The drum sound to the classic Led Zeppelin track ‘When The Levee Breaks’ is one of the most iconic in all of music. With its booming and echoing grandeur, John Bonham’s opening drum hits have become one of the most revered and sampled beats in all of music. If it wasn’t for the unique place where Led Zeppelin IV was recorded, that drum sound might not have existed at all.
When the band moved into Headley Grange for recording, it was a continuation of their ongoing process. The band had recorded in the house for their prior LP, Led Zeppelin III, and favoured an environment where they could write, rehearse, record, and live simultaneously. As Jimmy Page recalled in the documentary It Might Get Loud, it was thanks to a roadie that Bonham’s drums wound up in the entrance hall stairwell.
“Bonzo had ordered a new drum kit,” Page recalled in the film. “His tech, his road manager, had set it up in the hall, and when Bonzo came out, he started playing it in this thing. It was this huge expanse. You’re getting the drums reflecting off of the walls. [There was] this wonderful ambience to the drums.”
However, engineer Andy Johns recalled that setting up the drum kit in the stairway was his idea. “One night Zeppelin were all going down the boozer and I said, ‘You guys bugger off but Bonzo, you stay behind because I’ve got an idea’,” Johns told Rhythm Magazine in 2013. “So we took his kit out of the room where the other guys had been recording and stuck it in this lobby area. I got a couple of microphones and put them up the first set of the stairs.”
“I said: ‘Bonzo, come and listen to this, dear chap.’ And he came in and said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s more fucking like it!’ And everyone was very happy,” Johns added. “I guess I must have done it as a one-off thing and I didn’t start using that technique of room mics all the time until later in the ’70s with people like Rod Stewart. Jimmy picked up on it and used it on ‘Kashmir’. ‘When The Levee Breaks’ came out quite well and people still ask me about it when I appear on music biz panels and what-not.”
Bonham rarely had the time or interest to discuss the finer points of recording terminology with Johns. Instead, the two created their own language. “I never had Bonzo turn round to me and say, ‘Oh that’s a great drum sound, Andy.’ He’d just say, ‘There’s not enough ‘frudge’ on the bass drum,’” Johns recalled. “That was his word and I knew exactly what he meant by ‘frudge’.”
Check out ‘When The Levee Breaks’ down below.
