Jones, Plant, and Page were particularly struck by the fact that Johns and Bonham had dispensed with a separate mike for the bass drum. “We could have used a separate [mike], but we didn’t need to,” Page told Guitar World. “[Bonzo’s] kick sound was that powerful. And his playing was not in his arms, it was all in his wrist action. Frightening! I still do not know how he managed to get so much level out of a kit.” For Page, nobody other than Bonham could have created what he described as “that sex groove.”
The influence of Bonham’s groove on “When the Levee Breaks” has carried all the way through to hip-hop. Sampled by artists as different as the Beastie Boys (“Rhymin’ and Stealin”), Dr Dre (“Lyrical Gangbang”), and Ice T (“Midnight”), the opening four bars of “Levee”—Bonham unaccompanied, laying down that on-the-beat funk pulse—have become part of rap’s fabric. (Similarly, Physical Graffiti’s epic “Kashmir”—also recorded at Headley Grange—has been sampled on Schooly D’s “Signifying Rapper” and Puff Daddy’s “Come to Me.”)
“I think we set a trend with all of this,” Page told Stuart Grundy and John Tobler. “That whole drum sound and all this ambience is now captured digitally in the machine. Where we would do it that way, you’ve now got it in machines.”
Machines played their part in the making of “When the Levee Breaks,” with the addition of backward echo to both the guitar and harmonica tracks. “ ‘When the Levee Breaks’ was probably the most subtle thing on there, as far as the production aspect [goes],” Page told Dave Schulps, “because each 12-bar has got something totally new about it, although at first it may not be apparent. It’s got different effects on it, which now people have heard a number of times but which at the time hadn’t been used before: phased vocals and harmonica solos backward … a lot of backward echo.”
Backward echo was a gimmick Page had pioneered on the Yardbirds’s “Ten Little Indians,” and now he wanted to create a kind of sonic whirlpool with the effect. “That was done at Island,” Andy Johns recalled. “I put the harp through an old Fender Princeton with tremolo and miked it up.”
“A lot of times, we’d leave Jimmy alone to do his layering and his overdubs,” said Richard Cole. “You’d leave on a Friday afternoon, and then when you turned up on a Monday morning, you’d hear something completely different.”
“All the overdubs were done at Island,” Page told Dave Schulps, “because the truck wasn’t too together for too many overdubs. I worked quite a lot on the overdubs on those things. ‘Stairway’ [has got] quite a few guitars on it, and ‘Four Sticks’ was another one, with loads of chiming guitars and things that all had to be done in the studio.”
Finishing touches were put to other Headley Grange tracks at Island. First and foremost were a number of guitar overdubs—most crucially on “Black Dog,” which Page had already earmarked as an opening track that would be as strong as “Good Times, Bad Times,” “Whole Lotta Love,” and “Immigrant Song.”
The guitars on “Black Dog,” triple-tracked and plugged straight into the mixing desk without being amplified, have the fat, glossy timbre of synthesizers. “We put my Les Paul through a direct box, and from there into a mike channel,” Page confided to Guitar World. “We used the mike amp of the mixing board to get distortion. Then we ran it through two Urie 1176 Universal compressors in series. Then each line was triple-tracked. Curiously, I was listening to that track when we were reviewing the tapes, and the guitars almost sound like an analog synthesizer.”
“[It] was a trick I learned from Bill Halverson, who worked with Buffalo Springfield,” Andy Johns told Robert Godwin. “The only problem was that the second Jimmy would stop playing, [and] a huge amount of background noise would come surging up, which we had to try and fix in the mix. At the time, I thought it was damn fine and a novel effect.”
To Page, the guitars on “Four Sticks” were almost as important as those on “Black Dog.” “I can see certain milestones along the way like ‘Four Sticks,’ in the middle section of that,” he told Steven Rosen. “The sound of those guitars—that’s where I’m going.”
The song, long the least popular track on but a vital influence on LA band Jane’s Addiction, had eventually come into its own at Headley Grange, but only when John Bonham attempted it again with the four drumsticks of the title. As with the perverse rhythms of “Black Dog,” Zeppelin here strayed into the realm of the unfeasible, fluctuating between five- and six-beat meters.
