THE ENGINEER

Andy Johns: “We recorded Stairway To Heaven at Island [studios] and I remember the tracking quite well. In those days it was unusual in as much as we tracked the song without a bass; it was drums, Jimmy playing an acoustic and John Paul was playing an upright Hohner piano. I put a lot of bottom end on that so there’d be some bottom end to work with. It was a beautiful track and I could see it had dynamics. I thought: ‘Boy, this is gonna be fun.’ Then John Paul put the bass on. Then we put on the electric rhythm. When we went to do the electric twelve-string the song really started to come alive. Jimmy would use a 12-string quite often through his Vox AC30 amp, which has a very electric, distorted kind of sound. I said to Jimmy, “Why don’t we record this direct?” So that’s why the 12-string has that bell like quality. It wasn’t difficult to get a good guitar sound out of Jimmy. These days when you’re doing guitar overdubs I can spend the first week or two searching around to find the three or four basic sounds one needs. But Jimmy would just show up, plug in, I’d stick a mic on it and it always sounded pretty good.

“I remember Jimmy had a little bit of trouble with the solo on Stairway to Heaven. He hadn’t completely figured it out. Nowadays you spend a whole day sometimes doing one thing. Back then, of course, we never did that. They were a very quick band. We never spent a very long time recording anything. I remember sitting in the control room with Jimmy, he’s standing there next to me and he’d done a few passes and it wasn’t going anywhere. I could see he was getting a bit paranoid, and so I was getting paranoid. I turned around and said: ‘You’re making me paranoid.’ And he said: ‘No, you’re making me paranoid!’ Then: bang! On the next take he ripped it out. Of course, it’s a really wonderful solo. Pagey was just unbelievable.”