces I developed when I was in the Yardbirds…. It was played live in the studio with cues and nods.” The “little pieces” were a welter of influences, among them the Yardbirds’ essays of “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” and Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning,” and a previous “How Many More Times” by Gary Farr and the T-Bones; both Plant and John Bonham had performed Howlin’ Wolf’s “How Many More Years” together in their Birmingham years. The long, multipart Zeppelin rendition of the Howlin’ Wolf precedent figured prominently in the band’s concerts of 1968 and 1969, but on the album, away from the free-form live performances where Page would again stroke his guitar with a violin bow, the various words and music cobbled together to make “How Many More Times” were not difficult to trace.

  “Whole Lotta Love” (Bonham-Jones-Page-Plant)

  Led Zeppelin’s first big hit and still one of their two most famous songs, the Led Zeppelin II starter is also their most confirmed case of plagiarism—the one purists gloat over when insisting that the group were no more than spoiled, selfish white guys who got rich robbing the gritty, grizzled authors of real blues. In 1987 an out-of-court settlement was reached with Willie Dixon (1915–1992), who wrote the “You Need Love” that Muddy Waters recorded in 1962, for an estimated $200,000; Dixon’s name is now attached to issues of “Whole Lotta Love,” and royalties are collected by his estate.

  The “Whole Lotta Love” dispute is centered entirely around its lyrics: Waters sings, “I ain’t foolin’ / You need schoolin’,” while Robert Plant begins, “You need coolin’ / Woman I’m not foolin’.” By the end of the track he further quotes the Dixon songs “Shake for Me” and “Back Door Man.” Though the lift is apparent, Plant actually came by his words through a little-heard 1966 cover of “You Need Love” by England’s the Small Faces, only there it was credited to singer Steve Marriott (ironically Jimmy Page’s first choice as singer when forming Zepp
elin) and bassist Ronnie Lane (whose battle with multiple sclerosis spurred Page to play a series of benefit dates in the

  The original credits of “Whole Lotta Love” made no acknowledgment of “You Need Love,” composed by Willie Dixon.

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  early 1980s). The title itself could be a nod to Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” or Fats Domino’s “Whole Lotta Lovin’.”

  John Paul Jones has speculated that “Whole Lotta Love” first took shape during an onstage jam in 1969, when the quartet would stretch out for lengthy boogies around “Dazed and Confused” or Garnet Mimms’s “As Long as I Have You”—certainly Page’s simple E-based riff is something he might have hit on spontaneously—forcing Plant to quickly dip into his mental stock of blues lines. On the other hand, in 1977 Page insisted, “I had [“Whole Lotta Love”] worked out already, that one, before entering the studio. I had rehearsed it.” Though “Whole Lotta Love” has the same unvarying key as “You Need Love,” there’s little doubt that Plant was thinking of Muddy Waters’s piece more than Page was when they recorded the Led Zeppelin version.

  The distorted, echoed, and stereophonic treatment Page and his group gave “You Need Love” only angered the cognoscenti more, as they accused Zeppelin of reducing the subtleties of Chicago blues to a heavy metal overload. Rock journalist and Jimi Hendrix scholar Charles Shaar Murray has decried Zeppelin’s adaptation of “You Need Love” as something “come through crass exaggeration of surface impressions, and the intoxicated egos of posturing ninnies who appear not to realize that they have someone else’s dick stuffed down their trousers….” He summarizes “Whole Lotta Love” as “thermonuclear gang rape.” Yet the huge scale of “Whole Lotta Love,” with its canyons of reverberation and the sonic nightmare of its surreal interlude, is exactly what separates it from the down-home funk of its prototype. Musicologist Susan Fast has countered that criticisms such as Murray’s are themselves a simplistic formula: i.e., “Black blues musicians are the ‘real thing,’ not only the inventors of the genre but also those who lived the stories they were telling. White rockers appropriate the surface but can never match the ‘depth’ of black blues performers.”