“I had real problems working out where the beat should go,” said John Paul Jones, who’d fallen ill for a couple of days and left the others to get on with things. “Rhythmically, it was quite unusual, but I was the only one in the band who could do that because of my background as an arranger.”
“It was two takes, but that was because it was physically impossible for him to do another,” Jimmy Page said of John Bonham’s drumming on the track. “I couldn’t get that to work until we tried to record it a few times, and I just didn’t know what it was and I still wouldn’t have known what it was. We probably would have kicked the track out.” After much fuming and cussing, said Page, “Bonzo … just picked up the four sticks and that was it.”
At Island, John Paul Jones overdubbed the VCR synthesizer solo on the song’s second middle-eight section. By the time it was complete, “Four Sticks” just about worked as an exotic oddity, its crabbed Oriental feel making it a missing link between “Friends” and “Kashmir.” (When Page and Plant journeyed to India the following year, they recorded versions of both “Friends” and “Four Sticks” with members of the Bombay Symphony Orchestra.)
“It was a bastard to mix,” said Andy Johns. “When I originally recorded the basic tracks, I compressed the drums. Then when I went to mix, I couldn’t make it work. I did it five or six times.” It didn’t help that a quarter-inch tape of the track was missing.
If “Four Sticks” felt like a milestone to Page, the fourth album as a whole gave him immense satisfaction as a guitarist. He told Steven Rosen that “as far as consistency goes and as far as the quality of playing on a whole album,” was his greatest achievement.
“My vocation is more in composition, really, than in anything else,” he told Rosen. “Building up harmonies. Using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army—a guitar army. I think that’s where it’s at, really, for me. I’m talking about actual orchestration in the same way you’d orchestrate a classical piece of music. Instead of using brass and violins, you treat the guitars with synthesizers or other devices; give them different treatments, so that they have enough frequency range and scope and everything to keep the listener as totally committed to it as the player is. It’s a difficult project, but it’s one that I’ve got to do.”
The post-Headley sessions at Island witnessed another crucial overdub, this time on “The Battle of Evermore.” “It was really more of a playlet than a song,” Robert Plant said of the track in April 1972. “After I wrote the lyrics, I realized I needed another, completely different voice, as well as my own, to give that song its full impact.”
Sandy Denny, late of folk-rockers Fairport Convention and about to part company with her subsequent group Fotheringay, was Plant’s “favorite singer out of all the British girls that ever were.” He decided she would be the perfect vocal foil for “Evermore.” “I approached Sandy … and she was up for it,” he recalled. “I don’t think it took more than 45 minutes. I showed her how to do the long ‘Oooooh, dance in the dark’ so there’d be a vocal tail-in. It was perfect against my bluesy thing.”
To Plant, Denny “answered back as if she was the pulse of the people on the battlements.” He saw her as playing the role of the town crier, “urging the people to throw down their weapons.” Denny claimed she’d left the studio feeling hoarse. “Having someone outsing you is a horrible feeling, wanting to be strongest yourself,” she told Barbara Charone in 1973.
“For me to sing with Sandy was great,” Plant said, looking back on the session in 2005. “Sandy and I were friends
, and it was the most obvious thing to ask her to sing on ‘The Battle.’ If it suffered from a naivety and tweeness—I was only 23—it makes up for it in the cohesion of the voices and the playing.”
By the time Zeppelin had finished at Island, they had 14 tracks in the can. These included tracks from earlier sessions, as well as the songs begun or developed at Headley Grange. The option to make their fourth album a double was finally discarded, however. “We have enough here for two albums, but we won’t put out a double album,” Page announced. “I think people can appreciate a single album better.”
The group had also decided to break with tradition, title-wise. “This next album won’t be called Led Zeppelin IV,” Plant told Disc’s Caroline Boucher in February. “We’ll think of something else.”
From the second Bron-Yr-Aur stay to the final session at Island, the entire process of recording Led Zeppelin’s fourth album had taken little more than 2 months—with a Christmas break included. After the week of rehearsals at Headley Grange, the band had spent only a further 6 days there with the Stones’s mobile unit.
