01LED ZEPPELIN IV LED ZEPPELIN

(1971)

Ledzeppeliniii was hardly a flop, but Jimmy Page took criticism of it personally. The guitarist refused interviews for the next 18 months and resolved to let the music do the talking in the most dramatic way possible. The next album would have no accompanying words – not even the band’s name on the cover. The resulting untitled effort, known universally as Ledzeppeliniv, is the most devastating answer a band has ever given their critics.

“It was a really good and serious summing up of where we were,” said Jimmy Page of the album. “Each song has its own character. It gives all the different colours and textures of the band. We were moving the acoustic aspect of what we’d done on the third album into these more intimate areas with Going to california and The battle of ever more. The music kept expanding.”

It was in 1970 that Page, singer Robert Plant, drummer John Bonham and bassist John Paul Jones began the first recording sessions for the album at Island Studios in London, but the magic was not happening. According to Page, an early version of a key track, When the levee breaks, sounded “laboured”. The guitarist decided a new working environment was required.

He wanted somewhere the band could live, write, and record, so Led Zeppelin retreated to Headley Grange, a disused workhouse for the poor in Hampshire. Renting the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio to capture the results, the band dug in. “I liked the idea of everybody being in the same house and really working with the whole band,” Page recalled. “It was an old Victorian house, very imposing. It was in the countryside, so you weren’t going to have neighbours complaining. If it didn’t work we’d go into a studio, but in actual fact it was great. It was like everybody’s creative energies all joined. That’s what the whole magic of the environment was like.”

The band used cupboards and stairwells around the house as isolation booths for amps, setting up temporary studios ad hoc. They were constantly setting up in different locations, lending each track its own ambience. As Page said, “We used the acoustics of the house. We were playing in this drawing room to begin with, and then John Bonham has another drum kit turn up, and it’s in the hall, with this really high ceiling. When he started playing it was like, ‘right, we’ll have to do something in here now,’ with the drum sound like that, because it was just huge. You’ve heard it

–on When the levee breaks .”

Levee was Zeppelin’s thunderous reimagining of a 1929 Memphis Minnie tune. Although the melody does draw on the original, it’s unlikely anyone would have recognised the song if Plant had bothered to change the lyrics. Memphis Minnie’s tune was an up-tempo blues with a bright fingerpicking part. The original follows standard 12-bar chord changes, but Page’s ominous, droning riff never modulates, designed to invoke a trance. He played it on his Fender Electric XII in Open G tuning, but it sounds like Open F because Page slowed the track with varispeed. “If you slow things down, it makes everything sound so much thicker,” he told author Brad Tolinski. “The only problem is, you have to be very tight with your playing because it magnifies any inconsistencies.”

Working quickly, Zeppelin captured ideas while they still sounded spontaneous. “We didn’t over-rehearse things,” Page emphasised. “We just had them so that they were just right, so that there was this tension – maybe there might be a mistake. But there won’t be, because this is how we’re all going to do it and it’s gonna work!”

The record sounds fresh because it is. If a song didn’t come together quickly, they simply moved on. As Page recalled: “We’d get it up to a serious speed, so it’s really firing on all cylinders, and then you’d start recording. With the red light on there’s even more urgency to it. We’d arrive at those takes in a pretty short time – just a handful of takes, maybe. If a song started to labour, and it just wasn’t working, there’s no point in just recording it. We’d just stop it and do something else, and then return to it later.”

Guitar solos were always the last thing recorded. “I wanted it to be totally in character of what’s going on with the lyrics and a summing up of my guitar playing for that particular song,” Page explained. “What I’d do is just limber up and then, okay, put the red light on. And again, those solos weren’t done over hours and hours. They were pretty much improvised. They weren’t worked out note for note. Never. The solos were always: take a deep breath and go for it! For the spontaneity. I might have worked out how I might start it off. But that’s it.”

With a combination of inspiration and ruthless efficiency, Zeppelin’s fourth was essentially complete by the end of their month-long residency at Headley Grange. Three tracks remained unfinished: Foursticks (a rhythmic number on which Bonham on played with, yes, four drum sticks); Blackdog, the heavy hitter that would serve as the album’s opening salvo; and lastly, the song that many consider the greatest of all time.

“I had the sections for it. It was a question of piecing them together,” said Page of writing Stairwaytoheaven. “By nature of the fact that it had acceleration through it, it needed some work on it. Definitely it was the sort of thing where you wanted to be all around each other. Because of the amount of overdubs that were going to go on it, it needed to be done in a studio.” Returning to London, Page picked Island Studio 1 for its ambience and clarity.

The rich arrangement for Stairwaytoheaven includes all of Page’s main guitars. The intro was his beloved Harmony Sovereign H -1260, a budget acoustic used to write the first four albums, while the lush electric rhythms came from two different 12-strings, Di’ed and panned left and right. His Fender Electric XII was joined by the Vox Phantom he’d used on Ledzeppelinii and earlier, in his previous band The Yardbirds, for the song Tinker, tailor, soldier, Sailor. They were recorded straight into the desk and compressed. Outro riffs came from his Les Paul, while the solo was played on the legendary Dragon Telecaster, a gift from Jeff Beck he’d used to record all of Led Zeppelin’s debut. The Gibson ES-1275 double neck didn’t arrive until after the song was recorded, when Page needed one guitar that could reproduce all the parts live.

The solo used the same approach as the others, Page preparing the opening lick and a few link phrases before improvising the rest. He says the solo came together easily, in about three takes. Producer Andy Johns, however, remembered things differently in a 2009 interview with Rhythm. “There was a bit of a struggle on the solo. He was playing for half an hour and did seven or eight takes. He hadn’t quite got it sussed. I was starting to get a bit paranoid and he said, ‘No, no you’re making me paranoid.’ Then right after that he played a really great solo.”

Page is notoriously reticent to give details of the amps used on specific tracks, sometimes complaining that after he mentions using a particular amp with Led Zeppelin they become impossible to buy. He has variously claimed the Stairway amp was a Marshall or a Supro. We do know that his Number 1 Les Paul Standard and Marshall 1959 Superlead head remained his main rig for the Headley Grange sessions. That tone didn’t work for Blackdog, however, and Page