Once upon a time, Planet Rock Radio set out to create the greatest fantasy rock band ever. With an admittedly small survey pool of around 4000 people, fans submitted answers declaring their favourite singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer from the world of rock. The results comically crowned Led Zeppelin as the group so good they make rock fantasies come true.
Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham were all top of their respective classes. This makes them the only supergroup in the world who lived up to the sum of their parts. With the legendary Page often likened to a classical composer by his peers, Bonham the proverbial thunder, Plant with a voice that threatened to pluck Sputnik out of orbit, and Jones the perfect multi-instrumentalism to serve as the foil and glue, the band soared to Promethean heights.
However, even these maestros, a group of musical mavericks who helped to spawn the genre of heavy metal, had their limitations. In fact, being quite so skilled within the limited vocabulary of heavy rock often created an environment that caused them to trip over each other. Usually, they navigated the complex webs they wove with supreme skill, but every now and again, one was a struggle.
With that in mind, we’ve perused everything the band said about the tricky tracks in the pockets of their tight trousers and picked out the three most difficult Led Zeppelin songs to play. When even a fantasy band encounters difficulty, you know you’re dealing with a damning arrangement.
The three songs Led Zeppelin struggled to record:
‘Four Sticks’
John Bonham mightn’t be the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll drummer, but he is undoubtedly in the top one. But even he struggled to drum his way out of a pickle that Led Zep landed themselves in with the ‘Four Sticks’—perhaps the most obscure song on the opus that is Led Zeppelin IV. The song’s meandering, wistful section offers a yin to the heavy yang of the bulk of the track. After all, none other than George Harrison had said they should offer a change of pace. In order to achieve this, they took a literal approach and transitioned from the thunderous 5/4 main section, suddenly floating into dreamy 6/8, and back rolling into the insistent main riff without breaking stride.
Even recording this rhythmic oddity was difficult, never mind playing it live. “It took him ages to get ‘Four Sticks’,” Jones recalled regarding Bonham’s angry struggles. “I seemed to be the only one who could actually count things in. Page would play something and [John would] say, ‘That’s great. Where’s the first beat? You know it, but you gotta tell us…’ He couldn’t actually count what he was playing. It would be a great phrase, but you couldn’t relate it to a count. If you think of ‘one’ being in the wrong place, you are completely screwed”.
In other words, the band were singing from the same hymn sheet but in different languages, the meta was all messed up, and the self-taught ‘Thunder of Drums’ was at a loss. Perhaps this wasn’t all that surprising; as Jimmy Page said, “The song was supposed to be abstract.” As the band’s heartbeat, Bonham looked at a Jackson Pollock, wondering which bit was the nose. In the end, he got it in two takes, not because he nailed it, but as Page explained, because “it was physically impossible for him to do another.” As such, there are moments where you can tell the tempo is slightly off-kilter.
‘Black Dog’
The blues were always the backbone of the band, so when Jones said he had an idea inspired by Muddy Waters, his mates expected more bread and butter to be served. He would create a “rolling bass part” and the “riff that would be like a linear journey”. The problem was, while blues is a staple, he came to the studio with a ludicrously exotic tempo. “It was originally all in 3/16 time, but no one could keep up with that,” he said.
This fluid rhythm proved too tricky for the band as the sections became disjointed. So, the classic line “fix it in post” must have been uttered. Bonham recorded a human click track to relay over their workings, and around this, the band polished their performance into a masterpiece. “It was tricky to play,” Page admitted, but Bonham’s previous difficulties served as great experience for him to craft a handy hack.
“We struggled with the turnaround,” Jones told SiriusXM, “Until Bonham figured out that you just four-time as if there’s no turnaround. That was the secret.” And the roving, unpredictable changes left the song with a distinct tension that packs a punch.
‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’
The problem that the band faced with ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ was turning a simple blues track into something more elevated that suited their style; they had made a rod for their own back in this regard. This sent the song spiralling towards a complexity that tested every member’s strengths. As Plant told Mojo: “The musical progression at the end of each verse – the chord choice – is not a natural place to go.”
The singer continued. “And it’s that lift up there that’s so regal and so emotional. I don’t know whether that was born from the loins of JP or JPJ, but I know that when we reached that point in the song you could get a lump in the throat from being in the middle of it.” So, it was emotionally worth it. The track also became a live staple, and it typified the band’s ethos of borrowing, quite boldly, from blues sources and then twisting the tracks with classical complexity.
While the band would later say that it was the hardest track to record from Led Zeppelin III, this was partly due to the fact that they chose to do so entirely live with only a few little overdubs taking place in post. In fact, they were so determined to hone it down to one tight take that showcased their skill that you can even hear the squeak of Bonham’s pounding drum pedal going like the bedsprings in a brothel at certain stages.