“Looking back, I suppose what we really needed was at least 2 weeks solid with the truck,” Page admitted. “But as it turned out, we actually had only about 6 days. Usually, we need a full week to get everything out of our system and to get used to the facilities.”
On February 9, Page and Andy Johns packed up the tapes and flew to Los Angeles to mix the album. Little did they know how long the process was going to take.
6
PRAYIN’ WON’T DO YOU NO GOOD
“THE MOUNTAINS and the canyons start to tremble and shake,” Robert Plant sings on “Going to California.” “The children of the sun begin to wake …”
As Jimmy Page and Andy Johns landed at LAX on Tuesday, February 9, 1971, they felt the tremors of the Sylmar earthquake that shook Los Angeles at 2 minutes past 6:00 that morning. “As we were coming down the escalators into the main terminal, there was a slight earthquake,” Page recalled. “In fact, it was quite big. It cracked one of the dams there in San Diego, and in the hotel before going to the studio, you could feel the bed shaking. I thought, ‘Well, here we go.’“ It was an omen of sorts for the shaky experience that lay ahead.
Johns had used Sunset Sound studios before, having mixed an album there by a group called Sky. But his ulterior motive for mixing in LA was to progress a relationship he’d begun on an earlier visit. Page, for his part, was only too eager to resume relations with pretty Miss Pamela, the GTOs member who’d been his LA consort of choice. Keeping an eye on both men was Peter Grant, who’d flown out to join them.
The moment Johns sat down at Sunset Sound, however, it was clear to him that the monitors had been changed. The sound in the room was very different from the one he remembered. Moving to a different room within the complex wasn’t a solution, either. “We should have just gone home,” Johns admitted later. “But I didn’t want to and I don’t think Jimmy did, either. We were having a good time, you know?”
For several days, the engineer and the guitarist labored over the fourth-album mix. “We wasted a week [messing] around,” Page grouched after the fact. “It had sounded all right to me, but the speakers were lying. It wasn’t the balance; it was the actual sound that was on the tape. All I can put it down to was the fact that the speakers in LA and the monitoring system in that room were just very bright—and they lied. It wasn’t the true sound.”
Johns confessed that mixing was “still a bit of a mystery” to him and Page: “We were really young. We never took tapes home to listen to or we might have known.”
One Sunset Sound mix, however, turned out to be a winner. “One of my favorite mixes is at the end of ‘When the Levee Breaks,’ ” Page told Guitar World, “when everything starts moving around except for the voice, which stays stationary.” Page was particularly proud of the panning and “extreme positioning” he and Johns achieved in the song’s final 2 minutes, even if this can be properly appreciated only on high-quality headphones.
“At the end of it, where we’ve got the whole works going on this fade, it doesn’t actually fade,” Jimmy said. “As we finished it, the whole effects start to spiral; all the instruments are now spiraling. This was very difficult to do in those days, I can assure you. With the mixing and the voice remaining constant in the middle. You hear everything turning right around.” Perhaps this was what Page meant by the phrase “sucking you into the source.”
After they’d finished the mix, Johns’s older brother Glyn—who’d worked on the first Zeppelin album— dropped by for a listen. “We were really excited and told him, ‘You’ve got to listen to this,’ ” Page recalled. “Glyn listened and just said, ‘Hmm, you’ll never be able to cut it. It’ll never work.’ And he walked out. Wrong again, Glyn. He must have been seething with envy.”
Glyn Johns would not have been seething with envy when his brother brought the mixes back to London. “When we got back, the other guys wanted to hear the mixes,” Johns recalled. “We went into Olympic for a playback, which was another mistake. The only things that sound good in that room is stuff that’s been recorded there.”
“[Jimmy] brought the tapes back and they sounded terrible, so we had to start mixing all over again,” Plant told Disc in November. “The sound of the mixing room that Andy Johns took Jimmy to was really [useless].” Johns admitted that he and Page “crouched in the corner really embarrassed” as Plant, Jones, and Bonham listened in stunned disbelief. “I thought my number was up,” Johns later said. “But the others seemed to look to Jimmy, even though it was just as much my fault.” It was the last time Johns worked with the band.
Having originally intended to release the album in March, Led Zeppelin now had to put it on hold while they undertook a short UK tour that Peter Grant had booked. Remixing would be impossible before April.
Grant, eager to bolster the band’s UK fan base in the face of ongoing resentment at their focus on the US market, had been looking into the possibility of staging two London concerts: one at Waterloo Station, the other at the Oval cricket club. In the event, neither of these ambitious events panned out.
Instead, with a view to getting back to their roots, Grant hatched the concept of playing a select number of smaller venues around Britain. In part, this was a thank-you to fans and promoters, in part a platform for road-testing the new songs, and in part a silencing of rumors that Zeppelin was planning to split.
“The boys came to me after Christmas and talked about their next tour,” Grant told Melody Maker’s Chris Welch. “We decided to do the clubs and forget about the bread and the big concert halls. We’re going to restrict prices to about 12 bob [shillings] a ticket. When I rang the Marquee, the manager refused to believe it was me offering him Led Zeppelin, so he had to call me back to be convinced.”
The “Back to the Clubs” UK tour began at Belfast’s Ulster Hall on March 5. Here, against a backdrop of sectarian violence and rioting, Zeppelin played “Stairway to Heaven” live for the first time. “ ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is a good representation of what we’re doing now,” Plant told Melody Maker’s Chris Welch, who’d flown to Belfast to see the show. “There are different moods to the song, which lasts 10 or 12 minutes.” Plant said there was “a kind of instant excitement” about playing live again.
The English leg of the tour began at Leeds University on March 9, continuing with shows in Canterbury, Southampton, Bath, Stoke, Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, and (on March 23) London, where hundreds of fans lined up around the block for tickets—most doomed to be disappointed. As for Zeppelin themselves, “Back to the Clubs” was a well-meaning experiment they did not repeat again.
“They may have liked that closeness with the audience,” said Richard Cole, “but I don’t think they were really that enamored of the backstage facilities after all the stadium tours they’d done. It wasn’t that they were people who really had anything flashy in their dressing rooms—they had fuck apart from drinks and sandwi
ches—but the dressing rooms were so small, it was like, ‘We’re not gonna do this in a hurry again.’ I think they’d forgotten what it was like.”
On April Fool’s Day, the group recorded a session for John Peel’s BBC show Rock Hour at the Paris studios on London’s Lower Regent Street. “Stairway,” now more honed in its live arrangement, was performed along with “Black Dog,” the latter prefaced by the intro to Led Zeppelin III’s “Out on the Tiles.” Introducing the set’s acoustic segment—“Going to California” and “That’s the Way”—Plant muttered that “this is the time where we like to have a cup of tea, so I think we’d better sit down instead.” “Whole Lotta Love” and “Dazed and Confused” were wheeled out, together with a covers medley that included John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillun” and Elvis Presley’s “That’s Alright, Mama.” The rapturously received set concluded with Led Zeppelin II’s “Thank You.”
By mid-April, Jimmy Page was back at Olympic and Island, working on new mixes for the fourth album. (All mixes on the record were credited as being “with Andy Johns” except “The Battle of Evermore,” which credited George Chkiantz.) Due to further live bookings, the mixing process continued all the way into June. “It’s that long dragging-out thing of mixing a lot of the tracks,” Robert Plant told Sounds’s Steve Peacock. “It’s a drag having to do it twice, but we’re coming to the tail end of it now.”
It didn’t help that Led Zeppelin was meticulous to the point of anal retentiveness. “We used to spend hours, weeks, months sometimes in one room,” Plant says. “All going, ‘Mmm … no … let’s just close the gap between those two tracks a bit more….’ All that nuancing.”
Plant was nonetheless beginning to feel excited about the finished album. In the interview with Steve Peacock, conducted in late June, the singer described the LP. “Out of the lot, I should think there are about three or four mellow things,” he said. “But there’s also some nice strong stuff, some really … we don’t say ‘heavy,’ do we? Well, I don’t know whether we do. But it’s strong stuff and exciting, and the flame is really burning higher and higher.”
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